From: www.itworld.com

Call centers satisfy and retain customers

by Lori Mitchell

February 6, 2001 —

HAVE YOU HAD trouble keeping customers satisfied before or after sales? Is your customer data scattered all over your enterprise? Does your budget have room for investing in retaining customers? If you can answer yes to those questions, you should look into creating a call center for handling customer communications.

Call centers provide a single contact for customers who may try to reach your company via multiple channels: e-mail, Web chat, fax, phone, or VOIP (voice over IP). Call centers, often called contact centers to reflect the multiple points of access, provide your staff with consistent information throughout an integrated system. Centers capture data from across the enterprise and consolidate customer-related information into a central database. This integration improves your customer's interaction and satisfaction, and your operations gain efficiency. The costs of implementing a call center are high, but we hope to help readers understand the value of the investment.

There are many aspects to building a call center, including selecting the location, telephone equipment, networking equipment, and software, that combine to form a very daunting and expensive endeavor. Building a call center internally may be feasible only for very large enterprises, but smaller companies should consider outsourcing the centers.

A call center's services can be essential for a smooth-running business. Once a call center is in place, it integrates technology from customer databases, order-entry systems, fulfillment, and knowledge bases.

Calculating your overall budget for the project will help you determine whether to build and manage a call center internally or to outsource some or all of the operations to keep costs down and focus on customer retention. Building a call center can run to several million dollars in capital equipment alone, not to mention the cost of hiring a staff and managing the day-to-day operations.

Call centers are more than phones and operators

A traditional call center was basically a large room with switches, a PBX phone switch, and desks of service representatives taking calls over the phone. Customers in many cases endured long response times and had to repeat information such as account numbers or descriptions of the problems. This kind of service regularly resulted in frustrated customers and customer representatives.

In today's Internet-paced world, customers won't stand for such a long and tedious process, and it is no longer sufficient for customer representatives to depend solely on reference books when troubleshooting or assisting customers.

But along with Internet speed, came new ways for customers to reach your company. E-mail, Web chat, and VOIP now join the traditional forms of fax and telephone.

To prepare for these multiple forms of communication and to efficiently serve your customers, your company needs to capture information from across the enterprise and consolidate customer-related data into a central database. In most cases customer data resides in many systems, such as order history, fulfillment, shipping, and billing. The numerous sources slow the ability of your agents to handle requests, and they may also contribute to errors and duplication. For corporations to effectively handle these multiple customer conttact channels, integrating the varied systems is essential. Therefore, companies need to carefully select their call center tools.

In this Test Center Action Plan we will define the components that make up a call center and highlight several important issues.

Location decision comes first

If your company is starting a call center from scratch, one of the first things you need to determine is its location. Whether it is a small arrangement in your local facility or a large enterprise-size center, this step is important to your growth and bottom line; so plan carefully. The high cost of real estate in populous areas is driving many call centers to western and southern states. Call centers ultimately grow, so choose a site with room for expansion.

The size of your call center encompasses not only square footage but also the number of representatives, the telephony and LAN equipment, and the client desktops. The core of a call center includes many underlying components: the varied networking equipment, automated call distribution, the PBX phone switch, CTI (computer-telephony integration), and software components. (To see a graphical representation of a call center with all its underlying elements, see the illustration, below.)

Integrating all the components of your enterprise is time-consuming and expensive. You'll need to determine which systems and applications need to be integrated; the list might include legacy systems, disparate relational databases, and Internet technologies. Thus it is wise to select tools that integrate telephony equipment and software components.

However, you may find that even after you launch your call center, the number of calls may not decrease. More and better information on Web sites does aid customers; they benefit from online knowledge bases and FAQs. But when they need to interact with the call center, the Internet-savvy customer tends to ask more complex questions, which require call center representatives to be better skilled.

An increasing number of vendors, including Talisma, Kana, Genesys Telecommunications Lab, RightNow Technologies, Siebel, Echopass, Chordiant Software, and others, can help you build and integrate your call center. Their tools range in price from very expensive licensed solutions (from $200,000 to $300,000 for a Delano or Kana solution) to relatively inexpensive hosted models (averaging $600 to $1,000 per seat, per month for an Echopass solution).

Integrating with the Internet is critical, as it provides more avenues for assisting customers with chat, self-help, and live agents. We found a good example of integrated customer service on Talisma's Web site. While searching the e-CRM (customer relationship management) vendor's pages for information regarding products and services, we were greeted with a pop-up dialog box asking whether we required any help finding information.

Select tools that fit your needs and integrate well with your telephony equipment and current applications. These tools should be compatible with PBX equipment and dispersed data sources from warehouses and shipping and customer accounts. And make sure you select tools that can handle multiple customer-access channels such as telephone, Web self-help, e-mail, chat, integrated voice response, and application sharing.

Good help is hard to come by

Hiring a skilled staff is more important than ever. Today's call centers are much more complex, and they require specialized agents. Customers are more demanding; they expect immediate response and intelligent help. It is important to train your representatives and place them in specific roles. For instance, some are better on the phone, and others are better at handling e-mail. To streamline the distribution of contacts, you'll want to choose tools with workflow process support and skills-based routing. The latter feature enables the system to take a call regarding a specific produuct or application and then automatically routes it to a representative with the appropriate skills to handle the request.

Once your representatives have been hired and properly trained, retaining them is just as important as retaining your customers. Customer service representatives need to be kept up to speed on support methods, products, and processes. Keep your knowledge bases up-to-date so that your agents can best satisfy customers. Advanced training, recognition, and competitive salaries are essential in retaining your workforce.

With all the different customer channels for reaching your call center, it is important to answer and respond to incoming calls in a timely manner. Getting the appropriate agent to assist the caller requires that you define your workflow processes and SLAs (service-level agreements) with customers. Help centers that have automated workflow and skills-based routing can effectively route the incoming calls and ensure that the calls are being responded to appropriately. Monitoring tools and reporting features are essential for measuring your response times and the number of calls received; this data helps ensure that your goals are being met. Keeping your call center running smoothly is an ongoing task that needs to be revised from time to time to address problem areas and to help improve customer relations.

Call centers are an essential part of any business that deals frequently with customer queries, and the centers are changing with the influence of the Internet. Integrated call centers decrease customer waiting time, improve customer access, and improve call routing. Your company will benefit from satisfied customers who come back for more business. In spite of the high costs of a call center, you really can't afford to work without one.

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