 | Issue: | EMEA 2007 |
| Article no.: | 18 | |
| Topic: | Access trends and virtualization of the contact centre | |
| Author: | Ronald Rubens | |
| Title: | Vice President for Europe, Middle East, Africa and India | |
| Organisation: | CosmoCom | |
| PDF size: | 204KB |
About author
Ronald Rubens is CosmoCom Vice President for Europe, Middle East, Africa & India. He has more than 17 years of experience in the call centre and Telecommunications industry and a diverse background that includes management positions in sales, marketing, strategy and product management. Prior to joining CosmoCom, Mr Rubens worked for Avaya in several key management positions. Before Avaya, Mr Rubens worked for a system integrator in the Netherlands and for Northern Telecom in Sales and Marketing. Mr Rubens earned a BSc in Electrical Engineering, cum laude, from Rotterdam Faculty of Technology in the Netherlands and an MBA from New York University, Stern School of Business in the United States.
Article abstract
IP-based virtual contact centres reduce both the capital and operating expenditures of a contact centre operation and provide a greater degree of flexibility than traditional location-based centres. A virtualised call centre operation can take advantage of staff and knowledge resources – be they at the office, home or halfway around the world. Virtual centres can use the same infrastructure for multiple, wholly separate applications, and can even separately service the unique needs of a number of companies or business units.
Full Article
A collaboration of sorts, between robust access technologies and IP-based virtual and consolidated contact centres, is bringing a world of benefits to companies, agents and customers. Itís no secret that customer service excellence is a core strategy for businesses worldwide. Within contact centres – often the largest, and sometimes the only point of contact for company and customer – contact centre decision makers are under continuous pressure to increase customer satisfaction and reduce costs at the same time, all while managing increasingly complex day-to-day operations. This may sound like an impossible balancing act, but one of the most effective ways to achieve each of these challenging and often conflicting objectives – improving customer service, reducing costs, and streamlining operations – is through the deployment of a virtual contact centre. An achievement, I might add, that is more possible today thanks to ubiquitous broadband access technologies. A virtual contact centre enables a company to employ agents in multiple physical locations – including their homes – but deploy and manage them as if they were within a single physical location. This offers enormous benefits to all three constituents of the unified customer communications triangle – company, agent and customer. By deploying a virtual or logical contact centre the staff of which are physically situated at many locations, staffing resources can be used to their maximum efficiency. Since calls are shared by an entire pool of agents at different locations, call traffic is more evenly divided. This serves to moderate the workload for all agents while increasing satisfaction among customers. Busy signals, wait times and missed calls are reduced, which not only makes for happier customers but also decreases caller negativity that can wear down even the best agents. A virtual contact centre can draw upon full-time customer service agents located at several centralized captive (in-house) and outsourced call centres. In addition, full- and part-time agents at local branches and numerous designated product knowledge experts spread throughout the organization may also act as part-time agents. It is the ability to make all these resources available via a single virtual call centre that makes this strategy so effective. Since calls are routed to the right person regardless of location, fewer calls have to be escalated within the organisation and more inquiries are converted to business in less time. Because a virtual contact centre allows agents to work in any location, even at home, the model increases the pool of available agents, reduces recruitment and ongoing labour costs. The virtual contact centre model improves employee retention and satisfaction, reduces training costs and improves customer service. In many industries, such as financial services, this so-called ëhome-shoringí strategy is becoming an increasingly attractive alternative, as long as the agents at home are full participants in a unified, virtual contact centre. Virtual also means flexible. The mergers, spin-offs, reorganizations and redeployments so common in many industries are rarely painless, but they can be far less painful and costly to an organizationís contact centres when they are virtual and their technology resources are location-independent. Virtualization also supports and reduces risks associated with the current trend to offshore outsourcing of agents. While the cost reduction opportunity of offshore outsourcing is appealing, vital concerns often remain regarding loss of control, operational complexity and quality of service. Creating virtual contact centres mitigates these risks, because it enables managers to retain complete operational visibility and control of activity across the globe via easy-to-use, web-based administrative and reporting tools. It also allows seamless global call routing, so that callers can reach the most cost effective and appropriately skilled agent wherever in the world the agent may be, and be transferred quickly and seamlessly, when necessary, to any other agent located anywhere in the world. The IP advantage Because IP networks are inherently virtual, the deployment of an IP-based virtual solution is more cost effective and easier to justify as a capital investment. As enterprises enhance their own high performance IP networks, the IP advantage increases. There are other benefits to this inherently virtual technology as well. New generation software-based platforms donít require CTI, computer telephony integration, middleware to integrate with the IT environment and unify all communication channels in a single platform. A traditional premise-based enterprise deployment is not the only route to virtualization, however. Hosted IP contact centres, so called ëon-demandí services, are increasingly available from major service providers who provide a global presence. These services reduce the capital requirement of contact centre infrastructures – to only the client hardware – and provide instant virtualization since they are fundamentally engineered to support agents in any mix of physical locations. Whether they follow the traditional premises model or the new hosted on-demand model, IP-based solutions are affordable and quick to deploy. Virtual contact centre platforms can make the vision of a completely global, fully distributed, yet logically unified, contact centre a practical reality for industries and companies of every shape and size. Consolidation – multi-virtual centres Some forward-thinking enterprises are taking the next step and consolidating their call centres into one multi-virtual platform. Such an enterprise can use multi-tenancy capabilities to support not just one distributed virtual contact centre but any number of them. Some companies, such as large financial services institutions, have several contact centres addressing completely different applications. From a staffing perspective, it may not make sense to combine them, but it can make a lot of sense and save a lot of dollars to consolidate the technology infrastructure, even if the staffing is completely separate. This is the promise of a multi-tenancy, multi-virtual contact centre. To individual tenants, a multi-tenant contact centre platform appears to be their own dedicated platform. Combining the workloads of multiple applications by combining multiple tenants on the same platform generates great economies of scale across all the contact centres operating within an organization, because the peak loads of these different applications never align perfectly. There are also economies of scale in implementation and support personnel, because the investment in staff training and experience keeps on paying dividends as the number of applications increases. The virtual contact centre needs an all-IP platform to make it economically feasible, but companies need not stop at merely virtual. If virtual is good, multi-virtual is better. Multi-tenant technology, with tenant self-administration, today makes this unique and important innovation available to financial servicesí contact centre professionals. It is clear that the availability of IP-based contact centre solutions and proliferating broadband access has re-energized the contact centre function. Combined, these technologies offer benefits to both traditional premise-based contact centre infrastructures and outsourced hosted service providers.
