Technology makes call centers tick. It is
natural for a business owner on the
North Coast to wonder whether his or her call center vendor has the right technological tools in its toolbox.
Michael White says that having the right
tools for the job is an ever-evolving process. “We typically find, or create, four to
five new tools every year to keep our call
centers agile and able to respond to the
challenges of today’s marketplace.”
White and his team are responsible for all
of InfoCision’s internal IT infrastructure
and call center technology.
Smart Business asked him what technology tools he employs to keep his call centers competitive.
What tools does a call center need to be successful?
These days the most successful call centers take advantage of every opportunity to
keep their work force productive. Part of
keeping a work force productive is being
able to give them different types of work
depending on the demand. A true inbound/outbound blending solution gives
call centers the ability to present their
workers with inbound calls when the volume of incoming callers is high and seam-lessly transition them to placing outbound
calls or doing other work when the incoming call traffic is light.
One of the most significant aspects of
blending is the ability to receive consolidated reporting to help manage the time
spent in each activity and to be able to
make informed staffing decisions. The
most successful call centers can achieve 45
to 50 minutes of productive time out of
every hour.
What other tools might call centers use?
The best way to ensure effective communication is one on one, but oftentimes,
there is a need to provide information messaging or to allow customers the opportunity for self-service. E-mail, fax and
Interactive Voice Response (IVR) technologies all offer effective means of communicating with your customers. IVR technology is a perfect cost-effective solution for
giving customers an informational message when they contact your call centers
by phone. You can optionally invite them to
speak to a live person if their needs are not met in the IVR message. IVR applications
can also be much more sophisticated — to
the point where they take an entire order
and even offer context sensitive promotional offers depending on what products
have been selected.
Can you give an example of where an IVR
application has been successfully blended
with a live operator solution?
Several of our TV ministry clients offer
free products during their broadcasts,
which can generate thousands of calls in a
matter of minutes. To accommodate the
influx of calls, we will often employ an IVR
application to handle the free product
offer. We present the caller with an initial
menu of choices. For example: Press 1 for
the free product offer that you just heard
about; Press 2 for customer service; Press
3 for prayer requests.
Those who are interested in the free
product are directed through the IVR application and asked a series of questions,
using their touch-tone phone for the
response. The first prompt is typically,
‘Please enter your home telephone number.’ With the home telephone number, we
are able to reach out to a national database
and look for the address that is associated
with that phone number. If there is a
match, we use text-to-speech technology
to speak the address we’ve found, and we ask the caller to confirm whether or not
that is the correct address.
The next prompt asks callers to speak
and spell their first and last name, which
we will either record or use speech recognition to input into a database, along with
the rest of the caller’s order. Any time during this process we give the caller the ability to opt out and speak to a live operator.
Also, the initial menu options would allow
the caller to be sent directly to a person.
We’ve found the use of IVR to be a cost-effective solution for our clients and can
help our call centers manage the high call
volume situations that may not require
one-on-one interaction.
Which tools have helped you to better manage your call centers?
Work force management tools can help
to develop staffing models based on the
historical trends of incoming calls. These
tools work in conjunction with an automated call distributor (ACD) to look at the
number of employees who need to be on a
given shift, based on the number of calls
that are expected that day or a specific
hour of the day.
Scripting tools can significantly reduce
training time and provide a consistent presentation that the operator can follow, as
well as offer answers to FAQs (frequently
asked questions) and context-sensitive
product information.
Operator performance and productivity
reporting tools are essential to successfully manage any call center effectively. Call
center managers must constantly manage
the need to keep their work force busy,
along with the return on investment and
performance goals of their clients, to
ensure there is a win-win situation for
everyone involved.
MICHAEL WHITE is senior vice president of information technology infrastructure and call center technology at InfoCision
Management Corp., Akron. Reach him at (330) 668-1400 or
[email protected]. In business for 25 years, InfoCision
Management Corporation is the second largest privately held
teleservices company and a leading provider of customer care
services, commercial sales and marketing for a variety of Fortune
500 companies and smaller businesses. InfoCision is also a
leader of inbound and outbound marketing for nonprofit, religious
and political organizations. InfoCision operates 31 call centers at
12 locations throughout Ohio, Pennsylvania and West Virginia.
For more information, visit www.infocision.com.
