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| Critical Moments |
| Companies that are pioneering the Internet-enabled call centre are emphasizing the importance of catching customers at the "critical moment" of their Internet shopping experience. This "critical moment" occurs when the customer decides whether or not to buy a product. With a Web-based phone link to an agent, the call centres can interact with the customer, personalizing the shopping experience and capturing customers at their moment of "peak interest." By taking this approach, many Internet-enabled call centres report that |
The call centre market is booming. But the market is fiercely
competitive, and call centres are struggling just to maintain profits and
preserve customer loyalty.
At the same time, the Internet is moving from an information
medium to a consumer-oriented transaction medium. Web stores are convenient
because they are always open and offer huge selections at competitive prices.
Some even allow online shoppers to tailor the "merchandise display" to
suit their needs and interests.
A study by eMarketer predicts that retail revenues from
online shopping worldwide will increase by 784 percent over the next four years
to touch $35.3 billion by 2002. However, according to Yankelovich Partners,
there is a problem with Internet commerce: Nearly two-thirds of Web users are
unwilling to purchase products without human interaction.
The solution to both business problems is to combine the
human touch of the call centre with the convenience of the Web, creating an
Internet-enabled call centre. By offering customers a Web-based interface to
products and services, with an equally convenient link to a live call centre
agent, businesses can provide a broad range of exciting new services while
increasing sales, cutting costs, and improving customer service.
Why "Internet-Enable" a Call Centre?
An Internet-enabled call centre creates a personalized, shopper-friendly
market-place of products and services, which provides customers, call centres,
and their employees with:
Increased sales and marketing
Many Web consumers browse online catalogues, place orders, then cancel at the
last moment. With a push-to-talk button, however, many web sites report that
sales are up by 50 percent or more. An Internet-enabled web site also opens up
the largely untapped international market, since such callers can use the
Internet to avoid international toll charges.
Improved customer service and technical support
Customers can conduct transactions or receive information 24 hours a day, with
little or no wait time. In addition, they can choose the interaction form they
like best: Some prefer e-mail, others the phone. Their transactions are also
more accurate, because they can enter their own information through forms on the
Web.
Lower operating costs and improved time-to-market
An Internet-enabled call centre can manage Interactive Voice Response (IVR),
fax, e-mail, Web transactions, and phone service using a single communications
server. This eliminates expensive and time-consuming system integration and
maintenance costs, and improves time-to-market for both products and services.
Better staffing options and employee flex-time
An Internet-enabled call centre solves an important problem for call centres:
Finding good staff. Because agents can be geographically dispersed and in
different time zones, new areas for recruiting are available and multilingual
support can be offered more easily. The fact that agents can work at home also
makes the job more attractive to many.
The Benefits
An Internet-enabled call centre affects most businesses operations including
sales, marketing, customer service, technical support, operating costs, and
staffing options. Understanding which technologies to implement, and how to
leverage on them, is key to gaining a competitive advantage.
Sales
The merging of telephone and Internet technologies is opening a whole new market
for call centres. Many successful online companies such as Amazon.com Inc. have
web sites that can process customer transactions. But unlike books, music, and
videos, which are relatively simple to buy, many other products such as high-end
electronics devices are complex. In these cases, as customers browse online
catalogues, agents can intervene in a real-time voice call to explain details
about the products and close sales.
