Preparing your e-commerce call center with a customer-centric technology framework: Part III

Call Center Solutions, Jul 1999 by Talley, Bruce

The rapid expansion of e-commerce as a successful sales channel is driving customers to the Web. So it follows that ecommerce must be easing the burden on call centers, which were designed to serve more traditional sales channels, right? Not so. E-commerce is changing the way call centers manage customer interaction, forcing companies to rethink customer service and demanding greater efficiency from sales and marketing efforts - not reducing call center traffic. Why not? Because e-commerce offers customers a new set of options, and new options generate new questions. Who answers those questions? The call center. Now, things are more complex than ever for call centers. Customers may telephone to respond to a marketing campaign they saw online, call to check on orders they placed at a Web storefront or follow-up on support issues that began in e-mail dialog. In any of these instances, customers will expect customer service representatives (CSRs) to be apprised of their situations and ready to help. This means that CSRs need immediate access to customers' previous activity. This translates to complete integration of traditional and online marketing and sales functions at the call center layer. This is no easy task for information technology (IT) departments. Fortunately, innovations in call center technology, combined with the right technological framework, help companies gracefully reinvent call centers to support e-commerce. Front office software, a step beyond computer-telephony integration (CTI), is at the heart of this transition. Front office software manages and supports essential sales, marketing and service applications from the call center - giving CSRs access to all the information they need to assist customers and ensure that customers don't get lost in the shuffle.

Elements Of A Strong Technology Framework

In this atmosphere of escalating change and increasing customer demand, it is essential to use a technology framework that keeps everyone and everything fully integrated. The framework must be easy to implement, maintain and change, and must also leverage the systems that already exist. It must allow enterprises to manage workflow, no matter what systems people are working on or where the needed data reside. The framework should be compatible with applications from a wide array of manufacturers and, of course, it needs to be up and operating 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

Inaddition to meeting each of these requirements, the call center system must deliver all of this in a way that always puts the customer first. This means the technology framework will offer the following benefits:

Increased customer satisfaction. Increased competition in the online arena means that customers are becoming more demanding. so the experience a company provides every time a customer calls or contacts a Web site must always be satisfying. The customer interaction framework must be designed so that CSRs can handle calls more efficiently. The days of juggling customers and putting them on hold to find information or to take other calls are over. Furthermore, for e-commerce to be successful, customers need to know they can call a CSR and get quick assistance if they have a question during an online order.

Increased revenue. Once the customer is on the phone and enjoying the kind of customized attention that a strong customer interaction framework supports, the CSR has an opportunity to generate additional sales by cross-selling or upselling. This becomes easy if the framework gives the CSR instant access to the kinds of products in which the customer is interested.

Increased productivity. Providing CSRs with the tools to access pertinent information not only improves customer service, it also shortens the time spent on each call and improves productivity - enabling the CSR to increase the volume of calls fielded in each shift.

Reduced training costs. When the framework that integrates multiple platforms across several departments is easy to learn and use, new call center employees can be brought up to speed quickly and veterans will pick up the ins and outs of new marketing campaigns with greater ease. In a fully integrated call center, CSRs no longer need to learn and navigate multiple applications.

In order to facilitate all of these benefits, the framework must be the central interface for managing customer interactions across multiple channels such as voice, the Web and e-mail. Additionally, it must have an open architecture so IT professionals have the flexibility to plug in different components, depending on their needs, and to change certain components over time.

Because not every business is the same, the framework must include applications that address the specific needs of the organization using it. These include applications for order processing, financial services, account management, billing, service provisioning, workflow management and fault management. No matter what the need, the system must be able to integrate a new application or retrofit an old one.