There's been a lot of discussion about what's the best contact center to work with Lync, but I thought what could also be helpful is a discussion on HOW to buy a contact center from the IT manager's perspective. I'd like to answer the question "What is the process that will lead to the greatest chance of success in purchasing a new contact center?".
First, a quick note of caution: If you're moving forward with a major Lync deployment you might want to think long and hard about replacing a contact center at the same time. If you have an existing center that is basically working, but is in need of a feature upgrade, would it hurt the business to wait 6 months while everyone gets used to Lync? Even if there are costs to integrate the existing center to Lync that will be essentially lost once you convert, what are the risks in converting 2 major business tools at the same time?
This note will focus on a process, a process to help uncover the right business requirements for your new contact center technology, not pick features that any particular vendor thinks are important. It's meant to assist the IT manager tasked with finding the new solution develop a game plan of team building, and help you understand what functionality to prioritize that specifically relates to your business. If you haven't upgraded in a while the technology is going to offer your firm a chance to improve the business process. I can't tell you the number of times we've installed a new center with great, time saving features, only to be told, "We don't do it that way". My goal is to provide you a method so that doesn't happen in your environment.
In most companies the contact centers hold significant value even if they aren't considered "profit centers". The contact center is the storefront of the business and the interactions - good and bad, define the perception people have of that business. More and more companies with customer support, or customer service centers are beginning to understand there's a real dollar value associated with customer satisfaction through customer retention and the lifetime value of customers. The integration to Lync is a starting point, but the key to picking the right solution will be based on what's important to the business, not that they're "Lync Certified" or how slick the demonstration is.
On many occasions I've worked with IT groups that were just given a set of features or list of must haves, a budget, and then sent out to find a solution. This is a very dangerous way to buy any technology today let along an application that can be the face of your company. In the sections below I'll lay out a general plan including who to talk to, some basic questions to get you started and how to organize what you'll learn throughout the process.
Caveat: This article is directed at IT departments in general business but can be leveraged for Public Sector or the education market by thinking of all your call centers as a single entity. Governments, Higher Ed, and school districts have many very small call groups that usually add up to a significant number of seats, and should be considered for agent type functionality.
Create a team, don't do it alone
As an IT leader you may want the responsibility of finding the right solution but you shouldn't do it alone. If you go through the process I describe, you'll find there are many knowledgeable people in the call center and they'll provide significant value not only in your search for the new technology, but selling the change that the technology will bring. I think you'll understand once you'll read through this post and see some of the roles and responsibilities of titles I suggest you talk to.
The biggest savings in new contact center technology is not the cost of the technology but it's effect on the business process of the center. Of all the costs incurred to run a contact center only about 5 to 7% is in the technology while 70% and above is dedicated to staff. So the goal is to pick the right technology to have the biggest efficiency gain on the 70% not the 7%. The goal is to improve efficiency whether that's improving the value of a transaction or helping an agent solving a problem in less time so they can take X more calls per hour.
Team Members
The first thing to do is define the executive sponsor, the VP of Customer Care or other similar title is the place to start, he/she is the one that has the ultimate responsibility for the center from a P&L perspective. The VP obviously won't be attending every meeting but expect them sit down with you upfront and explain the goals of the center from a business perspective, what are his/her initiatives for improvement and what's the #1 thing that keeps them up at night (I actually hate that question but it does get to the root of the problem). I would also expect them to attend the kickoff meeting and the presentations of your final 2 or 3 down-selected companies.
Here's some boss questions:
o What are the strategic goals of the business over the next 2 to 3 years? This will have an impact on financial priorities, resources and frequently give valuable insight that can drive a technology project.
o What is one hour of downtime worth? The value will vary greatly depending on the type of center but a very key question.
o How are customers contacting us and is that changing?
o Is the organization looking at social media to manage market perception, peer to peer marketing, etc. (mostly applies to B to C businesses).
o Do you expect growth or reduction in the size of the center? What's driving either action?
o What is the value of each transaction?
o What is the hourly pay for the agents and supervisors? What is the salary of the center manager? (be prepared to supply these facts to your top 2 or 3 vendors as they'll be able to help craft your ROI for the project)
o Do you have specific goals for growing the number of transactions or the value of each transaction? How and why do you think that?
