One size does not fit all: Targeting your contact center services for better ROI

Customer Inter@ction Solutions, Mar 2002 by Wilson, Brad

To begin, let me congratulate today's call center professionals and information technology executives. Over the past decade, they have created solid and stable customer service systems using rudimentary tools. But as we move into the next millennium, these same executives have their work cut out for them. The call center will undergo sweeping changes, bringing both good and bad news.

Architected for intelligence, customer valuebased routing uses realtime profiling and analytics to suggest cross-sell, upsell and churn avoidance strategies, based on detailed customer data, behavior and preferences.

The bad news first: the call center is becoming more complex. In today's economy, call center managers need to lower costs while extending the call center's reach by integrating new communication channels and revenue-enhancing services.

Now for the good news: new technologies in customer relationship management (CRM) and converged networking can move call centers from "one-size-fits-all" customer service to targeted one-to-one service. This delivers value by improving customer satisfaction and boosting revenue, as in years past when local businesses offered personal service because they knew every customer.

One key strategy in moving the call center forward is customer value-based call routing. In conjunction with load balancing or skills-based routing strategies, customer value-based routing helps businesses do a better job of matching customers with specific needs or propensities with the agents that are best able to meet those needs.

A good way to understand how this works is by comparing traditional call centers with the modern "customer contact centers."

Communication channels. In most call centers, discrete and often proprietary solution elements handle a particular customer channel, such as the voice response unit, the private branch exchange (PBX) or automated call distribution (ACD), and the Web server for online interactions.

Far more effective is the modern customer contact center, in which new technologies merge all channels into a single communications platform that handles voice, automated voice, chat, agent-assisted chat, e-mail and the Web. IP-based infrastructure puts all communication channels and customer data into a single communications backbone, making it easier to implement and less expensive to maintain than today's disparate, multichannel networks.

Customer data. Traditionally, multiple groups within a company have managed customer data, creating a fragmented view of each customer. Customer data has usually been organized by division, by group and by application, making it difficult to see a single view of the customer. Groups that manage call centers, the Web, e-mail or other channels have thus far worked with a limited view within each specific channel.

By contrast, modern multichannel contact centers are architected for intelligence. They provide intergrated customer information in real-time to respond to requests efficiently and make value-added recommendations of products or other information. The ability to generate a real-time customer profile through a combination of offline data aggregation and real-time application integration is critical to making a multichannel contact center both efficient and effective. Real-time statistical analytics are also now available that allow every customer interaction to be personalized with a high degree of accuracy and very little overhead.

Business logic. Today, customers expect their suppliers to interact as a single enterprise consistently across all channels - a major challenge considering the multiple stand-alone applications in the typical call center. Business logic for serving customers has been hard-wired into applications such as e-mail, call center and interactive voice response (IVR) with little or no integration. If the e-mail response system is separate from other applications, how can an organization consistently decide whether or not to waive a late fee for a good customer, or determine which calls should be routed immediately to an agent?

The usual answer is to duplicate business rules across all systems, creating a nightmare of coding, revisions and upgrades. The modern contact center, however, delivers value by featuring consistent, centrally administered business rules across all applications, and shared customer information that allows agents to be marched with customers according to their value. This approach easily provides answers to questions such as: Which customers should be referred immediately to experienced agents and which should be routed to an interactive voice response system? How should we handle customers who are likely to churn? Who should receive special offers. The result is greater customer satisfaction and organizational effectiveness.

Performance monitoring. Traditional call centers have monitored performance by tracking metrics such as number of interactions, call handle times and time in queue, and the focus has been on making simple automated tasks faster and more routine. This has been important in the past and will continue to be important in the future. However, the modern contact center also needs to improve organizational effectiveness by working smarter: understanding cross-channel customer interactions and reporting cross-channel results. Once crosschannel reporting is in place, a company can get a better view of each customer's account, history and buying patterns, as well as the resources that are being expended on behalf of that customer. In other words, a company can discover the value of each customer, which is key to rationalizing the investments being made across a service organization, as well as optimizing the potential value in each customer interaction.