Industry Research

Page 2 Industry Research

An organization's contact center agents are usually a customer's primary and sometimes only contact. However, their role has changed lately from being the guardian of the relationship between the customer and the corporation to the keeper of the hold and handle times.

There are many reasons for this change in customer service roles. Driven by everything from sophisticated tools to brutal cost pressures, the role of the contact center agent is changing, in large part to create more business value from a smaller, more highly skilled workforce. Do-not-call efforts, real-time analytics, and personalization tools are placing great pressure on contact centers to sell during any appropriate inbound contact. Fear of customer defection in these trying economic times also has increased the pressure to resolve, rather than deflect, customer issues.

Many in the contact center industry fixate on the significant role labor plays in the cost of operating a call center--70 percent or more, according to some estimates. Technological advances allow companies to do more with their labor dollars than ever before. Virtual call center networks allow ad hoc teams to be created with at-home workers or multiple sites, even offshore locations. Web self-help and IVR not only offer more opportunities to resolve problems before they reach the contact center, but they provide invaluable sorting and routing assistance to the call center. Unfortunately, some remain too focused on squeezing the payroll to see the flaw in the numbers game.

Page 3 Industry Research

The metrics may be traditional, but the contact profiles are not. Even leaving aside the growing percentage of customer contacts that arrive via email and Web chat, the very nature of the "typical" call center inquiry changes the moment self-help enters the equation. As more mainstream customers adopt self-help and solve the simple problems solo, callers tend, on average, to have more challenging issues, meaning that even entry-level support agents may not be able to resolve today's entry-level