Infosys | Microsoft

We have seen a never before phenomenon of speed at which the products and services offerings change in today’s internet world, while this means that with every passing minute the choices that the customer has are increasing, it also means that it’s increasingly becoming important for organizations to keep their contact centres agile to understand offerings, convince customers about the products and services, and deliver superior customer experience consistently, with every interaction..

In the last couple of years organization have invested a lot on enterprise applications,  we see a lot of these applications being used in Contact centres as well , like CRM, Marketing, Billing , Logistics, Order management, Customer information management  to name a few. All of the above them have sub applications and multiple fields that an agent needs to be carefully aware of while handling a customer. While the applications make all the data available to an agent about a customer, they also make work complex, as for any information an agent needs to remember the right application and the right field and the right steps to get to that.

It is a well known fact that close to 70 % of the contact centre costs are all related to the human costs, like salary, training etc. Organizations today realise that they have to start right at the agent’s level to overcome the overall challenge of “Operational Efficiency”. In many studies in the recent past this has emerged as the top most focus area of many contact centres.

“A survey of contact center professionals conducted by independent market analyst Datamonitor (DTM.L) reveals contact center and contact center agent optimization are viewed as key investment priorities over the next 3 years. According to the report, "Contact Center Markets & Technology, Technology Evolution," pressure on contact center managers to do more (services) with less (budget) is increasing the demand for optimization technologies. According to Datamonitor as vendors look to develop multi-component solutions, effective integration and partnering will become a necessity taking vendors a step closer towards performance management solutions. In turn, the complexity of deploying such solutions will create a bigger role for professional services.

Datamonitor's report highlights the way contact centers are improving customer service through greater efficiency, using a range of optimization technologies. The report considers the role these technologies can play in delivering superior customer services from contact centers.”                      -Courtesy Datamonitor

It is an interesting time for the Customer Service industry, there is a lot of focus all of a sudden on a big word ‘Optimization’. Our internal research (both primary and secondary) reveals that there are a few big challenges that Customer care centers face today...

·         —  Low Agent & Enterprise productivity

·         —  Low Customer satisfaction

·         —  Application Silos

·         —  High Cost of operations

·         —  Weak Knowledge management & sharing practice.

If we look back .. way back in early late 50’s or 60’s, probably the time when the first so called ‘customer service cell’ was set up by Ford Motors with the help of AT & T who gave them and the first ‘Toll free’ number … to today, when a call to CITI or BA is answered thousands of miles away by an agent from a different continent, a lot has changed, or I should say evolved.

Customer service has evolved from a service department somewhere in the corner in a huge organization to a grown and matured industry. Analysts say it is around 45 Billion today from 35 Billion what it was in 2004, a huge growing industry. Today it’s needs are different from what they were say in early 80’s when ACD was a ‘Wow’ or 90’s when WFM, QMS and the big brother of reporting ‘Crystal’ was all the managers wanted. In the days to come optimization at all levels is gonna be a huge focus area, we’d see a lot of investment going in the software components, IP is already established and supposedly gonna over take the traditional TDM shipments this year, we’re also witnessing a huge amount of openness of data, and a shift towards ‘Presence’ and ‘De Centralized’ customer service centers. There are a couple of areas where we see the investments happening in the future.

Agent optimization: We’d see that a lot is gonna change in the way an agent desktop looks , from a complex where there is a spread of some 12- more applications to a smart, context based unified desktop that brings in a complete view of the customer.

Work force Optimization: These set of technologies would enable managers in these center to look at performance from a completely new perspective, combining data from various systems.

Unified Communication: Ability to serve a customer based on his/her choice of medium, virtually from any location and with ability to quickly look for information, people with the right skills.

Compliance:  Ability to ensure that the processes coupled with technologies around are designed in such a way that while the agents gets all that he wants to, they also get a pre designed flow to take a call/task to closure.

We’re confident that the above set of solutions would not only ensure that the Customer Service centers of the future are agile but also proactive in understanding and evolving with the changing needs… definitely nobody would want to lose a customer not because of poor product /service but to poor service