The Net? Not Yet

About 71% of call centers are using technologies more advanced than basic telephone switches and automated call distributors to manage and track productivity, but not as many are utilizing e-mail and the Web as part of their business, according to a new study on call center best practices.

The report – co-sponsored Morris Plains, NJ-based consulting firm Vanguard Communications Corp. and Loveland, CO-based research company and publisher ProSci – surveyed 112 companies about their call center practices, focusing mainly on those whose telecenters were in-house.

About 50% of call centers surveyed use e-mail to communicate with customers. Often the phone reps work on e-mail requests during off-peak phone hours. About 75% of phone agents working at the companies surveyed handle both telephone calls and e-mail.

Nine of the 112 companies surveyed provide customers with access to Web pages. Common applications include online accounts information, service requests, transactions and call-me buttons for customers to request calls from phone agents.

The advancement of technology has had a measurable impact. The implementation of call management and tracking systems decreased the talk time of phone agents an average of 40 seconds per call at 47% of the call centers surveyed.

The introduction of call management and tracking software also increased talk time nearly as often. About 46% of call centers experienced an average talk time increase of 50 seconds per call.

Generally, the increase in talk time was temporary and related to installation problems or inadequate training of phone agents using the new system. Permanent increases in talk time were typically the result of requiring phone agents to enter additional customer data or other information for computers to log calls.

Talk time also increased permanently as phone agents were given additional responsibilities to collect information or resolve customer problems. In other instances the new system takes longer to access customer data resulting in increased the talk time.

Benefits most often derived from computerized tracking included comprehensive organization of customer data, easy access to notes made by phone agents during calls and the history of phone contacts.

More than half of call centers surveyed developed call management and tracking in-house, but in hindsight more than two-thirds would use off-the-shelf technology for several reasons, including cost control, faster installation and access to vendor support and technology upgrades.

The reason why call centers may prefer to develop call management and tracking systems in-house is the ability to customize it for special business needs or a desire to use internal resources for better integration with existing systems developed in-house.

The next most commonly used technology in call centers is voice response, which typically requires inbound callers to select and press buttons on phone keypads to receive information or route calls to phone agents. One of the top priorities among call centers already using voice response systems is to introduce speech recognition technology in the future.

According to the study about 58% of the companies surveyed use voice response systems. This technology typically resulted in a decrease in the volume of calls routed to phone agents because of its self-service features.

Voice response systems resulted in 6% to 15% fewer inbound calls being routed to phone reps at 38% of the call centers using the technology. About one-third of call centers reported 16% to 30% decreases.

A key benefit derived from voice response is the ability to use the numerical responses given by inbound callers to activate data that pops up on computer screens when calls are transferred to live reps. The systems also provide customers with automated service features during non-business hours and when phone volumes are particularly busy.

With Web integration capabilities, e-mail “call-me” buttons and faster computers, vendors are outstripping the ability for most call centers to absorb new technology, says Dave Armstrong, teleservices consultant at Vanguard Communications Corp.

Armstrong, who works from the Toronto offices of the Morris Plains, NJ, consulting firm, recently completed an analysis of the ProSci Benchmarking Report on call center operations and technology. “Computer and telephony interaction has matured to become mainstream,” he says, noting that within the past five years, the ability to integrate databases and telecommunications technology has advanced to a point where information is being captured online and linked from multiple sources.

Technology vendors are now marketers too. The new buzz about customer relationship management (CRM) is nothing new to anyone familiar with another acronym, CTI – computer telephone integration – except that now more data can be linked, he says.

“CRM is now the hot acronym and vendors are knocking themselves out to use it. CTI is starting to die with attendance at CTI shows and CTI advertising going down,” Armstrong says.

Five years ago accessing and integrating data for teleservices was more cumbersome, often requiring data from multiple sources to be printed out and reentered to develop new marketing applications.

Data can now be collected and combined more efficiently, compared to a few years ago when it was typically stored separately in “silos,” making it more difficult to access for complex computer applications, Armstrong says.

Most marketers have yet to fully take advantage of recent technological advances. “It’s a huge investment and many large companies are still using dumb computer terminals rather than PCs linked to networks and databases,” he says.

The development of new media applications lags behind the development of new technology. In some instances consumers are more technologically advanced than call centers.

E-mail, for example, is widely used by consumers at home and in the workplace, but few call centers use it to communicate information to customers. Only about half of the 112 companies surveyed for the ProSci study use e-mail to communicate with customers.

“Most call centers have faxes but e-mail should be a bigger issue. While it’s not yet commonplace in call centers, it needs to be if you consider how many people are using e-mail,” Armstrong says.

Most home computers sold in the past few years come equipped with multimedia software, but again it’s hardly used for direct marketing. “My sense is not a lot of companies using multimedia technology but it is in various stages of evolution,” Armstrong says.

Only about 12% of call centers are linked to Web sites with some kind of interactive capability, according to the study. Less than 10% of the call centers surveyed have implemented any multimedia.

Armstrong says he anticipates the use of call-me buttons on Web sites won’t become widespread until voice and data transmission is fully integrated over one telephone line. “The call-me button is still very new and there is no question that it will become critical for call centers in the future,” he says. He expects call-me buttons will become second nature to consumers like pressing the zero on phone keypads is now for transferring calls from interactive voice response systems to connect to a live phone agent.