integrated call center: A strategic vehicle for large-scale operations to improve customer service while increasing profits, The

For many businesses, customer service has become the prime differentiator, that is, the single most important way for a company to distinguish itself from the competition For such a company, anything that compromises the customer service operation threatens the business directly. Yet, many operations are faced with pressures to "right-size" or "downsize," and these pressures are leading many companies to investigate ways to reduce customer service costs.

Hence, many businesses face twin challenges: 1) reducing costs and 2) sustaining high-quality customer service and thereby maintaining (and enhancing) profitability. To meet these challenges, it is necessary to find ways to make customer operations more productive. Indeed, increasing productivity is now an imperative for companies that want to grow and prosper in the long term.

To achieve the business goals of greater productivity and sustained profitability, many companies are turning to call center integration to make the telephone their preferred delivery method for world-class customer service. In fact, companies taking this approach are setting new standards in customer service on a daily basis. Successful companies no longer use the telephone simply as the "first line of defense but rather as the primary vehicle for delivering both customer service and sales.

In this environment, customer expectations have been growing. No longer is it acceptable for companies to hide behind their voicemail systems or automated attendant systems. Nor is it acceptable to pass inbound inquiry callers around a bureaucracy without at least transferring the caller's information and data along with the phone call. Customers are demanding better service, shorter response times and up-to-date answers to their sales or service questions.

To meet these expectations, many companies are turning to enterprisewide distributed processing, a technology that integrates voice and a wide variety of business applications and databases. With this technology, it is possible to create a call center in which sales and service agents get the information they need instantly--and in which voice and data are managed together--all in an environment that reduces costs and increases revenues.

The Increasing Importance Of Call Centers

Most large organizations today manage virtually all customer service contact functions via their telephone-based call centers--groups of agents and/or automated voice response units (VRUs) that support customer contact functions over the telephone assisted by computers. A major focus of call center integration is on such activities as customer service, order entry, reservations, help desks, dispatch systems, telesales, telemarketing, collections and other inbound and outbound applications.

Experience with now-ubiquitous 800 numbers has shown that improved call center integration can increase agent productivity and information access, enhance revenues and reduce costs, thus enabling higher quality, more personalized customer service over the telephone. With all of these benefits, it is no wonder that businesses are investing heavily in computer technology designed to improve call center integration.

Large-scale call centers today face many market and technology pressures. The trend toward distributed, client/server computing is gaining acceptance, as is the desire for new, easier-to-use client applications built with modern graphical user interfaces (GUIs). Although large-scale call centers have traditionally been the exclusive domain of mainframe applications, an increasingly large percentage of companies are migrating to client/server-based systems.

Call center integration includes customer contact management systems, interactive voice response (IVR) units, voice and data integration, integrated fax, automated dialing capabilities, enterprise information access and workflow management systems. Many companies are now using computer-telephony integration (CTI), which links the call center telephone switch to a host computer or server, and enhances these applications with new capabilities--such as automatic transfer of customer information to the agent's workstation when a call is forwarded to that agent. This provides significant gains in productivity, profitability and service levels.

Investing $1 Billion In Customer Service

Corporate America is paying more than just lip service to customer service improvements. When it comes to investing in new computer technology for customer service, big companies are putting their money where their headsets are. American businesses are spending more than $1 billion this year on computer technology just for customer service, with many of these investments approaching or exceeding $1 million per company in a single fiscal year. That translates into significant business opportunities for vendors providing software and services--such as systems integration--for the integrated call center market.

Call Center Integration Benefits

Today's heavy investment in call center integration allows many companies with large-scale call center operations to gain a respectable improvement in the corporate bottom line. Because labor and telecommunications are major components of call center costs, integration can significantly impact the bottom line by reducing the amount of time per call. This reduces the number of call center agents, and allows more calls to be handled at reduced telecommunications costs. Another factor is the relatively quick return on investment--for companies with large-scale operations, the payback period for new call center equipment and applications can be one year or even less.

While all companies hope to increase productivity in an effort to minimize agent head count (and therefore payroll), the largest percentage of companies responding to an International Data Corporation survey said their main objective was higher quality customer service. Companies evaluating new call center automation software solutions are looking for the following benefits, in order of priority:

* Improved quality of service and customer satisfaction.

* Increased number of calls per agent.

* Reduced telephone costs.

* Lower agent training costs.

* Reduced costs of sales.

* Increased revenues.

Building The EnterpriseWide Client/Server Call Center

The challenge for call center managers today is to take the best of the old and the new. This approach entails building an integrated, enterprisewide solution that preserves legacy applications and data; yields high-volume, on-line transaction processing; and seamlessly supports new GUI-based client applications on the agent's desktop.

Only a system in which host-based data and applications act as the enterprise server--in cooperation with workgroup servers and client PCs on the agents' desks--can provide enterprisewide client/server call center solutions. Such systems will improve the productivity of call centers in many industries, and offer companies the path to the ultimate large-scale call center one in which agents get the information they need instantly, enabling the company to meet or exceed customers' expectations for time convenience, immediacy of response and instantly available information.

Benefits Of Call Center Integration

Call center integration allows companies to:

* Improve the quality of customer service, by providing the information needed instantly on the agent's desktop.

* Shorten the length of telephone calls (and increase the number of calls handled per agent per day).

* Increase productivity among agents, and thereby either reduce head count or increase the level of services without adding incremental staff.

* Increase revenues resulting from cross-selling opportunities.

* Reduce the amount of agent training time required each time a new product or service is offered, or when a new computer system, peripheral or application comes on line.

* Reduce the reliance on slow, unwieldy paperwork.

* Increase customer satisfaction by delivering prompt, courteous and knowledgeable service that does not require callers to repeat their questions as they are routed through the organization.

* Facilitate complex business functions by providing the necessary electronic business workflow and message-based routing and querying functions.

Julie M. Fitzpatrick is product manager for Early, Cloud & Company. Her responsibilities include driving product positioning and direction, as well as acting as technical liaison between ECC's development team and marketing. A wholly owned subsidiary of IBM Corporation, ECC focuses on three areas: call center and customer service automation, message-oriented middleware, and systems integration services. ECC's two major products are the CallFlow(TM) call center automation software, which brings CTI and message-based data access to telephone-based customer service or sales operations, and the Message Driven processor (MDp(TM)), a message-oriented middleware solution that enables large organizations with legacy systems to more easily migrate to enterprisewide client/server computing.

Copyright Technology Marketing Corporation Nov 1995
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