I need actionable intelligence for my call center! Now!
This post was authored by Prem Uppaluru. Prem is the President & Chief Executive Officer of Transera.
The old adage, “You can't improve what you can't measure,” applies in spades to call center operations. In the world of call centers, metrics drive daily operations: call volumes, call wait times, call handle times, agent staffing levels, sales conversion rates, customer satisfaction scores—the list goes on. Continuous call center improvement comes from listening to customer calls, assessing first-call resolution rates, measuring agent performance, and then using this information to improve agent recruiting, training, and staffing, IVR menus, CRM knowledge bases, and other business processes.
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.
Office Depot, a global retailer of office supplies has found a way to do that. 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.
For the record, 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. “Virtual” is the key word here.
Only a virtual call center can provide centralized management of distributed resources to normalize 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.
Restoring visibility through centralized management is the key to regaining control of your call center operations. With real-time visibility we get actionable intelligence and then, and only then, do you get continuous call center improvement.