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When times are tough every business unit is expected to not only tighten their belts and cut costs, but reinvent their strategies. Contact centers are no different. The changing dynamics of a contact center—one that’s integral to a customer-centric business strategy—are changing the way companies view their call center operations.
Shifting focus to generate revenues: Opportunities to upsell and cross-sell are exploited in the contact center now more than ever. Suddenly, CRM integration and knowledge base management are leading the way in terms of how companies interact with their customers. And, with high customer service levels now the industry norm, contact centers must go beyond order-taking and traditional customer service models to differentiate their business units and prove their value to the organization.
New Customer Interaction Methods: Customer interaction modes are shifting away from the telephone. A 2010 Frost & Sullivan reports how inbound customer interaction channels in 2010 compare with the channels in 2009.
As the image above suggests there is a significant shift towards non-traditional channels.
Important Trends: If you’re a part of the contact center industry, you may have noticed these other changes-
Spurred by the paradigm shift in how contact centers operate—going virtual and thereby eliminating the need for a physical call center—the role contact centers play in driving customer interaction strategies has expanded. Is your call center keeping up with the trends?
In a recent blog post NoJitter talks about a survey by Information Week, of more than 400 IT decision-makers last April on the topic of Unified Communications adoption.
Unified Communications is a term that has many applications. Typically,Unified Communications addresses one-to-one communication where Interaction Management falls under the one-to-many category. However there are enough similarities between Unified Communications and Interaction Management to apply the lessons from the survey to the contact center industry.
The results from the survey raise an interesting question for the contact centers. How do organizations manage a variety of applications for their contact center agents without overwhelming them?
In a recent conversation with one of our panelists from an upcoming webinar, Jonas Nicholson from Direct Interactions mentioned that before adopting a virtual contact center solution their call center agents would have 4-5 applications running simultaneously for instant messaging, knowledge management, desktop sharing, etc. As a result their productivity levels were constantly deteriorating while their average handling times were increasing. By combining multiple channels of interaction within a single solution they have seen dramatic improvements in their call handling times. In addition to the reduction in stress on their agents their clients have seen an increase in productivity by as high as 50%.
The survey also talked about the barriers to fully using existing collaborative technology. And not surprisingly at the top was “End user base not fully trained”. You may recall from one of our earlier posts that for a traditional contact center, training contact center agents is a major challenge in terms of costs and complexity. Having different applications for knowledge management, CRM, chat management, desktop sharing , etc. can drive up training costs. Choosing a virtual contact center technology that combines all of these applications into a unified solution can reduce training costs by 60%.
So before you invest in another standalone desktop application for your call center agents, ask yourself what is the goal? Try finding the right contact center solution that combines most of the features together allowing you to reduce training costs and call handling time while creating an environment that allows your agents to be more productive.
It’s not often that removing something from a business model substantially adds to a bottom line. Sure, less is more, but that’s usually nuance not hard numbers.
But when that something being removed is a barrier, the results can be astounding. Take geography out of the equation by adopting a green, hosted call center model and you not only save on commuting, real estate, and utility costs (and reduce toxic emissions tons as well), but you literally grow your labor pool by geometric proportions. As your labor pool increases, your productivity and customer satisfaction levels soar even as costs decline dramatically.
Wider Pool of Agents: With a traditional call center, you are limited to hiring only those call agents within a roughly 30-mile radius of the office. The ability to staff your call center with home-based agents means you now have access to top-producing and specialized talent worldwide. Anywhere a top agent can plug in and log on is exactly where you can employ them.
But is a Bigger Pool Better: Booz Allen Hamilton reports that the attrition rate for home-based agents is 10 percent, compared to industry standards of 25%-45% for on-premise agents. Frost and Sullivan explain that the median age of on-premise call agents is 23-years-old. The median age of a home-based agent, according to the analysts: A seasoned, stable 38-years-old. In call centers, experience is everything. Veteran, home-based agents were a whopping 40 percent more productive than their younger, in-house counterparts.
