Dave Kirk
Stan Lepeak

Call centers, whether supporting internal staff or external customers and prospects, are a functional area that in most user organizations could benefit from greater standardization and economies of scale. Like many business activities, contact centers have often grown in loosely managed and uncoordinated ways. This seems especially true when the centers cross geographic boundaries or were constructed to support specific, narrow business needs that over time have grown to support a broader segment of the organization.

Organizations can undertake contact center consolidation and standardization efforts via internal process improvement, through the deployment and expansion of shared service centers (either domestic or offshore captive), or through business process outsourcing efforts. Many organizations will find that the optimal model includes a mix of all of these service delivery models to create the optimal customer and/or employee care function and process.

There are five key focus areas for organizations considering, planning or executing contact center consolidation and standardization efforts.

• Greater leverage of tools. Often organizations end up with numerous tools deployed across different contact centers. By leveraging one or just a few tools, organizations can save on license and maintenance costs. Organizations save by training as many agents as possible on only one or a limited number of tools. Using fewer tools also improves knowledge sharing. Centers that utilize a variety of tools experience a significantly harder challenge in sharing lessons learned about the tools, as well as in sharing the knowledge base that supports contact center staff. Finally, organizations that adopt common tools across centers are able to more rapidly and cost effectively introduce new tools into the operating environment, for example, to support social media needs and demand by customers.
• Consolidated knowledge systems. Related to using fewer tools, a single, consolidated contact center model makes it easier to leverage the knowledge and best practices on how to resolve core support needs. This is accomplished, for example, by employing a single knowledge repository embedded into the tool sets.
• Improved staff utilization. Organizations will enjoy much greater flexibility on staffing in a consolidated contact center environment where, for example, only one or a small number of centers needs to address a 7×24 support and availability requirement. These 7×24 requirements are usually prime contributors to underutilization of contact center agents when each center is forced to provide full coverage. In a consolidated model an organization can route all off-hour calls to one center.
• Improved staff leverage. Cross training is another means through which organizations can get greater leverage out of their contact center resources. Ensuring that each agent has a primary and secondary skill enables rapid redeployment of staff in the event of an unexpected surge in demand. This is much easier to achieve if the multiple teams involved are co-mingled and can adequately communicate, share stories, best practices, and more.
• More flexible staff utilization. While larger organizations will maintain multiple contact centers, ideally with standardized tools and processes wherever possible, it is still critical to enable the ability to quickly shift work between centers. Flexible staffing utilization enables organizations to quickly react to sudden demand bursts in one area by diverting resources from another center to support those demands. Recent global geopolitical and natural disasters are a reminder of the importance of this type responsiveness and flexibility.

While there is not simple formula to define the optimal number of contact center operations for most organizations, it is safe to say it is often less than are currently deployed. It is not simply about consolidation for pure cost reduction sake, but rather involves greater harmonization, coordination and standardization of contact center operations, processes, and tools to ultimately improve effectiveness while optimizing efficiency.

For more on optimizing call centers, read Transform Service Centers to Manage Critical Relationships and Maximize ROI from Equaterra.

Filed under: Call Centers, How to... by EquaTerra