From contact center to customer management center: What changed?
From contact center to customer management center: What changed?
The role of contact centers in organizations has changed over the years from a mere provider of customer access in the 1990s to the multi-channel facilities that they are now, serving customer demands in a 24x7 world. The journey, however, is not without order and chaos.
In a webinar, Martin Dove, Group MD, CIS, Dimension Data, and Strategic Contact Center Consultant Simon Roncoroni discussed the salient points of this transformation as they analyzed the major shifts in the industry as reflected in the 2011 Global Contact Center Benchmarking Report released in October.
The report, the 12th edition of the annual study conducted by Dimension Data in 66 countries, provided a lot of in-depth insights on the call center landscape today.
Order # 1: The move to multi-channel contact center
Dove said the 1990s call center was born out of the need to provide improved customer access as organizations were looking to replace face-to-face channels in branch networks and retail outlets. From 2000, however, there was a broadening of channel access as Integrated Voice Response (IVR), self-service, and email were integrated into the call center.
"There was a very strong commercial focus during the time of migrating activity to lower cost channels in order to improve the cost-effectiveness of delivering service," Dove said.
This trend is seen as continuing and viewed as the natural trajectory of the evolution of the call center, with social media seen as playing a big part.
"If you think of about your end behavior as a customer, the phone is not necessarily the first channel of choice anymore. Thus, organizations see the need to provide a multi-channel experience. There is a very strong focus on the need within organizations for more flexibility and agility to respond to changing customer demand," he said.
This race to the multi-channel platform, according to Roncorini, is anchored on the realization of businesses today that one of the very few differentiators available to them is service.
"Pricing is no longer much of a differentiator and pricing has been decimated by the availability of online and the ability of consumers to check prices across a wide range of supplies instantly. Distribution is also no longer a distribution and indeed rarely is product a differentiator. But the fact is, consumers probably value more than anything is the quality of service they receive from the org that they choose to do business with," he said.
"The call center is actually the glue that holds it all together. So because you have disparate channels out there, the one place that consumers can talk to and where all transactional data resides is in the call center," he added.
Chaos # 1: Getting one's act together
The Global Contact Center Benchmarking Report showed that in the 1990s, 90 percent of customer interactions were handled by traditional human agents. In 2000, only two-thirds were being handled by live agents as service became available on other channels. In 2010, live agent contact further fell to only one-third of total customer interaction.
Roncorini said the paradox of these numbers is probably a tenth of calls that got into the call center started online. "It migrated from online into the call center either because the consumer did not trust the Web or the instructions on the Web were to contact the call center," he explained.
"What we are starting to see is multiplicity of contact, which to suit the customer who can prefer one over the other and indeed is actually creating unnecessary cost for organizations in delivering the service that consumers want. I absolutely support multiplicity of contact but it is absolutely critical for organizations to start to try and understand where the contact is taking place and where they have opportunities to satisfy the consumer demand wherever it may be on the first attempt the consumer makes," he added.
It is equally important, he said, that the agent has a single and holistic view of the interactions initiated by the customer as a customer who sent a query online and called the contact center 10 minutes later would expect the agent to know that he had made a prior request. However, the online department may be sitting in a different city or country.
"Getting that process optimized is what some organizations are struggling with," he said, adding that multiplicity of contact suits the customer best, as they can prefer one to the other. However, it is actually creating unnecessary cost for organizations in delivering the service that consumers want.
"I absolutely support multiplicity of contact but it is absolutely critical for organizations to start to try and understand where the contact is taking place and where they have opportunities to satisfy the consumer demand wherever it may be on the first attempt the consumer makes," he advised.
In a webinar, Martin Dove, Group MD, CIS, Dimension Data, and Strategic Contact Center Consultant Simon Roncoroni discussed the salient points of this transformation as they analyzed the major shifts in the industry as reflected in the 2011 Global Contact Center Benchmarking Report released in October.
The report, the 12th edition of the annual study conducted by Dimension Data in 66 countries, provided a lot of in-depth insights on the call center landscape today.
Order # 1: The move to multi-channel contact center
Dove said the 1990s call center was born out of the need to provide improved customer access as organizations were looking to replace face-to-face channels in branch networks and retail outlets. From 2000, however, there was a broadening of channel access as Integrated Voice Response (IVR), self-service, and email were integrated into the call center.
"There was a very strong commercial focus during the time of migrating activity to lower cost channels in order to improve the cost-effectiveness of delivering service," Dove said.
This trend is seen as continuing and viewed as the natural trajectory of the evolution of the call center, with social media seen as playing a big part.
"If you think of about your end behavior as a customer, the phone is not necessarily the first channel of choice anymore. Thus, organizations see the need to provide a multi-channel experience. There is a very strong focus on the need within organizations for more flexibility and agility to respond to changing customer demand," he said.
This race to the multi-channel platform, according to Roncorini, is anchored on the realization of businesses today that one of the very few differentiators available to them is service.
"Pricing is no longer much of a differentiator and pricing has been decimated by the availability of online and the ability of consumers to check prices across a wide range of supplies instantly. Distribution is also no longer a distribution and indeed rarely is product a differentiator. But the fact is, consumers probably value more than anything is the quality of service they receive from the org that they choose to do business with," he said.
"The call center is actually the glue that holds it all together. So because you have disparate channels out there, the one place that consumers can talk to and where all transactional data resides is in the call center," he added.
Chaos # 1: Getting one's act together
The Global Contact Center Benchmarking Report showed that in the 1990s, 90 percent of customer interactions were handled by traditional human agents. In 2000, only two-thirds were being handled by live agents as service became available on other channels. In 2010, live agent contact further fell to only one-third of total customer interaction.
Roncorini said the paradox of these numbers is probably a tenth of calls that got into the call center started online. "It migrated from online into the call center either because the consumer did not trust the Web or the instructions on the Web were to contact the call center," he explained.
"What we are starting to see is multiplicity of contact, which to suit the customer who can prefer one over the other and indeed is actually creating unnecessary cost for organizations in delivering the service that consumers want. I absolutely support multiplicity of contact but it is absolutely critical for organizations to start to try and understand where the contact is taking place and where they have opportunities to satisfy the consumer demand wherever it may be on the first attempt the consumer makes," he added.
It is equally important, he said, that the agent has a single and holistic view of the interactions initiated by the customer as a customer who sent a query online and called the contact center 10 minutes later would expect the agent to know that he had made a prior request. However, the online department may be sitting in a different city or country.
"Getting that process optimized is what some organizations are struggling with," he said, adding that multiplicity of contact suits the customer best, as they can prefer one to the other. However, it is actually creating unnecessary cost for organizations in delivering the service that consumers want.
"I absolutely support multiplicity of contact but it is absolutely critical for organizations to start to try and understand where the contact is taking place and where they have opportunities to satisfy the consumer demand wherever it may be on the first attempt the consumer makes," he advised.
