To achieve these business goals, technology in the contact centre can be used to capture data on the customer and improve overall efficiencies which will not only save costs, but also improve customer service. I will cover the main technologies available in this article.

Differentiation

The debate about employee productivity and contact centre efficiency will continue, but regardless of location, customer service will ultimately be the differentiator for firms. The only way to ensure that a contact centre can both handle calls effectively and monitor the performance of its employees is by deploying appropriate technology to deliver on company promises.

The challenge is therefore evolving a contact centre from its traditional position of a ‘necessary evil’ into an real opportunity to build closer relationships with customers, gain more useful data on them and their habits and cut the overall cost of dealing with customer enquiries.

In order to be successful with those main objectives, businesses must analyse their existing customer service process carefully, find out what works, what doesn’t and why. The technology exists to provide the analytical breakdown needed to pinpoint these vital requirements. Too often I hear companies saying; “I don’t know what I don’t know…” What these companies don’t seem to realise is that the leaders of the future are already able to address this issue.

Increasingly for many businesses, the contact centre is the front line of an organisation’s public image. Call waiting times and the ability of agents to handle enquiries of differing degrees of complexity therefore transforms contact centre staff into a de facto wing of a company’s PR operation. Mess it up, and the brand suffers.

Technology can solve both these problems; firstly by better managing and directing calls and secondly by pinpointing both the training and internal processes necessary to improve and motivate employees.

Virtual contact centres

Virtual contact centres connect different contact centres together over a network, regardless of location. The key advantage of this architecture is that it provides increased flexibility to both operators and their employees, allowing them to utilise resources from multiple locations, including linking home workers and those from other countries.

As well as providing inherent resilience, virtual contact centres allow employers to be more flexible, enhance customer service and improve employee morale.

Having visibility over incoming call flows enables contact centre managers to better assign agents to, for example, different shifts to cope with changing demand as well as to direct the customer to an expert in the field that they wish to discuss or to a local language speaker. This gives significant competitive edge and helps reduce customer churn.

The customer is king

Increasingly, contact centres are moving away from standard metrics looking at call throughput, call length, and so forth towards measuring the total customer experience. However, traditional reporting systems cannot cope with this customer-centric approach. Using a “balanced scorecard” approach, for example, combines measures of efficiency, effectiveness, the customer experience and the employee experience to analyse overall performance. Intelligence is the key to both retaining the customer and better targeting them for new products and services.

As with all technology deployed in contact centres these days, there has to be a compelling business benefit for making the investment, one that has a measurable positive financial outcome. For example, customer relationship management (CRM) tools to capture data on the customer.

It is hard to prove a link to immediate return on investment, but the long term benefits of having improved knowledge about a customer will help the organisation target them more productively in the future. Interactive voice response (IVR) self-service applications can also help streamline operations by enabling the caller to deal with simple enquiries automatically and without the need to wait in a queue for an agent.

Employees — your greatest asset

Morale and performance are big issues in the contact centre world, where employee retention has traditionally been a problem. Using analytical technology, companies can assess which agents are performing well and which are not, and particularly which areas they are struggling in or need improvement. This helps managers to provide training to those agents to raise performance and esteem among the team.

Being able to pinpoint the strengths and weaknesses of employees by analysing both how they handle calls and how quickly they do it, enables trainers to better assign training and develop employee skills and morale, which in turn results in improved employee retention.

Twenty-first century industry

The Economist magazine carried an article earlier this year entitled “Sweatshops and technocoolies” to refer to India’s growing business process outsourcing industry, in particular its contact centres. It is an area of growing concern among the UK public, but the right technology can resolve a great deal of the issues of customer handling and agent stress and help reverse the perception of the contact centre as a ‘sweatshop’, be it in Bangalore or Birmingham.

Calls can be more accurately distributed across agents, customers’ waiting time can be cut and their overall experience improved. More information can be gained on the customer, enabling firms to build more solid loyalty bases. Agents can be retained more readily, with morale and expertise improved across the board.