This book tackles one of today s hottest topics: Customer Contact Outsourcing. Companies are in a quandary about the myriad of teleservices questions they re faced with, such as deciding to outsource, cost / benefit analysis, RFP development, proposal assessment, vendor selection, contractual requirements, service level performance measurement, and managing an ongoing teleservices relationship. With the authors help, readers will find this complex issue straightforward to approach, understand, and implement.
CHAPTER 1: CONTACT CENTER CHARACTERISTICS
Introduction
With the dawn of the 21st century, the total customer experience has become a required focus of any company that hopes to grow. This new focus on customer relationship management (CRM) has placed a great amount of emphasis on managing all of the customer contact channels, i.e., telephone, e-mail, Web, and more. In most companies today, customer contact centers are considered a critical business function. Companies establish contact centers to provide their customers with service and support, including sales support, customer service, and technical support. As companies experience this change in focus on the customer relationship, many are not willing to allow a third party to act on their behalf. In many cases, companies handle their own customer inquiries, whether those inquiries come into a centralized or decentralized contact center, and whether telephone agents make outbound telemarketing, sales, or proactive service calls. The challenge becomes one of attempting to establish customer relationship management as a core competency, when the company may not have the knowledge, experience, or talent to do so. Figure 1 shows the typical functionality of a multi-channel customer contact center.
This book will help you to demystify the process of leveraging third-party teleservices that will assist you in meeting a strategic goal that provides for increased loyalty, retention, satisfaction, and lifetime value of your customers.
Contact Center Specifics
The customer-service process is strongly influenced by the requirements and the needs of the particular company and its customers. Therefore, it is worthwhile to highlight the main idiosyncratic characteristics of contact centers before discussing outsourcing.
The first, and probably the most obvious, characteristic of contact centers is their dependence on other business processes. Contact centers cannot survive without the existence of product manufacturers and service providers. They are in a symbiotic relationship with these organizations, and they provide the communication bridge between companies and consumers.
A call center is like a "company within a company." The organization is fundamentally different than the core business it supports. An entirely different skill set is required to consistently deliver superior service.
The second trait of contact centers is the importance of their human capital. Contact center employees have an enormous influence on the effectiveness and efficiency of customer communication. It is a general belief that employee satisfaction and customer satisfaction are closely related.
Despite the importance of employee satisfaction, the turnover rate in contact centers is higher than in most other departments of a company. The average annual industry rate is around 25%, and in some contact centers, this rate will range between 100 and 150% per year.
Another contact center characteristic is limited career development opportunity. Due to their flat organizational structure, contact centers offer limited opportunities for professional development. The available growth positions are typically at the lower tier of the organizational hierarchy. The most common career path starts from telephone service representatives (TSRs), then goes to contact center supervisor, and finally, contact center manager. This partly explains the challenge contact centers have in recruiting skilled people, and also their inability to retain fast-track employees for a longer period of time.
Contact centers seek educated people with strong communication and computer skills. Since most customer interactions are made through the telephone, often with the help of a computer, issues such as non-dialect language, clarity of pronunciation, computer keyboarding, problem solving, and typing speed are important applicant selection criteria in the recruiting process.
Finally, the last distinctive characteristic of contact centers is the location boundlessness. This means that the contact center location is not bound with the area it serves. Virtually, contact centers can be located anywhere as long as they satisfy the needs of their calling customers, and as long as the regional telecommunication infrastructure offers sufficient alternatives.
Individually and in combination, these factors greatly influence the cost-effectiveness of a contact center. It is important to understand how these factors influence costs. We will address this issue later in this book.
