Optimizing Your Call Center

Call center managers looking to improve profitability of their teams will find a recent case study (registration required, PDF) by McKinsey & Co. draws a good line between analysis and action. The subject of The McKinsey Quarterly study is an anonymous telecommunications company with some interesting lessons on when to automate versus when to rely on live agents, with live agents being the best way to drive new sales.

Perhaps most interesting in this case study is the mix of live touch, self-directed and mixed support. Using tools such as instant messaging and speech recognition systems, call centers can manage the balance of self-directed help against the need to engage in selling. In this particular instance, the telco company's own research with customers found that the vast majority preferred self-directed help. Interactive voice response systems, or IVR systems, give customers the ability to quickly take care of basic call center requests, such as updating an address, through speech recognition rather than engage a CSR (customer service representative).

A combination of live touch and automated help systems gave the telco's CSRs the ability to reduce time with the customer in revenue opportunities so to improve productivity. By extention, the added free time gave them the opportunity to engage in more revenue generating opportunities.

Last year Wayne Pietraszek and Adesh Ramchandran of McKinsey & Co. authored a report for McKinsey on IT that provides a good vision for a holistic approach for Using IT to Boost Call Center Performance. The report provides more detail on the hows and whys of call center and call routing and call traffic optimization.

Michael Caton, Collaboration Evangelist, WebEx 

 

Comments

[Call Center]

Thanks for sharng good article about how to optimize call center by this one can increase business.