Contact Centers: A First Look
No company operates in a vacuum, devoid of contact with customers or the general public. If you have the need to communicate with others outside of your company, then you are a prime candidate for developing or using a contact center. You may already have a contact center and not even know it!
This chapter introduces you to contact centers—what they are and how they benefit customers and companies. You’ll even discover some of the traits that distinguish a good contact center from a bad one. By the end of the chapter you should have a good grasp of how good management, sound skills, and great technology can help make a good contact center into a great one.
What Is a Contact Center?
We’ve all seen it—an ad on TV urging you to call right away. It’s late at night, and some perky announcer is touting the benefit of the latest laser-sharpened steak knives, full-chicken roaster, or Patsy Cline collection. In a moment of weakness, you pick up the phone and feverishly dial the number on the screen. Within seconds, you are connected to someone willing to send you whatever it is that you can no longer live without.
The person on the other end of the phone (who also happens to be way too perky for your 2:00 a.m. call) is undoubtedly part of a contact center, waiting for your call and ready to help.
But contact centers aren’t limited to late-night calls to sales people. A contact center is the person at the other end of the phone when you call an airline, a cable company, technical support, or even your local health spa.
Sometimes a contact center is just one or two people sitting beside a phone answering customer calls. Often it’s a very large room with lots and lots of people neatly organized into rows, sitting beside their phones, answering customer calls.
But contact centers are more than headset-wearing switchboard operators. The modern contact center handles phone calls, e-mail, online communication, and sometimes even old-fashioned written letters. In short, contact centers deal with any type of contact for a company (other than in-person)—contact with the general public and customers of all types: potential, happy, or even disgruntled.
To a customer or client, contact center personnel are the voice and face of the company. If you (as a customer) are angry, you often get mad at the person on the other end of the phone—after all, you’re talking to the company, right?
Inbound/Outbound
Contact centers communicate with customers in a number of ways, but who initiates the contact defines the type of contact center. If the outside world initiates contact, then the contact center is said to be an inbound contact center. Conversely, if the contact center itself is responsible for initiating contact, then the contact center is said to be an outbound contact center.
Customers contact inbound centers to buy things, such as airline tickets; to get technical assistance with their personal computer; to get answers to questions about their utility bill; to get emergency assistance when their car won’t start; or for any number of other reasons for which they might need to talk to a company representative.
In outbound centers, representatives from the company initiate the call to customers. Your first reaction might be, “telemarketing, right?” Well, yes, telemarketing is a reason for a company to contact you, but companies have lots of other good reasons to contact their customers.
Companies might call because the customer hasn’t paid a bill, when a product the customer wanted is available, to follow up on a problem the customer was having, or to find out what the customer and other customers would like to see by way of product or service enhancements.
Outbound contact centers are, most often, very telephone centric. Whereas inbound centers can handle many different ways of contact, outbound centers most often use telephones because of, well, tradition and perception. It is not unusual for a company’s representatives to call a customer on the phone, but it is more unusual for them to send an e-mail to a customer. If companies send out e-mail to customers, it is often done through some mass-mailing effort, not as one-on-one contact. Perception enters into the picture because people are very quick to categorize unexpected e-mail as spam, but less likely to be upset by unexpected phone calls.
In addition, a new breed of inbound centers is starting to emerge—self-service centers. In traditional contact centers, all interaction between the customer and the center is done with human agents. However, in self-service centers a good portion of the load is being shifted toward non-human systems, such as automated response or even speech-enabled.
Automated response systems enable the customer to use the keypad on their phone to answer questions by pushing buttons. Each button push brings them closer to the information they want. Automated response systems have been around for years, giving the customer access to simple (and common) information, such as addresses, balances, and procedural instructions.
Speech-enabled systems are more sophisticated and easier for the customer to use. In such a system the customer actually speaks a response, rather than needing to press keypad buttons. Speech-enabled systems are a great boon for cell-phone using customers because they no longer need to perform gymnastics to keep pressing buttons on their phone. As speech-enabled systems become more sophisticated, customers will be able to ask questions directly to the self-service system and get a wide variety of answers.
Some contact centers are called blended operations—agents in the center handle both inbound and outbound contact. Blending done well can make contact center operations very cost-effective and can improve service to the customer as well.
Internal/external
Just as contact centers can be designed as inbound or outbound, they can also be designated as internal or external.
