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October 4, 1999

The Modern Call Center

Customer relationships and loyalty take center stage

By Brian Riggs and Mary E. Thyfault

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Illustration by Bob Scott or many enterprises, a call center provides the first-and sometimes only-direct contact with customers. But increasingly sophisticated customers expect more out of a call center than simply to press 1 for accounting, 2 for product support, etc. They want to make contact with someone who can answer their questions and resolve their problems.

Companies are responding by trying to enhance their call centers with new forms of communications and easier access to knowledge databases. In the process, they are transforming their call centers into a focal point for building and managing customer relationships and maintaining customer loyalty.

"There is a growing recognition at the executive level that their service centers play a pivotal role in attracting new customers and keeping old ones," says Maura Burke Weiner, a principal with the Service Impact Group in Fairfax, Va.

That's why today's call center is being asked to do much more than simply field telephone inquiries. The modern call center is being integrated with other IT systems, letting agents cull information from a variety of databases, Web servers, and legacy systems. The modern call center is also becoming a nexus for complex customer interaction, with the ability to respond to customers with whatever form of communication they prefer. And the modern call center is evolving into a knowledge center, a repository of best practices and customer feedback used throughout a company to improve its products and services.

It isn't always easy to integrate E-mail, Web chat, and other media and technology into call centers that normally handle only phone calls. But companies have found they can cut call-center costs, improve customer service, and boost sales by integrating call-center systems with customer-relationship management platforms, knowledge-management software, and other business and IT systems.

"Companies are starting to realize that their call centers are a way to gain 'wallet share' with their customers, to do the same thing that street salesmen have done in the past, but to do it directly and with less expense," says Jon Anton, research director at Purdue University's Center for Customer-Driven Quality.

Communications is still at the heart of a call center. But communications today means more than simply routing phone calls through conventional automatic call-distribution systems. Such systems, at the heart of every call center, are being asked to do more than ever before. Instead of merely sending incoming calls to call-center agents, automatic call-distribution systems are integrated with back-end databases so that data about a caller arrives on the agent's monitor at the same time the call arrives on the phone.

American Airlines, for example, is enhancing its call centers by installing Spectrum call-distribution systems from Rockwell Electronic Commerce, call-routing software from Cisco Systems, and AT&T's Intelligent Call Processing service. The result will be a "virtual call center" capable of routing callers to the next available agent working in any of the airline's eight call centers. At the same time, the system will provide agents with a screen pop of information about the caller.

"Its like having everyone in the same office, running off one giant automatic call distributor," says Craig Karr, manager of reservations operations at American in Fort Worth, Texas.

The distributed system is expected to save the airline a substantial, but unspecified, amount of money annually, in part because the company will be able to better utilize staff in smaller call centers that might be idle when other centers are overloaded.

chart American also hopes to reduce call-center costs through a recently implemented interactive voice-response system. When callers dial the American Airlines call center, they are prompted to enter their frequent-flier number. The system responds to telephone keypad tones and to a caller's voice prompt using speech-recognition technology from Nuance Communications, and it routes calls to the proper agent based on information provided by the caller. When agents don't have to ask for a caller's frequent-flier number because it's automatically provided by the system, they can cut about 10 seconds off each call. Ten seconds might not sound like much, but to a call center, time is-literally-money. Karr says American can save a half-million dollars a year if it can shave one second off every call.

Who's Best?
Intelligent call routing can not only determine the center most available to take a call, it can determine the agent best qualified to answer a specific set of questions. J.D. Edwards & Co., a developer of enterprise resource planning software, uses skills-based routing software from Siemens AG to reduce the time it takes to get newly hired call-center agents working on the phone.

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