The Business of Call Centers

Virtual Call Centers: Medication for Multi-Sourcing Maladies

While multi-sourcing - the mixing of an enterprise's own call center agents and those outsourced from one or more third parties - delivers tangible economic benefits and business flexibility, it presents some new challenges. It can lead to islands of isolation with each contact center location operating independently, using its own unique infrastructure, business processes and best practices. The result is maladies such as inconsistent customer service, fragmented resources and uneven performance. And if businesses lose the ability to manage multiple contact centers effectively, the costs can outweigh the gains.

Ideally, every company wants the best of both worlds - the competitive advantages of call center multi-sourcing without sacrificing the business benefits of centralized control. The solution lies in virtual call centers - centralized management of distributed resources normalizing the variations across multiple contact centers, while delivering consistent functionality and performance. Businesses are already adopting virtualization across a wide spectrum of business applications and IT infrastructure. Modern data centers employ virtual machines, storage networks, Web services and service oriented architectures (SOA) to gain centralized control of distributed resources. The same benefits can accrue to call centers that adopt similar virtualization solutions for customer interaction management.

In the world of call centers, metrics drive the daily operations - call volumes, call wait times, call handle times, agent staffing levels, sales conversion rates, customer satisfaction scores, etc. Continuous call center improvement comes from listening to customer calls, assessing first call resolution, measuring agent performance, and then using this information to improve agent recruiting, training and staffing, IVR menus, CRM knowledge bases, and other business processes. The old adage - you can't improve what you can't measure - applies in spades to call center operations. Supervisors live (or die) by key call center performance indicators (KPIs). Visibility is everything. Call centers that produce the best results and provide the highest quality customer service know what is going on - in real-time, not in hindsight. "Actionable intelligence, now!" should be the mantra of every call center manager.

Fortunately, there are call center software solutions that restore visibility and allow enterprises to regain control over distributed call center operations. Office Depot, a global retailer of office supplies, is a case in point. They mix agents from in-house call centers and multiple call center outsourcers and combine them to form a single global virtual call center. Any agent anywhere can answer any call from any customer anywhere in the world - period. Office Depot call center managers know the exact status of every call and every agent regardless of their location or affiliation. They can perform call monitoring on any call in real-time and record any customer interaction for later inspection. They can also hire and fire call center outsourcers at will based on their performance. Office Depot has been using Transera's SaaS virtual call center software (Transera Virtual Call Center Solution) for more than three years to run their contact centers.