Optimise service delivery

Most companies today no longer view the contact centre as the sole domain of customer service delivery; rather, it is fulfilled at many touch points throughout the company: branches, office-bound or home agents, field service agents, and back-office experts.

The contact centre has evolved rapidly in terms of functionality and ability to deliver world-class customer service, but other customer-centric activities elsewhere in the company have not evolved in step.

Many organisational divisions and functions may be involved in fulfilling customer service tasks, embracing work items, faxes and service requests, and these are to be found across a number of systems.

The sheer number of tasks can exceed the number of back-office resources, which means there are not enough staff available to fulfil the work, and the consequence is the organisation being unable to meet service levels and a potentially poor customer experience.

Companies simply must be able to optimise resources by identifying staff skills and by setting workload priorities. Along with this, they need to manage customer interactions and tasks across the organisation, and in so doing provide the best customer experience.

The answer is intelligent workload distribution, or IWD, which confers a number of capabilities on a company:

* Dynamic distribution of workload;
* Business value-based prioritisation and distribution of work;
* Full transparency of resources and workload in real-time and historic views;
* Efficient delivery of consistent customer service across all communications channels, by optimising the routing of work items across an integrated pool of resources - front-office, back-office, home, remote, branch, offshore, or outsourced;
* Reduces operational costs with the effective utilisation of all enterprise-wide resources, while optimally matching the task, priority, and person;
* Avoids over- and understaffing by harmonising the workload throughout the workforce, thus preventing load peaks and troughs; and
* Provides superior customer service and increases the speed and quality of business processes by providing visibility and control into all interactions, SLAs, work items, and resources across the organisation.

IWD works together with a company's applications, such as ERP and CRM, or in-house legacy systems, to build one, universal task-list, which is then ranked according to value to the business. Such a task-list allows the company to guarantee the appropriate resources, wherever they are, are proactively assigned the most important and highest value tasks, through whichever channel.

Companies today are working harder than ever to ensure they offer the best customer service, bar none. It is a competitive advantage to be able to manage resources optimally and deal with customer interactions seamlessly and efficiently across the board, so as to deliver a superior customer experience.

The contact centre has evolved rapidly in terms of functionality and ability to deliver world-class customer service, but other customer-centric activities elsewhere in the company have not evolved in step.

Michael Renzon is MD of Intelleca.

And the customer experience is what it is all about: research conducted in Australia, India and New Zealand shows that companies lost the equivalent of R46 billion through providing an inadequate customer experience (as per research conducted by Datamonitor and Genesys).

Many companies have chosen to manage their various customer interaction points and tasks via a unified application that can dynamically map the workload to available resources; they are finding that IWD is the way to go.

Let's look at two examples of companies that have gone this route:

* A leading British telco was struggling with unmet order fulfilment and fault resolution SLAs, coupled with excessive backlogs of 800 000 escalations, including a further 20 000 daily. Every time a delivery date slipped, it had to pay out huge fines for missing the SLA. The company urgently needed to improve customer service levels, reduce the backlog, and avoid such slippages. The company had an existing workflow system from which employees "pulled" work items and allocated the job to an engineer to complete the task. An IWD solution was integrated with this existing platform to enable the "push" style of work item distribution, and to monitor the adherence to SLAs. This enabled the company to finally be able to appropriately manage and distribute tasks, and to ensure the prevention of any further missed installation dates or occurrence of fines. Ultimately, overall service levels improved, as did the end-service delivered to customers.

* A leading German insurer employed 1 500 first-line generalists and 3 500 second-line experts, and back-office employees were split into dedicated silos handling 4.5 million calls and 15.3 million tasks per year. With such a large workforce, a balance was needed to improve productivity without disrupting "business as usual" or abruptly changing the overall organisational model. The CEO of the company was challenged to find a way to streamline business processes and virtualise the organisation, while at the same time defending cost leadership. Using an IWD solution to capture tasks from the host, the CEO expects loads to be harmonised across the organisational silos, leading to a 20% productivity increase. They now also have the flexibility to assign tasks based on skill levels, task complexity and SLAs in a dynamic and active "push/pull" distribution mechanism.

* Michael Renzon is MD of Intelleca.