Most call centers have sales, support, and customer service functions. In many organizations, you will find this department has a large number of staff as compared to other departments. This being one of the most crucial departments within an organization, it is of paramount importance that the activities within this department operate seamlessly. Through centralization of sales, support staff, and customer care, many organizations are able to address large numbers of inbound and outbound calls.
It isn’t a must to set a call center where the head offices of organizations are, hence you will find most organizations setting up call centers in places where they can obtain cheaper labor in terms of personnel and skills to run the service. In consideration of the above-mentioned issues, it is obvious that a disconnected call center operating currently will phase numerous challenges in terms of phone call flow, customer relations, ticket tracking, Support operations, engineers operations, agents operations, and system flow.
The most important step is to determine and analyze the types of call, the channeling path, and the technical support assignment depending on the type of support required by the call. If we have a disconnected system it will be very hard o determine the shortest path to a call solution. This is because the call will be moved from point to point without a clear marker of where the appropriate solution will be found. Through efficient call flow setup, it will be easier to note whether a call requires an automated response touch with a live operator. In an automated attendant model, it is important for the menu option to be as minimal as possible for the caller to remember. This model is considered important for first-time callers who are not sure of what response to get as a solution to their problem (Frost, 2007).
After a call is received in a call center, it is vital for the call to be identified, recorded or reported and then tracked for assignment to the appropriate support, be it sales, customer service or technical support until the problem is fully resolved. Many times you will find a call ticket requiring solutions from several levels of support members depending on their area of technical expertise. This will require an efficient system to be set for tracking data flow in order to resolve a call ticket in the shortest time possible.
For the case of a disconnected call center, data will move in a disorganized manner making it very hard to trace at which level the troubled ticket has reached and whether the correct steps have been followed in the process of resolution. A disconnected call center leads to a scenario where you will find the staff at the call center exhausted with a group of service dissatisfied customers impacting negatively on the image of an organization.
In a call center, the agent is the first person responsible to handle a customer call whether by chat, telephone or email. Irrespective of the manner of call, there should be a designated systematic flow on how the customer is handled. Any flux in the process of handling the customer may lead to a customer not being satisfied with a solution or not liking the process leading to the solution obtained. In a disconnected call center there is high possibility of a large volume of support calls not being handled in the appropriate way.
This will lead to a big percentage of customers being dissatisfied with the service. This creates the need of having a systematic flow on how a customer should be handled creating a general picture of a superb flow of relationship in the resolution process. Some of the core areas which might be affected in a disconnected call center are; inadequacy of the agent not being a good listener, poor command of the language being spoken, the caller is given a very divided attention, poor identification and note down of important points during a conversation and ineffective design of an automated call agent.
It should be clear to identify the beginning of the call, the middle of the call and the end of the call. For a call to have been managed clearly while observing customer relation flow, the customer should not have any queries in mind after a solution has been offered (Mayben, 2007).
Call centers today have systems in place to manage how call tickets are to be resolved. The in-depth of the system is independent of the kind of service or support offered by the call center. Getting software developed by a competent development team will be a plus to any call center. In addition to that, there should be satisfactory training on the agents so that there is flow with the developed system. In the case of any change to the software, there is a need for absolutely effective communication mechanisms to make sure every agent is aware of the changes and is well trained on the changes. In the event of lack of communication a disconnected call center in reference to development system flow will arise. This leads to a situation where the call agent does not know what to do in the event of call resolution.
It is common to find matted technology infrastructure in many call centers. This may include voice switches, speech recognition mechanism, voice response, firewalls, routers, e-mail server, chat server, voice response devices and multiple databases. This calls for the need to have a systematically developed system flow. The developed system should be able to bundle a converged solution of voice and data in delivery infrastructure able to run in a cloud. The benefits of a robust development system flow unlikely to be found in a disconnected call center are; a tightly integrated business process, improved deployment speed, flexibility in implementing new features in already existing platform, stability of the platform and ease of integration with other agent applications (Wembley, 2006).
For success to be realized in a call center there is a need for seamless workforce flow of activities within all sections of operations such as agents operations, technical support, and engineers operations. In disconnected call centers vital processes like interaction recording, performance management, customer feedback, workforce management, quality monitoring, cross-channel interaction, and real-time optimization process are run in a disjoint manner affecting the overall performance of the call center. In order to achieve the overall goal of maximizing on service at the same time minimizing on cost it is important for all processes to run seamless.
The sales agent operations should by no way hinder the performance of sales engineers operations or the technical support operations. In a disconnected call center you will find the sales agent operations colliding with the sales engineers operations. This sometimes leads to a customer being given a wrong solution to a specified call or sometimes instances of redundancies which are time and resource wasting (Dawson, 2008).
Data and voice convergence has really revolutionized the telecommunication industry creating a big impact on the design, configuration, and set up of call centers and contact centers. With the emergence of multiple large services and support industries being set all over the world, there is a need for efficient and well-managed call centers to address the customer care demand. This has made many call centers implement convergence hence not only cutting operations costs but also enhancing efficiency.
References
Dawson, K. (2008). The Call Center Handbook. Illinois: New society Publishers.
Frost, I. (2007). Call Center Forecasting and Scheduling. Illinois: Weaver Publishers.
Mayben, J. (2007). Call Center Management on Fast Forward and Scheduling. New Delhi: Anmol Publishers.
Wembley, J. P. (2006). The Executive Guide to Call Center Metrics. Michigan: Home Park Publications.