Reduced Costs: Not only does a virtual call center let you cherry-pick top talent wherever you find it, but if that talent isn’t in a major metropolitan area, IDC reports you might save as much as 30 percent by hiring home-based agents who live in remote areas. Using $13/hour wage (in metro areas), a conservative 10 percent savings translates into a $195,000 annual saving in payroll for a 100-seat call center. Even a 20-seat call center realizes a $40,000 savings in compensation by going green via a virtual call center.
Start adding up the savings in labor, real estate, utility, and commute costs when you go virtual and you will soon see how quickly all that green adds to your bottom line in substantial savings.
If you thought the savings, both financial and environmental, we identified in our last post about commuting costs were considerable, then you’re really going to like what’s next when it comes to the benefits of painting your call center “green.”
Operating a virtual call center means your agents are free to work anywhere they’ve got access to a phone and a web connection—especially anywhere but your office, trimming rent and utilities expenses significantly.
A traditional contact center allocates about 120 square feet of office space (including meeting space) per agent. With commercial office space commanding between $17 and $28 per square foot annually, depending on the region, even a conservative $21 per square foot rental pencils out at roughly $2,500 per year per agent in physical facilities’ costs. So, it’s not rocket science to understand that a 100-seat call center, whose agents work remotely from their home offices using a hosted call center model, can realize $250,000 in savings. Factor in utility costs of roughly $2.50 per square foot per annum and the green icing on your cake adds up to another $30,000 shaved off the expense column.
Don’t have a hundred seats in your operation yet? Even a smaller call center with 20 seats can pocket $50,000 in savings switching from a traditional to a hosted call center.
While what they say about the three most important things in real estate—location, location, location—remains true, it also holds true that no matter your location, you can realize substantial savings and improve the environment by switching to a virtual call center.
By now, you may know there are plenty of good reasons to operate your call center using a hosted or virtual business model: substantially lower operating costs, greater flexibility, and improved reliability, to name a few.
But there’s one benefit, often overlooked, that plays right into one of the hottest issues in business today: Virtual call centers are greener by a mile, or sometimes, even a million miles.
In this, our first in a series of posts detailing the ecological benefits of hosted call centers, let’s look at perhaps the most obvious savings: Fewer cars on the road, because virtual call centers let you tap into the home based agent labor pool.
Suppose you are a 100-seat call center and those 100 call agents can work remotely. The U.S. Department of Energy estimates the average one-way commuting distance is 19 miles; double that to 38 miles for a round-trip daily commute and the average worker travels nearly 850 miles monthly. One hundred virtual call agents working from their home save about a million commuter miles off our highways and byways.
Now, factor in the Environmental Protection Agency’s estimate that each gallon of gasoline expended emits 19.5 pounds of carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions into the atmosphere. Using a per-vehicle mileage of 21 miles per gallon and keeping those 100 agents remote reduces CO2 emissions by about 931,000 pounds annually. And your virtual agents? They collectively pocket more than $140,000 in commute-cost savings.
We know that you’ve been thinking green all along, except usually you’ve been thinking in terms of greenbacks and how to add more of them to your bottom line. A hosted call center does that in spades, and, for good measure, reduces your carbon footprint as well, making you a hero in plenty of customer’s eyes not just for the good service you provide them, but the good work you contribute to by running a green call center—a virtual call center filled with good intentions and great results.
Everyone knows time is money, but how much money is it?
How much is, say 23 seconds—the average time call center supervisors estimate it takes their agents to gather customer information—worth? Try about $1.05.
Spread that buck across just 40 agents in your call center and 23 seconds per call can top $45,000 in lost productivity per month.
Or, you could integrate your CRM with screen pop in your call center and even a 20 percent improvement in call handling efficiency can amount to $110,000 in savings annually.
Pop Top Line Results Too
Perhaps better still are the unlimited cross-selling and up-selling opportunities agents gain when customers needs and preferences pop up on the screen as the call begins. Are certain services up for renewal? Is there an incentive you can provide customers based on their buying history? When agents have a single, integrated view of the customers they’re engaged with, customer loyalty rates increase while churn rates decline.
Integrated CRM/Call Center applications facilitate valuable insight—in real-time, no less—by improving customer service levels; by instantly identifying the most profitable customers; and even by providing tools that enable call center agents to convert money-losing customers into profitable ones.
