Call Centres : Operational Challenges

Managing
customer interactions is increasingly becoming central to the creation of a "superior
customer experience" for service providers. Customers across a wide variety of
product categories are increasingly demanding effective answers to their queries and
solutions to their service requirements. Today, customers believe in easy, flexible access
on a 7x24 basis. With the increasing penetration of technology products the contact matrix
between the service provider and the customer is indeed complicated and diverse.

In
the recent past, one has seen the introduction of toll free number services, which is a
pointer to the challenges ahead for customer service providers to manage the barrage of
communication that would ensue. Hence, it is extremely important for service providers
across the spectrum of consumer goods to redefine their interaction strategies in order to
deliver superior customer service. In banking and financial services organizations, the
call centre is no longer just a service window, but a critical product delivery channel.
Along with traditional branch banking, ATMs and Internet banking, the call centre is a
competitive channel for successful tele-banking operations. These are an effective place
to begin the transformation of customer service towards building stronger customer
relationships.

The
mission of the call centre today needs to be redefined from "a cost of doing
business" to "a source of competitive advantage". Customer service
organizations in India are facing several challenges.

n Financial–restructuring
their cost to serve customers, improving efficiency and productivity, and enhancing
revenues through effective lead generation and closure.

n Customer–improving
services to profitable customer segments and building customer relationships/loyalty.

n Internal–capturing
customer experience and interaction history and using knowledge-enabled processes and systems.

n Growth
(and learning)–employee skill development and proper career plans and innovative
training, performance measurement and relevant compensation.

Financial
Perspective

 

 

 

Cost-to-serve

• The structure of the call centre in Indian operations typically does not optimize the
  available agent resources based on calls that are critical and/or revenue generating:
• Given
  that the bulk of the calls come in from low-to mid-revenue customers, it is essential to
  design the call centre by desks organized around skill sets, such as billing, services,
  sales, technical, etc.
• n  Should
  simple information calls be answered inside the call centre or should they be outsourced
  cost effectively? (Such calls constituted 19 percent of total incoming calls at an Indian
  call centre.)
• Should
  the call centre be giving out company phone/fax numbers and  addresses besides
  redirecting calls meant for non-customer service personnel? (These constituted 30 percent
  of the
  
  total incoming calls at one Indian call centre.)

Additionally,
large back-end operations result in a huge volume of correspondence between the customer
and the service provider; a lot of this paperwork is quite redundant. (At one Indian
customer service back-end operation, it was in excess of 1,500 letters/faxes per month!)