One Size Does Not Fit All: Targeting
Your Contact Center Services For Better ROI
By Brad Wilson, E.piphany
To begin, let me congratulate today's call center professionals and
information technology executives. Over the past decade, they have created
solid and stable customer service systems using rudimentary tools. But as
we move into the next millennium, these same executives have their work
cut out for them. The call center will undergo sweeping changes, bringing
both good and bad news.
The bad news first: the call center is becoming more complex. In today's
economy, call center managers need to lower costs while extending the call
center's reach by integrating new communication channels and
revenue-enhancing services.
Now for the good news: new technologies in customer relationship
management (CRM) and converged networking can move call centers from 'one-size-fits-all'
customer service to targeted one-to-one service. This delivers value by
improving customer satisfaction and boosting revenue, as in years past
when local businesses offered personal service because they knew every
customer.
One key strategy in moving the call center forward is customer
value-based call routing. In conjunction with load balancing or
skills-based routing strategies, customer value-based routing helps
businesses do a better job of matching customers with specific needs or
propensities with the agents that are best able to meet those needs.
A good way to understand how this works is by comparing traditional
call centers with the modern 'customer contact centers.'
Communication channels. In most call centers, discrete
and often proprietary solution elements handle a particular customer
channel, such as the voice response unit, the private branch exchange
(PBX) or automated call distribution (ACD), and the Web server for online
interactions.
Far more effective is the modern customer contact center, in which new
technologies merge all channels into a single communications platform that
handles voice, automated voice, chat, agent-assisted chat, e-mail and the
Web. IP-based infrastructure puts all communication channels and customer
data into a single communications backbone, making it easier to implement
and less expensive to maintain than today's disparate, multichannel
networks.
Customer data. Traditionally, multiple groups within a
company have managed customer data, creating a fragmented view of each
customer. Customer data has usually been organized by division, by group
and by application, making it difficult to see a single view of the
customer. Groups that manage call centers, the Web, e-mail or other
channels have thus far worked with a limited view within each specific
channel.
By contrast, modern multichannel contact centers are architected for
intelligence. They provide integrated customer information in real-time to
respond to requests efficiently and make value-added recommendations of
products or other information. The ability to generate a real-time
customer profile through a combination of offline data aggregation and
real-time application integration is critical to making a multichannel
contact center both efficient and effective. Real-time statistical
analytics are also now available that allow every customer interaction to
be personalized with a high degree of accuracy and very little overhead.
Business logic. Today, customers expect their suppliers
to interact as a single enterprise consistently across all channels ' a
major challenge considering the multiple stand-alone applications in the
typical call center. Business logic for serving customers has been
hard-wired into applications such as e-mail, call center and interactive
voice response (IVR) with little or no integration. If the e-mail response
system is separate from other applications, how can an organization
consistently decide whether or not to waive a late fee for a good
customer, or determine which calls should be routed immediately to an
agent?
The usual answer is to duplicate business rules across all systems,
creating a nightmare of coding, revisions and upgrades. The modern contact
center, however, delivers value by featuring consistent, centrally
administered business rules across all applications, and shared customer
information that allows agents to be matched with customers according to
their value. This approach easily provides answers to questions such as:
Which customers should be referred immediately to experienced agents and
which should be routed to an interactive voice response system? How should
we handle customers who are likely to churn? Who should receive special
offers? The result is greater customer satisfaction and organizational
effectiveness.
Performance monitoring. Traditional call centers have
monitored performance by tracking metrics such as number of interactions,
call handle times and time in queue, and the focus has been on making
simple automated tasks faster and more routine. This has been important in
the past and will continue to be important in the future. However, the
modern contact center also needs to improve organizational effectiveness
by working smarter: understanding cross-channel customer interactions and
reporting cross-channel results. Once cross-channel reporting is in place,
a company can get a better view of each customer's account, history and
buying patterns, as well as the resources that are being expended on
behalf of that customer. In other words, a company can discover the value
of each customer, which is key to rationalizing the investments being made
across a service organization, as well as optimizing the potential value
in each customer interaction.
Customer Value-Based Routing
By integrating communication channels, customer data, business logic and
performance monitoring, the modern contact center has the tools to perform
customer value-based routing. The optimal matching of staff resources with
customers fulfills a key business imperative for every call center.
