Outlaw: Is Your Call Center Killing Your Business?

By Joe Outlaw

"Of course not!" you say.  Don't be so sure.

First, let me say I appreciate there are many call centers filled with enthusiastic, knowledgeable, and customer-focused people doing their very best to address customers' questions and problems.  I also know there are many call centers applying the latest techniques and technologies to make their people both efficient and effective in support of their missions. But having positive attitudes and working hard while necessary are not sufficient to ensure your call center is helping your business not hurting it.

One very significant question to ask yourself about your organization and its call centers is how aligned with the core business strategies of the organization are they? Dimension Data, in its past several year's annual global contact center survey of large enterprises, found that less than half viewed their customer service organizations and call centers as strategic to their businesses. If your enterprise's call centers are fully aligned with your business strategies consider yourself lucky, but don't stop there in determining if your call centers are doing all they can to help your business.

Your Call Centers: Helping or Hurting --- 10 Questions to Consider

1. How open for business are you?

Is your call center operated only from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday throgh Friday, or is it open 24 hours a day, 7 days a week? The key here is not how many hours your call center is open, but whether your customers can access people or applications for help when they need it or when it is convenient for them. The right answer is not necessarily 7x24, but whatever is appropriate for your target market customers.

2. How easy to do business with are you? 

This is a topic for several books, but some of the customer service and call center considerations include:

• Do your people speak your customers' languages--actual language (English, Spanish, French ...) as well as the specific language of your products/services (plumbing parts, cell phones, landscaping)?
• Do your applications (voice and web) speak your customers' languages and are they intuitive and easy-to-use?
• Do you always offer live-person help as an option in your automated customer applications?
• Are your call centers adequately staffed to provide minimal wait times to speak with an agent?
• Are your agents trained, equipped, and organized to provide prompt service? This raises several important topics in addition to ensuring agents are properly trained and experienced in the use of the tools provided, including: Do your call center systems have sufficient capacity to operate with sub-second response even under their peak loads? Are your agent processes streamlined and all bottlenecks and redundancies removed, such as duplicate data entry and logging on/off multiple applications to access information or to make changes?
• Are your automated customer applications available, fast, and responsive?

3. Can your customers get answers to their questions and problems?

I am not talking about the customer is always right or whether your company should always give customers the answers they want. That would be determined by your business strategy. In your call centers, the question is just whether you are providing your customers with any answers to their questions and resolutions to their problems. For this, the issues include:

• Are your call center people fully trained to do their jobs, such as how to operate the necessary systems and how to interact with customers?
• Are your call center people and applications supported by the necessary customer and product information to answer questions and resolve problems?
• Are your call center people empowered to resolve customers' problems, at least the majority of those that reach the center? 
• How successful are you at resolving customers' questions/issues during their first contact?
• For questions/issues you cannot answer during the first contact, do you have escalation and follow-up processes to close the loop in time frames acceptable to your customers?
• Are you able to effectively deal with questions about the "off-label" uses of your products or interactions with your products and 3rd-party products?
• Are you providing customers with consistent answers and resolutions across all of your customer interaction points, in-person at your stores or branch offices, calls to your call centers, on your web site?

4.    Are you providing personalized service to your customers? 

When customers contact your call centers, can you quickly access information about them and provide services and offering which are tailored to that customer? Can you do this across all of your customer interaction points?

5. If your products/services are sold through partners and resellers how well are those customers supported?  Are your partners and resellers using the same systems or are their systems fully linked with yours in order to provide seamless service?

6. Do you provide pro-active service to your customers?  Do you reach out to your customers to provide useful information and offerings or do you wait for them to contact you?

7. How closely are you monitoring your customers' satisfaction with your products/services?  Do you know whether your customers' questions/issues are being addressed successfully by your call center? Really, based on actual responses from those customers or something else, like a report that lists closed tickets?

8. Does your call center support both customer service and sales?  Of course, it depends upon your business strategies, but if your call centers only interact with your customers for service while a separate organization only interacts with them for sales, how can you even hope to provide your customers with consistent, let alone accurate information during those interactions.  Likewise, if your company is not in some way leveraging its call centers' customer interactions for sales purposes it is missing a great many opportunities.

9. Have you struck the right balance between effectiveness and efficiency in the management of your centers?  Are you still operating your call centers primarily as cost center with a heavy emphasis on efficiency?  Alternatively, have you found a balance between how well and how cost-effectively they provide services to your customers?  While this balance point may move depending on the company's success and market dynamics, it should not swing wildly back and forth.

10.  How well do your call centers support your brands?  All of the other questions are about the mechanics of staffing and operating your enterprise's call centers.  This question is more of a style question for those enterprises whose call centers are strategic.  Do your call centers, and your other points of customer interaction, deliver a consistent reinforcing branded-experience to your customers, the Nordstrom's experience, for example?

And Now -- The Answers

You already know there are no one-size-fits-all answers to these questions. You need to do what is right for your businesses. The questions themselves as well as a few hints shed some light on what I think is important. However, otherwise I apologize for raising so many questions and providing so few recommendations. You also know the answers to most of these questions are not to be found solely in new solutions or technologies. There are, however, insights to be gained from the successes of leading enterprises and also increasingly new techniques and technologies that are being applied in support of customer contact strategies. My next column will be about proactive customer contact and will contain more insights and recommendations than questions, I promise.

Joe Outlaw is President and Chief Analyst of Outlaw Research, a firm that provides results-oriented analysis and consulting of the customer contact marketplace.  The objective of Outlaw Research is building a community around the leading edges of customer contact -- the advanced strategies early-adopter companies are applying and the technologies and vendors they are working with.  His work can be found at www.outlawresearch.com