By Diane Shariff, Avaya Director of Communications Applications
Cost versus revenue? Efficiency versus effectiveness? Contact centers have always had to balance these apparently opposing forces. If we look back over the decades, the business pressures around us have oscillated contact center thinking back and forth between these objectives.
What started as a whole new way to more effectively serve customers in the seventies, moved in the eighties and nineties into a continual search for efficiencies with technologies like CTI, skills-based routing, IVR, workforce management, agent monitoring and recording, and others. The Internet boom was a halcyon period where no amount of money was too much to spend on acquiring a new customer! One-to-one service, web-based eService, eCommerce, and multimedia contact centers were all the rage.
Most recently we have been living, with a morning-after headache, through a post-Internet depression where cost savings and more cost savings are uppermost in our minds. Outsourcing, offshoring, reducing agents and more IVR have been the order of the day.
So what’s next?
In discussions with CEOs over the past year we have seen a marked change in business focus. More and more CEOs are now focused on profitable growth – “our main priority is on never losing a customer, winning new business and growing our top line”, as one CEO said to us. More and more executive discussions are about consistent brand experiences, higher customer touch and more personalized interactions. For contact center managers, it is good news that the customer experience is back under serious discussion.
But does this mean that the days of cost cutting are gone? Here’s the bad news: your CEO now assumes that you and the organization have gotten really good at cost reduction and expects more of it – “even in growth markets, cost reduction is a top-of-mind issue, we have to reduce overhead while maximizing efficiency”. As a contact center manager you are now stuck in a vise. You are being asked to do more with less - be a part of generating growth and revenue, but still cutting operating costs significantly.
In this new era, contact center managers must find approaches that deliver on effectiveness and efficiency simultaneously. The best practices discussed here are those that Avaya has found can deliver on this promise today.
Contact centers are about people and skills – we all know that this is where roughly 70% of our costs lie. One of the biggest impediments to fully leveraging the right people, for the right customer, at the right time, is physical location. Traditional technologies do not make it easy to leverage widely distributed agents and resources at smaller locations, selectively blend in special skills or outsourced resources, or more tightly integrate the contact center with other business functions like branch offices or back-end operations. Indeed, even the classical model of multiple large centers linked together has required highly complex telephony solutions with ever-increasing communications and operating costs, plus considerable infrastructure duplication across locations. The good news is that moving to an IP-based infrastructure can eliminate some of this complexity. An IP-based Contact Center allows ubiquitous access to applications while simultaneously reducing the total number of servers across the enterprise.
Implementing your Contact Center upon an IP infrastructure is not without its challenges. Voice applications will need to have a prioritization that provides the appropriate level of voice quality. Security and reliability requirements must be identified and addressed. To ensure you have the flexibility to select the endpoints that best meet the needs of your IP Contact Center and your business, so you will want to ensure your vendor has open, standards-based interfaces rather than working around limitations that may be imposed by proprietary interfaces. And once the IP Contact Center is in operation, state-of-the-art assessment tools are essential to help identify and quickly rectify any problems.
Leveraging IP allows you to flatten and consolidate contact center infrastructure, removing expensive network charges and running many locations from one centralized set of applications (or maybe two for redundancy). This approach can result in dramatic operational cost savings for large customers – tens of millions of dollars in some cases. Home agents, satellite locations, outsourced resources, and even employees outside of the contact center are then easily added to the same virtual contact infrastructure, enabling centralized management and decision-making.
Ideally, you will want to work with a vendor who provides an evolutionary approach to IP, where contact centers can get started and move at their own pace, choosing whatever mix of existing traditional and new IP telephony makes sense. Ensure that the same rich suite of contact center applications and features is available regardless of the infrastructure underneath. IP allows you to affordably transform your separate call centers into a virtual contact center. You are able to show significant cost savings while extending your sophisticated contact center applications such as speech self-service, proactive outbound contact, agent performance management, and analytical tools, across your enterprise. These advanced capabilities can benefit agents wherever they may be located. Visit the Avaya web page at http://www.avaya.com/contactcenters to learn more about how an IP-based Contact Center can help your business today.