| Beyond Middleware: The
Web-Enabled Call Center
BY STEPHEN DELLUTRI
In "Internet time," things happen faster than they do
in real life. Take the spread of Web sites among
businesses. As few as five years ago, there were no
major corporations on the Web. Today, no company is
considered a major player without a Web site.
So we've moved beyond a mere presence online. Now,
companies expect their Web sites to work for them,
rather than just act as an electronic business card. One
way to make a Web site work for you is through
integration with your call center. The advantages of
introducing CTI middleware and the Web into the call
center are numerous, but can be summarized with a
phrase: control of information.
What Do You Know When You Pick Up The
Call?
The people calling (the customers)
need something (to make a purchase, to check on an
order, to review an invoice) and the people answering
the calls (the Customer Service Representatives or CSRs)
need to help each customer as quickly and efficiently as
possible and move on to the next one.
The more information the CSR has about the caller at
the beginning of the call, the more quickly the CSR will
be able to wrap up the transaction and take the next
call. If, prior to greeting the caller, the CSR can know
that person's name, the nature of the call, and some
information on the customer's history with the company,
the CSR can address the concern of the caller in a more
personal, and a more efficient manner.
This has several benefits. The CSR is less stressed
and thus more able to offer gracious service, the
customer receives personalized service which makes him
or her feel better about the transaction, and the call
is handled more quickly so the CSR is able to handle
more calls per shift.
The goal of the call center manager is to maximize
human resources, which are by far the most expensive
part of any call center's budget. If management can keep
the CSR working at a consistently high occupancy level,
there are significant savings to be realized. In fact,
informing the CSR via computer of what is coming in via
phone creates such efficiencies of scale that it
actually costs less to make more.
The Proof Is In The Numbers
Let's
look at a fictitious call center. The Acme Call Center
handles catalog sales for a large clothing company. They
are open 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and have 100
CSRs working on each of three shifts per 24-hour period.
That's 300 agents working a total of 2,400 man-hours per
day. That adds up to 72,000 man-hours per month.
Acme pays their CSRs $8.00 per hour for a total of
$576,000 in monthly CSR payroll.
The average call, prior to the decision to bring in
CTI middleware, lasted approximately two minutes. That's
30 calls per hour per CSR or 72,000 calls per day.
During each call the CSR has the opportunity not only to
build the customer relationship and sell whatever the
customer called for (or handle whatever problem they
called about), but also to increase the sale in some
way.
When Acme integrated today's state of the art CTI
into their operation, allowing their CSRs to access
vital customer information prior to answering the call,
as well as during the call, they shaved about five
seconds off the length of the average call.
Now, five seconds might not sound like a lot, but
let's do the numbers. By reducing the length of each
call by five seconds they freed up 360,000 seconds per
day. That's 6,000 minutes or 100 hours. That 100 hours
translates into either $800 per day, ($24,000 per month)
or Acme's CSRs being able to handle 3,130 more calls per
day (93,900 more calls per month).
Once you consider the fact that each additional call
represents an opportunity for that call's sale, plus
cross-selling and up-selling, plus increased customer
satisfaction as a result of shorter on-hold times and
more personalized service, you see that the savings of a
mere five seconds per phone call is significant.
Moving Beyond Middleware
So Acme
wasn't in bad shape with just the best CTI around. But,
being innovative and forward thinking, the management at
Acme wanted more.
They knew that the Web was important.
They had already participated in the first
three phases of commerce on the Internet. Now they
were committed to full participation in Phase Four:
Live, personalized customer service online. To accomplish this objective Acme needed to
Web-enable their call center. [Click
here for a diagram of a Web-enabled call
center.]
There are several aspects to this decision. Happy
customers are repeat customers, moving calls from the
expensive 800 number to the virtually free Internet
saves Acme real money, and encouraging customers to use
the self-serve features of Web-enabled e-commerce saves
CSR time (which is Acme's money).
Let's do some more numbers: Industry statistics place
the price of an inbound 800 line call at between $.07
and $.10 per minute. For our example we'll use $.08.
Acme has, during any of its shifts, 100 active agents
with an in-call to on-hold ratio of 1:1.5. That equates
to 150 inbound 800 lines, assuming a fully occupied
environment. 150 lines x 24 hours x 60 minutes x $.08
per minute is $17,820 per month in recurring 800 line
costs. Moving just 15 percent of those calls from the
800 number to the Internet saves Acme $2,592 per month.
This represents a very real and immediate return on
their investment.
As for the "happy customers are loyal customers"
aspect, Acme believes the adage that "customer
satisfaction is worthless, customer loyalty is
priceless." From that belief grows the management
strategy that customer satisfaction is but one
ingredient in the development of customer loyalty -- and
they want loyal customers. Web-enabling their call
center is making their customers come back again and
again.
Compared with the telephone, the computer has the
potential to be a superior communications device based
on its higher level of functionality alone. It is also
an unparalleled data storage and retrieval appliance.
With a Web-enabled call center, your customers can reach
you through the medium they choose. Plus, your CSRs have
access to the ease of using the telephone, plus all the
information which can be pushed to the user (or pulled
from back-end applications) with the computer, allowing
for more informed responses on their part.
First look at the caller's perspective. A customer is
browsing your e-commerce site and has a question. She
probably has to disconnect from the Internet, call the
800 number, and describe what she was looking at to the
CSR who answers the call. Once you Web-enable your call
center, she can click on an icon or a link and be
launched immediately into whatever type of session she
wants, from real-time text-based chat to feature-rich
multimedia communication.
Now look at the same call from the CSR's perspective.
A screen pop appears on his terminal, populated with the
caller's name, address, phone number, credit card
information, and whatever customer history is in the
database. In addition, a picture of what the caller was
looking at on the Web site when she launched the call, a
list (with available pictures) of what she has in her
shopping cart, and a list of suggested cross-sell and
up-sell items also appear. The CSR can push Web pages
with information and pictures of the things he wants to
suggest to the caller, making the transaction more
personalized and creating the kind of customer
satisfaction that leads to customer loyalty.
Back to the view from the customer's seat. Not only
has she been greeted by name and had her questions
answered in real time, she has been offered additional
options (with pictures!) so she can make an informed
buying decision. There is even a picture of the CSR, so
she has the feeling of communicating with a real person
who is interested in assisting her, personally. She will
definitely be shopping at this site again.
Statistics show that she will be more likely to
handle the entire transaction in the self-serve mode
next time. Just knowing there is live assistance
available if necessary makes people more likely to take
care of themselves -- saving the call center even
more.
By Web-enabling your call center you allow your
customers to reach you in any way they want (PSTN, text
chat, VoIP, e-mail) and you get more for less -- more
customer loyalty, more CSR efficiency, more cross- and
up-selling -- for less money.
Stephen E. Dellutri, CosmoCom's Vice President of
Engineering, oversees the design and development of
their virtual call center technology. As the company's
co-founder, he worked closely with the CEO to design the
company's flagship product, CosmoCall, and he wrote the
product's first iteration. Today he oversees a team of
engineers who are responsible for custom software
design, systems integration, and installation and
implementation of the CosmoCall solution at customer
sites. Visit CosmoCom on the Web at http://www.cosmocom.com/.
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