CHICAGO — Contact centers are becoming increasingly distributed as companies move away from building vast phone rooms in favor of smaller remote offices and home-based agents.
To streamline management of multiple locations, companies are investing in IT products and services that link distributed contact center sites, aggregate customer data from disparate sources, and make real-time performance metrics available to staff and management. Nearly half of all centers plan to outfit remote workers, mobile workers and select business experts with the means to help field customer inquiries, according to Richard Snow, a vice president and research director at Ventana Research. Snow spoke at the recent International Contact Center Management (ICCM) conference in Chicago, where participants shared stories about what they’re doing to make operations run more smoothly without sacrificing customer service.
While the staff handling calls is becoming more far-flung, IT resources are being centralized. The mortgage group at Dutch banking giant ABN Amro, for example, is in the process of expanding its deployment of CallCenterAnywhere, a hosted telephony platform Oracle gained in its acquisition this month of Telephony@Work.
With CallCenterAnywhere, ABN Amro will be able to use a single queue to prioritize and route calls (based on agent skills and availability) across the mortgage group’s five U.S. contact centers. In the past, the mortgage group maintained separate calls queues for each site, and calls couldn’t be swapped from one queue to another to alleviate backups, said Chad Barker, an assistant vice president in the enterprise architecture group at ABN Amro.
The bank is planning to consolidate its telephony gear rather than maintaining premises-based systems such as automatic call distributors at every site. The goal is to cut down on product and licensing costs, as well as personnel costs associated with having a telecom expert at each site, Barker said.
Disaster recovery plans also are improved, he said. If one contact center becomes unavailable because of a natural disaster, for example, the other sites will be able to pick up all the calls. “This gives us the opportunity to virtualize the disparate call centers,” he said.
Sharing knowledge
A common theme among speakers at ICCM was the need to increase the quality of information available to agents and managers in the call center.
Most companies know how long a caller waits before a customer service agent picks up the phone, but few have the systems in place to identify and prioritize callers based on how valuable they are to the company, Snow said. In addition, most companies don’t make it easy for agents to get to the data they need.
In 37% of centers, agents are required to use more than one desktop to access the systems they need to resolve an inquiry, and 43% have a single desktop but have to log in separately to multiple systems. Just 19% have an “intelligent” desktop that allows them to navigate quickly between applications without having to re-enter any data, according to Ventana’s recent survey of 853 IT and call center operations staff.
“I’ve been in a center where I’ve seen agents on chairs, rolling between five different desktops. There were grooves in the floor from wheeling up and down,” Snow said. “Help your agents out.”
One tool McKesson Health Solutions has deployed to share data more easily with distributed call center staff is IEX’s TotalView workforce management software. The division of San Francisco-based McKesson runs a call center that provides nurse triage and disease management services.
The TotalView software gives agents and supervisors access to schedules and performance statistics via a Web browser. Agents working from home can see where staff is needed based on anticipated call volumes and adjust their schedules to fit staffing gaps, said Linda Casey, a senior manager of operations at McKesson. It’s important to give agents the data and tools to manage their own schedules. “Agents can’t be flexible if they don’t know when they are most needed,” she said.
Likewise, Conseco has worked to improve operations by aggregating data from its multiple administrative systems. The Carmel, Ind., insurer worked with Verint Opus Solutions to build performance dashboards tailored for senior executives, managers and agents, said Peggy Hutchinson, a senior vice president at Conseco.
Continental Airlines, too, is feeding performance data to staff and managers with a new scorecard application it developed in-house to measure agents in key sales, customer service and productivity areas.
“It provides agents with a single view of their performance,” said Jim Thistle, a senior director of international reservations and revenue programs at Houston-based Continental. “Agents can adjust their habits during the course of a month if they see that they’re falling behind in bookings per hour, for example.”
The airline also has rolled out software from BenchmarkPortal that lets it survey call center customers on the service they received from agents. So far 18% of callers who are sent surveys via e-mail complete them, said Anthony Bagio, a manager of operations at Continental. “Customers were just surprised that we even did it.”
