In the last Industry Insight in this series, I looked at the key attributes of the dynamic contact centre. In this Industry Insight, I will look at how these capabilities can be orchestrated so as to combine their power and enhance both customer service and return on investment.
Unless consciously designed otherwise, businesses have a tendency to operate in silos. That's just the way it is: IT does its own thing, as do sales, marketing and manufacturing. Contact centres are no different: the various activities that go together to make up the contact centre tend to gravitate to their own sphere of operations.
The consequences, though, for the business and its customers, are predictable: broken, redundant and tautologous processes, poor and fragmented customer service, error through incorrect task handover, lost business opportunities, and internal and external frustration, to name a few.
The three pillars
Management's ability to make the dynamic contact centre pay is limited only by imagination.
Peter Flanagan is director of Intelleca.
The success of all contact centre businesses is mandated on three pillars: people, process and technology. The dynamic contact centre brings these three together in such a way that the full power of the contact centre is unleashed.
The answer in bringing them together is orchestration. Wikipedia describes orchestration as: "The automated arrangement, co-ordination, and management of complex computer systems, middleware, and services. (It) is often discussed in the context of virtualisation, provisioning, and dynamic data centre topics.”
There are three essential levers in any contact centre:
* Traffic: This is the number and volume of calls coming into the contact centre: voice calls, e-mails and even chat.
* Resources: These are the people or technologies that cope with incoming traffic, and they are typically live agents, interactive voice response (IVR) systems or other self-service systems.
* Outcomes: These are the objectives aligned with prevailing circumstances. So, by way of example, in busy times, a contact centre focuses on call handling. In quieter times, such as when experiencing a downturn in the market, the contact centre can be used for initiating customer contact and revenue-generating exercises, both outbound rather than inward-looking initiatives.
Orchestration allows the dynamic contact centre to combine one or more capabilities to create an environment that balances these three levers to deal with any crisis or change in the contact centre. And there's a correlation: the more of the capabilities that are orchestrated, the greater the benefits.
Here are a few examples of how orchestrating the capabilities can yield profound benefits:
* Dynamically generate outbound calls when the contact centre reaches preset thresholds (service levels, queue lengths).
* When service levels are high and excess service capacity is available, then dynamically start prompting agents with customer-specific up-sell and cross-sell opportunities.
* In times of low in-bound voice traffic, route non-real-time customer engagements such as faxes and e-mails to inbound voice agents who are idle.
* Dynamically load-balance the percentage of calls to IVR with those sent to live agents to balance the gap between traffic volumes and resources.
* Direct calls to agents based on their specific knowledge or capabilities.
* Be able to tap into internal expert resources outside of the contact centre or overflow work to the back office, including the ability to engage with an expert at home.
* Be able to break out of a Web chat to engage directly with a live agent or even force this when call volumes are low.
* Be able to prompt a cross-sell to a customer based on their clearly visible purchasing history and current and future projected value. The ability to deepen share of wallet can on its own be sufficient reason to invest in the dynamic contact centre.
These are just a few of the reasons an organisation would want to consider investing in the dynamic contact centre. In fact, management's ability to make the dynamic contact centre pay is limited only by imagination.
Orchestrating the dynamic contact centre puts management in charge of the three levers: instead of them dictating what management must do.
In the next Industry Insight in this series, I will look at the steps needed to begin the journey to a dynamic contact centre.
* Peter Flanagan is director of Intelleca.
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