Does your contact centre make or break you?

Contact centres are traditionally viewed as liabilities, an obligation towards customers that costs money and has to be managed and operated as efficient as possible. In the current economic state, this view might seem to make sense. But contact centres today have the potential to be much more.

The old “call” centres were so named because the only means of customer-agent contact was through voice calling, while modern contact centres enable many ways of communication such as voice, e-mail, fax and Web chat. By tapping into the potential of these multi-channels and advanced technologies in order to foster customer satisfaction and loyalty, as well as generate new business and subsequently increasing revenue, organisations can transform contact centres into profit centres.

It is key to find a balance between keeping costs as low as possible and providing good service. If cutting calls short means that agents come across as rude or irritable, quality will be compromised resulting in a low customer satisfaction. Approaching customer transactions differently and implementing the right tools might just give your company the competitive edge.

A prerequisite for a successful profit centre though, is to have an integrated environment. Routing e-mails, faxes and Web chat together with incoming voice interactions on a single platform saves time and equip agents to efficiently handle calls while at the same time enhancing customer satisfaction. When a customer phones in to follow up on previous correspondence, agents are able to automatically pull the information from the system and get a holistic view of the customer's information.

This type of customer data assists agents in resolving issues quicker as well as identifying opportunities for product upgrades or new sales, resulting in revenue-generating transactions instead of merely draining the bottom line.

By further linking an advanced routing system to customer databases, skills based routing is made possible. Upon identifying customers and their requests, calls can be routed to specific agents with certain skills such as languages spoken, product knowledge or selling abilities, fitting the customer's needs. The end result is fewer misdirected calls, higher customer satisfaction and more opportunities for generating revenue.

Agents are the highest cost in a contact centre and by automating certain functions, costs can be reduced. Self-service technology gives customers the option to access standard information by entering information via a telephone keypad or through automatic speech recognition. On the other hand, companies should consider customers' preferences and determine customers' ability to use the technology before implementing complicated procedures that scare people away. A safe decision is to always offer the option of speaking to a contact centre agent.

It is also important to manage contact centre workforce in terms of productivity, quality and cost-effectiveness. It is not necessarily the agent who takes the most calls that is accomplishing the best results for the company. Contact centre managers should monitor and analyse calls in order to assess the quality of the interactions and identify agents who need coaching to assist them in meeting service and revenue goals.

By training agents to become self-sufficient and allowing them input into schedules as well as access to their productivity reports, managers can empower staff to become responsible for their performance. Providing them with the tools and opportunities to monitor and better themselves will also make them feel as part of the team.

In addition, most contact centres split inbound and outbound call handling, but by combining the two, productivity during valleys and peak times can be better managed. In adopting technology to include outbound calling and campaigns, agents have the opportunity to schedule callbacks at times when the contact centre is not so busy or to update customer data during quiet times.

Each site has specific key objectives and can put individual service levels in place dictated by its volumes and systems, but an acceptable standard in the industry is that 80% of all calls must be answered within 20 seconds. The challenge for contact centre managers in achieving this is to balance the cost of productivity by getting the right number of agents without being overstaffed.

Essentially, organisations must strive to get the best value out of what they've purchased by optimally utilising all opportunities. What started out as a “call” centre meant for inbound calling only, can become a vital service and revenue tool for any organisation.