ICMI's Customer Management Insight - January 2008 - (Page 41)

EXPERT’S ANGLE ments with solutions that identify, in real time, a company’s market position, customer opinions, competitors’ activities and product feedback. This next generation of marketing and operations research is based on capturing data from customer contacts, which is now possible because of the availability of speech and screen analytics, as well as other analytic tools. The maturation of dashboards and Webreporting technology enables this information to be immediately disseminated across a multinational corporation. The question being offered by the emergence of the supporting platforms — speech analytics, text analytics and other methods for capturing customer opinions and experience — is not just about the opportunities to improve productivity and ”answer interesting questions. For the corporation, the ” more important question is how these tools can be used to change the strategic value of the contact center to the entire company. Is there an opportunity to enhance the role of the contact center such that it becomes a peer with R&D, manufacturing, marketing, sales and finance in the corporate executive committee? MANAGE THE EVOLUTION OF THE CONTACT CENTER M Identifying the Contact Center’s Corporate Role 1. What functions does your contact center provide — support, sales, up- and cross-sell, churn management, customer surveys? If you don’t do these things, does someone else? 2. What is your role in the corporate management group? 3. Do you often work with and support multiple groups in the company? 4. Do you provide occasional or continuous organized information on customer opinions and behavior to other groups? 5. Do you participate in creating business strategies that affect revenue and profitability with other groups? 6. When you do, do you take proactive responsibility for portions of these plans? Management has aggressively reinvented the corporate role of contact centers, making them more valuable over time. This is no surprise. They are expensive and in the front line of customer contact, so a focus on their value should be a continuous management exercise. Unfortunately, some companies still view contact centers primarily as a cost sink. This view is more typical in traditional industries, where the contact center is a smaller portion of the overall corporate budget or where customers have less choice and more difficultly moving to competitors, for instance, in utilities and product manufacturers supplying large distributors. However, managers in the leading-edge industries continuously evolve the role of their contact centers. They look for new ways to provide value through their expertise — handling customer contacts, capturing information and supporting or executing corporate sales and partner relationships. They search for ways to either retire or outsource packaged activities to reduce costs and reassign their direct personnel to make the optimal contribution to the corporation’s bottom line. A useful exercise for understanding this evolution is to identify the contact center’s value from the corporate view by documenting its role. Such a statement can be used to question whether the optimal value is being achieved for the contact center. It is also the foundation for creating the strategy for evolving the center’s role and value. A few questions can start this process (see the box above). Management should consider: what were the answers to these questions a few years ago, what are they now, and what might they be in several years? Once these questions are answered, management should map the flow of information between contact centers and other groups. All too frequently, call center managers answer that they are kept in the dark. They don’t learn about new marketing, sales or support programs until customers call and want to talk about them. However, when the contact center is responsible for sales, managers report a steady flow of information. In these “integrated” examples, there is an overt, measurable set of information that passes from the contact center to management — closures, revenues, marketing program data, etc. — and a stream of questions and information passing back to the contact center. icmi’s insight www.icmi.com | JANUARY 2008 41 http://www.icmi.com

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of ICMI's Customer Management Insight - January 2008

ICMI's Customer Management Insight - January 2008 Contents Customer Care Technologies Ad Index Editor's Page Contact Center Spotlight People: Prehire Tests In The Center Strategy: Video Contact Centers Show Preview Operations: Knowledge Management Industry Research Contact Centers Face Today's Realities: A Case for Consolidation 2.0 Is Your Agent Training Process Evolving with the Role? The Key to Innovation Is Maintaining Your Strengths Becoming Strategic: Using Customer Contact Analytics to Empower the Contact Center's Role

ICMI's Customer Management Insight - January 2008

For optimal viewing of this digital publication, please enable JavaScript and then refresh the page. If you would like to try to load the digital publication without using Flash Player detection, please click here.