Companies looking to stand out from their competition are seeking to differentiate their services and create a “techno-savvy” identity. This trend is not limited to global brand positioning or strategic marketing and advertising, but includes specially-developed technologies and integration of the Internet with call centers to make the customer service experience more personalized.
According to Al Hukle, a member of Rockwell Electronic Commerce’s electronic marketing department, “Many businesses realize that to remain competitive and profitable, they must go beyond achieving product differentiation in the marketplace. Consequently, the call center environment has become a critical, integral part of business operations by helping companies increase sales and customer satisfaction, reduce the cost of overhead and significantly improve productivity. But in order to stay ahead of the competition, there is a trend of consolidation and the use of key technologies to differentiate one’s business from the competition’s.”
Currently, the majority of call centers are using traditional phone systems to provide access to live agents — but that is slowly changing as technology continues to embrace voice and electronic access to customer service agents.
“More companies are thinking about how to establish a more effective means of interacting with their customers using a combination of self-service — interactive voice response and Web sites — asynchronous communications — e-mail and Web call-back — and real-time communications — live agents, chat and video conferencing,” says Hukle. “All of these methods involve a mix of Internet and more traditional call center technologies.”
According to Craig Shambaugh, director of product management at Rockwell, “The drivers fomenting the most recent evolution include the unprecedented embrace of LAN/WAN and client/server technology by corporations. Coupled with real standards and interoperability, the data landscape within enterprises has been fundamentally altered. Today, the call center can tap the information within the business enterprise to uniquely route and prioritize each call based on the appropriate business rules and the needs of the caller. The end result is that both the needs of the caller and the business are satisfied in the most efficient and personal manner possible.”
Interactive Voice Response and Screen Pops are two examples of how call centers are embracing technology to personalize and streamline the call center process. IVR is a small computer system that can be designed to deal with routine calls instead of routing the inquiry to a live agent. “An example of this is account balance inquiry available at most financial institutions,” says Shambaugh. “Organizations that have efficiently deployed this technology may have over 50 percent of all calls completed within the IVR system, which frees the agent to handle more complex and strategic transactions.”
Screen Pops are a means to deploy specific targeted information to the representative directly relevant to the caller and issue at the same time that the voice connection is made. “This allows the agent to greet the caller and start immediately on concluding the business transaction,” says Shambaugh. “Organizations that have efficiently deployed this technology have saved 20 seconds per telephone transaction.”
Although the use of technology is helping to personalize and streamline the call center process, enabling companies to apply the most appropriate agents with specific skills to certain calls, there is a danger inherent in embracing too much technology. If companies are not cautious, it s possible that call centers will reach a saturation point where they have so much technology automating call flow that callers will get lost in an automated call center black hole.
“Most callers today expect to be handled in the most expeditious fashion with a multitude of transaction methods — depending on their transaction choice,” comments Shambaugh. “Poorly designed business exchange systems such as an IVR system with more than four choices will cause the caller to avoid using that form of communication — and potentially the company.”
“When companies measure the call center usage level and find no justification to the expense to maintain the technology, they know that they have reached their technology saturation point,” says Shambaugh.
To avoid reaching call center technology overload, Shambaugh recommends that companies do six things:
- Properly define the business reason for the technology.
- Define the business process to be automated.
- Start simple and then begin building.
- Establish benchmark measurements before and after implementation to determine success or failure.
- Work with knowledgeable individuals and take the advice offered.
- Do not try to automate a process that cannot be accomplished manually.