When companies are small, they often develop their own contact center capabilities internally. As companies grow, they often look to outsource their contact center functions, or they spin off those functions to a subsidiary or partner company. This is where the concept of the external contact center comes into play—the center is external to the main company.
In fact, companies that provide nothing but contact center functions to other companies have grown into a multi-million dollar industry. At last count the traditional call center industry employed more than 6 million people in North America alone, and accounted for the sale of more than $700 billion in goods and services. Through today’s contact centers you can purchase, complain, or just talk about almost anything from the comfort of your home, office, car, or wherever you can get to a phone (or log on to the Internet).
Whether your contact center consists of a receptionist and a customer service person or entire departments, the principles by which a contact center are operated are still the same. People involved in customer contact need the same skills and the same tools, regardless of the number of people involved. Thus, the information in this book has applicability regardless of the size of your operation, and regardless of whether your operation is internal or external.
Contact or call center: What’s in a name?
Traditionally, contact centers have been called call centers. The newer name—contact center—reflects the fact that more than just phone calls are being handled. Many call centers have evolved over the years to do much more than just answer phones.
Bottom line, it’s up to the customer to decide how they want to communicate with your company, and it’s up to your company to respond appropriately through its contact center.
Some companies choose to separate the handling of customer contacts by medium. For instance, a company may establish a department for inbound calls, one for outbound calls, and a group for e-mail. (There are as many organizational permutations as there are ways to communicate.) Some companies, especially smaller ones, opt to create “universal agents” who handle all contact types. Companies create universal contact agents for reasons of efficiency and service, and often because they find it easier to train agents in multiple communication methods than to train multiple agents in product or service information.
Throughout this guide you’ll find references to handling contacts or contact centers. Fortunately, the techniques shared and considerations discussed apply equally well to contact centers and call centers. After all, call centers can rightly be viewed as a subset of the more encompassing contact center.
The bottom line is to discover ways you can best reach out and contact your customers (or respond to them reaching out to you). Those companies that successfully communicate with customers are companies who are turned to again and again in an ever-toughening marketplace.
Figuring Out What Makes a Good Contact Center
In general, the things that make a good contact center are also the same things that make a good business. For instance, a good contact center has a strong culture where people work from a common set of values and beliefs and are bound by a common purpose and a strong focus on the business objectives. Just as in any business, effective management continually aligns everything the contact center does with its business objectives and desired culture.
Generally, as Figure 1-1 illustrates, you should look for your contact center to deliver in three areas:
• Revenue generation: includes everything that leads to revenue—sales, upgrades, customer retention, collections, and winning back previously lost customers.
• Efficiency: refers to cost-effective operations for the organization—whether this relates to the operation of the contact center or to getting work done for the organization. Generally, the contact center is a much more efficient means of contacting customers about a new promotion than John, Betty, and Fred in the marketing department.
• Customer satisfaction: is really long-term revenue generation—build customer loyalty and keep them doing business with you. Contact centers should make things easy for the customer. The contact center is available when the customer needs it and has access to all the information necessary to answer customer questions or solve customer problems. Try calling a checkout clerk or even the president of your favorite sporting goods store—even if you do get through, you probably won’t get the answers you need.
It’s a mistake to think that revenue, efficiency, and customer satisfaction are distinct goals. In fact, they’re very much mutually dependent. Good revenue generation cannot happen without some level of efficiency, and only satisfied customers will continue to buy a product. And, for customers to remain satisfied, they want the same thing contact centers do when they do business—an efficient transaction. For most customers, talking to your contact center is not the highlight of their day!
When a contact center fails to sell a customer on the first attempt, revenue isn’t maximized because customers who really want your service/product must call back. This creates inefficiency by duplication of effort. It also represents poor service, as it makes customers do more work to get what they wanted when they initiated the first call.
The good
Not all contact centers are created equal—some are run very well with clearly defined missions, while others are a hodgepodge of people tucked away in a corner trying to poke their fingers in the dike. When everything is working as it should, a good contact center:
• Focuses on its business goals
• Answers customer contacts (phone calls, e-mails, and soon) quickly
• Has high employee morale
• Resolves a high percentage of customer inquiries on the first contact
• Measures customer satisfaction as a service indicator and has high customer satisfaction scores
• Provides a significant source of revenue for the organization
• Has a good process for collecting and presenting performance data: everyone knows where they stand monthly, daily, hourly, or in real time
• Is efficient—little rework is required: calls are consistent in length, requiring a minimum of customer time for resolution
• Has everyone engaged and busy with a purpose, but with no one overly taxed
• Improves processes continually to make constant gains in service, efficiency, and revenue generation
• Is seen corporately as a strategic advantage—an ally to the rest of the organization
Many contact centers are exemplary in their dedication to customers and clients. The real pros in the industry have transformed perceptions so that well-run contact centers are no longer viewed as “money holes” or “necessary evils,” but as profit centers or a real competitive advantage.
