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December 2008 | Volume 11/ Number 12
Viewpoint: Voice of the Customer

Contact Centers and the Recession: Emerge as a Leader

How is the current economic news playing out in your contact center? We at Vanguard have been discussing this topic and getting feedback from our clients. My sense is a lot of organizations may just be freezing projects or budgets. Others are trying to juggle ways to reduce costs with increasing sales and maintaining service levels. This might be through operational and process assessments and changes or by looking at existing or new technology applications to increase sales and loyalty. If budgets are frozen, don’t just sit still! Here are some ideas that can help contact centers get through the difficult times and emerge as more nimble and competitive.

Customer Focused

Obviously it is critical to retain customers now, since replacing them is costly. Even if customers aren’t buying during this downturn, you want them to remain loyal. One way is by improving your customer’s experience with your company. Only by stepping into their shoes can you really understand what it’s like to be a customer. So think about mapping the customer experience across channels, think about doing some key “moment of truth” mystery shopping – buying a product, returning an item, questioning a bill, looking for support. This is a critical first step to understanding your customer’s experience with your company. How do you compare to you competitors? Where can you be more customer-focused? How can you effectively segment customers to provide the right service at the right time?




Operations and Process Focused

If you haven’t done any business process or continuous improvement studies to reduce costs and improve efficiency in a while, now is the time. You might look into tuning up the IVR to increase usage — for most call centers, even a 1% gain in use represents substantial dollar savings. Sometimes even partial automation applications can provide a cost savings.

How about contact handling and backend processes? If you are still using the same processes you did 8 or 9 years ago, there is room for improvement. These types of changes can help you manage with what you have during increased call volumes and no funds for additional staff. If, on the other hand your contact center volumes are dropping, how about being proactive? There may be opportunities for outbound notifications or opportunities to tap into your best customers to in-crease wallet share at this time. Have you considered looking beyond your call center to other functional areas of the organization that may be able to leverage your capabilities? You may have opportunities to provide some economies of scale to your peer departments.

Technology Focused

Do you feel you are using your existing technology to the fullest? There may be opportunities to boost effectiveness with existing tools. For example, is your workforce management system being used correctly? Are the schedules still accurate? We work with many clients who improve the customer experience and/or reduce costs just by making minor changes to processes in order to leverage a technology feature or two.

If you believe you are wringing out as much productivity as possible from your existing technology, here are a few other applications that show a solid Return on Investment (ROI) for many companies:

Speech Recognition — Speech is meeting the promise of increasing customer satisfaction, increasing IVR containment, and shortening calls. It enables companies to implement applications that are impossible with touch-tone, such as name and address changes, service initiation, and moving from multiple to a single 800 number.

Outbound Contact — Besides making manual outbound calls, use automated calling as well as other media like SMS and email for proactive contacts. Look at opportunities to actually prevent inbound calls, to reduce costs by providing appointment reminders (to reduce no-shows), or conserve revenues by making outbound collections calls that enable customers to pay privately in the IVR.

Virtual Contact Centers — Look at virtualizing (IP-enable) multiple contact centers to gain economies of scale savings in people and equipment. This is especially effective if you have multiple small (less than 50 seat) centers.

Hosted Services — Hosted or on-demand services (IVR, ACD, CRM, Knowledge systems, etc.) are a real alternative today. Some of the key benefits can include little up front capital costs, pay by the bite pricing (per call, per minute, per agent seat, etc.), and multi-site disaster recovery options (depending on provider).

Every contact center has areas of improvement or cost reduction. Finding them and making the changes will help you stay focused in the days to come. Good luck. IT

David Powis is Chief Technology Consultant at Vanguard Communications Corporation, a consulting firm that specializes in contact center processes, operations, and technology. He leads many technology and application focused projects and implementations. Visit them at www.vanguard.net or contact David at [email protected].

 

Did You Know…

• 1,926 respondents in a ChangeWave (www.changewave.com) corporate IT purchasing survey conducted November 6-12, shows a bright spot among the decline in U.S. business spending: the corporate smartphone market shows continued growth, with Research In Motion maintaining its traditional lead, though Apple (News - Alert) continues to make inroads in small- to medium-sized businesses (SMBs).

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