Maggie Klenke of the Call Center School will be participating in an online webcast with Call Center Magazine on Thursday, March 18, 2004. The subject is Finding and Keeping the Best Call Center Reps. You can register to attend the presentation free.

Over the last few years we've all heard a lot about Customer Relationship Management (CRM). Most of the attention has been focused on the enterprise customers in terms of identifying those who are profitable and those who are not, and exploiting the full wallet-share of those that we can. The question is, who are the customers of the call center and how well are they being managed?

Let's go back into your company's history to a time when there was no call center. There were employees within various departments who took calls from external customers. Perhaps there were a few employees in accounting who handled billing issues, a couple in the marketing department fielding advertising inquiries, and some in the executive office handling customer complaints. With only a few people in each department doing this work, the call handling was probably pretty inefficient and inconsistent. And the folks handling calls probably had other duties and found the calls to be an interruption of that work.

At some point, the company decided to centralize the call handling process and establish a call center where some or all of these various departments' calls could be answered. This allowed the departmental employees to focus their attention on other tasks without the interruptions of the calls. And more importantly, it allowed one group of people to concentrate on the calls as their primary duty, significantly improving the consistency and quality of customer service, as well as maximizing revenues (in those centers that take orders and sell).

In many ways, what happened is that the internal departments of the company have "outsourced" their contact handling to the call center, just the way that a company can hire another firm to handle its calls.

Think of it as if XYZ Company outsourced its calls to Acme Outsourcer. Acme Outsourcer's client is XYZ. Now ACME has to take good care of XYZ Company's customers to keep its contract, but it must always remember who makes the rules. So the call center is an outsource provider to the other departments in the company who generate the calls. That means that the call center's clients are these other departments, while the enterprise's customers really belong to the departments who manage the overall relationships with the call center's assistance.

Let's relate this to the typical call center in a bank, for example. The bank has a number of products including deposit accounts, mortgage loans, investments and trust accounts. Each of these products has a group or department that focuses on that type of product, and the bank overall may have centralized marketing and accounting. Sometimes these departments are in competition with one another to gain the most customers or revenues (although this is contrary to CRM principles). Each of these departments is a client of the call center. The bank's customer with a mortgage loan is a customer of the mortgage department.

This sets up an interesting set of dynamics. To start with, marketing is the call center's client, not its nemesis. When marketing gets ready to initiate a campaign that will generate calls to the center, there should be a relationship that recognizes that it is the call center's job to serve the client within the boundaries of the agreed workload. But it is also the call center's responsibility to advise its client on the impact of various choices it might make regarding the timing of the campaign and conflicts with other client's needs. If the center will need to hire and train more people to handle the added workload, then the marketing folks must be informed so that they can decide if the benefit is worth the incremental cost. If the call center thinks it can perform the work more efficiently through the use of self-service (such as IVR), it must be the choice of the client -- not the call center -- whether they want their customers answered with a person or machine,. In the end, the choices belong to the client who pays the bills.

The call center should generate the data that marketing will need to judge the effectiveness of its campaigns and determine which to expand and which to cancel. Additional data-gathering about each customer for demographic analysis and CRM projects is another task that the marketing department may contract with the call center to do. Developing and delivering reports to the clients is expected of any outsource provider, but so is the incremental cost to do so.

Let's switch to one of the product departments like mortgage loans. Customers calling in to get service on existing loans or to place orders for refinancing can be directed to the call center for handling. But the mortgage department will need to be informed if there is a rush of calls due to some change in the market (if they are not the ones letting the call center know it is coming). And the mortgage loan client should inform the call center before generating thousands of letters to customers with a change in their account information, anticipating some increase in call volume or handling time as a result.

If all this is true, then shouldn't the internal department clients be responsible for budgeting for the activities that they outsource to the call center? A service level agreement should be in place between the client departments and their contractor " the call center. This agreement spells out the projected workload, timing, speed of answer goals, first-call resolution expectations, etc., just like the contract any company would have with an outsource provider outside of the company.

If marketing wants to generate 15% more calls than last year, then they need to budget for additional costs to have those calls handled. If a product release is faulty and generates massive call volume, then the product department must bear the cost of that error, not the outsourcer call center. The call center should essentially be a zero-budget operation with all costs allocated back to the departmental clients they serve, and the revenues distributed to the clients as well. It is essentially a business within a business. Of course, the clients will expect the call center to be an efficient and effective partner or they will feel free to look for a better outsource provider. The clients shouldn't feel they are captives of the call center any more than the call center should feel it is a victim of the departments it serves. So if marketing generates a campaign without informing their contractor far enough ahead to get the resources in place, then there is an additional cost that will be allocated to marketing for the temporary help and other costs the center must incur to handle it.

Think about the annual budgeting process and the impact this kind of thinking could have. Senior management announces that all departments will take a 5% cut in budget. It is not up to the call center manager to determine how to get that 5% reduction in operating costs (by canceling training, increasing queue time, or delaying acquisition of new technologies). It is up to the various departments to figure out how they will reduce the workload that will be sent to the "outsourcer" to keep the bill down. And the various department managers can lobby senior management for the importance of one kind of work for the call center to do rather than another when the competition for limited dollars gets started. So some projects will be eliminated and other cut back, but it is not the call center's decision what stays and what goes. It is simply a contractor to these departments managing its business as efficiently as it can. So the call center might suggest that self-service option or some other change that will reduce call handling time as an option to reducing the call volume. But that suggestion goes to the clients, not to the senior management group as a call center initiative.

Next comes the senior management concept that outsourcing to some offshore location would be more efficient than operating the internal call center. As long as the call center is viewed as a commodity and call handling is viewed as a necessary evil, then offshore outsourcing looks pretty attractive. And when the call center budget is a lump of money spent for a variety of undocumented purposes, it is hard for anyone to champion the cause of keeping it intact. But if the call center has positioned itself as an important partner to the client departments, working effectively to manage the costs and gathering customer data and satisfaction, then the client departments will lobby against this work being sent to another provider. Of course, the call center might need to consider subcontracting some the workload to manage its costs more effectively to keep its clients' business. And it will be incumbent upon the call center management to do so without compromising the quality and client satisfaction.

As a call center professional, think about who your clients are and how you can serve them better. Get in touch with those internal department managers and figure out how you can help each other. Build your budgets based on the project each client contracts with you to do during the year and their estimates of the workload involved. Lobby for a budgeting scheme that allocates the costs and revenues back to the client departments. Then when there are budget changes, you'll be in a position to approach your clients to see which projects they want to cut or increase. And when the topic of outsourcing is raised, you'll be able to enlist the aid of your clients in finding the right answers for your organization that minimize the risk of sacrificing customer satisfaction and retention for lower costs. And you'll likely keep your job in the bargain!