ProtoCall One, which provides systems integration and consultancy for contact centre companies, has advised contact center managers to look at six major options to face the economic downturn in 2009.

 

Top six options suggested by ProtoCall One include 21st century business intelligence (BI), invest in workforce optimization (WFO) tools to improve workforce productivity and performance, Web and speech self-service, business process optimization and unified desktops, customer segmentation and profiling and multi-channel communications.

 

“In the current economic downturn it is inevitable that operations will be asked to deliver more for less,” said Faraz Khan, managing director, ProtoCall One, in a statement. “But it is also clear that contact center managers should not just sit back and prepare to issue the P45s.  Instead they should take a long hard look at these six areas to see if productivity gains can be realized through intelligent thinking and application of these techniques and technologies.”

 

For each option, ProtoCall One offers some suggestions too. For instance, ProtoCall One has developed ONEVIEW, which is based on QlikView’s ‘associative query logic’. At call centers, this BI tool allows data to be better connected and analyzed - regardless of data source.

 

A well-implemented WFO can improve customer experience and agent performance while reducing costs through more efficient staff scheduling. WFO is widely used to help contact centers to cope up with fluctuations in demand. It also ensures agents handling calls have the right skills to meet the customer’s and the business’s requirements. WFO can increase employee job satisfaction and reduces recruitment costs.

 

Organizations will be deploying interactive voice response (IVR) systems to help segment customers by value and type of enquiry. IVR can also put customers through automated authentication before they speak to an agent. IVR reduces workload on agents and they can serve customers more effectively.

 

ProtoCall One is working with a number of contact centers to improve and streamline critical call handling processes. This activity incorporates unified desktop initiatives, which enable agents to access information faster and increases their productivity.

 

Customer profiling has become sophisticated. If applied correctly during the call routing process, it produces startling returns.  If customers can be segmented on a whole range of different geo-demographic, socio-economic and lifestyle variables today, it can definitely deliver returns.

 

Contact centers will invest in supporting the array of communications methods from email through to text and Instant Messenger (IM) that customers want to use to make a service request.