InformationWeek
Defining The Business Value Of Technology
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April 9, 2001 |
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The Modern Call Center
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"These services will appeal to a broad audience be-cause they provide the full communications infrastructure for a call center, including combining multiple channels, which is something many companies really need but just can't afford,'' says Elizabeth Herrell, call-center and CRM research manager at consulting firm Giga Information Group. Herrell expects other telecom providers besides AT&T, Qwest, and WorldCom to roll out network-based call-center services as a means of differentiating themselves from pure bandwidth pushers.
WorldCom says its Web Center Service, slated to launch next month (see sidebar story, "WorldCom Bets The Future On Its Web Center Service"), is best suited for call centers with up to 100 agents, which Herrell says is the size of 80% of the 75,000 formal call centers and 100% of the 80,000 to 150,000 informal call centers in the country. It would take six months to more than a year to build a formal call-center facility for that many agents, she says; WorldCom says it can turn on the service in a matter of days. Herrell defines a formal call center as one in which the primary work is answering phones, while informal centers at places such as dot-coms, startups, and branch offices have employees who answer phones as only a part of their duties.
WorldCom's Web Center Service will provide advanced call routing, voice-response features, and software that supports phone, E-mail, fax, and instant chat communications. The service will carry a fixed monthly per-agent subscription cost, which will include agent training. What's not included are call-center applications such as CRM and sales-force automation or integration of the packages with the provider's service.
Although WorldCom is hammering out pricing this month, businesses can expect to pay less than $600 per agent per month for Web Center Service, says a WorldCom spokesman, adding that high-volume users will receive discounts. The alternative of revamping existing call centers or adding new ones is pricey. For example, a company would pay roughly $160,000 for a typical midrange Avaya Inc. package to serve 100 agents that includes a PBX with add-on automatic call distribution software and reporting capabilities, as well as phones and integration services, according to Avaya. Add a voice-response unit, which responds to keypad entries or voice commands to provide basic information and answers to simple questions, and the price tag goes up between $65,000 and $250,000.
And that's all just to handle voice calls. Supporting additional channels such as text chat, Web call-back, and E-mail management would require Avaya's CentreVu Internet Solutions packages that include software, hardware, and services for $100,000 to $200,000. On top of the infrastructure, there are costs associated with real estate, technology licenses, and IT staff to maintain and monitor equipment.
The expenses add up to big numbers for users such as Roger Rainville, president of Pioneer Investment Management Shareholder Services in Boston, who expresses strong interest in services like WorldCom's. That may seem ironic because Pioneer has already invested hundreds of thousands of dollars in call-center infrastructure equipment from Nortel Networks Corp., including an automatic call distributor for the new headquarters it will soon move into. The financial-services firm already has a voice call center in Omaha, Neb., and another in Boston, each with 75 agents.
"At least in concept, [WorldCom's service] is a smart business model, and we'll seriously look at it," Rainville says. "We're very interested in how these offerings will be priced." Pioneer potentially would use a network-based call-center service for a new call center or to augment or replace infrastructure at a current center, he says.
While the idea of providing customers with numerous communications channels to Web sites and call centers is enticing to many companies, little attention has been paid to how to handle people resources--specifically hiring and training new agents to field more than just phone calls.
"This is a gigantic issue that companies just can't hide from because their agents may be computer-illiterate and need to be trained, or in some cases replaced by workers who don't need training,'' says Mark Zohar, a director at TD Capital Communications in New York, the private-equity division of Toronto Dominion Bank. "The dream is to hire agents who can handle everything, but the reality is companies are starting with one agent group to answer phones and another to handle electronic communications. Few, if any, firms have agents who can handle it all."
Buttressing Zohar's claims, one call-center manager, who requested anonymity, says training is a major drain on call-center resources, from time, energy, cost, and management perspectives. "We didn't have what we needed for this type of training so we outsourced it, and it was very expensive," he says. "Also, not all of our phone agents responded well, and this was just for phone and E-mail communications."
Companies gunning for the modern call center have their work cut out for them. Still, the potential payoff is hard to dismiss: Better customer service breeds more-loyal customers. And that can go a long way toward helping a company through these tough economic times.
Call center photo by Burke Uzzle
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