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October 4, 1999

The Modern Call Center

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New agents starting work at J.D. Edwards' Denver call center are usually required to complete a six-month training program before they're allowed to staff the phones. With Siemens' ResumeRouting, J.D. Edwards is able to put agents to work after only two weeks of training because the software sends them only those calls involving issues they've been trained to handle. ResumeRouting is integrated with Siemens' Hicome 300E communications server; prices start at $45,500 for up to 150 agents.

Calls come into an InterVoice-Brite Inc. interactive voice-response system, which costs $1,500 to $5,000 per port, depending on the size and features of the system. It prompts callers to press one button for accounts payable, another for human resources, and yet another for technical support. When a selection is made, the system queries a Windows NT server running Siemens database software, which contains profiles of each agent, details on which types of issues they have been trained to handle, and even which languages they speak.

"Our customer-satisfaction scores have gone up dramatically because customers get to the right person the first time around," says Tricia Fezler, global telecom IT manager at J.D. Edwards.

Modern call centers must also be able to handle the many different ways that customers contact them. In 1997, about 97% of all business-customer interaction took place over the phone. This year, that figure will be 60% and will continue to fall to 5% by 2003, according to Forrester Research. The main replacements are E-mail and the Web. Forrester says E-mail interactions were 2% in 1997, will hit 23% this year, and rise to 30% in 2003. Web customer interactions are growing faster: 1% in 1997, 14% this year, and 56% in 2003.

"Voice is only one way that a customer is going to want to deal with you," says William Blackstone, VP of call-center strategy at MediaOne Inc., a large operator of cable television systems that next year plans to integrate E-mail and chat over the Web into its call centers. "If you can't deliver the same quality and pace of service over the Internet as you do over voice, your company probably won't compete well."

The costs of integrating E-mail and Web communications into call centers that now handle only phone calls range from $1,000 to $5,000 per seat, about a 15% increase over the $30,000 per-seat cost of initially setting up a call center, according to Purdue University.

E-mail integration is a common feature offered by call-center systems vendors such as Aspect Telecommunications, Lucent Technologies, and Nortel Networks. And the financial benefits of E-mail integration can be substantial, according to call-center managers. "When you're selling a $20 or $40 product, a couple of phone calls can quickly eat into your margins," says Linn Brown, manager of MacAfee support at Network Associates Inc. in Santa Clara, Calif.

Network Associates outsources its call center to Sento Corp. Brown estimates it costs an average of $7.50 to field a support phone call from a customer of its utilities and security products. By contrast, he says, it costs only about 50 cents to respond to a typical E-mail query. Network Associates this month plans to launch customer-service chat sessions on the Web. Brown estimates that customer queries fielded via Web chat will cost less than $1.00 per customer if an agent can interact with three or four customers simultaneously. "While one customer [in a chat session] is gathering more information for the agent, the agent can be providing someone else with answers," Brown says.

That's one reason why Network Associates is trying to increase awareness of its E-mail and Web customer-support operation, stamping information about it on products and mentioning it on the recording that customers hear when they call the support line. Currently, 14% of customer inquiries come in via E-mail, a figure Brown hopes to increase to 40% by the end of the year and perhaps to 80% later on.

Divergence Of Opinion
Still, not everyone agrees that E-mail can cut call-center costs to the extent cited by Network Associates and others. Anton at Purdue estimates that fielding a customer's phone call costs an average of $3 and responding to a written letter costs about $25, while answering an E-mail message costs somewhere in between. Meanwhile, Lucent Technologies places the average cost of handling an E-mail at $17 or $18, especially when a carefully worded reply is required.

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