Saturday, September 11, 2010

Tips for taking your contact centre into the cloud.

Business Week claimed in 2008 that ‘cloud computing is changing the world’.  In the same year, commentators quoted on CNET.com suggested cloud computing represented a ‘paradigm shift’ and was ‘the new black’.  Hyperbole surrounds this subject.

Cutting through the hype is vital if enterprise level cloud services are to be brought to bear on the contact centre.  Most people use the cloud to mean cloud computing.  In fact, computing power is simply one service, albeit one of the most common, that can be delivered via the cloud.  As a rule of thumb, cloud delivery means a service is pay-as-you-use, scalable, based on shorter contract terms – hours rather than years and consumed via a web portal.

A cloud-delivered contact centre meets these criteria, combining hosted IP telephony and automated, voice-activated software-as-a-service to deliver a package that is deeply scalable and can be purchased in new and flexible ways, such as per concurrent agent and by the hour.  This new level of cost granularity will allow chief operating officers and heads of customer service to measure more closely than ever the efficiency of their contact centre infrastructure, unlocking service improvements and additional cost savings in the future.

The cost efficiency of a contact centre is based largely on how successfully it can be operated at or near its capacity.  This is the key advantage of a cloud-based contact centre.  For example, imagine a travel company taking hotel bookings for the 2010 World Cup in South Africa.  The company has invested in contact centre infrastructure sufficient to handle peak demand in a normal month.  As the World Cup approaches, peak times may comprise twice as many incoming calls as their contact centre has been manned to cope with.

But imagine now the company employs an automated service that presents the customer with choices about the hotel they want, the room type, length of stay, whether breakfast is included or not, and so on.  Critically, the service is based on applications hosted on virtualised servers in the cloud.  If the travel company is using software-as-a-service in this way, scaling up services for only a few hours is suddenly feasible, as it no longer requires the company to have free server space itself, or trained customer service agents waiting on hand to process the calls.

In 2010, finding the right technology partner to move contact centres into the cloud, and the right commercial model to buy those services, will be vital.  This year, in particular, purchasing decisions will be under scrutiny by finance departments, regulators and investors.  What advice, then, can be given to organisations planning to negotiate increasingly complex and nuanced technology and payment models?  Here are BT's tips – ‘ten for 2010’:

1)            Don’t underestimate ‘self-service’ technologies.  They can do more than you think and customers don’t dislike them as much as they might say.  Two thirds (60 per cent) of US and UK customers would rather use a voice-based self-service system than an offshore contact centre to improve service efficiency.

2)            Voice-based self service can also improve efficiencies and stop avoidable manned contacts – two vital outcomes in the current climate.  Remember that with self-service and virtualised options, you can deliver 24/7 customer service without employing a 24/7 rota of agents.

3)            Hosted services help you cope.  The advantages of hosted services are not just the obvious financial ones such as the avoidance of capital expenditure. One real benefit is the ability to scale.  If your demand fluctuates by 40 or 50 per cent, that means for much of the time you are paying for twice as much capacity as you need. Hosting services in the network means you pay only for what you use – and they can simply be scaled by a factor of 10 or 100 if that is required.

4)            Take the call to the agent not the agent to the call. Save money and the environment by using cloud-based contact centres, routing calls to agents, instead of having your agents go to a place to receive calls.  It saves money on facilities, increases the pool of skilled workers available, increases their productive hours and allows resources to be flexed as needed.

5)            Read up on virtualisation!  Virtualising services is happening all over the place, right now.  It will provide agent savings (of up to 15 per cent, according to BT estimates) while improving the average answer time, thereby improving customer satisfaction.

Hosted contact centres, delivered from the network, are the quickest, most cost-efficient way to virtualise resources.  This can improve service quality by connecting the best person with the right skill to the right enquiry every time.  Moreover, costs can be optimised, by maximising the use of expensive skills and managing skills centrally as one big ‘pool’.  Any agent can be available to any call, just by connecting to the hosted platform.

6)            Choose non-geographic telephone numbers.  That way, you are not tying your organisation to a specific location.  The number can move with you as you grow without you having to change your main contact numbers. Your contact number can even become part of your brand.

7)            Consider looking beyond call recording as a ‘tick in the box’ for industry regulation.  Instead, view it as an aide to understanding your customers and improving the quality of agent interaction.  Let automated analytics loose on your archive of recorded calls and learn things you never knew about your customers, your agents, your IT infrastructure and your products and services.

8)            As the delivery of customer contact services becomes increasingly technological, organisations must think carefully about what is mission-critical.  Is operating contact centre infrastructure a central aspect of the organisation?  Concentrating on core business competences is likely to meet the approval of your shareholders and investors, and letting a specialist provider operate your contact centre infrastructure takes away the problems of supplier management and service support.

9)            Protect yourself against rapid change.  Innovations such as cloud services, virtualisation and unified communications are likely to bring about a step change in the way customer contact is delivered and priced.  The best way to remain at the leading edge of this change is to work with a partner focused on delivering these innovations with the stability and security required by international enterprises and Government bodies.

10)        Pick a partner that understands the full range of contact centre technologies – from network management and telephony, to cloud delivery of applications and services.

One of the features of 2010 will be the increasingly innovative use of cloud services, and contact centres are no exception to this trend.  For heads of customer service and chief operating officers, the focus this year is to balance exemplary customer service and cost containment.  They may find the cloud – without the hype too often associated with it – is the way to achieve both.

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