By Prem Uppaluru, Transera Communications
The contact center is undergoing significant social, technological and economic changes.
This past holiday season you may have experienced similar frustrating time "on hold" while calling customer service.
According to a survey commissioned by DHL and conducted by Roper Public Affairs and Media, more than 80 percent of
consumers say bad customer service experiences would cause them to switch to a different business or service
provider. Among consumers' pet peeves are dealing with automated telephone systems and being kept on hold for long periods of time or have to listen to a long pause without knowing what is happening next.
Have you had a similar experience from a large corporate all centre? I have and it is very poor customer services that some large corporate businesses offer.
To keep pace with the increased volume of customer calls and
make live agents available, many businesses have several call
centersâ€"some of them in remote locationsâ€"rather than being
"boxed in" to a single call center.
"Homeshoring," the handling of customer support calls by
stay-at-home workers, has recently garnered attention, with
companies as diverse as JetBlue, Office Depot and
1-800-Flowers embracing the trend.
"Outsourcing" to call centers in India, for example, has
proven its advantages, allowing for 24x7 operations and
lower-cost skilled agents. While the promise of using multiple
call centers lowers costs and increases responsiveness, it
also makes the management of customer support operations more
challenging and expensive, limiting visibility, control and
quality management. While conventional call centers are not
only hard to manage, they also require costly equipment for
each site to operate efficiently. What is the point of
decentralizing call center operations if the upfront capital
costs outweigh the benefits?
Confluence of communications and computing
Enter the global on-demand IP call center. The confluence of
communications and computing changes everything. With the
maturity of telecommunications networks and web-based software
applications, phone calls can now be managed virtually to
distributed agents anywhere in the world, as long as they have
a phone, an Internet connection and a personal computer.
New standards like SIP, Web Services and XML eliminate complex
deployment and integration requirements and significantly
reduce maintenance overhead for call centers. The new
standards allow software applications to be linked into global
communication infrastructures and overlay them with
value-added software services that can be bought "on-demand,"
much as we buy electricity.
For example, Allegiant Air, a discount airline providing
leisure travel services and charter flights, is the first
business ever to use on-demand IP call center technology.
Allegiant Air has a call center in Reno and customer service
agents at airports, with executives located in Las Vegas. And
it has paid no upfront costs for the new call center
technology.
Since turning on the new system, the president and CEO,
Maurice J. Gallagher, has had the ability to log on to the
Internet from his home office to check hold times, handling
times, call volumes and other metrics. He can even accept a
customer call. Concurrently, he and his management team have
the ability to direct incoming calls to remote agents working
in both the corporate offices or at the airline ticket
counters. The ability to bring on additional agents and modify
call distribution strategies in real time is especially handy
during busy times such as peak hours around the holiday
season. Equally important, agents need only a phone and a
web-based PC and to be linked into the customer service and
reservation system empowered with caller ID, screen prompts
and other service aids.
On-demand global IP call centers help organizations globalize,
diversify and grow their call center operations to deliver
exceptional customer care with no infrastructure investment
required. They help enterprises and outsourcers connect,
communicate and collaborate beyond the boundaries
traditionally imposed by organizations, technologies and
geographies. As companies seek new ways to improve the
performance management of their call center, expect to see the
adoption of the on-demand call center as a solution that will
modernize the industry for years to come.
And for consumers, the prospect of being able to reach a
well-qualified, culturally attuned agent without the tedium of
waiting on hold for "the next available agent" is certainly a
plus. While no one can promise that you will never again hear
those all too familiar words, "All of our agents are currently
handling other calls. Your call will be answered in the order
that it was received," companies using global on-demand call
center software can minimize the frustrations and maximize the
value of customer support.
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Prem Uppaluru is the president and CEO (co-founder) of
Transera Communications, a Cupertino, California-based
venture-backed start-up he co-founded. Uppaluru brings 25
years of experience to the telecommunications industry and
holds a Ph.D. in electrical engineering and computer science
from the University of Texas at Austin. He received his
master's and undergraduate degrees in electrical engineering
from IIT from Bombay.
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