Ideally, call centers would be available to offer round-the-clock support and provide superior assistance to meet every customer's unique needs. Doing so, however, can exhaust both human and technical resources. Some companies are turning this challenge into an opportunity, finding a solution in an unlikely place.

Call Center In Crisis
Industries that rely on call centers for support and sales often face a conflagration of human resource and IT challenges that leave them wishing for an emergency helpline for call centers. Let's take a look at a theoretical print media company as an example — a company that offers subscription-based magazines and newspapers to its customers. The company's customer care staff answers calls for paper deliveries and subscription renewals. It also recently began managing the advertising specials in daily papers and the weekly magazines. This is an excellent extension of the media company's business, but it presented new challenges. Rapid growth from on-sale items and specials caused a need for additional applications to support these new features. The customer service representatives (CSRs) had to be trained on each application. The reality for the CSRs, however, was redundant data entry combined with the hassle of accessing each application separately.
Eventually, someone at the company wondered, "Is there a way to provide access to all those systems (line-of-business applications) into one sign-on and one computer screen?" The answer was "yes," and the company spent significant resources to achieve the result. The improvement was obvious: The same CSRs required less training, the turnover rates lowered and both CSR performance and customer satisfaction began tracking significantly higher.

So, the initial fire was brought under control, but a new question fanned the flames: "How can we add more service or sales opportunities without overburdening our CSR staff?" The answer might surprise you: Turn customers into volunteer CSRs.

Customers As Volunteer CSRs
In today's 24x7x365 world, customers want to get information or solve problems on their own terms, not those predefined by a company. Aggregating customer information across all the ways customers interact with your company makes it possible for busy customers to use self-service channels to quickly and easily address their concerns. This experience gives them control over their interactions and makes customers feel that your company respects the value of their time as well as the value of their business.

The print media company we discussed previously took the same technology that connected disparate systems to the single sign-on and unified agent desktop, and turned it around to face the customer via a Web portal. The company judiciously decided on all the parts of the company's line-of-business applications that it wanted to expose to its customers.

Now, customers can edit their address information and name spellings, and update their e-mail and cell phone numbers, and the database has never been more current. Even better, customer satisfaction is up. As an added bonus, many of those items sold in the publications can be purchased quickly and easily over the Web without agent intervention.

Intensive Self-Care
Although self-service isn't for every customer, this sort of account portal is becoming more popular, with basic functionality often including access to a user's account status, payment history, service descriptions, related knowledge bases or FAQs and similar items.

The next level might include asking the self-service customer, "How do you want us (the business) to interact with you (the customer)?" For instance, a credit card company might offer reminder e-mails about the customer's account or an option for electronic payment. Portals can offer opt-in or opt-out for advertising e-mails and offers, paper statements or electronic statements, and access to other accounts. All this service and opportunity arises simply because someone decided to turn the screen around and give the customers direct access.

One other area worth mentioning in this resume of forward-looking implementations in customer service is the automated service agent (ASA). This is a "chat-like" technology popping up on many self-service portals and has tremendous benefits for call deflection, transfer to live agents with session history, and even decision-tree implementation to customers (or even the agents). By design, an ASA can address the top self-help-related issues in "natural language." For instance, a customer could go to the Web portal for a large cable company and type in "what channels are in my area?" The ASA asks for the customer's ZIP code and then promptly displays the channel lineup for that area.

Final Prescription
To ensure exceptional customer service, call centers must be available to offer round-the-clock support and provide superior assistance to meet every customer's unique needs. Meeting these demands can exhaust both human and technical resources, but some companies today are turning this challenge into opportunity by offering Web-savvy, time-restricted customers quick answers to their everyday questions. It all starts when companies invite their customers to be their own service representatives.

Corey Freebairn is a Senior Product Manager at Microsoft (www.microsoft.com). Corey has spent over 22 years in software and telecommunications. His experience has included pioneering in groupware, fax servers, computer-telephony integration (CTI), unified messaging, IP telephony and contact centers for both the enterprise and service providers. His current focus is Microsoft's customer care initiatives including Customer Care Framework Solutions.