(the last two questions are related to sales centers but they can be changed to time based questions if your centers are more customer service)
What are the most important metrics of success (KPI – or Key Performance Indicators) for their line of business?
o What is the annual agent turnover? This question can lead to a very long and deep discussion but at the very least many of the vendors will want to know the number and claim to be able to solve the problem.
The rest of the team:
The Call Center Director (probably the most important discussion) - This person retains operational control of the center and depending on the size of the center may have multiple managers reporting to them. This person's main concerns are metrics and how is the center performing against plan. An in depth conversation with this person is critical in that they will know where all the bodies are buried so to speak. Their main concern is going to be how are my reports going to change from both a real time and historical perspective? You need to understand specifically what metrics they rely on and what they wished they had. They're probably going to have multiple custom reports they've built over the years so be very concerned with those and have them explain exactly what they look for in each report.
This person is also going to be able to tell you what other systems touch the call center like Interactive Voice Response (IVR) systems, CTI apps, desktop apps, remote agents, call recording, workforce management (WFM), wallboards and a host of other potential integration issues that have to be cared for. You probably need to talk with several of the manager's of these systems, and depending on the importance to your business, you may want to include them in your team. Call Recording tends to be a big deal these days especially with regards to compliance, so that's an example of why you need to talk with all these folks.
List everything in your file along with the person that runs each application, I've seen a few surprises at implementation time because IT didn't know every single system that touched the center.
Here's some Director questions:
o What's an hour of downtime worth? (it's that important, ask it again)
o What metrics are most important to you? Often different than those of the executive team.
o Do you look at any real time reports?
o Do you manually move traffic based on those reports? What metrics are the Key Performance Indicators that start any action?
o Can you provide me with your 24 hour, weekly and monthly reports?
o Who's in charge of call recording?
o Who's in charge of WFM or agent scheduling?
o What does CTI do here? What application(s) are used at the agent desktop and are any of them delivered with relevant data along with an inbound callget? (The supervisors and agents will have more detail, but it doesn't hurt to start the conversation here)
o Thinking about the customer interaction – what are the types of interactions – help with an order, bill payment, etc.
o What percentage of callers are estimated to be calling from a mobile device?
o Is there a data warehouse for the Call Center data?
o Do the agents perform outbound calls? As part of an automated campaign?
o Do agents handle email, webchat, etc?
o How do agents interact with each other? Do you have experts assigned for the teams to work with? Is there a IM client in use for internal communication?
Telecom Manager - The telecom manager will be a wealth of information so if that individual has not been involved in the Lync discussion, you definitely want to involve them in this discussion. Now that you've learned all the systems that touch the call center you probably want to talk to the person responsible for installing everything, or at least setting up the connections so they interact. This resource will be able to save you tons of time in this process and will "speak the language" so to speak when it comes to voice related tools. Make this person an integral part of your team, in a fairly sophisticated center you really can't proceed without them.
Floor Supervisor - a conversation with this person is going to be an extension of the conversation you had with the center director but focused more on the real time aspects of call routing. Supervisor duties usually have to do with agent monitoring, assisting agents on difficult calls, adherence, and time and attendance monitoring. A conversation with a longtime supervisor can be very enlightening because these folks usually rose through the ranks and know how agents game the system. Yes, agents are gaming the system right now to avoid calls, transferring tough calls, and reaching performance bogeys any way possible.
Sit (walk around) with the Supervisors - See how many calls they listen in on, see how easy or how difficult it is.
Supervisor questions:
o Work off the questions form the director, follow up anything you didn't quite understand.
o What's your day like?
o What would make your job easier?
o What tools did they use at other jobs that worked better than what they have here?
o Can you show me the reports you use?
o Do they work from a dashboard or an application?
o What metrics are you judged by?
· Example: What is your agent occupancy target? How often do you make it? What are the main causes of missing your number?
Agents - First thing to do is sit in on calls, multiple calls if you have different types of calls in the center, watch what the agent does, watch for the screen that gets delivered, look for areas technically that you can shorten the length of the call. See how many applications per call they use or how many they have open at any given time (work related of course).
At this point you've probably captured most of the information you'll need to move forward. Hopefully you've recorded, categorized and prioritized it in a format like Excel that can be easily understood and used to score each vendor. You've also talked to several people so you may want to pick a few of them to join your team. I would then circulate the collected information to your boss along with the VP of CC and the Director to see if they'd like to make any changes in the prioritization. From here on out you're probably familiar with the buying process so go get'em.
