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Understanding and assessing multi-channel Call Centre solutions

Many established Call Centres face pressures to open up additional customer access channels. Especially now that the Internet bubble has burst, and many start-ups have fallen away, customers demand and expect enterprises and organisations to offer more than just a traditional call centre. This article surveys the history of today's solution and offers some hints and tips for those that are considering or are in the process of acquiring a multi-channel solution.
 
Just a few years ago, customer sentiment was riding against call centres as an obvious cost-cutting exercise. The Internet has avoided this stigma, largely because it enables customers to transact with an enterprise or organisation at their own pace and in their own time. This addresses two of the most frequently heard objections against the use of call centres: operators are obviously in a rush (to meet their quantitative service standards) and inbound call centres open hours do not match the schedule of busy people (in contrast to the outbound telemarketing call centres).
 
At the start of the Internet boom, claims were made that this channel would do away with the need to employ expensive customer service representatives. Just before the correction, many e-tailers went into a recruitment drive to employ customer service representatives that did not answer phones (too old economy), but answered e-mail instead (a less efficient way of dealing with customer service issues, but very new-economy). And now, one year later, those that have succeeded (Amazon, Dell), have established traditional call centres to answer queries regarding product availability and delivery. So, the question is, has anything changed? Yes, the last three years have had a significant impact on the way call centres operate, and the channels it has to support. The on-line revolution has seen a handful of pure-play enterprises emerge, and the rest of the economy follow suit, and despite the lukewarm reception to WAP phone, expectations are that mobile computing will come of age in the next two years.
 
Multi-channel Call Centres (or Contact Centres as they are referred to in most sales collateral) are not established with the same degree of sophistication and ease that can be achieved with traditional telephony technology. The reason is not entirely technical, but it has a large impact. Skills-based routing can deliver great additional efficiencies in a telephony-centric Call Centre, but in a Contact Centre it is an imperative: only in the largest Contact Centres can teams be deployed exclusively to deal with telephone calls, e-mails, web forms, facsimile transmissions or interactive web-chats.
 
Furthermore, most CRM Front Office software vendors have yet to redesign and redevelop their offerings to include these channels at the heart of their products. Market-leaders Siebel and Clarify/Nortel Networks have added multi-channel capabilities to their products, but they are add-ons that prove hard to integrate into the CRM Front Office application, let alone into the legacy Back Office applications that still produce the products and services for most click-and-mortar companies. Some vendors, such as e.Piphany's Analytical CRM offering (purchased from Octane Software), provide a more compelling integrated solution as far as the channels are concerned.
 
Legacy application has always been a major obstacle in the way of rapid adoption of CRM Front Office applications, and the multi-channel challenges has served only to raise the bar on this issue. Middleware vendors such as IBM, BEA Systems, TIBCO, Seebeyond and even Microsoft, have offered their solutions as the panacea for Front Office to Back Office integration. Realising that middleware was little more than 'plumbing infrastructure', these vendors added applications servers into the mix to create a less intimidating solution to purchasing business executives and re-branded themselves as Enterprise Application Integrators. Companies that have gone down the CRM Front Office and EAI path have found that the additional cost of integration amounts to 3 to 4 times the cost of the CRM Front Office application.
 
There is a need in the customer service market for solutions that seamlessly deliver telephone calls (either over PSTN, ISDN or IP), e-mails, web-forms, web interactions and collaborations as well as facsimile transmissions to and from the Contact Centre desktop. Presently, these channels are served in their own compartmentalised interaction application, increasing the stress on contact centre agents and reducing their productivity. Whereas in the past, call centre managers had to address the issue of department or product-based legacy Back Office applications, they now have to prevent a similar process as far as their Front Office is concerned.
 
What follows is a quick checklist of features to evaluate when purchasing a multi-channel customer interaction solution:

• Direction - Does the product, or suite of products, support both inbound and outbound communication? If it does, is there a strong bias towards one or the other? Some e-Mail Campaign Management software, for example, tends to have great analytical functionality when it comes to personalising the outbound message, or to treat templated responses, but fails when it comes to interpreting a free-format response.
• Channel integration - Does the product, or suite of products, seamlessly support many channels? For example, when a customer attempts to conduct a self-service transaction on the Web, through WAP or in an IVR and subsequently contact a Call Centre, is that information readily available, or does it require additional development? If the latter is the case, keep looking for a more appropriate solution.
• Application Integration - Does the product or suite of products have the ability obtain information in real-time from existing applications and conduct real-time transactions, such as purchases, funds transfers without the need of an intermediary database? Most traditional CRM solutions put an intermediary database at the heart of its solution and copy-manage data in and out to transact on legacy applications. While this may work in less time-critical Sales Force Automation deployments, it is unacceptable in real-time (B2B, B2C and C2B) eBusiness and Customer Service environments.
• Future-proof - Does the product, or suite of products, have the ability to rapidly deploy emerging channels, such as wireless devices or speech response or language recognition? Companies need and want the ability to trial new channels. Adding a new channel to a solution should not come at an increased cost. Rather, adding a channel should be at a discount, since only the channel technology cost should be incurred, not additional systems and channel integration.