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Happy customers, happy managers

The dynamic contact centre helps businesses respond to the changing dynamics of customer service and sales.
Peter Flanagan
By Peter Flanagan, Director of Intelleca.
Johannesburg, 04 Sep 2008

Imagine a world where contact centres provide both superior customer service and outstanding management metrics.

In this world, agents are fully utilised, maximising every interaction for its revenue potential. In those inevitable times when the contact centre is seriously stressed and the overall atmosphere is one of chaos, it automatically and calmly - without management intervention - adjusts its resource pool to continue providing a superior and consistent experience to customers.

Well, stop imagining. The dynamic contact centre is here, and it makes such a world not just a possibility, but a reality.

The dynamic contact centre helps businesses respond to the ever-changing dynamics of customer service and sales by orchestrating resources and contact centre capabilities to align with customer needs and business objectives.

For example, how can an airline best respond to increased customer call volumes during weather delays, while improving cross-sell rates for a travel promotion during lulls in traffic?

Fine-tuning on the move

While traditional contact centres manually adjust to changing conditions, the dynamic contact centre has the know-how, technology and built-in processes to make adjustments in real-time.

Ultimately, the dynamic contact centre has a dramatic impact on the overall business by improving the customer service experience, increasing agent productivity and satisfaction, and driving revenue with efforts to enhance loyalty and up-sell customers.

The dynamic contact centre leverages basic capabilities and, based on business rules and requirements, sets and assigns priorities in real-time to address prevailing contact centre circumstances.

The dynamic contact centre enables organisations to meet all their objectives: cost reduction and containment, customer satisfaction and revenue generation.

The dynamic contact centre integrates the three pillars of business - people, process and technology - to manage the three levers that affect contact centres:

* Traffic: This is the volume of calls, e-mails and other interactions handled by the contact centre. Encompassing both inbound and outbound interactions, traffic also refers to the choices made by contact centre managers about how interactions should be managed.
* Resources: This refers to the efficiency, availability and capability of the contact centre's human resources (agents) and automated systems (such as IVRs) that handle interactions.
* Call outcomes: The desired result of interactions. This variable tends to focus on efficiency metrics such as queue length (answering all service calls in under 60 seconds), handle time (completing calls in less than 45 seconds), and outcomes such as sales results, referrals and customer satisfaction ratings.

Each of these variables or levers is inter-related. So, an unexpected traffic peak will impact and change outcomes. Similarly, in a high traffic environment, a contact centre cannot raise its call outcomes without raising the level of available resources.

No pipedream

A contact centre's ability to harmonise its three parameters determines its cost, quality and revenue performance

Peter Flanagan is director of Intelleca, a division of the Bytes Technology Group.

A contact centre's ability to harmonise its three parameters determines its cost, quality and revenue performance. Yet, under the current model, decisions about these three levers are generally taken haphazardly. In the dynamic contact centre, the three levers of resource management, traffic management and outcome management are in harmony and perfectly optimised.

In such a scenario, every agent handling interactions would have at their fingertips the full customer interaction history and current data, as well as information about current sales offers and products matched to that customer's profile.

Agents would be more satisfied, because their capabilities would be used to the fullest. Queues would be shorter and the quality of interactions improved, which translates into happy customers. In addition, agent productivity would be maximised, eliminating agent idle time and associated costs.

Addressing all of these requirements through one platform may seem like a pipedream, but it is entirely doable with the dynamic contact centre.

All elements of the contact centre would operate in perfect harmony at every moment: call handling times, queue length, resource availability and outcome focus. Adjustments would take place dynamically and in real-time to ensure the contact centre delivers on the organisation's key business objectives.

* Peter Flanagan is director of Intelleca, a division of the Bytes Technology Group.

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