In fact, today entire companies are built around contact center capabilities. For example, you may buy a computer from a company that doesn’t have a retail store, or do your banking with a bank that doesn’t have branches—they offer the telephone or Internet as your only contact options.
The bad
Not all of the changes in contact centers have been viewed as positive. Contact centers and their managers have faced significant challenges. Partially because of the impact that contact centers have had on everyone’sdaily lives, and partially because of some bad management and bad business practices, contact centers have raised the ire of consumers and caught the attention of legislators, particularly outbound centers.
Legalities are important
In the United States, overly aggressive telemarketing practices have resulted in laws governing telephone sales, especially who can and cannot be contacted. These laws have affected the way that outbound contact centers can do their work.
Inbound centers are similarly touched by the law. Some industries are legislated as to how quickly they must answer incoming calls—a response to poor service and long delays that consumers have experienced in the past.
Additionally, privacy legislation has added a level of complexity to how contact centers collect and use identifying and financial information about their customers. Other legislation that restricts how and where contact centers can operate is being considered in a number of countries.
Some of the legislative challenges faced by contact centers have been brought on by poor business practices, some by the success of the industry. Explosive demand for contact center services, both from business and consumers, has taxed the discipline’s ability to grow in size and capability while maintaining excellence. Still, on balance, contact centers continue to advance in number, capability, sophistication, and excellence for two reasons: They are effective and efficient business tools, and they satisfy the increasing customer demand for convenience.
If your business is running a contact center or thinking of starting a contact center, make sure you fully investigate any of the legalities involved. Legalities are important, and you don’t want to land on the wrong side of a legal battle.
Not all contact centers operate in ways beneficial to either themselves or the organization as a whole. These are some things you’d expect to see in a contact center that isn’t working properly:
• Long delays for customers to get through to “the next available agent”
• Frequent shuffling of customers from agent to agent
• Customers often left on hold for extended periods of time
• Customer issues that frequently require multiple contacts before they are resolved
• Low employee morale and high turnover
• No way to measure customer satisfaction—or, if there is, scores are low
• A poor understanding of metrics or performance
• Harried staff running from crisis to crisis, putting out fires but not getting ahead
• A lack of improvement in working conditions
• The wider corporation grumbles about the contact center, complains about costs, and questions the results; some talk about outsourcing.
Fortunately, as ugly as the symptoms of a bad contact center are, they can be solved. It takes determination and perhaps a complete “rethinking” of your organization, but solutions do exist. This book provides a few strategies, tools, and skills to help you control what your contact center produces.
As with any business, a competent and productive contact center is the result of well-planned objectives and conscientious alignment—management needs to align practices so that they are consistent with objectives. When this is done effectively, the contact center will have many characteristics of the good, few if any of the bad, and none of the ugly.
A well-run contact center is not an accident. It’s a result of good planning and good execution by good people.
What Does the Future Hold?
As technology and management practices improve, so will the sophistication, capability, and service of contact centers. If it has not happened already, your contact center will likely continue to evolve, integrating all methods of communication into one quick and seamless channel, regardless of what language or device your customers are using.
One of the fascinating things about contact centers is their never-ending pursuit of improvement. Effective managers are constantly looking for better technology, better processes, better people, and better training for those people. It’s all part of the original charter for contact centers: to find more effective ways of communicating with customers so the company can serve customers better and cheaper, while generating more revenue.
Accordingly, I look for contact center services to become more customized to the needs of individual customers. There will be technological advancements, perhaps some “ohhs and ahhs” in what contact centers can do with automation. But the end result will be that more contact centers will provide better service. Great one-on-one service will become the minimum expectation for doing business, regardless of the medium.
Fortunately contact centers aren’t alone in their quest to better service their customers. Leading vendors, such as Avaya, continue to provide groundbreaking technology specifically tailored to the needs of a modern contact center. Such companies stand ready to partner with organizations interested in meeting the future head-on.