Alfredo González, Presence Technology’s Product Marketing Director, analyzes the keys to tackling the economic crisis in the Contact Center sector. Providing quality and appropriately assessing resources are crucial factors in obtaining good ROI levels. He also recommends being imaginative when confronting expenses and considering different alternatives for purchasing technology.

Here are his recommendations for tackling today’s economic situation and getting the most out of all opportunities:

Keeping satisfied clients loyal The quality of the service provided by a Contact Center plays a relevant role in securing the loyalty of clients, whose satisfaction is essential to the company’s healthy performance. Thus, quality must be a priority in the Centers’ client service strategy. Providing the best service achieves the differentiation sought by many firms in a highly competitive market of products and services such as today’s. Having a good product is not enough; top-rate service that satisfies clients must also be offered. To do so, it is important to establish quality criteria and have monitoring tools that enable results to be followed up. We must never forget that satisfied clients generate benefits in all senses, since they become loyal consumers and a reference in the market for other potential clients.

Recognizing agents’ fundamental role The agents who are on the other side of the phone line in a Contact Center become a company’s final image and play an essential role in quality strategies. The better prepared an agent is to take care of clients, the greater the degree of loyalty will be to the company. A large part of a Contact Center’s cost is spent on human resources, which is why it is so important to recognize and enhance the value of these resources to achieve good returns on investment.   In addition to appropriate, on-going, customized training, agents must have good tools at their disposal to comply effectively and efficiently with established procedures, eliminate tasks that do not contribute value and harness the potential of personalized treatment for clients. Automating certain simple tasks in which agents do not contribute added value, such as collecting contact data or types of incident, eliminates potential human errors and considerably reduces delay times. In addition several applications can be integrated, so that when agents speak to clients for the first time, these agents already have all their data and the reason for the call. This is a much faster way of managing possible incidents, which leads to higher customer satisfaction levels.

Automatically identifying customers Clients are the driving force behind companies, yet we should bear in mind that not all clients are alike. It is important to establish criteria and differentiate clients individually when providing service. Attending to a new client is not the same as attending to one who has demonstrated loyalty or one whose relationship with the company is far from healthy. Therefore, having tools that distinguish between different types of clients and can tailor service levels to this criterion greatly facilitates call management.  Intelligent routing systems can better define the destination of each contact that reaches a Contact Center and establish criteria that allow incoming contacts to be channeled to the agent best equipped to take care of them. For example, calls from clients who have called before about incidents can be transferred to the agents who first took care of them and are already familiar with the problem. Thus, contacts will perceive the service being offered as personalized and have a better image of the company.

Information is power Keeping abreast of what is happening in a company is essential to its healthy performance. Knowing whether the customer service strategies in use are effective and the quality striven for is really what is desired is vital in detecting possible failures and being able to react as quickly as possible. A company’s capacity to react is becoming a question of survival in a dynamic and competitive market such as today’s. Having monitoring tools available that obtain information on the effectiveness of resources is crucial to a firm’s success in the Contact Center sector, yet not all cases are alike. It is important to analyze each situation and each tool’s potential and consider the setting, center size and agent profile.

Imaginative budgeting Although tackling expenses is not an easy task these days, the market is constantly changing and the competition will not let us lag behind. We must be imaginative and take different options for acquiring technology into account.There are a number of alternatives available for purchasing technology, such as leasing and the payment per use model. Leasing offers the chance to reinvest the economic profits that stem directly from its use into subsequent acquisitions, whereas payment per use is recommended for Contact Centers with varying software use each month.