Keep Your Call Center Outsourcers Honest
This post was authored by Arnab Mishra. Arnab is VP of Products and Solutions at Transera.
Direct marketing campaigns containing offers to respond to a toll-free number are particularly challenging to call centers—especially if they are successful! The responses flood in soon after the campaign is launched, creating call spikes that require careful resource planning. In addition to staffing issues, a more significant challenge lies in routing these calls to the call center agents who can convert the leads into sales while keeping abandoned calls to a minimum.
Direct marketers typically manage these unpredictable call volumes by contracting with call center outsourcers. However, they face a fundamental tradeoff in terms of staffing versus service levels: paying for more call center agents reduces wait times for callers (decreasing call abandons) but also increases costs. Given the unpredictability of consumer response to specific campaigns, it is hard to commit to strict staffing levels at each chosen contact center outsourcer. The inability to accurately gauge staffing needs is further exacerbated by the fact that many companies simply allocate the incoming traffic across multiple call center outsourcers (known as multi-sourcing) in fixed ratios. This “spray and pray” strategy typically yields suboptimal routing decisions and results in high abandon rates and lower sales performance.
Level the playing field. What if call center agents were rated in real-time based on their service levels and performance? Calls could then be routed to the best-performing agents while maintaining the desired service levels. This approach takes the guesswork out of call routing and levels the playing field across call center vendors. It forces outsourcers to compete for their client's business by staffing their call centers adequately with the most skilled agents they can hire and train.
When call center outsourcers compete in real-time for the business of their clients, everyone wins: call center customers are assured the best performance across their vendors, and the outsourcers are assured more business from their clients if they outperform the competition. Enterprises choose the set of contact center outsourcers they wish to do business with and keep everyone honest.
Transera enables this approach with Scorecard Routing, Transera’s intelligent call routing software overlays the software in the call centers of your outsourcers and consolidates their operational data to compute and compare agent performance. Automatically routing calls to the best-performing agents—whichever call center they are operating from—is a sure way to increase sales conversions and drive revenues.