InformationWeek.com

Welcome Guest. | Log In| Register | Membership Benefits

October 4, 1999

The Modern Call Center

continued...page 4 of 4

Related links:

Right Now To Add Human Touch To Web Customer Service

And from our sister publications:

InternetWeek There's More To IP Telephony Than Just Cost Savings

Data Communications VOIP Gateways: Voicing Doubts?

So MediaOne plans to set up a separate team of agents to interact with customers' queries from the Internet. "When you get an E-mail response from us, you want it to be concise and professional. So that group has to have a level of expertise that we don't expect from most of our other advisers," says Blackstone.

DecisionOne Corp., a provider of computer maintenance and technology support services, is taking the opposite tack. The company is in the initial stages of implementing E-mail and Web customer interaction capabilities in its call centers, and plans to have the technicians who staff its call center specialize in supporting a specific set of customers or applications, not a specific medium.

"If we dedicated 20 people to E-mail and only three E-mails come in this week, we've got a bunch of people sitting around doing nothing," says Scott Stellmon, DecisionOne's manager of call-center technologies, in Frazer, Pa. "Efficiency is everything to us. We want someone who can handle a particular set of questions regardless of how they are asked."

Some modern call centers are more than a point of complicated customer interaction. Some are places to gather and store best practices and other forms of business knowledge useful to employees throughout a company. MediaOne, for example, wants its call centers to play a major role in an upcoming companywide knowledge-management initiative.

From their desktops, MediaOne call-center agents will be able to query a centralized database of best practices, letting agents determine if a specific issue has been addressed in the past, how the issue was resolved, and where to contact reps that have dealt with the issue before. Once in place, the knowledge base of customer-interaction information will be available to other MediaOne employees outside the call center.

"The idea is to bring the customer's voices into the company farther than they could often get through a call center," says Scott Robertson, senior member of technical staff for shared information and knowledge at MediaOne in Denver. "So someone in the lab can see what customers are talking about and what issues and problems they have."

DecisionOne is moving in the same direction. It's deploying ServiceWare Inc. knowledge-management software in its call centers. ServiceWare's Knowledge-Pak software modules-product information about Microsoft Office and Windows NT, Lotus Development software, Dell Computer platforms, Hewlett-Packard equipment, and other hardware and software products-are used by call-center agents to field customer inquiries as well as support DecisionOne technicians. The ServiceWare platform also lets DecisionOne field technicians submit new information about the systems they support when they encounter issues not contained in the predefined knowledge base, such as technical problems with custom-built applications that DecisionOne supports.

"The plan is to have a knowledge architect at each center, with a supervisor for the entire knowledge-management initiative who would oversee the whole operation," says Stellmon at DecisionOne. The knowledge architects will gather best practices and other information from call-center operators who are assisting the technicians, edit the material, make sure it doesn't duplicate anything that's already in the database, and then add it to the knowledge base.

DecisionOne also wants to provide its call-center agents with access to graphics and video clips, in addition to the standard fare of text information. Multimedia servers containing WAV files, screen shots of applications that technicians support, and other multimedia data have been set up at data centers, some of which are hundreds of miles from the call centers. Agents will have access to them through a Web interface on their desktop PCs.

A call-center agent doing hardware support for field engineers, for example, might watch a minute-long training video that explains how to install a particular card into a Compaq server. "That way, the call-center operator can get a quick, step-by-step walk-through of how to do something so he can walk the field engineer through it," says Stellmon.

Graphics and video files eat up more bandwidth than text, so DecisionOne is upgrading its network infrastructure. The company is investing hundreds of thousands of dollars in new high-speed networking equipment from 3Com Corp. in each of its call centers, a cost that does not include significant rewiring costs nor the work hours it takes to redesign the centers. WAN links are also being enlarged to provide added bandwidth. Currently interconnected by multiple T1 (1.5 Mbps) connections, the links are being enlarged to T3 (45 Mbps) or OC3 (155 Mbps) lines.

continued...page 5
return to page 1, 2, 3