Who’s in Charge?

By Keith Dawson (News - Alert)

It used to be that the people who bought technology and equipment for contact centers were professionals in the art of running those centers — they were people with some kind of direct telecom or operations experience. Those days are long gone.

Now, important decisions are made by teams of people from different disciplines within an organization. The contact center practitioner is indeed one of the people on that team, but he or she is no longer the only voice in the room when important tools like call routing engines, analytics and reporting, and even workforce management are evaluated.

The question of who is in charge of these purchasing decisions is slippery, because no two companies (and no two technology spends) are the same. Unique circumstances come into play each time. But we do know that there are increasingly varied stakeholders in the outcome of those decisions. Interested parties now include IT managers, marketing and finance executives, line of business managers, and other constituents who have serious stakes in how contact centers use their tools.

And not only are they more interested in the outcome, but the technologies used in centers today are much more entwined with systems used elsewhere in the organization. Data is shared by different systems in different departments, and it travels over unified communications networks that tie siloed organizations together. Even if organizations are slow to realize it, their contact centers are in fact much more thickly tied to the rest of the enterprise than in the past.

With the landscape changing so quickly, it bears looking at who those various stakeholders are. From the point of view of the contact center executive, the more you know about the fundamental interests of your colleagues around the decision table, the better you’ll be able to look out for your own interests. An IT manager looks at a possible technology purchase through completely different eyes from a contact center manager: different ROI, different feature criteria. Are you defining success differently, as well?

Start with IT. The interests of an IT manager lie in how it will affect the company’s network and how much it will cost to deploy and support. To some extent that dovetails rather nicely with the kind of operational viewpoint prevalent in contact centers, where the primary metrics used are those that measure activity rather than outcomes. And because IT has been working closely in tandem with contact centers for years (most notably on the deployment of IP telephony networks and CTI (News - Alert) systems), there is a fair amount of understanding between IT management and contact center management. They don’t always have the same objectives, or speak the same language, but they largely comprehend each others’ point of view.

Where things get messy is when marketing and line-of-business managers get involved. Marketing and finance are used to using technology to understand what business conditions are like. They use analytical tools to slice apart their data sources and find out what motivates customers, prospects, and partners. They have vast experience with tools, like business intelligence systems and market modeling systems that tell them whether the company’s activities are in lockstep with the company’s goals. The difference between what they do and what the contact center does is the difference between strategy and tactics — so when the contact center managers start to talk about ROI in terms of call avoidance or improvements in average speed of answer, they seem irrelevant. What’s relevant in the overall corporate context are revenue, profit, value and outcome. Activities (like call handling) are just a means to get to profit and value.

It’s not that the different professionals are trying to reach different goals, it’s that the language used to express progress towards those goals diverges, making it difficult to agree on whether a technology spend is worthwhile or not; whether it is needed now or next year.

We are starting to see the mass adoption of contact center tools in non-contact-center contexts. Analytics-driven performance management is one strong example. But even something as mundane and mature as workforce management software is now in the inter-departmental mix. WFM does three things really well: forecasts volume, creates schedules, and measures adherence to those schedules. It’s recently dawned on a lot of managers of back office and retail employees that they can be effectively scheduled (and have their work parceled out to them in neat blocks) using automated software. And so WFM vendors are looking at expanding into those areas of the organization. It hasn’t hurt that by some estimates there are three to five times as many schedulable workers in those environments than there are in contact centers. One major vendor is already seeing 40% of its WFM revenue coming from outside the contact center.

What does that do to the contact center manager who’s historically been responsible for purchasing the tool? It forces that manager to consult with other operations managers who also need the system when spec-ing it for the vendor. But it also spreads the possibility for ROI among a greater number of stakeholders. So while it makes some internal conversations more complex, it also brings opportunities for collaboration.

The idea of collaborating with colleagues in other departments isn’t new, but it is newly urgent. Because when one group defines success differently from another in the same organization, you have a recipe for friction and discord. What’s of paramount importance in the center is for the managers there to have a good handle on how the contact center contributes real value to the overall health of the organization. That’s the argument that’s going to carry weight among the decision-makers. And when the organization is convinced that the center is a critical element in company health and profit, then the organization will surely commit resources to protect and grow that center.

Keith Dawson is a Senior Analyst with Frost & Sullivan (News - Alert).

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