Executive buy-in is key to successful contact centre consolidation

According to the attendees of the recent Interactive Intelligence Webinar: 'Contact Centre Consolidation and Centralisation: Building a Plan to Get There', 29.2% of the companies are in the early phases of centralising and consolidating their contact centres, but are running into various roadblocks. And, the biggest difficulty (44%) was articulating the benefits of a consolidated contact centre to management.

According to Drew Kraus, research vice-president, worldwide enterprise communications applications at Gartner, this echoes what the consultancy is seeing in the industry.

Presenting during the Webinar, Kraus said they had identified getting executive buy-in early as the single most important critical success factor for a contact centre consolidation project. He said that executive buy-in is key in order to motivate the various business units to participate in the project.

Consolidating onto a centrally managed contact centre platform, equipped to service all business locations, can drive down total cost of ownership, while at the same time delivering more advanced services to a company's customers. Elimination of the multitude of systems in various locations, from various vendors, each with distinct administrative interfaces, makes it easier to centrally manage communications across the enterprise. Productivity increases through a common set of applications and services, as well as the ability to deliver new functionality simultaneously across all locations. And overall reliability and availability of services can increase substantially.

Despite these strategic, organisational and financial benefits to a consolidated contact centre, there is a range of reasons why such a project might face internal resistance, said Kraus. Chief among these is the concept of “brittle” infrastructure: that over time existing infrastructure has become a knitted together multi-vendor deployment, difficult to maintain, costly to support, and tricky to change. This results in companies being stuck with 10-year-old operations, too scared to tweak anything for fear of affecting the entire system, and therefore unaccustomed to altering existing processes, even if newer technology can break through the “brittle barrier”.

Tom Fisher, Interactive Intelligence's director of systems engineering, concurred that the number one mistake companies make is failing to get executive buy-in. When that happens, he said, people dig their heels in and become rogues or outliers, jeopardising the project.

Brad Herrington, Interactive Intelligence's senior manager, solutions marketing, went on to discuss implementation tactics for ensuring buy-in from the key executives:

Ensure all the right business units and key players are in the room, and then sell the benefits to them from the point of view of their roles. For instance, he said, don't stay at the desktop level when it comes to administration of the contact centre. Show the executive management the consolidated reports that give them an easy-to-read, concise overview of the performance of the business.

Don van Doren, president of independent consulting company Vanguard Communications, agreed, saying that to avoid contact centre consolidation looking like a pure IT initiative, talk to the senior executives about the issues they are facing. For instance, explain the impact a change in the way the business deploys contact centre staff can have on first call resolution metrics and overall customer satisfaction and loyalty.

Another suggestion Kraus had for the Webinar participants was to do a detailed inventory of all sites. Not only would they be surprised by what was lurking in the corners, he said, but an inventory would also help define where roadblocks and objections might be located.

If companies still struggle to get buy-in, Gartner's Kraus recommended showing early wins. Pick a piece of the technology stack to start trialling early on the process, even before the entire project is fully planned out. Taking a more iterative approach gives the implementation team a chance to learn lessons, as well as the early wins making the entire migration appear more manageable and less threatening, giving people a chance to buy into it.

More information, including the presentation deck and a recording, can be found here: www.inin.com/postevent. Interactive Intelligence's next Web event is titled: “2012 Key Contact Center Trends and Priorities: How You Can be Ready”, and will be held Tuesday, 31 January at 11:30am Eastern time (EST). To register for the Webcast, visit www.inin.com/webevent.