Today’s contact centers have
undergone, and continue to
experience, revolutionary
changes,” says Waymon Bryant, Spherion
partnership director for several contact
centers in Atlanta. “Most are known as
multi-channel contact centers rather than
call centers due to the diverse communications tools they now employ, and those
tools are the product of enormous
advances in technology. It’s a very exciting workplace these days.”
Smart Business asked Bryant to share
some of his insights into the evolution of
the contact center, why companies
choose to outsource their centers, how
center performance is measured, and new
trends.
What type of contact centers do you manage
for clients?
I’m responsible for both types of centers: the inbound center that provides customer service and support, order-taking,
appointment-setting and other passive
transactions, and the outbound center
that performs active sales and telemarketing functions, whose agents work on a
base-pay-plus-commission basis.
What are some of the current trends you’re
seeing?
I’ve seen an increased demand for multi-lingual agents, especially in the residential
or consumer market. The incidence of
multi-purpose inbound calls is growing as
well, which entails marketing additional
services to a customer during an inbound
call.
Shift work remains commonplace in
contact centers and is a very important
consideration. You have to put a shift
schedule in place, hire to the schedule and
then train to the schedule. For example,
you should not hire night-shift staff and
expect them to come in during the day for
a week of training.
Creative solutions are key to operating a
first-rate contact center that’s firing on all
cylinders. For example, if you’re looking for ‘soccer moms’ to work in a center,
consider offering a part-time shift from 10
a.m. to 3 p.m. so they can have their work
time and still be there for their kids after
school.
The trend is to provide on-site, on-staff
training expertise as a standard part of the
cost of operating a contact center. This
enables you to develop quick refresher
training as needed to fill gaps, respond to
emergency needs, introduce new programs or offers, and turn on a dime to stay
out ahead of the competition.
Finally, the trend in outsourcing contact
center operations continues to grow, on
both the inbound and outbound side.
What are some of the reasons companies
outsource their contact centers?
There are lots of good reasons. We’re
able to staff outbound and inbound centers quickly and less expensively than
most clients can. Outsourcing offers flexibility through the ability to staff for peaks
and valleys and seasonal demands, and
then ‘un-staff’ when the demand spike is
gone without having to layoff the client’s
permanent employees.
Outsourcing can also enable a client to
avoid having to build facilities, purchase equipment, develop training, manage
advertising and outreach programs and so
on. Many companies that have been operating successful inbound centers find that
trying to add an outbound operation, dedicated to acquiring new business by
phone, is just too large and different an
initiative for them to take on.
We’ve seen how important it is to be
flexible. Using an outsourcing staffing
provider can enable flexibility, whereas
sometimes the policies that an in-house
company center might have to follow
could actually inhibit flexibility.
How can you tell how a contact center is
doing?
The basics for an inbound contact center include ASA (average speed of
answer), as measured in seconds or minutes; abandoned calls, when the hold time
has become unacceptable to the caller;
and blocked calls, or how many times a
call reaches a busy signal due to call volumes.
The appropriate metrics would also
include how many contacts are required
to resolve an issue. There should be a
requirement for acknowledging receipt of
an e-mail or online Web contact within a
specified period of time, and a standard
for resolving that inquiry. Other standards
include forecast contacts versus actual
contacts and occupancy rate, which is the
number of incoming calls versus the number of agents to handle them.
In the outbound sales and marketing
contact center we measure revenue, the
number of decision-makers we touch,
number of calls per day, and average talk
time, for example.
Finally, we like to look at agent turnover
and customer survey ratings to round out
the picture and enable us to constantly
improve the contact center experience.
WAYMON BRYANT is partnership director for Spherion
Corporation in the Atlanta area. Reach him at (404) 829-7102 or
[email protected].