The Coming Parallel Paradigm Shifts
The most recent trends in call center operations point to the beginning of parallel paradigm shifts in how call centers think of themselves and how they do business.
Call centers are moving away from a reactive cost center model to becoming proactive profit centers that contribute to the bottom line. At the same time, they are transitioning from being a physical location full of agents to a virtualized enterprise full of expertise.
Change in Underlying Assumptions Needed
To make these changes, call centers will need a new business model. Call centers and technology vendors will need to change their underlying assumptions about:
1. How workforce optimization tools are offered and used
2. How to improve agent productivity
3. How call centers are managed
Conflicting Goals
Although nearly all call centers have similar goals, those goals are often in direct conflict with each other. Increasing revenue and reducing expenses are at odds with improving customer satisfaction. Customers can sense when the agent is playing “beat the clock” in closing the interaction.
Challenges of Achieving Conflicting Goals
Some of the challenges in achieving these conflicting goals include managing the following:
• The high percentage of the operations budget devoted to labor costs
• The increasing complexity of the agent’s desktop
• The trend away from one centralized call center to many smaller, dispersed facilities and at-home agents
• The need to partner with other businesses to expand your capabilities or maintain continuity during call overflows and disasters
Changing Assumptions about WFO
The next generation of WFO tools will need to be packaged as a single, affordable and inter-working product with multiple solutions for recording, quality monitoring, workforce management, performance management, coaching, analytics and surveying to collectively control costs, and improve productivity and customer satisfaction. Today’s complex mix of independent point solutions from multiple vendors will need to be replaced with a fully integrated and affordable suite of solutions.
Simplifying the Agent’s Desktop
Assumptions behind the agents’ desktop technology will need to focus on automating processes to prevent problems, rather than fixing them after the fact. Automated, pre-populated and unified screens, automated scripting and transaction workflow will eliminate errors. Automated compliance management and effective, real-time communication among customers, managers, and other agents or other employees of the enterprise will help take the agent’s focus off navigating the technology and put it on building customer relationships.
Managing the Virtualized Enterprise
In the virtualized office, technology will need to enable call routing beyond the call center’s walls to draw on the talent of the total enterprise. Call routing will need to extend to dispersed call centers and at-home agents. It may even be extended to a business partner who can best address the customer’s concern. Groups of companies may unite into a virtual call center with a broad and deep talent pool.
Products that support the virtualized enterprise will need to deliver a totally integrated solution for distributing, synchronizing and managing not only calls and information, but agents’ desktop applications to maintain the integrity of transactions and provide a consistent customer experience anywhere, anytime and throughout the entire virtualized enterprise.