Go BackConsolidation nation
All contact centre managers want to improve customer service, utilise resources more efficiently and reduce overall costs. The consolidation of customer interaction technology infrastructure provides the answer, argues Martin Granger, business development director for CosmoCom.
Consolidation of technology is a natural part of business as a way of reducing costs and improving efficiency. Take a look at unified communications, for example - bringing voice, fax, email, instant messaging and mobile under the same platform makes sense from a business and practical standpoint.
The practice of consolidation in the contact centre market is now at a critical stage in its evolution. Contact centre managers still rely on disparate systems to deliver what is often the front line between the company and its customers. This can have a damaging effect on quality of service. Indeed, research by the Institute of Customer Service (ICS) recently found that, across the board, customer satisfaction levels were running at just 66 per cent, which offers much room for improvement.
Contact centres also face the challenges of increased demands for enabling flexible working and a shortage of in-house IT skills, coupled with a plethora of expensive to support legacy systems. The constant need to cut operation expenditure and real estate, especially with UK contact centre staff numbers around the million mark, also provides a conundrum for contact centre managers.
Bad Tradition
The current practice of consolidation has helped pile the pressure on contact centres and has led in part to the perception of poor customer service. In the 1990s 'consolidation' for contact centres meant the 'one big room' approach in the hope that putting all agents and equipment in one place would provide economies of scale, and improve measurement, manageability, and operational control.
To some extent - and with the technology then available - this brought some benefits, but it also had disadvantages, especially when it came to servicing across time zones, and brought high communications costs. We call this period 'Consolidation 1.0', the first phase of the practice.
Network-based pre-routing then arrived and led to agent efficiency improvements for multi-location contact centres. But two-stage routing is still inefficient, and the handsome revenue stream for telecoms carriers offering these services became a substantial new cost of operations for the centres.
The current environment, still offered by many industry vendors, is the concept of standardising contact centres on a single vendor environment and connecting them to the proprietary networking capabilities of that vendor. While this reduced some of the IT support burden related to the multi-vendor environment, it has proven difficult to network separate contact centres that increasingly forms part of the more flexible twenty-first century contact centre culture.
The next evolution in contact centre practice brings us to 'Consolidation 2.0'.
New World Order
Done correctly, consolidation has positive connotations in business as a means to cut costs and improve efficiency. Consolidation 2.0 in the contact centre environment promises to be disruptive, offering one single platform that enables multi-tenant and multi-virtual components.
The drive towards virtual contact centres (VCCs) - where agents are situated in multiple locations but managed and utilised as a single entity - is also gaining momentum. That is to say, the location of agents is irrelevant as they are all now linked via IP in the same system.
This provides a number of efficiency improvements:
-
Agents: Staff can now work remotely and have real-time access to customer and product information at their finger tips and benefit from consistent training programmes
-
IT: CIOs can manage - or outsource - their contact centre environment far more effectively. They have access to unified reporting measured against key performance indicators (KPIs)
-
Applications: Contact centres can rapidly deploy and better manage new applications
-
Customers: Callers to the contact centre can look forward to improved service from better informed and highly motivated staff
-
Outsourcers: Contact centres can better manage their outsource contracts with improved visibility and success
Consolidation 2.0 is applicable to organisations of all sizes, irrespective of location.
Case Study
VisitBritain, the organisation responsible for marketing and developing British tourism globally, is an excellent example of Consolidation 2.0 in action.
Operating in 36 countries with 21 overseas offices, VisitBritain needed to cost-effectively deploy local contact centres worldwide and deliver a high quality customer experience from each one.
CosmoCom implemented a Consolidation 2.0 strategy that consolidated 13 local operations distributed across the world into a global Internet Protocol (IP)-based virtual contact centre. These were anchored on a single CosmoCall Universe platform from CosmoCom, meaning that callers could be served locally or globally - at a standard local rate.
This has transformed and enhanced the way that VisitBritain interacts with the public. VisitBritain can now easily monitor agents, assess loads and performance, and respond as required to maintain high service quality throughout - while using and preserving its existing investment in MPLS and Voice over IP technology. The organisation can also administer the entire customer contact operation centrally and add additional sites and agents, including home-based workers, quickly and easily as operational requirements change, without modifying any systems.
The deployment of a consolidated, IP-based virtual contact centre for VisitBritain demonstrates that global contact centres are not solely the preserve of large enterprises but also empower small and medium-sized organisations to install more flexible and powerful customer contact operations.
In summary, using the Consolidation 2.0 approach, VisitBritain is providing even better customer service, reducing communications costs, enjoying higher levels of control and flexibility, and responding even faster to changing market challenges.
Making Consolidation Work
Technology is changing the way contact centres operate. Consolidation 2.0 builds on previous contact centre and business process improvements but it differs from earlier projects as it is driven by the omnipresent IP network and the convergence of voice and data.
Contact centres which migrate to the consolidated model can look forward to:
-
increased control
-
improved IT efficiency
-
higher staff morale and efficiency
-
better all-round customer service
-
reduced real estate and energy overheads
-
a happy CFO and CEO
Consolidation in the contact centre environment is a win/win situation for enterprises of all types and sizes, including telecommunications and network service providers who can offer hosted solutions for contact centres. Large and medium-sized organisations can operate traditional premise-based systems or utilise a hosted platform model, while smaller ones can use a hosted platform to deliver affordable world class customer service that rivals their largest global competitors. Organisations which chose to plough the lone furrow and fail to investigate the next stage in contact centre technology will experience the same frustrations and operational inefficiencies.
Those that embrace the evolution of consolidation will reap the competitive benefits it offers.
