Tips for call centers considering Web enablement

Call Center Solutions, Jul 1999 by Wood, Stephen

Try before you buy. Call center outsourcing agencies are now offering Web-enabled call center (WECC) services; ranging from handling simple callbacks to the whole enchilada, including voice and video over the net.

Don't be deterred by the sky-high price tags when looking to implement an in-house WECC. Vendors often drop prices substantially if companies agree to act as a reference site for their WECC product.

Look at your existing vendors to see what WECC products they offer. Many of the major call center vendors are offering a full range of Web functionality, and although these will cost you more than building a best-ofbreed WECC, systems integration costs will be substantially lower.

Be sure to see the WECC product working in a commercial environment. Beware of vendors who talk of hosts of blue-chip users who are not willing to go public.

Reach for the lowest fruit. Implementing callback is the simplest form of WECC, and also currently the only solution that offers carrier-grade audio.

Don't be tempted to think that service-level unification across all contact media is an ideal business strategy. The WECC is the bridge between the high-cost live agent interaction and the low-cost Web interaction. True effectiveness stems from balancing these channels with customer needs and customer revenue in a contact media integration (CMI) strategy.

Don't forget your brand. Offering a WECC can be a real bonus in marketing terms, but only if your CMI strategy maintains brand image coherence across all media. Remember, a brand is not a static thing. Each interaction customers have with your company forms their perception of your brand.

Determine what your agents' core skills are and how these relate to the WECC. Usually, the predominant skill set will be verbal. This should be kept in mind when multitasking agents across text- and verbally based media.

Establish a small pool of agents who are dedicated to providing WECC services. This will assist in gauging the value of WECC to your contact strategy, reduce your initial training costs and keep SI costs to a minimum by operating the WECC applications in a stand-alone environment. This is obviously not a strategy for the long term, but is good for testing the proverbial water.

Trends

The WECC is unquestionably in the technological "chasm-crossing" stage. It is slowly changing from being a means of asserting competitive advantage to being something that customers will come to expect. Over the past year, there has been rapid adoption of the WECC by both enterprises seeking to realize their latent e-commerce revenues though the call center, and call center operators leveraging the hype and functionality of the Internet.

Companies that are adopting WECC primarily view this technology as having three main aspects:

1) The reactive, which focuses on fielding customer-initiated communication,

2) The interactive, which augments verbal interactions with collaborative Web sessions between agents and customers, and

3) The active, whereby the WECC system can actively monitor your site, using algorithms to locate potential customers or browsers who are having difficulty completing an e-commerce transaction and enable you to "push" live-agent help to them.

However, the third aspect of WECC has been the slowest to realize its commercial potential. What is surprising about the inertia slowing the adoption of the active tactic is that the process mirrors the popular movement in outbound call center campaigns, away from "cold calling" to "warm calling. " As the surfer is on your site, he or she obviously has an interest in your products or services, so why not develop it? The main argument being used to explain the reluctance to use active WECC features is that such approaches are far too aggressive for customer-facing environments.

VoIP is still the "holy grail" for the WECC, as it offers global, visual and verbal communication at a fraction of PSTN prices. Let's separate the spin from the substance as far as VoIP goes: carrier-quality audio-- over IP is still approximately five years off. However, Cisco's $2 billion acquisition of GeoTel and multiple global carriers' EP beta projects indicate that this is undoubtedly the critical area for call center solutions vendors to watch.

Stephen Wood is lead analyst at Ovum, Inc. (www.ovum.com) and co-author of Ovum's report, Next Generation Call Centers: CTI, Voice and the Web.