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Make call centres part of an overall strategy Greater focus placed on people aspect to increase efficiency Organisations in general are not realising the potential of their call centres, which invariably are seen as an add-on cost centre. "In many cases the call centre is still seen as a help desk to field customer calls," says Deon Scheepers, technology and solutions director at Atio Corporation. As a result, call-centre staff tend to have a poor understanding of the rest of the business and the implications of their actions for it. It is important to have a call-centre strategy aligned with business goals and objectives, says Scheepers. Technology, processes, staff, customer satisfaction, interaction quality and process improvement objectives are some of the key elements that should be included in the strategy, says Scheepers. Companies will also need to analyse what constitutes customer satisfaction and how to measure it, and have a mechanism for ensuring the underlying business processes and technology can support the objectives, he says. "There needs to be a balance between a focus on technology, people and processes. A lot of people want to be able to choose whether they communicate by phone, fax or e-mail and get the same level of service across all these channels." A key issue is that most call centres focus on voice interaction, with major delays in response times across other channels such as e-mail and fax, says Scheepers. He says agents should notify customers that their e-mail has been received and is being attended to if they cannot provide the required information immediately, but this is invariably not the case. To achieve this will require a workflow process that can establish the nature of the content of an e-mail and the person it is intended for, ensure that action is taken in an acceptable time frame, and escalate it to a higher authority if it is not. "It is no good responding to a customer to thank them for their e-mail if it takes five days to respond to the query or request," he says. There is an increasing focus on the people aspect of the call centre in the drive to increase efficiency and raise customer service levels, says Scheepers. "People account for 70% of call-centre costs." Technology provides the underlying support for all call-centre processes and will allow management to measure service quality and customer satisfaction levels, he says. For example technology tools can be utilised to ensure that calls are routed and escalated to the relevant individuals or departments, says Scheepers. Call centres are starting to move to integrated solutions that manage all communication channels and allow multimedia interactions to be handled by the agents so that they have no excuse to leave their desks, says Scheepers. "This will result in major productivity improvements, and the supervisor can get a single view of all the transactions handled by the agent," he says. |
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