[October 23, 2001]

Exploring Virtual Contact Centers: A Treasure Trove Of Efficiencies

BY BRYANT DOWNEY

During the Age of Exploration, adventurers discovered new lands, sailed uncharted waters, and broadened the limits of communication, trade, and commerce. Call centers are at a similar point today, as companies explore virtual technologies offering nearly limitless potential for unifying multi-location operations into one seamless contact center.

The same force that drove 17th century explorers around the globe drives exploration of the feasibility of virtual contact centers: money. Today, companies are searching for the most efficient way to service customers. Moving to a virtual, or distributed, contact center model may enable both service efficiencies and cost savings. However, change isn't easy. Just as the ancient maps used to say about uncharted waters: "Here Be Monsters." Still, with adequate planning, there are many benefits to distributed call centers; we'll discuss them here.

The IP World Is Not Flat
Your call center is reaching its limit and expansion is the key. Qualified, available agents are located in the Midwest, but your home office is in rent-rageous California. Is there a way to open a Midwest center without losing the convenience of a single location center?

In the PSTN-based call center world, a multiple location call center operation has severe limitations. It's difficult to seamlessly route calls to agents at disparate locations, handling overflow is cumbersome, and you can't easily pull in additional resources within the company in emergency situations. An IP-based virtual contact center eliminates these problems.

IP technology allows voice calls to be transmitted throughout a data network just like e-mail and Web chat, as digital packets. These packets break down the walls of distributed offices making unified, virtual contact centers possible. Calls and all other contacts can be routed transparently anywhere, anytime. The data network doesn't view your offices as separate, therefore -- to the customer --  your offices aren't separate. Virtual contact centers allow managers and agents in geographically separate locations to work together in one unified center, just as if they were in the same room.

This "breaking down the walls" is a dream come true for contact centers frustrated by the limitations of PSTN. However, no one is going to tear down the large, centralized call centers that initially dominated the market -- they are too valuable. As companies look to expand, however, they will see the value in searching the world for distributed, IP treasure.

When The Queen Pressures You For Gold...
Call centers are increasingly under pressure to offer better service with fewer resources. Virtual contact center implementations can help managers come up with this "gold." One way to tap the efficiencies of a virtual call center is to have several smaller locations working together as one. There are many advantages to this type of organization.

Cost Savings
According to Erlang formulas, a virtual contact center with four locations needs 115 agents (about 29 at each site), to handle an enterprise-wide total of 1,600 calls per hour. Four traditional independent call centers would need 128 agents total (32 at each center) to handle the same call volume. Using a conservative annual cost per agent estimate of $32,000 and monthly T1 connection costs of $7,800 per month, this virtual contact center saves the company $322,400 a year.

More Flexible Staffing
Contact center agent staffing continues to be the top concern among call centers. Virtual contact centers make finding and keeping agents easier and more cost-effective, since you're no longer be limited to one area's workforce pool.

Searching for, and keeping good agents is a major headache, but you don't have to lose your best agents just because they are moving to a different city. Virtual agents can work from home-- all they need is the proper data connection.

Better Time Zone Coverage
The most recent hot topic for contact centers is "follow the sun" service. Most call centers located in the Eastern time zone must staff their center from 7 a.m. until 11 p.m. to accommodate West Coast and after-hours customers. But finding agents to work a second shift, or absorbing the costs of paying overtime, isn't easy.

Why not set up a second contact center location in the Pacific time zone and connect the two using virtual contact center technology? The Eastern office can open early and start the day with the rest of the East Coast. When the day winds down in the East and Midwest, the West Coast office will still be going strong, able to handle the East and Midwest customers who are calling after working hours and the West Coast customers who still have several hours left in their work day. All of this shifting is transparent to the customer.

Avoid Disruptions In Coverage
Customers don't want to hear about snow storms, rolling blackouts, and other unforeseen events. You can't control everything, but virtual contact centers are far easier to adjust when the weather tries to control them. Supervisors can log in from home and reconfigure routing tables and other aspects of the contact center. Branch offices can also be reconfigured to pick up the additional workload. Agents with appropriate data network access can log on and work from home.

Seamless Routing And Monitoring
With a virtual contact center, there are no walls curbing mangers' and supervisors' ability to monitor agent performance or generate enterprise-wide performance reports.

In a traditional distributed offices format, a supervisor at a main office in California could not physically monitor the Midwest agents. But a supervisor could easily check on activity at any point in the virtual contact center right from their desktop. Agents can also be organized into skill groups without taking into account their physical location.

Additional Options
Having multiple locations working as one isn't the only broadened possibility for a virtual contact center. You can also use virtual contact technology to connect customers to specialized experts within your company -- informal agents. Virtual contact center technologies allow any person in your company to act as a service agent.

If your contact center doesn't have the information it needs to service a customer, it's worthless to that customer (which could send them knocking on your competitor's door). The virtual contact center can determine if a resource (such as an engineer or a specialized troubleshooter) outside the contact center is available and connect the customer directly to the best resource in the entire enterprise. Virtual contact centers bring that specialized individual into the contact center, momentarily, to answer one specific question.

Be A Pioneer!
The concept of virtual contact centers has already been discovered, but you can still take advantage of the treasure trove of cost savings it holds. Pioneers that explore the move to a virtual  model now will be rewarded with a competitive advantage.

Bryant Downey is the chief technology officer and co-founder of Cintech Solutions, Inc. Cintech creates Internet technology solutions, including the NetVIA e-contact center, to manage and analyze interactions with customers, partners and associates.