Johannesburg, 23 May 2008
The expansion of the call centre environment is a clear signal that ICT companies have reached higher levels of maturity and are now truly capitalising on their technical expertise to boost profit.
So claims Robert Sussman, joint-MD of Integr8 IT, South Africa's largest privately owned national BEE ICT network integration and infrastructure management specialist.
According to Sussman, service providers within this competitive business arena are now beginning to up levels of use and application of technology to gain market share within fiercely competitive market sectors.
This change in call centre structure and modus operandi is evident in the emergence of the nerve centre to add additional value to what is commonly referred to as the contact centre.
"Nerve centres can mean different things to different businesses depending on requirements and focus. Generally they represent the next level in centralised infrastructure in client service and encompass all aspects including technology, people, leadership and strategy," says Sussman. "It is a developed facility that, if positioned correctly, ensures remote call management to sustain the highest levels of managed services. This can include anything from maintenance on servers right through to connectivity."
A typical list of services via a nerve centre could be: a central point of contact, call logging, service level management, first, second and third tier remote support on workstations/ servers and first, second and third tier onsite/ roaming support on workstations/ servers; project management and roll-out.
Another key element of a nerve centre that separates it from call centre status is that all personnel within a nerve centre are technical - from the person taking the call right through to the consultant who calls a client to verify/ confirm details. Additionally this environment takes the conventional target/deadline and incentive component to a new level as well.
"While it differs from location to location, we have found that many companies put key performance indicators in position and these are discussed with employees. Many decision-makers prefer to make bonuses performance-based with the understanding that salaries need to be competitive in order to retain key skills," says Sussman.
At Integr8 IT, all nerve centre engineers use leading innovative technology tools to improve levels of productivity.
"The standard of technology and equipment aside, it is people that represent a critical aspect of the nerve centre. Experience and qualification with cognisance of what constitutes professional service is what really counts. Success in managing and leveraging off the nerve centre infrastructure to manage customers is not reliant on any single technology," adds Sussman.
One of the fundamentals of the nerve centre environment is the ability to use technology to offer complete, proactive remote support to workstations, servers, switches and routers, and LAN, WAN and VPNs as a whole.
"This allows for us to connect any of our clients at anytime using multi-level authentication criteria," adds Sussman.
Ultimately, the nerve centre has come to resemble the next generation in contact centre application in the market. It is usually a sizeable investment and this is why many companies prefer to outsource the function. And companies such as Integr8 IT are positioned strategically to take advantage of this trend.
"Our nerve centre is trademarked and has evolved over the past eight years plus. In this time we've grown to over eighty dedicated engineers, all of whom are technically competent. We achieve an average call resolution with the service level agreement rate of more than 97%. Our abandoned call rate is below 0.3% and 65% of all our calls are completed remotely," Sussman confirms.
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