Contact center environments are highly varied, and over time I’ll address a number of them in my column. For this article, my research has taken me to a particularly challenging scenario – shared services. During the course of recent industry conversations, as well as formal research interviews, I’ve gained a better understanding of the challenges addressed by the shared services model. As a rule of thumb, contact centers become more complex the larger the enterprise, and operational decisions around them have far-reaching implications.

Shared services is one approach to consider, and in certain situations it offers the best path to ensure a high level of contact center performance along with supporting corporate level business objectives. I like to think of shared services as a hybrid between hosted and premise-based. Shared is akin to hosted in the sense that the contact centers are usually in remote locations, separate from the rest of the company’s operational sites.

On the other hand, they’re similar to premise-based in that their sole focus is that company; they don’t take on outsourced contact center work from other companies. However, in larger enterprises, they will likely serve multiple lines of business and subsidiaries, some of which may have come from acquisitions. As such, even though a shared services contact center model is centralized and internally focused, the needs served may well vary considerably in areas not just related to the business, but also cultural and social. To clarify the scenarios that call for shared services, consider a few basic parameters:

• The enterprise is a global business, both in terms of operations and customers
• The enterprise supports these with contact centers situated in various regions
• Often need to support multiple contact center solutions, due to either the local preferences of regional operations or as part of the infrastructure coming via acquisition
• Strong IT expertise which dictates the preference to manage as much in-house as possible
• A customer base that requires a high level of professionalism from contact center agents
• A customer base where information needs are constantly changing and agents need to have access to the latest updates, enhancements, etc.

Each of these parameters has individual merit, but it is not hard to envision scenarios where all of these – and more – come into play. This is where things become much more challenging, and I’ll provide some examples to show how shared services can address them.

Let’s start first with the customer and the grave-to-cradle approach I explored in my last article. The key here is to understand what drives satisfaction with customers and work backward from there in determining the right model for a contact center. In some businesses, the vast majority of customers are high value, and to the extent that is true, the contact must be high performing. Only in the best of circumstances can this experience be trusted to an outsourced partner, but that requires a big leap of faith.

The more likely scenario is some form of in-house, which brings us to shared services. Simply put, these enterprises accept the trade-off of having a more costly contact center operation in return for more control over the experience, which should translate into higher retention levels and greater success at upselling. However, to make that tradeoff work, the enterprise must have the right tools to measure and manage all their contact center operations. As mentioned earlier, the bigger the enterprise, the more daunting the task.

Consider an enterprise whose customers are in the professional services sector – accountants, lawyers, management consultants, etc. – and are themselves globally-based. Like any business, their needs will vary for calling a contact center – problem resolution, general inquiry, specific inquiry, technical help, billing issue, etc. Regardless, given the nature of their work, there will be two core expectations at all times – inquiries need to be handled quickly and professionally. These are high end but also high value customers. Time is money for them, and they don’t mind paying top dollar for the service they need.

Clearly, there is little margin for error here, which explains why enterprises would not be inclined to outsource contact centers for these types of customers. Aside from keeping better tabs on the overall operations, this gives them better control over having the right types of agents who truly understand the needs of this particular set of customers.

Before continuing, I should note that even in a professional services business, not all customers are high value. There are many large enterprises where the majority of customers are at the other end of the spectrum, and they require a very different type of skill set and operational effort to provide quality customer service. All enterprises have a mix of high and low value customers, and the more varied their needs are, the more challenging it becomes to manage the overall contact center operations. Regardless of this mix, there must be an operational platform that ties things together. Coming back to professional services, here are two basic examples to illustrate these challenges.

• For a global enterprise serving global customers, it will be important to have consistent performance across all contact centers, not just for internal management, but as a public benchmark to show market leadership in supporting these types of customers. As an example, consider a basic metric like hold time. In some cases, there will be universal metrics that apply across all the contact centers run by the enterprise. For others, though, there may well be regional variances where different lengths of hold time are acceptable. In a shared service environment, there must be adequate tools in place that allow for centralized monitoring across these locations. Not only that, but they need to function in near real time, especially to manage disputes.

• Virtual call queues are another example. This is especially important for connecting agents with appropriate expertise located in a different geography than the caller. International businesses that I have spoken with about this will all say this is harder to do than it looks. In a shared services model, contact centers operate fairly autonomously from region to region, even though they are all part of the same corporate entity. A high priority call in one region may not be a high priority call in another region, and when trying to connect an anxious customer to a specialist thousands of kilometers away, the sense of urgency may not be there. Furthermore, for global enterprises, there are wide variances of cultural, social and linguistic mores that make it difficult to provide a consistent caller experience from start to finish. Shared services may not be the least expensive way to run a contact center, but when dealing with these types of realities, I think the odds are much better for getting the desired result than with a fully outsourced model.

These examples require a shared services model to provide sufficient visibility to all agents across the various centers to manage this efficiently. Aside from being able to identify the right agent to pass the call along to, there is value in being able to tell the customer how long they’ll have to wait to speak with that agent. This may seem fairly basic for a small operation, but for a global enterprise with multiple locations it is quite the opposite. However, when having the tools in place to do this, two strong benefits emerge right away.

First is demonstrating to customers your ability to draw from global resources on the spot to get them the help they need. Second is an internal benefit by giving agents advanced capabilities to do their jobs well. Agent turnover is a fact of life in contact centers, but when considering both customer and employee satisfaction in a shared services environment, the payoff will be even greater.

Stepping back a bit, the main message here is that shared services give enterprises more control for providing the right level of service to all their customers. High value and low value customers will have different service level needs, and to meet them effectively, enterprises need much more than an army of agents. Distinct service fulfillment capabilities are needed for each type of customer, and overriding that must be a management team that knows how to enable this. With all the complexities touched on herein, it is easy to see how important reporting metrics are for identifying these customer segments and measuring the effectiveness of each call. In my view, it’s also easy to see the fit for shared services in these situations.