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MARKETS » NFV Pandemic Tech News
 September 2008 | Volume 27 / Number 4
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The New Contact Center: Virtual, and Virtuous
What does this new center have and look like? * A focus on solving issues that generate contacts The traditional approach to managing contact centers has been reducing costs while retaining customers. Yet as firms are beginning to realize, and outsourcers such as Convergys (News - Alert) are now offering to their clients as a service, a more productive technique is to identify why customers are contacting their organizations, and address those needs so that they don’t have to reach for the keypads. Taking care of underlying issues such as confusing website design, poor product quality, lack of communication between sales, service, and delivery saves more money and results in greater customer satisfaction. * Voice self-service (VSS) as channel, rather than as a screen Organizations have traditionally tended to deploy DTMF IVR and more recently speech recognition a.k.a. voice self-service (VSS) as a first level or screen in the customer care process. Yet too often this practice has resulted in too many customers frustrated with the punched-in or spoken menu options and responses. VSS, no matter how advanced the technology, is not an in-line substitute for people when it comes to handling complex customer care issues. No more than web or e-mail self-service can provide the same function, or for that matter, the most widely-used self-service example there is: bank ATMs. Instead, organizations should redeploy VSS as a separate channel from live agents, just as they have done with the web and banks have done with ATMs, handling specific tasks that befit their benefits. Customers will know what to use self-service for and what to call live agents about. * The professional agent When customers speak to organizations’ representatives they increasingly expect them to listen, think, solve, and resolve what they speaking to them about. They do not want to speak to those who are limited by their scripts and who are too often forced to say ‘let me have you speak to my supervisor’. This demand by customers is beginning to give rise to the ‘professional agent’, otherwise known as a ‘financial specialist’ or ‘travel advisor’ or ‘installation technician’. Someone who is empowered to and who has the expertise to handle what they are being contacted about, and who is responsible enough to meet employer expectations without constant supervision. Professional agents are already happening in contact centers such as in higher level tech support and in ‘dial-a-nurse’ services. Going to a professional agent approach requires, however, a radical overhaul of contact center operations. Emphasis would be placed more on selecting for education, maturity, and problem solving skills at screening and recruitment and less on heavy post-hire training and coaching. Gone is the big organizational pyramid, replaced by minimal escalations to a handful of top managers. Yes, in some cases, where there is considerable job-specific expertise required, there may need to be a lower level like an ‘assistant’. They will work with rather than report to the pros, who are not there as supervisors but as line workers, like apprentices to journeymen in the construction trades. That will motivate them to success by performing well. * The virtual (and virtuous) center The ‘new center’ will be virtually invisible. Gone are the big ‘call warehouses’ that eat up too much money, have limited labor pools, and are directly and indirectly vulnerable to disasters. There will be much less need for people and those that will be recruited will not need extensive post-hire training and supervision as they will be professional agents. Instead the contact center becomes virtual and virtuous, achieved by shifting it from the employer’s doorstep to the employees’, which dramatically widens the size and improves the quality of the labor pool: top people almost always prefer to work at home. If organizations go with the assistant/apprentice approach, these workers can be started in small low-cost storefront contact centers, helping each other with access to a remote mentor or foreman and then move home when they become full-fledged pros. Reaching this new contact center will take time and effort, but the road forward has already been marked out and paved by industry suppliers and experts. With your customers prodding you in the back to deliver better service that this route promises, it is perhaps time to begin the journey. CIS CIS Magazine Table of Contents |
By Brendan Read
