BY STEPHEN DELLUTRI

In "Internet time," things happen faster than they do in real life. Take the spread of Web sites among businesses. As few as five years ago, there were no major corporations on the Web. Today, no company is considered a major player without a Web site.

So we've moved beyond a mere presence online. Now, companies expect their Web sites to work for them, rather than just act as an electronic business card. One way to make a Web site work for you is through integration with your call center. The advantages of introducing CTI middleware and the Web into the call center are numerous, but can be summarized with a phrase: control of information.

What Do You Know When You Pick Up The Call?
The people calling (the customers) need something (to make a purchase, to check on an order, to review an invoice) and the people answering the calls (the Customer Service Representatives or CSRs) need to help each customer as quickly and efficiently as possible and move on to the next one.

The more information the CSR has about the caller at the beginning of the call, the more quickly the CSR will be able to wrap up the transaction and take the next call. If, prior to greeting the caller, the CSR can know that person's name, the nature of the call, and some information on the customer's history with the company, the CSR can address the concern of the caller in a more personal, and a more efficient manner.

This has several benefits. The CSR is less stressed and thus more able to offer gracious service, the customer receives personalized service which makes him or her feel better about the transaction, and the call is handled more quickly so the CSR is able to handle more calls per shift.

The goal of the call center manager is to maximize human resources, which are by far the most expensive part of any call center's budget. If management can keep the CSR working at a consistently high occupancy level, there are significant savings to be realized. In fact, informing the CSR via computer of what is coming in via phone creates such efficiencies of scale that it actually costs less to make more.

The Proof Is In The Numbers
Let's look at a fictitious call center. The Acme Call Center handles catalog sales for a large clothing company. They are open 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and have 100 CSRs working on each of three shifts per 24-hour period. That's 300 agents working a total of 2,400 man-hours per day. That adds up to 72,000 man-hours per month.

Acme pays their CSRs $8.00 per hour for a total of $576,000 in monthly CSR payroll.

The average call, prior to the decision to bring in CTI middleware, lasted approximately two minutes. That's 30 calls per hour per CSR or 72,000 calls per day. During each call the CSR has the opportunity not only to build the customer relationship and sell whatever the customer called for (or handle whatever problem they called about), but also to increase the sale in some way.

When Acme integrated today's state of the art CTI into their operation, allowing their CSRs to access vital customer information prior to answering the call, as well as during the call, they shaved about five seconds off the length of the average call.

Now, five seconds might not sound like a lot, but let's do the numbers. By reducing the length of each call by five seconds they freed up 360,000 seconds per day. That's 6,000 minutes or 100 hours. That 100 hours translates into either $800 per day, ($24,000 per month) or Acme's CSRs being able to handle 3,130 more calls per day (93,900 more calls per month).

Once you consider the fact that each additional call represents an opportunity for that call's sale, plus cross-selling and up-selling, plus increased customer satisfaction as a result of shorter on-hold times and more personalized service, you see that the savings of a mere five seconds per phone call is significant.

Moving Beyond Middleware
So Acme wasn't in bad shape with just the best CTI around. But, being innovative and forward thinking, the management at Acme wanted more.

They knew that the Web was important. They had already participated in the first three phases of commerce on the Internet. Now they were committed to full participation in Phase Four: Live, personalized customer service online. To accomplish this objective Acme needed to Web-enable their call center. [Click here for a diagram of a Web-enabled call center.]

There are several aspects to this decision. Happy customers are repeat customers, moving calls from the expensive 800 number to the virtually free Internet saves Acme real money, and encouraging customers to use the self-serve features of Web-enabled e-commerce saves CSR time (which is Acme's money).

Let's do some more numbers: Industry statistics place the price of an inbound 800 line call at between $.07 and $.10 per minute. For our example we'll use $.08. Acme has, during any of its shifts, 100 active agents with an in-call to on-hold ratio of 1:1.5. That equates to 150 inbound 800 lines, assuming a fully occupied environment. 150 lines x 24 hours x 60 minutes x $.08 per minute is $17,820 per month in recurring 800 line costs. Moving just 15 percent of those calls from the 800 number to the Internet saves Acme $2,592 per month. This represents a very real and immediate return on their investment.

As for the "happy customers are loyal customers" aspect, Acme believes the adage that "customer satisfaction is worthless, customer loyalty is priceless." From that belief grows the management strategy that customer satisfaction is but one ingredient in the development of customer loyalty -- and they want loyal customers. Web-enabling their call center is making their customers come back again and again.

Compared with the telephone, the computer has the potential to be a superior communications device based on its higher level of functionality alone. It is also an unparalleled data storage and retrieval appliance. With a Web-enabled call center, your customers can reach you through the medium they choose. Plus, your CSRs have access to the ease of using the telephone, plus all the information which can be pushed to the user (or pulled from back-end applications) with the computer, allowing for more informed responses on their part.

First look at the caller's perspective. A customer is browsing your e-commerce site and has a question. She probably has to disconnect from the Internet, call the 800 number, and describe what she was looking at to the CSR who answers the call. Once you Web-enable your call center, she can click on an icon or a link and be launched immediately into whatever type of session she wants, from real-time text-based chat to feature-rich multimedia communication.

Now look at the same call from the CSR's perspective. A screen pop appears on his terminal, populated with the caller's name, address, phone number, credit card information, and whatever customer history is in the database. In addition, a picture of what the caller was looking at on the Web site when she launched the call, a list (with available pictures) of what she has in her shopping cart, and a list of suggested cross-sell and up-sell items also appear. The CSR can push Web pages with information and pictures of the things he wants to suggest to the caller, making the transaction more personalized and creating the kind of customer satisfaction that leads to customer loyalty.

Back to the view from the customer's seat. Not only has she been greeted by name and had her questions answered in real time, she has been offered additional options (with pictures!) so she can make an informed buying decision. There is even a picture of the CSR, so she has the feeling of communicating with a real person who is interested in assisting her, personally. She will definitely be shopping at this site again.

Statistics show that she will be more likely to handle the entire transaction in the self-serve mode next time. Just knowing there is live assistance available if necessary makes people more likely to take care of themselves -- saving the call center even more.

By Web-enabling your call center you allow your customers to reach you in any way they want (PSTN, text chat, VoIP, e-mail) and you get more for less -- more customer loyalty, more CSR efficiency, more cross- and up-selling -- for less money.

Stephen E. Dellutri, CosmoCom's Vice President of Engineering, oversees the design and development of their virtual call center technology. As the company's co-founder, he worked closely with the CEO to design the company's flagship product, CosmoCall, and he wrote the product's first iteration. Today he oversees a team of engineers who are responsible for custom software design, systems integration, and installation and implementation of the CosmoCall solution at customer sites. Visit CosmoCom on the Web at www.cosmocom.com.

Figure 1. The development of commerce on the Internet.

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Figure 2. One configuration of a Web-enabled call center.

Diagram courtesy of CosmoCom.

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