ICMI's Customer Management Insight - April 2008 - (Page 20)

RECOMMENDED READING agent and system availability. > POOR ASSET UTILIZATION KEEPS COST PER CALL HIGHER THAN IT SHOULD BE. The inability to reconfigure and reallocate call distribution as situations change may result in one agent group experiencing light volume or sitting idle while agents at another location are inundated. To avoid customer service impact, companies may over-staff beyond optimal and cost-effective levels. > MULTISITE DEPLOYMENTS, UPGRADES AND MAINTENANCE STALL TIME TO MARKET AND DRAIN SAVINGS. Return on investment from new products, technological innovations in call center infrastructure and service enhancements are delayed and diminished by the complexities of rollouts across the heterogeneous platforms used by multiple outsourcing vendors. Companies then pay for unnecessary and redundant maintenance in their aggregate outsourcing bills. It doesn’t have to be that way. Companies moving to multisourced call centers can avoid these problems and maximize their savings and other benefits by adopting a common hosted call center platform. Hosted platforms flexibly extend across any number and variety of outsourcing resources — and rapidly scale to meet changing call volumes and business strategies. They enable companies to deliver consistent, high-quality customer service transparently to their customers while taking advantage of the growing range of outsourcing options. ACHIEVING SERVICE LEVEL CONSISTENCY M > > > > > > > > > > > Advantages of Multi-Sourcing with a Common Hosted Call Center Infrastructure Efficient load balancing among all agents at all locations More effective skills-based routing among all agents at all locations Unified historical and trend reporting Comprehensive real-time visibility and control Broader, deeper, more consistent systems integration including incorporation of outsourced, remote, and in-house agents A common agent user interface Faster, easier, more consistent agent training Consolidated monitoring, recording, evaluation and scoring (even coaching) of outsourced, remote and in-house agents Efficient and warm transfers between locations, if desirable Better disaster prevention through complete redundancy and guaranteed systems availability Lower cost through the need for fewer agents SOURCE: Echopass Corp. When customers are interacting with a call center agent, they’re interacting with the company — that’s how they see it. The compaicmi’s insight ny’s ability to support this perception through technology that makes service delivery mechanisms transparent to customers is, of course, the key enabler behind call center multi-sourcing. The problem for companies adopting multi-sourcing without benefit of a common hosted platform is that the transparency of the delivery mechanism is far from 100 percent. It shows itself through the numerous inconsistencies that disparate agent platforms and user interfaces cause in call center processes and workflow. Customers who frequently interact with a call center — often a company’s most valuable customers — certainly notice these inconsistencies and soon become disappointed and frustrated by unsatisfactory and unpredictable experiences. Inconsistent service can also turn off one-time callers, if they have an experience below the standard of quality they had expected of the company. And, unlike frequent callers, these customers may never give the company a chance to change their negative opinion. There are numerous ways platform differences can create differences in call center treatment. These discrepancies may be as subtle as the way agents transfer a call or as significant as the number of questions customers are asked during a transaction and the time required to complete it. Consider these examples: > TOOL DEPLOYMENT DELAYS. An inhouse call center develops a new scripting tool that allows for greater structure in the call and therefore better compliance with company service policies. The tool is useable immediately on the in-house platform, but deploying it on the platforms used by multi-sourced agent groups takes additional time since some custom coding is required. While the outsourcers eventually get up to speed, it isn’t long before www.icmi.com | APRIL 2008 20 http://www.icmi.com

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

ICMI's Customer Management Insight - April 2008 Operations: Small Call Centers, Big Potential Ad Index Contents Editor's Page Contact Center Spotlight People: Assessment Tools Recommended Reading Technology: Speech Recognition Special Feature: Best of Show Strategy: Service-to-Sales Success Expert's Angle - High Volume, High Stakes: A Better Strategy for Hiring Experts Angle - Secrets of Recruiting Success/Job Brands: Changing Applicant Reactions to Your Openings Experts Angle - Speech Analytics: Uncovering the Voice of the Customer

ICMI's Customer Management Insight - April 2008

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