Not many mashups can simultaneously impact top and bottom line results, and do so quickly, but an integrated CRM and contact center solution promises to do just that, 23 seconds at a time, on every call.
Let’s say you’re a large really enterprise. You have 10,000 employees worldwide and most of your 5 million customers interact with you via telephone so you have 2,000 call agents to manage your customers’ needs.
But, you also have a call center with just 40 seats to manage those 10,000 employees’ needs. The internal call center can address their travel needs or assist them with managing their benefits, just to name a few.
If it’s tied to your primary call center solution, this smaller center is linked (some might say anchored) to a behemoth, hampering its ability to respond quickly to your employees needs. After all it’s those employees that are the backbone of your enterprise; they’re the ones who keep those 5 million customers satisfied.
From one of our previous posts we have seen how complex the on-premise call center architecture can get. By unhitching your smaller, internal help desk from the primary call center and adopting a virtual or hosted solution, you can achieve several things, not the least of which is providing your employees the best possible service while lowering the cost to do so.
Minimize Risk Profile: Decoupling your departmental call center operation from the overarching corporate solution minimizes your risk profile. If one of the components in the corporate premises- based system fails, a component that the smaller in-house call center may not even use, the internal center goes down too. Operating as an independent call center, a virtual call center continues humming along, never skipping a beat because the hosting provider has redundancy inherent in its architecture.
Better Control: A hosted call center provides the business owner more control. From the type of interactions supported, to the reporting, monitoring, and recording frequency, the system can be configured to meet the unique needs of the functions it is supporting without having to rely on an IT department for which the departmental call center is just one of many priorities.
Agility: Because a hosted call center is less dependent on the enterprise’s IT organization, the department is more nimble and can make changes in real-time; the result is complete flexibility when managing their call center.
So, although in business, bigger is usually better, sometimes bigger and smaller is better still.
When you’re in the call center business, dropping even a single call is costly. So, dropping hundreds of calls is unimaginable. But the unimaginable happens every day.
Natural disasters—hurricanes, tornados, snow storms, earthquakes, floods—constantly cause disruptions at businesses around the globe; manmade events—power failures, and infrastructure failures—conspire against continuity too.
When you use a hosted call center, you instantly plug into cutting edge call center technology built to ensure business continuity, one with redundancy already in place should anything cause your primary business operation center to have to stop taking calls.
The cost savings alone are cause to consider a hosted call center for disaster recovery. No more budget-busting backup facility that sits idly by 24/7 waiting for disaster to strike while racking up maintenance costs 365 days a year. Hosted call centers—the good ones, anyway—are completely redundant, typically with far more redundancy and flexibility than any on premise call center operation could afford. Read how Spirit Incentives saw $100,000 in cost savings as a result of switching to hosted solution for business continuity.
Employing a virtual call center model not only means your systems are protected against virtually any type of disruption, but with the click of a mouse staff can continue taking calls from home or hotels, anywhere there’s power and a high-speed Internet connection, keeping customers happy and your revenue stream flowing.
With a hosted call center, when disaster strikes you can let competitors operations crash while you continue to answer the calls…all of them, without skipping a beat.
Target these five customer satisfaction benchmarks collectively and watch your bottom line grow
Before determining the most important metrics for your call center, ask yourself a few questions. Who are the metrics for? What do you value the most in an organization?
It is important that as an organization you define what your foundation metrics are as they are the core principles of any call center.
However focusing solely on the foundation metric can drag the bottom line down. Customer satisfaction, for example, is a foundation metric. Maintaining high levels of customer satisfaction can come at a high price tag. Consider these metrics to increase customer satisfaction without dragging your bottom line down:
There doesn’t always need to be a tradeoff between increased customer satisfaction levels and reduced operating costs. With diligence, the right tools, and the right technologies you can increase customer satisfaction without negatively affecting your bottom line.
We are proud of our partnership with Salesforce and many of our customers have benefited from our seamless integration with Salesforce CRM. During Cloudforce we will be showcasing our award-winning OnDemand Contact center and fully integrated agent console. Stop by our booth during the event and enter our drawing for a free iPad. We look forward to meeting you in person.