Breaking Down the Walls: Leveraging a Virtual Contact Center to Satisfy the Need for Skilled, Global Customer Service

Most people can visualize the classic customer service environment –  hundreds of unhappy agents sitting side-by-side in a large contact center, all working from the same script. But in reality, there’s a dramatic change taking place in the way businesses view customer service operations, how agents work, and the skills required. In fact, many businesses are moving toward virtual contact centers which provide a better work environment for agents and can greatly increase service levels for businesses.

NetworkOmni is a California-based company that provides language translation and interpretation services over the phone. To ensure that translators are available 24 hours a day, the company’s 1,500 multi-lingual agent interpreters are spread across the globe. NetworkOmni is leveraging the virtual contact center model to take advantage of agent skill sets and create a higher level of service for customers.

Like the interpreters at NetworkOmni, today’s customer service professionals are often required to have skill sets specific to a company’s products or services. In financial services, for example, agents may need to represent as many as 30 different products without handing the customer off to another department or call center.

Customer service is changing quickly through the combination of highly skilled agents and technical developments. Interactions that require standard scripting and basic answers are now being handled by self-service via the Web or speech-enabled interactive voice response systems (IVRs). These services decrease the time agents spend dealing with routine customer interactions, allowing agents to utilize their skills to assist customers with more complex requests.

In turn, customers expect that information given to any automated system will be relayed to the agent when there’s a need to speak in person. Once a call does go through to a live agent, the agent has to be prepared to respond to more interesting and varied questions, and to pick up the “conversation” where the automated system left off.

Another change from traditional contact centers is that today’s agents are not just handling inbound phone calls. Many are multitasking, using blended call systems that allow them to move between responding to incoming calls and conducting outbound campaigns. Tasks often include Web chat or responding to e-mail. This variety prevents drudgery and gives agents a far more varied and interesting work day.

Can a quality agent be virtual?
Currently, agent attrition stands at 15 percent to 25 percent annually in Western countries and new agents are only 16 percent as productive as experienced agents. At the same time, the need for agents with higher skill levels is growing.

To attract quality professionals, businesses must look beyond the traditional contact center and explore where and how the next generation of agents can work. In many cases, not all agents have to be based in the contact center.

Technical developments – both IP and network-based technology – allow for agents to be in multiple locations, and skills-based routing ensures the correct distribution of calls. At a basic level this means that agents can work together as one virtual center, and the boundaries are limitless – even oceans apart. NetworkOmni employs the Genesys 7.2 IP-based real-time interaction suite to intelligently route calls to agents across the globe as quickly as if that agent were down the hall.

However, virtual contact centers don’t always draw on workers thousands of miles away. In some businesses, especially financial services, insurance and banking, contact centers are beginning to leverage knowledge workers in the back office and mid-office. For example, an insurance customer with a claim may need help from an adjuster or field agent who does not work in the contact center. The agent taking the initial call can gather information and then pass the claim to a specialist in the back office for further action. This trend has been made possible by enterprise interaction management software with “presence management” capabilities – technology that shows employee availability and can transfer calls to people outside the contact center. In fact, some calls don’t even need to go through the contact center, but can be automatically transferred from the self-service system directly to a knowledge worker.

Groups of back-office workers often sit in the local branches of a company. A branch worker in a bank may specialize in anything from home financing to investment portfolios and is suited to serve customer needs that require expertise or certification to conduct a transaction. Also, back office workers can be used selectively during slow periods or for unique outbound campaigns.

Another group of virtual agents is home workers who live a long way from the contact center, are looking after children or simply wish to work at home. These agents may be employed during limited periods of the day or when a contact center agent is unavailable. With a group of home agents living around the world, a true 24-hour system can be created even for a relatively small international company. In such a system, it is easy to implement appropriate security safeguards, since all applications and data remain within the contact center.

The benefits of breaking down the walls of the contact center are numerous – for an agent it can mean a more varied and interesting job and the possibility of working nearer to home. For the company, improves both efficiency and the quality of service provided to customers.

The future belongs to highly-skilled agents
Clearly there will always be a need for some centralized contact centers, but the potential to expand customer service to leverage knowledge workers, branch workers and home workers is now a technical reality, and for many organizations, a business necessity. The virtual contact center is one of the major tools to reconcile the need for more skilled, specialized customer support. The outdated image of the contact center may quickly become ancient history, as customers embrace self-service from the Web, speech-enabled automation and a new breed of highly-skilled agents to serve their more complex needs.

Wes Hayden is CEO of Genesys Telecommunications Laboratories. Contact Genesys at dradoff@genesyslab.com  for more information.

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