There are two major components that define a successful contact center. The first is company-centric and it includes efficient business processes and operations. The second is customer-centric and it revolves around customer satisfaction. These two components are tightly interconnected, to the point that customer satisfaction cannot be really achieved without an efficient contact center. And vice-versa, extremely low customer satisfaction can often result in contact center over-burdening, rendering it unable to accomplish its purpose.
Efficiency is the keyword that one has to keep in mind when designing a contact center. It applies to virtually everything: business processes, cost structures, employee performance, technological components and so on.
In this context, the contact center should be able to generate direct revenue through successful sales (of both new products and upgrades), customer retention, collections or whatever else the enterprise deals with. It should also be the foundation of long-term revenue generation through sustaining and expanding the company's customer base (which tightly relates to the customer satisfaction issue that we will discuss about later).
Another important strategic consideration is to keep operations simple and cost-effective. Efficient business processes are critical, since they avoid unnecessary overheads. A correct mix of well-designed automated systems and employees contributes to cost effectiveness. The technological component of the contact center has to be complex enough to automate most routine tasks, always within the company's budget. A frequent reason of failure when designing and implementing contact centers is overextending in terms of costs, with the company ending up with incomplete or severely flawed automations (this topic is rich enough to require a separate post to explain in some detail).
The last thing to discuss regarding efficiency is how to measure it. Every contact center should have dedicated resources to collect statistics about its operations and consolidate them into relevant information. Parameters such as cost per customer interaction, revenue per customer interaction and employee performance ratings are very important in order to improve the contact center. All major contact center equipment and software vendors offer such solutions in many flavors, suitable for every situation and pocket. These solutions typically collect and report both historical and real-time data, facilitating employee performance.
There are various other considerations that one has to take into account to design and improve a contact center. However, the most important thing is to be focused on customer satisfaction. A lot of companies today have contact centers focused on dodging complaining customers.
Keeping customers satisfied has become a full scientific field in itself. In the consumer-centric society, customers become increasingly more demanding and are quick to switch to a competitor if they are unhappy with the customer support. A well designed contact center can be a strong source of competitive advantage in this regard.
One of the key factors that the customers usually require is contact center availability. This includes sufficient operation hours depending on the service (for some services, office hours support is enough while for others contact centers should work 24hours/day, 7days/week). Apart from the operating schedule however, what is usually more important is resource availability to actually serve the customer. Personally, I am extremely displeased when I need to wait several minutes listening to music while waiting in the phone queue to ask a simple question, or when I send an email inquiring about the status of a delayed purchase order and I don't get a reply ever. This problem can be usually alleviated by a correct utilization of self-service technologies like a well-designed website with an intuitive interface or a well-designed IVR.
Another very important issue is first contact resolution (FCR). This term means that when a customer reaches a contact center agent, (s)he should be able to answer the question or solve the problem without any call transfers, unless some very special conditions apply. FCR tremendously increases the efficiency of the contact center (saving time and effort) and also usually results in very happy customers. To increase FCR, the contact center must employ a combination of well-designed interconnected systems (typically glued together using Computer Telephony Integration technologies) and well-trained and skilled human resources.
Again, there are several other issues to consider regarding customer satisfaction but the two aforementioned issues (availability and quick issue resolution) are probably the most vital.
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