The Times they are a-Changing. And so is the Contact Centre.
It's only when you get to engage directly with customers that you get to see first hand the effects that the current global economic situation is having on their businesses.
A couple of weeks ago I met with the contact centre senior management team of a large financial services company. With financial services businesses hit hard in the last year I was interested in hearing how business had change and particularly how that had effected their contact centre operations.
Changing call mix
It turns out that this multimedia contact centre had experienced large changes in type of contact and the volumes. Inbound voice call volume had remained fairly constant but the mix had changed dramatically. Sales calls had reduced significantly as the company wasn't writing much new business, but existing customers increasingly called, mainly to check interest rates as these had been subject to much change over recent months. Many agents were reassigned to handle customer service calls as well as sales calls.
Email a preferred channel
Additionally, those customers finding difficulty in paying were tending to send emails to the company about their situation rather than calling, so email volumes had increased significantly, leading to the need to increase multimedia agent numbers.
Home agents to the rescue
Over on the collections side, the requirement for outbound calling had increased dramatically as the usual calling pattern for past due accounts was now beginning to lose its effectiveness and thus required more attempts to get the customer to pay. The increase in outbound calls required more outbound agent positions to be installed but with the office facility already full a decision was made to switch some inbound agent positions over to home based agents.
Technology enables business flexibility
What struck me about this story was the speed with this contact centre had reacted to the changes in caller and business requirements. Monolithic technology of the past would have been a major inhibitor to this change but with advanced applications and IP platforms the reconfiguration can be accomplished speedily.
The times certainly are a-changing but luckily so too is the contact centre.
Posted 12 May 2009 at 05:05 AM