You have been promoted to Call Center Director [2] and your organization follows

Question

You have been promoted to Call Center Director [2] and your organization follows CobiT [1]. Part of your promotion was to recognize your abilities in working in the HCI part of IT that is, working with users, including human factors, ergonomics and user-centered computing. In awarding the promotion, the CIO specifically mentioned that you were a key player in bring about outstanding user experience for the call center. Since user experience is the key to your call center’s success, you want to incorporate that user-centric flavor into the Call Center IT. You see this can be incorporated into the IT assurance program that is ongoing within your organization.

Once again you turn to a web search and discover that accessibility [3, 4] is a key HCI concept for the Call Center. You are especially aware that the Call Center wants to move to use more web based presentation and interaction and that many of your regular callers are disabled. Develop a list of 10 to 20 “discussion points” about accessibility of the IT within the Call Center that will contribute to both business strategy and IT assurance.

Explanation / Answer

I will consider the following factors of both IT and Business sides.

BUSINESS OBJECTIVES:

Increased Sales

Outbound call centers have salespeople that call on leads or prospects. Whether you operate a call center business or use one, the primary objective is to generate new sales and revenue while growing the customer base. Typically, call centers have organizational sales objectives as well as quotas for each team or employee. Achieving a high rate of conversions as a percentage of sales calls is a common specific goal within a company call center.

Customer Service

Providing customer service and support is another common, broad goal of a call center. This relates to the goal of delivering the best possible experience to each business customer. This improves positive word-of-mouth conversation in the marketplace. Customer satisfaction ratings are among the specific metrics used to evaluate the performance of a call center worker. Surveys are often used with customers after phone calls to assess the level of service.

Customer Retention

A follow-up goal to deliver a high level of customer service is customer retention. This means optimizing the amount of one-time buyers who become repeat purchasers, and eventually loyal customers. This is critical for small businesses that can't afford to give up any captured customers. Retaining existing customers is much less expensive than investing in various forms of promotion to attract new customers. Along with good service, call centers often make periodic follow-up calls to monitor individual customer experiences and to detect common problems that arise with products and services. This allows for improvements going forward.

Optimal Resource Utilization

Businesses typically look to either increase revenue or minimize costs with all facets of operation. In call centers, a cost-minimization objective is to optimize efficiency in resource utilization. Small companies must typically accomplish goals with modest costs. Average handle time is a metric used in call centers. This is the amount of time it typically takes to complete an outbound sales or service call or to handle an inbound customer issue. While quality of service is important, call centers want employees to make as many calls as possible in a given work day. Additionally, companies have to compare the sales and service results of call centers against other investments in business activities aimed at the same goals.

IT OBJECTIVES:

Call centre technologies include speech recognition software to allow computers to handle first level of customer support, text mining and natural language processing to allow better customer handling, agent training by automatic mining of best practices from past interactions, support automation and many other technologies to improve agent productivity and customer satisfaction. Automatic lead selection or lead steering is also intended to improve efficiencies, both for inbound and outbound campaigns. This allows inbound calls to be directly routed to the appropriate agent for the task, whilst minimizing wait times and long lists of irrelevant options for people calling in. For outbound calls, lead selection allows management to designate what type of leads go to which agent based on factors including skill, socioeconomic factors and past performance and percentage likelihood of closing a sale per lead.

The universal queue standardizes the processing of communications across multiple technologies such as fax, phone, and email. The virtual queue provides callers with an alternative to waiting on hold when no agents are available to handle inbound call demand.

Premises-based technology

Historically, call centres have been built on Private branch exchange (PBX) equipment that is owned, hosted, and maintained by the call centre operator themselves. The PBX can provide functions such as automatic call distribution, interactive voice response, and skills-based routing.

Virtual call centre

In virtual call centre model, the call centre's operator pays a monthly or annual fee to a vendor that hosts the call centre telephony equipment in their own data centre. In this model, the operator does not own, operate or host the equipment that the call centre runs on. Agents connect to the vendor's equipment through traditional PSTN telephone lines, or over voice over IP. Calls to and from prospects or contacts originate from or terminate at the vendor's data centre, rather than at the call centre operator's premises. The vendor's telephony equipment then connects the calls to the call centre operator's agents

Virtual call centre technology allows people to work from home, instead of in a traditional, centralised, call centre location, which increasingly allows people with physical or other disabilities that prevent them from leaving the house, to work. The only thing that is mandatory is to have an Internet access and a workstation.

Cloud computing

Cloud computing for call centres extends cloud computing to software as a service, or hosted, on-demand call centres by providing application programming interfaces (APIs) on the call centre cloud computing platform that allow call centre functionality to be integrated with cloud-based customer relationship management, leads management, and other applications. Computer telephony integration APIs provide developers with access to basic telephony controls and sophisticated call handling on the call centre platform from a separate application. Configuration APIs provide programmatic control of administrative functions of the call centre platform which are typically accessed by a human administrator through a graphical user interface.

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