CALL CENTERS

Significant portions of real world transactions are conducted over the telephone and many of these customers are routed to call centers filled with CSRs who are equipped to handle a variety of customer interactions. Using the telephone for commerce and associated customer service functions is widely accepted by the public. The brick-and-mortar businesses that have migrated to the Web probably have existing call center relationships, but how will these call centers address the world of the Web? If your current call center doesn’t meet the task, what steps should be taken to bring it up to speed? Should you use a hybrid system with some matters handled by the call center and some in-house? What if you are a new business, without a call center outlet? As a start-up grows, most will find that they need the services of a call center.

A call center is a combination of employees (CSRs), hardware, and software — all trained or designed to aid in the efficient processing of large volumes of telephone calls. It is where a high volume of calls are placed or received for the purpose of sales, marketing, customer service, telemarketing, technical support, or other specialized business activity. To take it a step further, a call center is a place for doing business by phone that combines a centralized database with an automatic call distribution system. However, a call center can be even more than that, it is:

• A fundraising and collections organization.
• A help desk, both internal and external.
• An outsourcer (better known as service bureau) that uses its resources to serve a number of companies simultaneously.
• A reservation centers for airlines and hotels.
• A customer service department for catalog retailers and e-commerce sites.
• An e-commerce transaction center that doesn’t handle calls so much as automates customer interactions.

A self-service website has its limits. No matter how well designed the website may be, not all customers can or will navigate their way to the correct information. And some will not have the time or inclination to sit through an extended browsing session. A website should offer alternatives to these customers. Give them the option of picking up their telephone and calling a CSR. Although this kind of immediate service adds to your costs, it can be extremely valuable to an e-commerce website that offers products and services that require a lot of research or that has complicated installation requirements.

Call center technology and the solutions it provides is a dense subject and beyond the scope of this book. For additional information on call centers go to Online Customer Care (www.olccinc.com), The Resource Center for Customer Service Professionals (www.the-resource-center.com), and Call Center Magazine (www.callcenter.com). All three are have a ton of information — bookmark them. Other websites that you might find of interest include Callcenternews.com and Callcenterops.com. Also use search engines — there is a lot of information on the Web about call centers and outsourcers. Or perhaps purchase one of the many books that are available on this subject. One of the author’s favorite is Designing the Best Call Center for your Business, Brendan Read (CMP Books).

Multi-Media and Web-enabled Contact Centers

Some of the most exciting trends in call centers are the multi-media contact centers and/or the web-enabled contact centers. E-commerce businesses increasingly will find that their customers want to conduct business in a variety of ways: text chat, email, VoIP conversation (“Talk to Me”), “Call Me”, and the toll free number. If a website offers a variety of options to its customers it needs to be sure that the call center it contracts with has the resources to follow through.

Why would a website want or need a multi-media or web-enabled contact center? The Web appears to be a self-contained entity where a customer can surf the web, get information, and buy products and services — it is a great channel or conduit for all kinds of things — but it is a passive channel. An e-commerce site needs a way to handle customers and potential customers who want a dialog, whether through email, chat, telephone, or VoIP.

A brick-and-mortar has a superlative, multi-functional sales tool — the human being. For web-based business to emulate this same type of service, it needs a web-based call center. You’re on the Web, let the Web do what it does best — automate. But at the same time keep the human element — this is where call centers enter the picture.

The fact that call centers offer a personal and immediate response makes it an easy choice for customers — it is also your most expensive one. So make it easy for your customers to find quick access to other customer service channels — FAQs, email, a knowledge base, message boards, chat, etc. before they place that expensive telephone call. A well thought out and designed website can help build a contented customer base and at the same time reduce your annual call center expenditure.

Most of the multi-media center and/or web-based call center applications work on the same principle — the website’s customers click on a “Call Me” or “Talk to Me” or chat button placed on the website to communicate directly with a CSR. With any of these three options, the CSR and the customer engage in a real-time two-way chat via voice or text. Of course, as discussed previously, for it to be voice-based the customer needs a multi-media enabled computer. Some of the applications even allow collaborative “whiteboarding” or “co-browsing,” i.e., the CSR can browse along with the customer, each viewing the same web page at all times — the CSR, in effect, takes over the customer’s browser for a short period of time. In addition, the applications usually can automatically track, store, and intelligently queue emails to appropriate CSRs or route electronic messages to the correct destination, so customers don’t have to wait hours or days for a response.

PeopleSupport (www.peoplesupport.com) offers a solution that even the small e-commerce business might want to consider (this company offers a wide selection of options). This online customer service outsourcing company’s CSRs do everything from managing email to offering real-time text-chat customer service. PeopleSupport offers many flexible services. For example, a website can contract with PeopleSupport for their CSRs (who answer questions as though they were the website’s employees) to provide live chat support to help customers perusing your site, but opt to handle all email inquiries in-house. Or a website might want to use PeopleSupport’s technology (its software is transparently accessed from its application service provider) and provide its own in-house CSRs to interact with its customers. PeopleSupport provides with many different scenarios within which it can provide an e-commerce business customer service support.

CUSTOMER RELATIONSHIP MANAGEMENT

Some readers may be interested in customer relationship management suites — especially those working with an enterprise-sized e-commerce business. If so, look into products offered by Wintouch (www.wintouch.com), Right Now Technologies (www.rightnowtech.com), and Peoplesoft. Note that the solutions offered by these vendors (and others), while providing numerous benefits, are very expensive. To integrate them into an e-commerce business’s systems will dramatically increase the cost of operating the online business, sometimes ranging well over a million dollars.

When investigating the feasibility of one of these suites, remember that a web-based business must not only survive the procurement, installation and testing of the system, but the costs for integrating integrate the system with the web-based business’s operations. Once everything is up and running you also have the additional cost of maintaining a customer service center and its staff.

For more information on customer relationship management read another of the author's books entitled A Practical Guide to CRM (also published by CMP Books).

Go to their website and click on their live demo where you can test their chat services through a chat session with one of their CSRs. Also look into LivePerson (www.liveperson.com) and HumanClick (www.humanclick.com).