Although businesses would like to provide great service to every
caller, it's an expensive proposition. If you learn which customers
deliver the most value and which the least, you can align each customer
with the appropriate level of service. This has been done in the past with
rather simple offline segmentation schemes. Value-based routing achieves
this at a more fine-grained level and does it on the fly, ensuring fast
routing to the right agent or resource, regardless of agent location or
communication channel. As a result, the most knowledgeable agents will be
focused on working with the highest-value customers. Because customers are
better matched with the right contact center resources, the contact center
can save money while boosting overall customer satisfaction and retention.
Such routing also boosts the morale of call center agents, as they can
specialize in ways that offer them more satisfying work and new ways to
advance their careers.
Architected for intelligence, customer value-based routing uses
real-time profiling and analytics to suggest cross-sell, upsell and churn
avoidance strategies, based on detailed customer data, behavior and
preferences. Better routing and more personalized offers and information
help customers get what they want, faster. A retail-banking customer, for
instance, could be identified in real-time before the call has been routed
as a good candidate for a mortgage refinance offer, and could then be
routed to an agent who has been trained in mortgage products as well as in
handling general requests like a funds transfer (which was the reason why
the customer called).
Most contact centers want to cross-sell, and most make some attempt. If
you're already making the attempt, using more precise targeting
strategies can generate tremendous revenues with very little incremental
costs ' it's 'free money,' so to speak, as the returns far
outweigh the incremental investment. As an example, consider a
telecommunications company that receives 50 million calls per year, where
the value of a successful cross-sell has a marginal value of $50. In this
situation, every one percent of calls (in this example, 500,000 calls)
that can be cross-sold is worth $25 million. Moving a cross-sell success
rate by a few points can have a huge impact.
Another benefit of value-based routing occurs in customer retention.
Calls from dissatisfied customers ' for example, those who have two or
three open service calls ' can be routed to a 'save' unit, where
specially trained agents try to win them back. By reducing customer churn
and keeping valuable customers longer, contact center managers can improve
the company's bottom line.
As with so many things in the contact center, it's a numbers game.
When you have a lot of customer contacts, even small improvements in
cross-selling and customer retention can pay off on a grand scale.
Action Items For Call Center Managers
What, then, should call center executives do to evolve their technology
and staff toward the vision presented here?
Keep in mind that you don't have to upgrade the call center all at
once. Instead, you can improve your contact center incrementally by
building a single view of your customers by implementing a converged
communications platform or by leveraging real-time analytics within a site
or across an enterprise. This can protect and extend existing technology
investments until you're ready to trade up. If you're ready to move
faster, a hosted Web-based, multichannel contact center can be brought
online immediately that provides a consistent view of the customer, uses
shared business logic and uses real-time analytics to get the most out of
every interaction.
Make sure you work with vendors that share your vision and offer some
compelling technology that makes implementation and maintenance as easy as
possible. Modern technology can enable you to go further, with less
effort, than you may be used to. Watch out for 'sheep in wolves'
clothing,' or vendors with outdated technology that have done little but
update their data sheets with the latest marketing buzzwords.
Since many call centers alternate between flat and peak periods, the
contact center solution you implement should be able to scale up or down
easily. Being able to grow or shrink your contact center through the use
of strategic outsourcers and application host partners can be a good
strategy, particularly if your call load is seasonal or otherwise
irregular.
Business strategy and technology platforms are key concerns, but just
as important are organizational and staff issues. You can't make
effective use of your resources without tackling some serious management,
training and compensation issues. You may build and deploy a very solid
contact center solution just to watch it fail if agents and supervisors
aren't trained correctly or provided with the right incentives to
cross-sell or perform other important functions.
One of the most overused marketing phrases in this industry has been
that you can 'turn a cost center into a profit center.' It's largely
been unachievable, due to a combination of immature technologies and
unclear customer service strategies. The good news is that if you can
bring your customer service strategy and objectives under control, the
technologies now exist (such as Web-based applications and real-time
analytics) that allow you to lower your investment while driving real
top-line revenue. Customer value-based routing is one technique that will
extend the usefulness of your current call routing technologies in place
today and that offers the possibility of staggering returns for many large
enterprises.
Brad Wilson is vice president of Product Marketing and Platforms for
E.piphany. He joined the company as part of the RightPoint Software, Inc.
acquisition. E.piphany is a provider of next-generation customer
relationship management software for the customer economy. E.piphany E.5
blends Web-based analytic and operational CRM to unify all inbound and
outbound marketing, sales and service customer interactions. The company's
worldwide headquarters are in San Mateo, California.
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