Often contact centers that do not directly generate revenue/sales are called a “cost center”. This causes customer service and support contact centers to struggle to quantifiably prove their strategic value to organizations.  In almost every contact center you walk into, there are significant opportunities for process improvement and productivity enhancements.  Yet even the best run environments have quantifiable in-efficiencies in process, ability to deliver satisfactory service, and collecting customer feedback.  Research has shown that contact centers have the potential to create value on any combination of three levels.

• Level 1 Operational Performance – This is basic efficiency.  Contact centers are created since a centralized workforce of pooled people, technology and information can lead to a highly efficient means of delivering service.  In short, contact centers are typically created simply to reduce costs.
• Level 2 Customer Loyalty – In recent years, research continues to reveal that high levels of customer satisfaction lead to increased profitability.  Increasingly contact centers conduct customer satisfaction surveys with a goal to provide “top box” on customer satisfaction surveys.
  
• Level 3 Business Unit Intelligence – Contact centers are a vast and centralized resource of the customer wants, needs, and desires.  Truly advanced contact centers have developed means to harness this Voice of the Customer feedback and share this intelligence with other departments to foster process improvement, product development/improvement, refined marketing campaigns, etc.
  

One of the largest areas for strategic value creation in contact centers is adding intelligence to the existing ACD routing.  Replacing elementary (often outdated) ACD systems with multi-channel, skills-based routing and enabling agents to log into multiple queues improve the ability to route contacts to the most appropriate agent.  This leads to increased first call resolution and customer satisfaction while lowering agent talk-time and costs.  This improves a contact center’s performance at Levels 1 & 2.    

Further enhancing skills based routing by integrating with a CRM database takes contact center’s ACD to Level 3.  This substantially augments the ability to provide a “wow” customer experience and provides measurable improvement to your bottom line. Identifying customers in real-time categories, such as ‘most or least profitable’, ‘past due’, ‘at risk of attrition’ or ‘strategic accounts’, is the first step to deploying an enhanced routing strategy.  Once these categories are established, specific rules are then applied to the routing and reporting of these contacts, including the ability to automatically redirect a VIP call to the front of a queue, or to a preferred agent, or the ability to play customized on-hold announcements just for that category of caller.  Where applicable, these same rules can be applied to other channels of communication, including email and web chat requests, IVR transactions and even inbound faxes.

The common myth within our industry is that this level of sophistication is priced beyond the reach of the small and medium sized call center.  The truth is this functionality does exist in affordable, off-the-shelf applications.  What doesn’t exist in most contact centers is operating at Level 3 Business Unit Intelligence.  This involves having a strategy to use the data from this intelligence to design CRM based enhanced routing.  To be fully effective contact centers also need a vendor to partner in implementing this strategy/design for the real-time categorization of customer contacts.  Smart vendors have recognized these projects as not only an additional source of revenue, but as a means of differentiating their services – becoming more of ‘a peer in the boardroom, rather than a vendor in the hallway.’  The typical contact center use canned routing based on the vendor’s general design.  To operate as a strategic asset that utilizes business unit intelligence select a vendor that allows you to route based on customer needs.

As an additional benefit, contact centers can reduce costs with enhanced routing.  Automatically route customers sight unseen to the correct collection and sales queues.  This reduces call center minutes spent in the incorrect queue, inter-queue transfers, and increases the volume of delinquent customers being transferred to collections. Routing high potential profit customers to agents trained on specific areas of cross selling and referrals increases revenue contribution.  Such enhanced routing will contribute significantly to a contact center’s ability to contribute to growth and profitability.

The examples of business intelligence routing are nearly limitless.  Maxing customer service profitability depends in part on its developing a system that can differentiate quickly and accurately among customers based on the degree of service they require, the revenue they are likely to generate, and if they need to speak with Service, Collection, or Sales agents.  Not all customers require the same level of service or generate the same potential revenue.  Some companies struggle with this concept since they want to provide the same quality service to “every customer, every time”.  However, retaining and attracting profitable customers allows companies to be able to afford to continue servicing the unprofitable customers.