Companies not utilising full potential of their call centres
October 2006

Most companies do not exercise the full potential of their call centres, seeing them instead as an add-on cost centre and a glorified helpdesk to field customer calls and queries.

This is according to Deon Scheepers, technology and solutions director at Atio Corporation, who says this results in call centre staff being unable to fully understand the function of the business and how their actions could possibly affect it.

Scheepers says it's vital to align your call centre strategy with the other business objectives and goals. "In this way, should the business objective be to increase revenue and raise customer service levels, the call centre staff should not only be concerned with handling as many calls as possible, but with resolving all queries, because dissatisfied customers will only have to call again."

He cites technology, staff, customer satisfaction, interaction quality and process improvement objectives as some of the key components to be included in a solid call centre strategy.

He says a blended focus on technology, people and processes is needed. "Businesses need to discover what amounts to customer satisfaction, and how to measure it effectively. Following this, they need a mechanism in place for making sure that the fundamental business processes and technology can support the objectives.

When establishing objectives, organisations should ask their customers what they like and dislike and their preferences when interacting with a call centre, for example offering them a choice of being contacted by phone, fax or email. They then need to offer the same level of service across these channels.

"Many call centres focus on voice or telephonic interaction, and have very delayed response times when it comes to email or fax," says Scheepers. "This is a major issue, but can be counteracted by using technology to send automated e-mail and fax responses informing customers that their email or fax has been received and is being attended to, if the query cannot be immediately resolved.

In order to get this right, Scheepers says a workflow process must also be established to surmise the nature of the query and its intended recipient, to ensure it is actioned in a timeous manner, or be passed on to a higher authority if it is not.

He says it only infuriates customers when you respond to them to thank them for an email after its taken a week to resolve their query or respond to their request.

"There is a growing focus on the people aspect of the call centre, to increase efficiency and improve customer service levels. After all, people count for approximately 70% of the call centre overheads. Technology allows management to measure customer satisfaction levels and the quality of service, and provides the fundamental support for all other call centre processes."

He cites technology tools being used to ensure calls are routed and escalated to correct staff member or department as an example. "Similarly, workflow applications and business process management are utilised to streamline various processes in order to meet strategic objectives."

Moreover, knowledge management and business intelligence applications can enable relevant information from diverse sources can be utilised by the call centre agents on a single screen while engaging with the customer. He says call centres are slowly migrating to integrated solutions to manage all communication channels and allow multimedia interactions to be dealt with by the agents, ensuring they no longer need to leave their workstations.

Scheepers sees this as resulting in massive improvements in productivity. "In this way, the supervisor is afforded a single view of all the transactions handled by the agent. In addition, innovations in voice-recording and other workforce-optimisation technology, enables organisations to analyse how calls are being handled and whether any additional training is needed for the call centre agents.

"Multimedia recording solutions are now also on the market, that has the capability of capturing agents' screen interactions. This enables supervisors to assess the manner in which information is being entered into the system. In addition, quality assessment software tools are now available for monitoring agent interaction and identifying skills gaps."

"Lastly, it's now possible to conduct surveys by email or interactive voice response (IVR) to get customer feedback, on how they rated the service they received," concludes Scheepers.