Given the profound developments taking place in call center technologies, there are a number of trends I believe we must prepare for. These are not predictions -- they have already been set in motion and are changing the call center landscape significantly and rapidly.
1. Customers are better informed and have higher expectations.
The proliferation of mobile and broadband services, Internet-based information, sophisticated search tools and ever-changing cultural expectations have created a better informed, more empowered and more savvy customer base. As consultant Gordon MacPherson put it a decade ago, "A new breed of technology-sophisticated consumers is demanding a choice of how they will be served. They often know what the choices could be, and they will become increasingly critical if you do not offer the choices they think you should offer." It's up to you to open up and develop the alternatives as technologies and expectations evolve.
All channels have a place. A call center agent won't suffice when the customers needs to download software. Speech recognition doesn't illustrate a graph of movement in a financial market. Web based services don't come close to matching the proficiency of an experienced technical support representative, nor can they cross-sell and upsell in the personalized manner of a seasoned sales representative. Your customers and their specific situations will dictate the best channels to use in each case.
Heightened customer expectations also add a sense of context, even urgency, to the quality- and performance-boosting technologies that are becoming available. The contacts that require agent-assistance have to go well -- you can and must deliver value on all three -- efficiency, customer loyalty and strategic contributions.
2. You'll always need agents -- but for different reasons.
I recall having a lunch meeting with an executive of a company based in New York City. After meeting in his office that morning, we walked to a restaurant for lunch -- about four short city blocks away. It was high noon, and there was a throng of people on the sidewalks and crossing intersections -- literally hundreds at each corner. I found myself fixated on just how many people were using their mobile phones or thumbing through email and other information. (I've since found myself making the same observation in cities around the world; it's a strange pastime, I admit, but it puts faces -- lots of them -- on industry statistics).
After lunch, we continued our discussion. "Our plans are for customer calls to go away," he told me. "Any transaction we can get onto the Web is going to be cheaper for us and better for them [the organization's customers]." I couldn't help but smile at the contrast between his strategic initiative and what we had just seen on the street below. "You mean, the masses of people we just saw making calls and sending e-mail are all going to hang up and use self-service when they contact your company?"
Many industry pundits predicted in recent years that self-service capabilities would dramatically reduce reliance on agent-assisted services across the industry. Some predicted we would need few agents, period. But the variable missing in much of the analysis is that communications capabilities create new kinds of services and grow the economic pie. Many organizations are finding that total contact workload often -- not always, but often -- increases as new customer access channels are added. And that's true in general -- the widespread use of email, for example, has not lead to a commensurate drop in phone calls or in-person travel; at best, it has slowed the growth of other channels. By opening up access alternatives, we seem to be encouraging customers to contact us more often. Contacts will happen -- and that puts a premium on ensuring that we squeeze maximum value out of them. Get used to that reality now, and you'll be better positioned to open up all forms of channels and encourage -- not force, encourage -- optimum use of self-service.
3. Agent-assisted services are being rationed.
Here's the tricky part of predicting that you'll always need agents: Many of the contacts being handled today can be, will be and should be handled by self-service channels in coming years. Consider the travel sector. Every time a long-established airline closes a call center somewhere, journalists jump on the story -- "Is the call center industry in decline? Is this representative of what's happening across the board?" (The fact that they even care is indicative of the kind of employment numbers call centers post.) Short answer: no. Those interactions needed to be automated. Most of us are simply not calling airlines as much as we used to -- we're seeing the advantages of booking online.
Historically, that kind of displacement has been going on for decades. For example, when telephone companies automated switching centers, there were marches on the streets to protest the hundreds of thousands of lost operator jobs. The fear was that there would simply not be enough jobs to go around. Sound familiar? That was over a half-century ago.
Forward-thinking organizations are taking tangible steps to establish self-service alternatives and encourage customers to use them. And leading call centers are taking a proactive role in this effort. They are ensuring that their highly trained, highly paid agents are handling transactions that really require the human touch. In other words, they are rationing live answer.
4. Call center employees require increasingly high levels of skill.
As self-service technologies offload relatively simple or well-defined contacts and products and services grow increasing diverse and complex, agents face a number of challenges. In addition to handling more difficult transactions, they must serve increasingly well-informed and varied customers; adjust to rapid changes in products, services and technologies; operate in a time-sensitive, multimedia environment; communicate quickly and accurately in both verbal and written form; and understand Web- and IVR-based applications and help customers use those alternatives.
At the management level, the traditional "jack-of-all-trades" call center manager role is being divided among specialists doing everything from data analysis to scheduling, quality monitoring and coaching. Evolving technologies are powerful and enormously flexible, but they are contributing to the emergence of technology managers who require specialized expertise to understand, manage and maintain them.
5. Call center structures are being redefined.
Many organizations are restructuring so that all channels of contact with customers are under the same management umbrella. This is causing enormous internal structural change that involves IT, marketing, HR, and virtually every other department. Whatever the final structure, all contact channels must be planned and operated cohesively -- each impacts the others.
Many call centers are also becoming more distributed. Multisite call centers and agents based at home, in other departments or even in other organizations have proliferated rapidly in recent years. Virtually any place with up-to-spec communications technology and a skilled and flexible labor force is a candidate for regional, national or international-oriented call centers. The call center as a "place" will in many cases (certainly not all) fade.
6. Clear business thinking is more important than ever.
New technologies are not passive -- to get good results, they must be implemented with foresight and good planning. Take, for example, skills-based routing. Remember how it was supposed to solve scheduling and staffing problems? And yet, many call centers have taken a few steps back from the most involved types of skills-based routing, having been unable to achieve the efficiency and effectiveness they had with pools of cross-trained agents. It turns out that it's like hot pepper sauce -- a little bit goes a long way, and the use and context must be precise.
Similarly, open systems offer wonderful flexibility and customization, but they need to be programmed to do what you want them to do. Clarification and definition of the underlying business rules is an ongoing challenge for any organization. And that has a lot more to do with clear business thinking than a specific technology capability. The late Peter Drucker contended that the most important impact of information technology is not the capabilities of the technologies themselves, but that these systems force you to organize processes and information more logically.
Excerpted from "Call Center Management on Fast Forward: Succeeding in Today's Dynamic Customer Contact Environment," by Brad Cleveland; updated and expanded edition to be published in September 2006 by ICMI Press
Copyright 2006 CMP Media LLC. All rights reserved.
9/1/06, Issue # 1909, page 32.
