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Contact Center Management Technology

Sunday May 26, 2013





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The Customer Contact Center Technology Suite

Much has changed over the past 20 years in customer contact centers throughout the corporate world.  Where once the telephony was a push-button phone system, there are now sophisticated routing and switching tools to automatically route calls to the most qualified person to answer them. The first "call-tracker" was a Number 2 pencil and a steno pad, and the "shouterbase" knowledge was accessed by covering the phone and calling across the room or looking things up in manuals or 3-ring binders. Mo

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The Mission of a Customer Contact Center

The true mission of a customer contact center  is: Profitability . Stop; read it again. The mission of a customer contact center is its contribution to sustainable corporate profitability. Everything about the center needs to be directly connected to that mission. A customer contact center, be it about service or support, is about generating two kinds of profitability - direct profits from immediate conversion of contacts to additional sales, and indirect profits from the retention of customers

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The Metrics of Customer Centricity

All across the corporate world, there's a metric and a means of capturing the data for nearly every possible operational detail to be found in any customer contact center. First Call Resolution Rate. (FCR) Average Speed to Answer. (ASA) Abandons. (People who hang up before being connected to a Customer Service Representative.) Escalations. (What happens when the 1st CSR couldn't find the answer.) Attendance. Adherence. Volume. Average Handle Time. (AHT) Service Level Compliance. The problem is t

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Aligning for Effectiveness

An important moment in each new customer contact center assessment project happens when the client's senior management team is shown that establishing and running an effective customer contact center is a matter of Strategy, Process(/Workflow), People and Technology -- and the crucial aspect is the alignment of these elements into a smoothly functioning profitability engine. The center's chances for success are highly dependent upon decisions made from above, well outside the boundaries of the o

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Staffing Levels & Center Responsiveness

A company's customer contact center should be designed, built and managed as a profitable knowledge inventory and distribution operation. One of the first strategic decisions senior management must make is: How fast does the center need to be in order to retain customers and maintain profitability? The decision on Responsiveness will be expressed in a target Service Level that will in turn dictate the staffing level required to consistently achieve that target. Here's a simplified illustration o

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By Mikael Blaisdell

EngineEstablishing and running an effective customer contact center is a matter of Strategy, Process(/Workflow), People and Technology, and the skills needed to manage these elements within the center, while specialized, are available on the open employment market. Alignment of these elements into a smoothly functioning engine and properly placing it within the overall strategy of the company, however, is a Senior Management role that is unfortunately often missing. In order to get the maximum sustainable profitability benefit from the substantial investment required in order to build and operate the resource, the center has to be clearly defined and understood for what it is: a knowledge inventory and distribution operation.

Efficiency and Profitability

Knowledge is created throughout the company. Customers ask for that knowledge to be distributed to them through various channels. Here’s the key point: some channels are significantly more efficient, and therefore more profitable, than others. It costs the company far less for a customer to get the knowledge they want themselves directly from the website than if they call the center to talk to a support rep. The website is a “one to many” distribution channel, the telephone or chat line is a “one to one” channel.

Knowledge NetworkMost customer contact centers offer four main access channels for the customers: The Phone, the computer Chat line, E-mail and the Website. Each access channel has different costs, advantages and disadvantages associated with it.. The challenge for senior management is to set policies and priorities regarding those access channels to the company’s knowledge inventory to ensure the greatest profitability returns. The phone line still has value, despite its higher costs: You want the customer to call when there’s a better chance for an up-sell or cross-sell from the human contact. While maintaining an attractive website is not cheap, the return on the investment can be huge. The basis for the policy decisions regarding access channel prioritization is profitability.

One of the unfortunate gaps in the contact center technology suite is that while the applications may help center manager to track individual cases through to resolution, those applications fail to enable effective management of the center itself. For that, at the present time, you need to look elsewhere. It can be done; if you’re interested in learning how, give me a call.

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Published: May 3, 2007

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