Enterprises are migrating call centers away from being centers that simply receive complaints. Rather, the call center has become a “customer contact center” – that is, a place where interactions with customers can be leveraged to increase top-line revenue by increasing customer satisfaction and, therefore, loyalty. At the same time, the “traditional” call center operations are being continuously streamlined to be as efficient as possible with an eye on the bottom-line.
Operational efficiencies are improved using quantitative metrics – Call Quality (e.g. First Call Resolution), Accessibility (e.g., Blocked / Abandoned Calls), Average Speed of Answer, Cost per Call, etc. – that are tracked and measured as Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) in the traditional call-center operations.
The same metrics are also used to fine-tune call center operations with the aim of increasing customer satisfaction levels. The usual approaches have involved reducing the “average speed of answer”, “average handling time” & “percentage of abandoned calls” by using IVR-based systems, or increasing the “call quality” by providing “self-help” applications like searchable knowledge bases, FAQs, Personal Account information, etc.
Let us consider a real-life scenario where a large customer is being acquired – negotiations with respect to costing, service level agreements, credit refunds, etc. are the norm. As a result, contracts are almost always “one-of-a-kind”, and “never-to-be-repeated.” Therefore, designating “relationship managers” who are specially trained to support these “custom” products becomes vital in ensuring that such customers are satisfied with the post-sales service provided.
"Dumb" Call-Routing Systems
There is only one catch: ensuring that the relationship manager is the one to answer all the support calls from the customer. Current call-routing systems are “dumb” – that is, they simply wait for the first available agent to become available and route the call to the agent, regardless of whether the selected agent has any knowledge about the “custom” product or otherwise.
According to “Dimension Data”, calls are taking longer to deal with than they did in 2003, with the average length of a call standing at 240 seconds compared to 222 seconds two years ago.
This results in the customer’s call being transferred from agent to agent (or kept on hold) until the relationship manager is discovered and informed about the call. The “average on hold time” for the most important customers may actually be greater than the overall average! In fact, the larger the customer and the more specialized the contract, the bigger the “average on-hold time.”
Clearly, this is not what is intended!!
Employee Turnover
The problem with high turnover rates is twofold:
Current statistics estimate that employee turnover in the Indian financial services call center industry is 49 percent. On an average, therefore, the relationship manager for a major customer will change every 2 to 3 years!!
Is it possible to have a technical solution to this problem? Of course not! But, can technology be leveraged to mitigate this problem? Yes, it can!
IVR Systems
IVR-based systems are one of the most commonly explored routes to reduce the workload on agents. By capturing as much knowledge as possible in the IVR-based System, call-centers are trying to drive down the dependency on humans – agents, relationship managers, etc.
However, can the IVR be configured to capture “custom” products / services that were sold to large enterprise customers? IVR-based systems are extremely limited in their capabilities to capture, understand, and enforce contractual obligations. Secondly, maintaining the IVR System becomes a big burden especially when contracts keep getting added / modified / deleted periodically.
There is another big problem to address. A lot of customers prefer to simply wait for an agent to pick up the phone rather than interacting with an IVR. The reasons for this could be many. For example, customers might not remember their Personal Identification Number (PIN). This negates the whole idea of installing / maintaining an expensive IVR system. So how do you force customers “into” the IVR system?
Solution Idea
These issues can be solved if the call-center deploys a solution that:
Building the next-generation Call-Center Solution
The solution described above can be built easily using Business Rules Management Systems (BRMS). To put it simply, BRMS technology specializes in:
How can BRMS help in building the next-generation call-center systems? Here is how, in three steps:
Step 1: Capture the Contracts in a BRMS Product
Use the toolset provided by the BRMS System to capture all the “custom” products / services that the call-center agents are expected to handle.
Step 2: Build a “master” Call-Center Solution
The solution should integrate into CLI (Caller Line Identification), Call-Routing Systems, IVR Systems, and BRMS Systems. The workflow should be:
Step 3: Audit the calls that are being handled by agents
By continuously monitoring the calls that are being handled manually, and analyzing the logs printed by the BRMS system, it is possible to identify the “gaps” in the captured policies. This information can be used to enhance the captured policy, ensuring that the same query / complaint is handled automatically the next time around.
What is the ROI?
Over a period of time, the BRMS product will capture more and more of the policy governing the customer’s account, potentially increasing automation levels to more than 90 percent of the calls.
This ensures that:
Boni Prasanna is Co-founder and Vice-President of Professional Services at YASU Technologies (www.yasutech.com), an innovative vendor in business rules management software. A free report on “Implementing BRMS technology in Call Centers: A business case” is available for readers by emailing [email protected]