Evaluating A Call Center Solution

Transcription

1 Make sure you cover all your bases when rolling out a solution. Checklist: Setting Up a Call Center The salespeople in your business, no matter its size, need to communicate with customers, clients and prospects. Depending on the specifics of your business, you may need to do a lot of communication with one of these groups. For example, you may need a call center to provide after-sales service and support. Or you may need a call center for plain, old outbound sales and telemarketing. Regardless of your reasons, there has never been a time when it was easier or more cost effective, to set up call center. You can make use of low-cost, moreadvanced technologies inherent in VoIP. You can better integrate a call center into your phone system and into your business operations and applications like CRM (Customer Relationship Management), SA (Sales Automation) and ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning). You can operate a call center remotely, offshore or even virtually. This checklist should give you a start in your planning and call center rollout by providing a set of checkpoints, from planning the project through to optimizing it after launch. Understand your goals and objectives. First of all, you need to know exactly why you want a call center, then you need to define precisely what you expect it to achieve for your organization. Only by examining the possibilities and defining goals and objectives can you then measure the call center s performance and improve it after the initial deployment. What is the primary purpose of the call center? Is it to generate sales? Is it to sort prospects into targets for sales? Is it to increase customer satisfaction? Is it to deliver post-sales support? Once you know the primary objective of the call center, you also need to decide if there are secondary objectives. While you are generating sales, do you want to add a second team to deliver support?then you need to move on to scope. How large is the call center expected to be on deployment? And how about in three years? Call centers nowadays can be as few as three people and still be effective. The kinds of questions you should be asking include the following: How many employees are in your organization? Will your company be in growth mode over the next five years? How quickly are you looking to deploy a call-center solution? Do you have the in-house IT resources to support an on-premise solution? What degree of customization are you expecting from a call-center application? How could you benefit from monitoring your call-center agents? How could you benefit from a geographically diverse call-center staff? How can you improve your customer-support services and activities? Copyright 2007, Tippit, Inc., All Rights Reserved 1

2 Understand your operational parameters and constraints. Before you proceed to evaluating potential solutions, you still have another set of data to acquire. You need to know about your existing phone system and how well it can or cannot integrate with a call center. You need to understand the basic business operations of the groups that are going to be using the call center. Issues that are immediately obvious include whether you may need to upgrade your phone system when you install a call center. If so, should you just upgrade the call-center employees or the whole division or organization? You also need to determine if there is going to be a single physical location for the call center, multiple physical locations or if you are going to set up a virtual call center. You also need a firm idea of your budget for capital and operational expenditures. To some extent, that may depend on the solution you end up selecting, but you will still need some parameters about minimum and maximum expenditures. Call-center solutions can range from very inexpensive to extremely costly. Use your company s metrics to define the optimal cost for your call center. Remember that the call center may take a year or two to prove its worth. Choose a platform hosted or premise-based, simple or complex. Now that you know where you stand in terms of your organization s needs and capabilities both current and future you are in a position to make a clear evaluation of the potential solutions. The first decision is a basic one that influences all the rest of the following decisions: whether the chosen solution will be hosted (outsourced) or premise-based (internal). Hosted solutions are easier to install and operate. They often require no capital investment other than the cost of phones and even the phones can sometimes be leased on a monthly basis as part of a package. Some kind of installation cost is still likely, however. On the other hand, premise-based solutions are often more flexible, provide a great deal more control and offer better security. In particular, regulatory requirements, like HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act), may force an organization to use a premise-based solution so they can guarantee no external access to privileged information. You also need to look at the additional features you want, particularly integration with the rest of your phone system and existing business applications. For example, it is common for an organization to want its call center to tie in to a CRM or customer-service application. Some of the features you should consider include predictive dialing, quality monitoring, automatic routing, interactive voice response and integration of multiple forms of communication (instant messaging, video and so on). 2

3 Finally, you should take a very serious look at any solutions supported by your existing phone system. Eliminating the need to change or upgrade your phone system can eliminate a huge additional cost in rolling out a call center. The two decisions whether or not the call center will work with your existing phone system and whether it is to be hosted or on premise are the two that will most affect the overall cost. There are two more factors to take into account when evaluating solutions. However, in this case, they should be evaluated as part of a testing procedure in which you take the two or three most promising solutions for a trial run whether that is at a vendor s solution center or for a one-month trial period. The first factor is how well the exact equipment offered fits your employees needs, in terms of headset comfort, controls, physical operation, ergonomics and so on. The second factor is how well the solution fits into your business operations. For example, if you want calls to go through a central distribution point because of how you want to run the call center operationally, then the solution should enable that rather than hinder it. Or vice versa if you want an automatically distributed system. Evaluate potential solutions. Now that you have researched the possible solutions, you need to evaluate a couple of the most promising. Is should be possible to at least get a demonstration, if not a free trial period. This is a critical point in your decision-making process, and you need to make sure that the evaluation includes not just a technology evaluation that will make sure the system integrates with your existing systems, but also an evaluation of how well the system works in constant use by actual call-center employees. Once you have made a decision and deployed a solution, it will be too late to change your mind even if you pick a lightweight, hosted solution. The added costs of training and inertia will saddle your company with an unsatisfactory solution if you don t get this stage right, so take your time. Now that you have made a decision about a solution, you need to make choices about any potential upgrades in particular those involving network and phone-system upgrades. You should already have factored in the additional cost, but you still have to make the practical decisions about what exact upgrades are needed and actually perform them before you deploy the call-center solution. Train employees. Adding a call center to your business represents a big change for existing employees. To ensure buy-in and employee satisfaction, sufficient training on the purpose and use of the call center is essential. Different training programs may fill the needs of different employees, such as those for product experts who provide technical 3

4 support or experienced sales teams that generate new business. Training should be ongoing as the call-center software is updated or your business changes. Revisit the deployment to improve operation. You will want to do this twice, initially a few weeks after the deployment to make sure that the call center is meeting initial expectations and that any remaining issues from deployment have been dealt with. This is essentially a review to make sure that the call center is functioning effectively as intended. However, even at this stage, do not ignore any warning signs. Make sure that equipment is performing as expected, and replace anything that is causing trouble. Tweak call-center operations and business operations to make sure that the call center is not adding any new problems to the business by making more work in a different area even as it improves efficiency in the primary areas. You should next plan to revisit the call-center deployment and operation after about three months to examine how to take the successes already achieved and extend them into other areas of the business. By now, any successes should have been understood by those parts of the business primarily affected. If other areas of the business can benefit from the call center, that fact should occur to those divisions. Make sure to survey employees from across the organization to ensure that you get input from everyone. This is not the time to be shy or cautious; look hard at every possibility to optimize the performance of your new call center. 4

5 5