According to Call Centre gurus, Pat Holgate and Graham Knight, both of National Data Systems, one of South Africa`s leading suppliers of call centre solutions, the reason that any company should implement any one of the "big five" technologies would be to make the call centre more effective. Effectiveness is to address the customer requirements in totality in a single call/contact. Having addressed this, make the most of the contact by either selling, marketing or learning more. To achieve this effectively, there is a great dependence upon the part of the agent. Wouldn`t it therefore make perfect business sense to make the life of the agent less stressful?
One of the ways this can be achieved is to use technology to assist the agent. One of these solutions, adopted more and more, both locally and overseas, is an IVR. According to Knight, an IVR is used extensively to take the mundane, routine and repetitive tasks away from the agent. It can also be used to provide straight-forward information that is conveyed via audio text. However, says Holgate, only if the IVR is implemented correctly, would this solution make the life of the agent less stressful. If implemented incorrectly, callers will be reluctant to communicate with the IVR unit and will always want to interact with the agent, thereby putting more unwanted pressure onto the agent. However, whenever an IVR is well implemented, service is always consistent.
Call blending is a solution/feature that is used to enhance productivity. It enables the processing of both in-bound and out bound calls within the same call centre and at the same time assigns certain capable agents to handle both in-bound and out-bound calls.
"This is a wonderful technique, but one tends to find that certain personalities only handle in bound calls and visa versa," says Pat Holgate.
"This feature also allows an organisation to prevent over-staffing. In peak periods you can have these almost `super agents` that are able to handle both types of calls thereby shifting the workload. This is dynamic and the application should do this dynamically," says Knight.
"If the call blending solution sees that there is a tremendous workload waiting on incoming call queues, it will take some of the agents working on outbound campaigns and switch them to accept the inbound calls," continues Knight.
This solution also alleviates a certain amount of boredom, and ultimately stress and even burnout, that is often allied with a call centre. Call blending, in allowing calls to be shifted around, varies the agents type of work and relieves the monotony and repetition associated with call centre work. This is where cross-selling is brought to the fore thus making the agents job a lot more interesting and thereby less stressful. However, in order for cross-selling to be effective it needs to be relevant to the particular caller and there needs to be as much intelligence behind that cross-selling as possible.
Mundane scripting, too, can create more boredom and repetition. It should be used as a guideline, and not a script that should be followed like an actor. Agents should have a guideline or introductory panel and be encouraged to use their initiative without the agent spending longer than necessary on any one call. Scripting too, saves on agent training time.
Caller-line ID (CLI), while useful is currently the victim of a lot of hype and stress. What people are forgetting, says Knight, is that a vast majority of calls are made during business hours from people calling from their offices. You will therefore not have a telephone number associated with a name, so this technique is generally very limited, unless of course someone is calling from a cellphone, which has its own CLI. Whereas, ANI (Automatic Number Identification) is far more effective and useful as a productivity tool and is ideal when calls are made during business hours. It tells the agent why the person is calling, as opposed to who is calling, and allows the agent to pop the appropriate service straight away. Screen-popping is therefore often a direct result of having CLI or ANI implemented.
"ANI is also particularly effective where you have a situation of agents handling various campaigns," says Knight.
"Knowing why the person is calling as opposed to who is calling, is far less stressful in my opinion," says Holgate.
"This is because the agent is pre-aware of the reason for the call and is mentally ready to handle the call," continues Holgate.
While Computer Telephony Integration (CTI) is an important aspect of a call centre, particularly where integration of multiple components is concerned, this term has been flogged to death, say both experts. Perhaps if organisations had considered the other solutions that are available, before investing in CTI, they may have reaped more benefit, believes Holgate. The early implementation of CTI, in fact, could be the one solution in many cases, that has often been noted to cause the agent more stress. For instance, if the agent does not have all the information required at his or her fingertips to service the customer, and through CTI, the delivery of calls is now speeded up, the agent`s stress levels are going to be increased.
"Therefore, before investing in any of this technology, do so from a business point-of-view and not because it`s `nice-to-have`, concludes Holgate.
Pat Holgate is Manager Call Centre Solutions Business Unit at National Data Systems (NDS).
Graham Knight is Senior Consultant, Call Centre Solutions at National Data Systems (NDS).
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