Outlaw: Is Your Call Center Killing Your Business?

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By Joe Outlaw
"Of course not!" yousay. Don't be so sure.
First, let me say I appreciatethere are many call centers filled with enthusiastic, knowledgeable, andcustomer-focused people doing their very best to address customers' questionsand problems. I also know there are manycall centers applying the latest techniques and technologies to make theirpeople both efficient and effective in support of their missions. But having positive attitudes and workinghard while necessary are not sufficient to ensure your call center is helpingyour business not hurting it.
One very significant question toask yourself about your organization and its call centers is how aligned withthe core business strategies of the organization are they? Dimension Data, in its past several year'sannual global contact center survey of large enterprises, found that less thanhalf viewed their customer service organizations and call centers as strategicto their businesses. If yourenterprise's call centers are fully aligned with your business strategiesconsider yourself lucky, but don't stop there in determining if your callcenters are doing all they can to help your business.
Your Call Centers: Helping orHurting --- 10 Questions to Consider
1. How open for business are you?
Is your call center operated only from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday throgh Friday, or is it open 24hours a day, 7 days a week? The key here isnot how many hours your call center is open, but whether your customers canaccess people or applications for help when they need it or when it isconvenient for them. The right answer isnot necessarily 7x24, but whatever is appropriate for your target marketcustomers.
2. How easy to do business with are you?
This is a topic for several books, but some of the customerservice and call center considerations include:

• Do your people speak your customers' languages--actual language (English, Spanish, French ...) as well as the specific language of your products/services (plumbing parts, cell phones, landscaping)?
• Do your applications (voice and web) speak your customers' languages and are they intuitive and easy-to-use?
• Do you always offer live-person help as an option in your automated customer applications?
• Are your call centers adequately staffed to provide minimal wait times to speak with an agent?
• Are your agents trained, equipped, and organized to provide prompt service? This raises several important topics in addition to ensuring agents are properly trained and experienced in the use of the tools provided, including: Do your call center systems have sufficient capacity to operate with sub-second response even under their peak loads? Are your agent processes streamlined and all bottlenecks and redundancies removed, such as duplicate data entry and logging on/off multiple applications to access information or to make changes?
• Are your automated customer applications available, fast, and responsive?

3. Can your customers get answers to their questions andproblems?
I am not talking about the customer is always right orwhether your company should always give customers the answers they want. That would be determined by your businessstrategy. In your call centers, thequestion is just whether you are providing your customers with any answers to theirquestions and resolutions to their problems. For this, the issues include:

• Are your call center people fully trained to do their jobs, such as how to operate the necessary systems and how to interact with customers?
• Are your call center people and applications supported by the necessary customer and product information to answer questions and resolve problems?
• Are your call center people empowered to resolve customers' problems, at least the majority of those that reach the center?
• How successful are you at resolving customers' questions/issues during their first contact?
• For questions/issues you cannot answer during the first contact, do you have escalation and follow-up processes to close the loop in time frames acceptable to your customers?
• Are you able to effectively deal with questions about the "off-label" uses of your products or interactions with your products and 3rd-party products?
• Are you providing customers with consistent answers and resolutions across all of your customer interaction points, in-person at your stores or branch offices, calls to your call centers, on your web site?

4. Are you providing personalized service toyour customers?
When customers contact your call centers, can you quicklyaccess information about them and provide services and offering which aretailored to that customer? Can you dothis across all of your customer interaction points?
5. If your products/services are sold through partnersand resellers how well are those customers supported? Are your partners and resellers using thesame systems or are their systems fully linked with yours in order to provideseamless service?
6. Do you provide pro-active service to yourcustomers? Do you reach out to yourcustomers to provide useful information and offerings or do you wait for themto contact you?
7. How closely are you monitoring your customers'satisfaction with your products/services? Do you know whether your customers' questions/issues are being addressedsuccessfully by your call center?Really, based on actual responses from those customers or somethingelse, like a report that lists closed tickets?
8. Does your call center support both customer serviceand sales? Of course, it dependsupon your business strategies, but if your call centers only interact with yourcustomers for service while a separate organization only interacts with themfor sales, how can you even hope to provide your customers with consistent, letalone accurate information during those interactions. Likewise, if your company is not in some wayleveraging its call centers' customer interactions for sales purposes it ismissing a great many opportunities.
9. Have you struck the right balance betweeneffectiveness and efficiency in the management of your centers? Are you still operating your call centersprimarily as cost center with a heavy emphasis on efficiency? Alternatively, have you found a balancebetween how well and how cost-effectively they provide services to your customers? While this balance point may move depending onthe company's success and market dynamics, it should not swing wildly back andforth.
10. How well doyour call centers support your brands? All of the other questions are about the mechanics of staffing andoperating your enterprise's call centers. This question is more of a style question forthose enterprises whose call centers are strategic. Do your call centers, and your other pointsof customer interaction, deliver a consistent reinforcing branded-experience toyour customers, the Nordstrom's experience, for example?
And Now -- The Answers
You already know there are no one-size-fits-all answers tothese questions. You need to do what isright for your businesses. The questionsthemselves as well as a few hints shed some light on what I think isimportant. However, otherwise Iapologize for raising so many questions and providing so few recommendations. You also know the answers to most of thesequestions are not to be found solely in new solutions or technologies. There are, however, insights to be gainedfrom the successes of leading enterprises and also increasingly new techniquesand technologies that are being applied in support of customer contactstrategies. My next column will be aboutproactive customer contact and will contain more insights and recommendationsthan questions, I promise.
Joe Outlaw isPresident and Chief Analyst of Outlaw Research, a firm that providesresults-oriented analysis and consulting of the customer contact marketplace. The objective of Outlaw Research is buildinga community around the leading edges of customer contact -- the advancedstrategies early-adopter companies are applying and the technologies andvendors they are working with. His work can be found at www.outlawresearch.com


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