User guides- Contact Centres

Control your call characteristics Get a handle on call processes Make your contact center larger Mix types of work for better agent utilization Train during idle time Look for ways to offload unnecessary contacts Enhance customer support with speech Discover what it costs to take agents off the phones Invest in your staff Become a proactive manager

enerally speaking, contact centers provide a very efficient way to communicate with a large number of customers. However, since contact center expenditures are frequently one of the larger line items for corporations, the costs are usually closely scrutinized.

In this part you find some general tips for improving your contact center by implementing efficiencies and decreasing overall costs.

Improve Call Control and Map Call Processes

Implementing a better call control strategy can have an immediate impact because reducing call length without sacrificing service is an effective way to reduce costs.

A good way to improve control is through the development of a contact guide. Guides can be as simple as an outline of the general flow and content of each contact — perhaps on one piece of paper — or can be very complex, using sophisticated scripting software and logical branching.

Any control mechanism you put in place for phone calls can also be generalized and adapted for other contact methods as well — including web, chat, e-mail, and self-service. The idea is to improve the customer experience by ensuring the contact never takes longer than is necessary to achieve a satisfactory resolution.

Mapping your processes for handling various types of customer calls is another useful exercise. Start by identifying the eight to ten primary reasons customers contact your center. Then, sit down with a group of agents, perhaps a supervisor or two, and a trainer to map out (on paper or in software) how each contact is to be handled.

After you map the top call types, you can ask the group the question, “How might this be done better?” Simplifying and improving processes can result in tremendous improvements to call length and other call objectives.

Enlarge Your Contact Center

You can enlarge your contact center in many ways — and not all of them involve using more physical space. In general, larger contact centers are more efficient than smaller centers.

The easiest way to make your contact center bigger is to work together. If your contact center is running separate call-handling groups (customer service and collections, for example), then by merging these two groups you can take advantage of the economies of bigger contact centers.

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You can continue to have call-handling groups logically separated, but with the ability for available agents in one area to handle overflow in the other area.

Implementing an IP contact center can help make your operation more scalable, which means you can enlarge without costly build-outs or investments in your plant. Instead, you can utilize and manage agents — through your IP infrastructure — as if they were physically in your office.

You can also expand your contact center to take advantage of personnel in lower-cost labor markets. If your contact center is located in the heart of Capital City you may have access to lots of the best-qualified people, but they’re likely to be expensive. It often doesn’t cost as much for the same quality of staff in Rural City, USA; Frostbite Falls, Canada; or Farfaraway, India. If you have an IP contact center, expanding in such markets is much easier than in traditional contact centers.

Blend Work

You can benefit from improved agent occupancy by blending work into your contact-handling queue. A classic example of blending is mixing outbound telemarketing into an inbound sales or service queue. In this case, you make use of agent idle time — time agents spend waiting for incoming calls — to do your outbound work. As a result, your agents are busier (more occupied) overall. Should inbound volumes increase or spike, your agents stop making outbound calls while they handle the inbound calls.

Outbound collections calls and customer-service “welcome” calls can also be used for blending, perhaps as an alternative to telemarketing. Or, other types of work can be blended in, such as answering e-mail, chat, or regular mail.

Provide your agents with tools to maximize their efficiency. By providing screen pops of relevant information, an easy-to-use agent desktop, perhaps softphone, and the ability to access experts for the tough questions, you increase the number of one-call resolutions and customer satisfaction. And, you decrease the overall volume of calls to your contact center.

Turn Idle Time into Productive Training Time

Even in larger, more efficient contact centers, idle time can make up 15 percent or more of an agent’s day. You can monitor agent activity and inbound call loads, and when agents have sufficient idle time, a CTI system can send training material to the agent’s desktop. If the application is sophisticated enough, material can be customized to the needs of the individual agent, and testing can also be added.

Eliminate Unnecessary Calls

Unnecessary calls come from a variety of sources, including calls handled poorly on the first attempt, confusing marketing materials, incorrect or confusing invoices, misdirected calls, and so on. Reducing them is a basic step in increasing contact center efficiency. Here are three quick ways to reduce unnecessary calls:

Implement an IVR. Using an integrated voice response — where automated voice prompts used to service customer contacts — offers customers a fast and efficient means of self-serving their calling needs 7 days a week, 24 hours a day. Depending on the environment, an IVR can offload between 5 and 25 percent or more of your center’s call volume.

Use Web pages. The use of company Web pages to provide customers with self-service options probably has a bright future. Self-service through a company Web site is cheaper than via an IVR, it’s generally always available, and the complexity of transactions that can be done through the Internet is greater than any IVR solution.

Analyze why customers are calling. A slightly more complex way to reduce unnecessary calls is to track the reasons for the contacts. Tracking, in detail, why customers call highlights the number of call types that are unnecessary and avoidable.

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Add Speech Self-Service

Although speech self-service can reasonably be considered a method of eliminating unnecessary phone calls, the technol-ogy’s promise to leverage existing Web investments really makes it stand out. In a speech self-service system, your “automated agents” can understand normal human speech and provide the information needed by customers. Beyond automated agent interactions, today’s speech automated systems use open standards technologies like VoiceXML to better leverage existing Web self-service investments. This information can be provided quicker over any telephone and with less frustration than with a more traditional touchtone system. (Customers can get tired waiting for “press 1 for this, 2 for that, and 3 for something else.”)

Find Out What a Change in Agent Utilization Costs

You can’t chain your agents to their desks; they need time for breaks, meetings, training, and coaching. In most operations, you also find a certain amount of time that’s unaccounted for. This missing time happens for a number of reasons and is probably acceptable so long as it doesn’t get out of hand — no more than a few percent, for example.

Every percentage reduction in agent utilization — the percentage of time agents are actually logged in to the phone systems, compared to the total time they’re being paid for — costs the contact center thousands of dollars per month. So, when you plan meetings, training, and so on, keep the cost-benefit in mind.

Spend More on Staff

Sooner or later, most contact centers fall into the trap of focusing too heavily on cost of labor. In fact, much of the outsourcing industry has been stuck in this dilemma.

It goes like this: Senior management wants the lowest possible cost of service. As a result, you reduce wages. You then spend more time than usual sifting through recruits trying to find the best cheap labor. You might even spend a lot of time training, but you don’t want to overdo it because training is expensive. Once the agents are active you do your best to monitor, coach, and program them to make them the best that they can be.

What you end up with is cheaper labor with reduced skill and motivation. As a result, although the cost of your service is low, the capability is also low. Results of this cheaper service include longer calls, less revenue generation, the need for more training, substantially higher levels of errors and callbacks, and, ultimately, dissatisfied customers who may stop doing business with you.

Bottom line: Consider spending a bit more on labor up front.

Proactively Monitor and Manage

You meet two types of managers: reactive and proactive. Those in the former group are perpetually behind the gun, racing to get on top of some problem or catch up with the competition. Those in the latter group analyze data, anticipate problems, and plan for changes that head off the competition.

If you want to be proactive, learn what reporting capabilities your systems have and how you can best use the data they provide. If you’re running an IP contact center, pay attention to reports generated not only in your contact center applications, but in your network management systems. Over time you can identify opportunities and circumvent potential problems, all to the benefit of your organization.

If your converged network is brand new, don’t be afraid to seek outside help from qualified vendors — such as Avaya — to help you make sense of the new management tools you’ll have available.