Transforming customer service

Customer service is the secret to customer loyalty, but it is an experience that has rapidly become commoditised. Nortel VP for Africa Yves Roux looks at what it means to provide customer service in a contact centre environment.

One of the inescapable truths of business today is that customer loyalty is difficult to achieve. Globalisation and the Internet have given rise to thousands of brands promoting similar products to customers, making the market tougher and more competitive.

This has prompted many organisations to see customer service as a key area to differentiate themselves from the competition. However, just revamping a traditional call centre is no longer enough to achieve a competitive advantage, not least because the structure of the contact centre is changing more rapidly today than at any time over the past 30 years.

This change is a true revolution: one that is being demanded by customers, driven by the strength of their buying power and impelled by the importance of their loyalty in a highly competitive world.

Traditional call centres were designed to be a separate function for managing customer service interaction. Using a dedicated business unit, customers were to be given, for the first time, a consisted single point of contact and a measurable level of services.

At that time, this was nothing short of a paradigm shift. And the evolution continued. With the introduction of IP technology, contact centres were outsourced and off-shored. This delivered increased performance, competitiveness and flexibility than ever before, while further reducing operating costs.

This unique competitive advantage the contact centre once offered, however, has diminished - partly through ubiquity but also because customers generally dislike call centres. They remember a time when you could speak to an actual employee of a company, when you did not have to be transferred several times to get through to someone who could help. And customers remember when they didn`t have to queue in an IVR system.

At the same time, customers have forgotten that the old way of doing things often came at the price of not getting through at all, never finding the right person to speak to and, and when they did, liaising with someone who had received only limited training to talk with customers.

In short, customer expectations have continued to increase as new technology and new ways of doing things have emerged. Moreover, the pressures on the contact centre have come full circle. The criteria to gain a competitive advantage is now placed firmly on integration within the enterprise - on making the contact centre an integral and physical part of the business. But, crucially, this time it has to be done without sacrificing customer service.

It is precisely this that will be enabled by the imminent arrival of a new generation of technology. And with this, the contact centre could once again become a source of competitive advantage.

Trek to the summit

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The vision behind Nortel`s multimedia contact centre solution is simple. It takes the expertise from the wider organisation and makes it available directly to customers through the contact centre.

This vision is achieved through SIP and IP telephony, enabling experts in the wider enterprise to participate in customer service while the contact centre is maintained as a distinct entity, enjoying all the benefits it has traditionally provided.

In practice, this means that all employees - as well as dedicated agents - can deliver a high level of customer service while still maintaining their existing roles. Moreover, customers can now use any medium to communicate with the contact centre, including e-mail, Web, SMS and instant messaging, turning the traditional call centre into a multimedia contact centre.

This facilitates a fundamentally better way of delivering customer service. For example, when an employee is available, they can be asked by an agent to assist with a call relating to their specific field of expertise. In the case of a salesperson, they could be asked to join a call directly to provide assistance. However, if they person is not accustomed to a customer-facing role, they could be employed indirectly, passing key knowledge and information to the agent via secure instant messaging and other collaboration tools.

Such a contact centre solution not only means all available expertise is being fully utilised to enhance customer service, but customers can expect quicker response times to their queries, and a more satisfactory resolution.

The basic technology for such a solution has existed for several years. Solutions enabling virtualisation based on SIP and IP do exist.

But what have not been available, and this is a fundamental change, are solutions that make the practical implementation of such an extensive vision possible.

Nortel has made it a reality by combining increased functionality with high-level scalability. Nortel Contact Centre incorporates all the capabilities for a call server, administration server and multimedia solution. At the same time, the product also supports up to 100 000 users. The result is a truly carrier-grade contact centre solution delivered from a single product.

Nortel is addressing the technological requirements of the next generation of contact centres. The solution enables the contact centre to match the agility of the rest of the business in meeting customer demands.

Analysts such as MZA and Gartner have reported favourably on Nortel`s remote licence strategy. Nortel`s policy is to enable licences to be quickly and easily transferred across sites and between users, preventing not only the glut of under-utilised licences that is now common in the industry, but that licences can be flexibly assigned to users across a virtualised contact centre as and when needs dictate. The customers only pay for licences as and when required.