Conversely, customers cannot use the phone to browse a
catalogue or read detailed product specifications. It is also difficult and
sometimes impossible to do comparative shopping over the phone, and far too
time-consuming to do so by mail or in person. Phone service is needed to enhance
Web commerce, and a Web interface is needed to enhance traditional call centre
services. The Internet-enabled call centre allows businesses to:
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Boost close rates and do up-selling and cross-selling
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Increase customer visits through increased customer
dialogue -
Differentiate themselves from the competition by
providing a value-added service with the personal touch of a live agent -
Enhance customer satisfaction by responding quickly to
customer needs by text chat, Web push, or phone
Operating costs
| The Limitations of Call Back |
| The principle advantage of call back is that abandoned Web-based calls can be tracked by caller identification information, providing the means to re-establish contact with the caller. However, the call back option has several limitations:
|
According to Ernst & Young, a call centre transaction costs between $6.00
to $7.00, while an IVR transaction costs between $1.00 and $1.50, and a Web
transaction costs $0.05 or less. An Internet-enabled call centre allows
companies to optimize the ratio of agent, IVR, and Web transactions. When a live
agent is required for a transaction, Voice-over-Internet Protocol (VoIP)
technology can save the call centre long-distance toll charges. VoIP calls are
bandwidth efficient requiring 10 Kbps or less, whereas a standard dial-up line
requires 64 Kbps.
Call centres are also reducing operating costs by using
e-mail as a customer service medium. According to Forrester research, the number
of people using e-mail will increase from 15 to 50 percent by 2001, with
e-mail-based services growing nearly six times to $12 billion annually.
Customers expect the same level of service and response times with e-mail as
they currently get over the phone.
Marketing
For the first time, an extraordinary wealth of accurate marketing data can be
collected about individual users or, given privacy concerns, aggregate marketing
data can be collected. The data can reveal which Web pages customers visit,
including the sequence, time spent viewing each page, and other consumer
behaviours. In areas of market research, this saves companies money, bypassing
the time consuming and expensive customer surveys that require one-on-one
personal interviews with customers.
Customer service
An Internet-enabled call centre is more than a sales/marketing tool. With this
class of call centres, sales and service is merging. Customers can use the Web
to look up the status of an order, 24 hours a day, without the need to talk to a
live agent. This is economical for call centres and benefits customers in many
new ways.
For example, customers can:
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Track their orders
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Look up the status of their accounts
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Fill out feedback forms
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Participate in threaded discussion groups
When the customer cannot obtain the required level of
customer service via the Web and wants to speak to a live agent, a VoIP
connection saves the call centre long-distance toll charges that are incurred
with an 800 number.
Technical support
Customers can obtain a wealth of technical support
information from a web site, including:
-
Answers to Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
-
Software release notes
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Software patches and fixes
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Product documentation
| Push-to-talk and Call Back |
| Capturing customers during the "critical moments" of a purchase decision requires live interaction, either through a push-to-talk button that enables customers to speak with agents over the Internet, or via call back, in which the call centre initiates an outbound call to the customer’s second phone line. After customers click a push-to-talk button, they can be put on hold while waiting to speak to an agent. Some companies have developed a multi-hold feature that enables This relevant information can provide the caller with answers before |
When the customer cannot obtain the required level of
technical support via the Web, a VoIP connection saves the call centre
long-distance toll charges. In both instances–customer service and technical
support–Internet-enabled call centres allow the service representative to
actually see what the problem or question is. The customer is better served and
the duration of the call is shorter.
Staffing options
Call centre managers know that turnover is high and staffing can be a serious
challenge. It is often difficult to find people who are willing to stay in one
location. A virtual call centre (often called a PBX extender) allows managers to
recruit the best employees regardless of their geographic preference. Customer
service representative positions become more attractive for those looking for
part-time work, especially parents of young children. Agents can work overtime
during peak seasons rather than come in for a short period of time. Many
companies (as well as economists and industry experts) believe that this kind of
telecommuting represents the future for a substantial portion of the population.
A recent Wall Street Journal column notes a 7 percent growth in all forms of
working at home, full time or part-time, and the trend is expected to continue.
With a virtual or "decentralized" call centre,
agents can be dispersed in different time zones to more effectively offer
24-hour service. They can also speak multiple languages. The agent uses a Web
browser as a terminal. Since remote agents use a Web browser as a terminal, it
appears to the customer and call centre equipment as though the agents are
working within the actual call centre.
Extracted from a white paper by Dialogic, an Intel company