Improving contact centres

Driving forward with efficiency

At ntl:Telewest Business, we understand the kinds of issues being faced by your contact centre environment. To take just a few examples:

• Peaks and troughs in customer call volumes - you don’t want to pay agents to sit there not taking calls but customers don’t expect to wait in long queues either.
• Staff churn - as much as 25% of your staff may leave every year and have to be replaced, with newly trained agents.
• Multiple channel choices - customers now expect multi-channel communication options, with agents and systems in place to support them.
• Low customer perception - many people that call you really don’t like dealing with call centres and absolutely hate IVR!
• Occupancy - the percentage of time that an agent is actually speaking to customers
• Fist time resolution - the percentage of customer calls fixed first time
• Cost / agent - the total cost of the operation - salaries, overheads and equipment
• Handling time - the average length of each call
• Customer service - influenced by agent ability, first time resolution and % answered in measured time.

All of these objectives need to be addressed in different ways, but they can all be positively influenced through good use of technology.

Reducing occupancy through technology

Driving up occupancy is mostly about forecasting and scheduling - and good quality management information is the key. Our network can provide extensive data about calling patterns, including abandonment rates, which can help you with this.

Managing agents across multiple call centres as a single pool, with a single queue, can also bring some significant economies of scale. Technologies like ‘call-back’ can help to smooth out peaks and troughs and thereby improve agent utilisation.

• Better scheduling - detailed management information and reporting
• Manage several call centres as a single pool - using virtual call centre services to manage agents across multiple locations
• Blend agent activities - mix inbound, outbound, email and web chat handling.  

Improving first time resolution through technology

First time call resolution is impacted by getting the call to the right agent and having that agent properly equipped with the skills and tools they need to sort out the customer’s issue or to sell them what they want.

Technology solutions can help by working out who the customer is and what they want while they’re still in the queue. Routing options include:

• IVR and database integration - 'Who are you and what do you want?'
• Skills based routing - person best suited to handle the call
• Dynamic routing - send to next available agent, not to the back of a queue.

Other key components of getting it right that should be considered are training and desktop systems.

Using technology to reduce agent cost

One of the obvious ways of reducing agent cost is reducing agent salary and taking advantage of lower wage conditions elsewhere in the world. This may be part of your strategy already. Treating multiple call centres as a single whole also extends to call centres in other countries. It is possible to establish a single virtual call centre for your whole organisation, and then control the flow of calls in real-time to each physical location wherever that may be.

While a competitive tariff for the minutes is not completely irrelevant, it just doesn’t make a big dent in the overall costs.

We recommend that customers reduce costs by not investing in capital equipment (switches and software) unless they absolutely have to, as you take all of the technology risk and are stuck with whatever you’ve bought until it’s written off. You may find more flexibility and some financial advantage in buying managed services, where the capability is hosted in an operator’s network.

• Buy technology on a pay-as-you-use basis - through network hosted applications
• Consider having agents offshore - integrate call centres in multiple countries
• Provide flexible working hours - have agents at home taking IP calls over broadband, managed as though they were in the call centre
• Or even… pay less for an inbound minute.

Using technology to reduce handling time

Handling time is a key area where technology can help. A combination of IVR and CTI can save the 10-20 seconds that it takes to identify, verify and authenticate the caller and statutory announcements can also be automated. Some calls can be automated entirely - very simple transactions (such as balance enquiries) often make up the vast bulk of calls that a contact centre receives. Finally, your lower cost channels should be used to defer some calls altogether.

The impact of technology on customer service

With today’s solutions, you can save money and improve the level of service. The use of technology on all of the call centre objectives can lead to improvements in customer service levels. The customer service experience is a combination of:

• Queue length, where forecasting and scheduling are key and where additional benefits can be gained from virtual call centre technologies
• Sensitive use of automation (IVR and speech recognition) where the simple transactions are made even simpler and the complex ones are routed quickly to a real person
• First time resolution or first time sale, where the call is routed to the agent with the right skills first time.

Customer service performance clearly has a bottom line impact through revenue from new sales and customer retention.

Solutions for improving customer service

• Customer Contact Solutions - Solutions include routing management, reporting, on-disk billing and inbound call analysis, self service, interactive services, fully integrated hosting solutions and telemarketing numbers.
• Converged Solutions - IP technologies have set business buzzing with opportunities to transform customer and employee communications, including IP Multimedia and IP PBX.
• Business Phone Lines - From a single phone line to ISDN30 to an advanced IP Telephony system.

We can also help with your other needs; to find out more, please contact us.