Standardising Technology across a network of Contact Centres

For enterprise clients, one or two contact centres is unlikely to meet the demand from customers for service requests. Often, in large markets, an enterprise may well have ten or more contact centres. This is to do with the difficulties in placing all staff together on one massive contact centre.

In these matters the only certainty is that nothing is certain - Pliny the Elder

Operationally, it would be difficult to organise a call centre with many thousands of staff and as a location it would offer no resilience to the business. Specifically:

• it's hard to recruit more than 1000 contact centre staff in all but the very largest of locations - bear in mind that yours will not be the only employer in an area and in areas with high contact centre penetration, competition for good staff can be fierce


• limits on organisation's ability to manage 3000 people on one site


• building logistics complexity increases beyond a certain size - around a thousand seats


• reslience is nill if all staff are in one place


• for 1000 seats, if you staff more than one shift (common) then you are looking for not 1000 staff in a location but perhaps 2000 or 3000 - that will place a burden on your HR resources and external employment agencies

For these reasons and more, it is uncommon to find individual contact centres above 1,200 seats and 400 to 600 would be a much more common maximum size. For some organisations, such as Vodafone in the UK with over 7,000 seats, this means several locations.

If multiple locations are reality, how do you make it work? Well from a data perspective, it's relatively straightforword to "pipe" data applications into different locations from a central hub. Companies such as Citrix specialise in enabling remote operation. The voice environment is more difficult because organisations often have a mix of call centre technologies - different switches, different ACDs, different voice recorders, etc. It's often due to mergers and acquisitions where differing technologies build up as rival firms get purchased. Or it could be due to a deliberate strategy to not have too much reliance on one provider. Often, a large part of an organisation's contact centre estate is in the hands of outsourcers - and their technology will often be different to the brands they serve. Whatever the cause, dissimilar technologies are a reality for many organisations and it's usually easier to normalise the data environment, but the voice environment is harder because mostly, the key serving technologies are premises based - i.e. the reside in the location where service is delivered. To get round this, organisations look at a variety of normalising technologies:

• homogeonising CTI (Computer Telephony Integration) technology - plugs into each physical switch and allows it logically to operate in harmony with dissimilar switches


• hosting technology to move away from premises based equipment to a network solution - piping in services from a remote location


• workstream organisation - moving projects from the workstack to locations where the volume can be comfortably contained without overspill to other locations


• progressive standardisation - progressively refreshing eqipment which an agreed corporate standard


• deploying more self-service technologies - at a central point make investments in self-service to draw more transactions to the web, push data capture requirements to customers (form-filling online) etc and reduce the transaction burden across the estate

Which strategy to adopt?

Selecting the correct option from the above list is hard and largely depends on the business requirements, however, it would not be uncommon for a strategy to involve three of the above options and often all of the options in the one strategy. Say, to host IVR operations for the group centrally, to reorganise projects to place them in contained areas, change procurement policy to govern new purchases and accellerate technology refresh, invest in more self-service technology and process redesign and at the same time deploying CTI solutions to allow multiple physical switches to operate as one logical switch. Needless to say, this is a complex strategy, but it may well be the only way forward. Hosting everything may not be an option due to the existing investment in technology, CTI may be good for some services (switch integration) but may be poorer at others (staff effectiveness metrics), rationalising the workstack can only go so far - if you need to handle 50K calls per day, then you need to handle them regardless if only 40K per day capacity exists in your preferred sites, and customers may reject moves to self-service options or perhaps self-service leads to other, new transactions (the law of unintended consequences)

Alternatively, an organisation may enter a large outsourcing deal with a large provider - IBM, EDS, etc. and pass the burden for technology refresh to them in exchange for a seven year contract to run the show.

6 things to consider before deciding

1. Have we exhausted all possible options for simplification, clarification, rationalisation and automation - if not, dig further, no point adding new technology to a bad process - get the process right, then technologise


2. Can suppliers be persuaded to engage more in exchange for a contract extension? Perhaps there is appetite at suppliers to take on more risk and complexity in exchange for a bigger share of the long term pot


3. What does the future hold for customer interactions - are there more transactions on the way or is the transaction load stable? Will new services require ever more complex technology innovation or are needs currently adequately met?


4. What technologies are on show at tradeshows and at supplier previews? Perhaps putting up with inconvenience for 18 more months to then deploy an interesting new technology once it has been market tested - this could save short term investment to direct to other deserving causes and lead to a smarter and slicker solution for the future


5. Are there regulatory issues that mean there is a pressing need for reform?


6. Are there commercial disadvantages compared to best in class - e.g. if processing time for a high volume process stream is 30% higher than your prime competitor then this probably deserves attention ahead of other transactions

Bear in mind that technology is not a silver bullet for all organisation problems. The greater the time spent planning and thinking about customers always pays dividends by yielding better technology projects. At the same time some pragmatism is required with regard to over-analysis.

Copyright 2007, Robert A Innes