What
has been the greatest challenge the contact center industry has
faced in the last 12 months and why?
Competition, from offshore, from web-based businesses and from other
contact centres operating in the same sector.
Within the UK the “honeymoon” period for contact centres
has come to an end. Contact centres, (or call centres as was), were
originally justified as a means to provide new “direct”
businesses to compete with the likes of First Direct, and Direct
Line, providing extra customer choice and convenience. The next
wave of expansion came as companies realised that the cost base
for running a direct business was much lower than that of a branch
based operation. It wasn’t long before major institutions
were competing to open 1000 seat contact centres before their competitors.
Subsequently, the CRM bandwagon started rolling, stimulating further
waves of investment.
Now that contact cntres are widespread, the opportunities for further
savings to be made by closing down branches are limited, and the
benefits promised by the CRM revolution have failed to fully materialise.
Therefore contact centres are faced with finding ways of delivering
greater efficiency, supporting increased volumes of transactions,
or delivering more revenue generation, without increasing costs.
In 2004 what do you think will be the top priorities
for (answer both):
a) Contact center managers
Delivering improvements in efficiency, or increasing call-handling
capacity whilst maintaining business as usual. This will have to
be achieved without increasing staff attrition rates, and in most
cases without major investment programmes. Equally, high quality
management information will be |
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required
to assist in managing these processes and validating progress.
b) Company executives
Responding to demands to become more competitive, whilst resisting
the temptation simply to outsource offshore. The headline savings
for going offshore are very attractive – and it is right for
some organisations. However it is very important to account for
all costs, operational factors and customer attitudes to going offshore.
For many companies there will be better ways of delivering the improvements
required.
What do you believe (a technology, process,
attitude etc) will have the biggest impact on the industry over
the next 12 months - how and why?
On the basis
of discussions with existing customers and other enquiries we are
receiving there are three significant impact areas:
The provision of automated, self-service options for customers,
using well-designed IVR, providing either touch-tone or speech-recognition
based user interfaces. If these applications are carefully designed
to provide both the correct customer experience, and the types of
transactions customers demand, they can deliver massive cost savings.
Consider that IVR platforms have fallen dramatically in price, and
can process both routine and complex transactions non-stop 24x7x365,
leaving agents free to handle more challenging, higher value transactions,
and the scale of the savings become apparent.
The second area of interest is from organisations consolidating
existing multi-site contact centre networks, or linking them to
assist in load balancing, and deliver efficiencies. This throws
up a whole host of challenges, including process harmonisation,
call routing and linking MI systems to assist in effective management
of the consolidated operation |
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We
are also receiving an increasing number of enquiries from customers
who wish to use management information to manage contact centre
operations more pro-actively. Typically this is driven by organisations
linking different contact centres together to assist in load balancing.
In other cases MI drawn from a number of disparate sources must
be combined to provide reports that address real business objectives.
This often involves combining information from telephony systems,
core operational systems and contact management systems to provide
an overall picture. We are now seeing organisations identifying
a need for bespoke systems to meet their unique requirements for
MI. This isn’t the most glamorous part of contact centre operations,
but well executed MI database and reporting systems can make a massive
difference to an organisation’s ability to run a competitive
business.
What impact has 'external' events (economy,
continuing terrorists fears, etc) had on your company, and how have
you adapted your business, if at all?
We have seen a reduction in major capital projects, and many of
our customers are now working closely with us to see how they can
squeeze more out of the existing operation, without embarking on
costly technology implementations
Do you feel the
service you personally get as a consumer is better or worse than
it was a year ago and why do you think it's so?
I generally feel things have deteriorated somewhat – this
is probably a reflection of operations inappropriately moving offshore,
the problems associated with the breaking up of the directory enquiries
market, and poorly planned consolidation exercises. |
