Johannesburg, 25 Oct 2004
Working in a call centre can sometimes be hell. In most modern call centre environments, call centre operators typically have to access, update and interact with a variety of different applications at the computer desktop to handle the different aspects of a single call. To navigate between these applications, the user must often perform an awkward series of keystrokes, encountering a distinct interface with each application.
In addition, the user frequently has to key in the same customer data for each application, delaying call resolution and increasing the possibility of data entry errors. As a result, customer interactions are negatively affected, each operator handles fewer calls, training time is increased due to the complexity of accessing different applications and opportunities for cross-selling are overlooked or missed for lack of time.
The call centre is rarely the principle concern of the IT department. This is the underlying reason why call centre staff have such poor interfaces in terms of screens and applications they have to work with during the course of a single customer call.
Many organisations discover that call centre representatives are restricted because some CRM systems are not integrated with back-office and other business-specific applications. Consequently, representatives do not have access to all the information required to service customers, such as billing, order entry, inventory, accounts payable/receivable, sales, shipping tracking and the like.
But mainstream enterprise integration projects are very hard to cost justify in the current economic climate, which means a different approach is needed. Jacada's Fusion platform offers a breakthrough, in that it provides a departmental approach to integration which allows the call centre's complex interface to be replaced with a single screen - as opposed to the multiple screens that dominate the modern call centres.
By combining legacy data, Web-based information and data from departmental Windows applications, the main barriers to improving not just efficiency but the customer experience itself can be effectively removed, while at the same time call centre managers are empowered to remodel the key business processes without active involvement of the IT department.
If performance improvement is the ultimate goal, then empowering staff to focus on the customer rather than the process involved in getting the right information on screen is surely the key - not only to a more effective call centre but to a more content and easily trained workforce.
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