A call centre is a centralised office used for the purpose of receiving and transmitting a large volume of requests by telephone. A call centre is operated by a company to administer incoming sales, service, product support or information inquiries from consumers. Outgoing calls for telemarketing, clientele, product services, and debt collection are also made. A call centre is often operated through an extensive open workspace for call centre agents, with work stations that include a computer for each agent, a telephone set/headset connected to a telecom switch, and one or more supervisor stations. It can be independently operated or networked with additional centres, often linked to a corporate computer network, including mainframes, microcomputers and LANs. Increasingly, the voice and data pathways into the centre are linked through a set of technologies called computer telephony integration (CTI).
This is where most people get it wrong! They think that, in addition to a having a call centre, collective handling of letters, faxes, live chat, and e-mails at one location means that they have a contact centre. WRONG! It only becomes a contact centre when ALL Channels can be delivered seamlessly to appropriately skilled agents. Also known as a customer interaction centre, it is the central point of any organisation from which all customer contacts are managed. Through contact centers, valuable information about the company and customers are routed to appropriate people, contacts to be tracked and data to be gathered. It is generally a part of company’s customer relationship management (CRM) environment. Today, customers contact companies by calling, emailing, chatting online, visiting websites, faxing, instant messaging, Facebook and Twitter.
This is the big divide where operational teams and IT split. Technology is only an enabler and the definitions for what systems your company needs should only ever be driven by comprehensive business requirements. This approach ensures that there is the correct balance between people, processes and technology. This is particularly necessary as call and contact centre technology is subject to continual change, improvements and innovations. Some of these technologies include speech recognition software to allow computers to handle first level of customer support, text mining and natural language processing to allow better customer handling, agent training by automatic mining of best practices from past interactions, support automation and many other technologies to improve agent productivity and customer satisfaction.
The concept of the Universal Queue standardizes the processing of communications across multiple technologies such as fax, phone, and email whilst the concept of a Virtual queue provides callers with an alternative to waiting on hold when no agents are available to handle inbound call demand.
Historically, call centres have been built on PBX equipment that is owned and hosted by the company’s IT department. The PBX might also have attached software which will provide functions such as Automatic Call Distribution, Interactive Voice Response, and skills-based routing. The IT department and vendor would be responsible for the maintenance of the equipment and necessary software upgrades as released by the vendor. In many cases, there has been significant capital investment in such systems, and considerable ongoing maintenance and support costs. In many instances this very fact is a barrier to exploring the most suitable solutions to meet the business and its customer’s needs.
With the advent of the Software as a Service technology delivery model, the virtual call centre has emerged. In a virtual call centre model, the company’s IT department does not own, operate or host the equipment that the call centre runs on. Instead, they subscribe to a service for a monthly or annual fee with a service provider that hosts the call centre telephony equipment in their own data centre. Such a vendor may host many call centres on their equipment. Agents connect to the vendor's equipment through traditional PSTN telephone lines, through web portals or over Voice over IP.
Cloud based integrated computing and multi-channel platforms for contact centres extends cloud solutions beyond just Software as a Service, or hosted, on-demand call/contact centres by providing application programming interfaces (APIs) on the call centre cloud computing platform that allow call centre functionality such as provided by NewVoiceMedia to be integrated with cloud-based Customer Relationship Management, such as Salesforce.com or Oracle CRM and leads management and other applications.
The APIs typically provide programmatic access to two key groups of features in the call centre platform:
Computer Telephony Integration (CTI) APIs provide developers with access to basic telephony controls and sophisticated call handling on the call centre platform from a separate application.
Configuration APIs provide programmatic control of administrative functions of the call centre platform which are typically accessed by a human administrator through a Graphical User Interface (GUI).
As can be seen, there is an immediate problem caused by multiple teams of agents doing single tasks. As there is no workflow between agent groups (bar perhaps in the call centre), there will be significant variances in how the tasks required are completed, monitored or their impact on the customer experience.
Whilst many of these newer call centres benefit from advanced telephony technology, they do not have the capability to integrate with other communications channels, or give such choice to their customers. They also tend to be predominantly cost centres, handling inbound service and enquiry calls. Where some re-active selling is present, it usually is in the form of order taking.
Few understand how to improve service whilst reducing ongoing operating costs, so it becomes an issue of minimizing cost at the expense of service quality, leading to increased levels of customer churn, which impacts on loyalty, decreasing revenues and therefore profits. Inevitably, the business, staff and customers all loose, although this effect is masked in many organizations whose overall size, revenues and profits (actual or expected) are significantly large. This is more apparent in Financial Services and Telecomms than in any other sector.
