The key to achieving full benefit from customer interaction centres is seamless integration with the rest of the enterprise. Workflow technology is the catalyst helping to bring this about.
This is the opinion of Mark Ehmke, MD of Staffware South Africa, who explains that even though the concept of a call centre was formed over 50 years ago, the aims are the same today.
"Call centres are there to generate or maintain customer relationships," Ehmke says. "Nowadays, through significant advances in technology and infrastructure, the emphasis is less on overall call centre productivity and more on the level of service that can be offered to customers in the race to greater competitiveness."
One of the first-ever 24-hour call centres was an inbound customer service and sales centre set up by Pan American World Airlines in 1956. As the volume of both inbound and outbound calls increased, new telephone technologies were introduced.
Automatic call distributors (ACDs) improved inbound call queuing and routing, while predictive dialers and voice detection units (VDUs) speeded up the process of detecting a customer to talk to for outbound telemarketing campaigns. In the mid 1970s, IBM introduced its Customer Information and Control System (CICS) that allowed online access to customer account details, whereas previously customer information access involved thumbing through computer reports and files of correspondence.
These advances in technology improved the productivity of the call centre. In the mid 1980s, it became clear that it was also vital to control costs. The largest cost factor then was payroll and it continues to be so to this day. Technologies such as interactive voice response units, computer telephony integration (CTI) and intuitive agent desktop systems aim at increasing agent productivity and thus reducing payroll costs.
"Although controlling costs is still a key objective, there is also a growing focus on using the call centre to provide a high level of quality service to customers, and thus transforming the call centre from a cost centre to a revenue centre," Ehmke believes.
"Buying decisions are increasingly influenced by how well a company treats its customers. Every contact is important, whether at the first inquiry, during the sales process or in the service and support. Customers feel better about a company when they are treated well."
Research has shown that a customer`s loyalty to a company actually increases if their questions are answered, problems are solved, or needs are met on the first phone call. However, the same research shows that the loyalty rate falls dramatically with each subsequent call. It certainly is beneficial if the customer`s problem or request is accomplished during that first call, but it is more likely that some action will be required that will require the involvement of other elements of the organisation and the completion would be accomplished after the call is terminated.
"If you consider that customers represent a significant revenue stream during their lifetime (thanks to upgrades, add-on sales, and referrals) the revenue exposure associated with customer service is significant. Regardless of whether an organisation delivers highly focused financial offerings to an increasingly targeted market, configures complex telecommunication solutions, is a new player seeking a share of the utilities market, or is an established manufacturer looking for an edge through mass customisation, the answer remains the same: the key differentiating factor is the degree of sophistication brought to bear on the relationship with the customer."
Better customer relationship management does not necessarily mean more frequent customer contacts. When problems arise, customers prefer to deal with an organisation that can access information quickly and provide an update without having to pass them through a series of different departments. The goal is higher quality contacts, by providing better information, better timing and, above all, a more proactive, more responsive company culture.
Of central importance to the efficiency of the call centre in this new climate is the need to manage the dossiers generated by incoming or outgoing calls. Each call creates a need for certain activities to be carried out by people and/or systems within the organisation. It could be a request for a new product or service or a complaint about an existing product. The resulting dossier will pass through various departments, roles and individuals and will have a number of documents and database records associated with it.
"A rigorous workflow solution is required to ensure that a customer does not get lost between systems," Ehmke stresses. "Workflow technology is the ideal way of tracking the flow of customer-initiated activity and applying consistent business policies and procedures.
"Workflow technology also ensures that call centres do not operate in isolation from the rest of the organisation. Customer-initiated requests will inevitably need to be passed on to others in a structured and controlled way. Furthermore, if the efficiency of the call centre is to be maximised, back office staff should also pass requests on to the call centre for action."
The workflow solution allows agents to have concurrent access to multiple processes and will be able to trigger automatic activities. Performance standards can be enforced by the workflow solution by tracking the progress of a transaction and issuing notification if and when preset time lines are passed for the provision of a given customer service.
When supported by workflow, the call centre is transformed from being a reactive resource to a proactive tool. Call centres using workflow allow agents to:
have a complete view of customer information, access customer status, and make a quick response to the customer inquiry;
give an adequate response to the customer without first having to pass the customer through several different departments;
forward information quickly and easily to other parts of the organization, thus reducing fulfilment times for customer requests;
automatically record, track and escalate customer issues to call centre managers; and
benefit from the automated direct transfer of data to back-office systems and thus reduce the amount of the post-call work or "wrap-up" time.
"Workflow is an extremely important component of a customer relationship management solution," he continues, "because it allows information to flow from the call centre to other areas of the enterprise and vice versa. Furthermore, it provides an invaluable link between the handling of the call and the response to the customer request by providing a managed business process and a high-performance marketing and business-development function.
"Integrating workflow into the sales and service environments helps to reduce the fulfilment time for new product orders and allows call centre agents to be better informed of the current status of a customer`s business transaction. Not only does workflow manage the business processes, but it is also easily integrated into all other levels of existing applications (both those specific to the call centre and general business applications). As a result, call centre agents can obtain vital information from the system. This data is needed for building accurate customer profiles and consequently developing existing and new accounts.
"The workflow applications can be utilised throughout the entire enterprise, working collaboratively with nearly any desktop application without requiring significant additional system resources and at very reasonable cost. The combined power of workflow and call centre technology creates a backbone any business would be proud of - one that can consistently provide the right product or service for customers while helping to build a reputation as an efficient, dependable, and customer-friendly company," Ehmke concludes.
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