Contact Centers and the Recession: Emerge as a Leader

How is the current economic news playing out in your contact center? We at Vanguard have been discussing this topic and getting feedback from our clients. My sense is a lot of organizations may just be freezing projects or budgets. Others are trying to juggle ways to reduce costs with increasing sales and maintaining service levels. This might be through operational and process assessments and changes or by looking at existing or new technology applications to increase sales and loyalty. If budgets are frozen, don’t just sit still! Here are some ideas that can help contact centers get through the difficult times and emerge as more nimble and competitive.

Customer Focused

Obviously it is critical to retain customers now, since replacing them is costly. Even if customers aren’t buying during this downturn, you want them to remain loyal. One way is by improving your customer’s experience with your company. Only by stepping into their shoes can you really understand what it’s like to be a customer. So think about mapping the customer experience across channels, think about doing some key “moment of truth” mystery shopping – buying a product, returning an item, questioning a bill, looking for support. This is a critical first step to understanding your customer’s experience with your company. How do you compare to you competitors? Where can you be more customer-focused? How can you effectively segment customers to provide the right service at the right time?

Operations and Process Focused

If you haven’t done any business process or continuous improvement studies to reduce costs and improve efficiency in a while, now is the time. You might look into tuning up the IVR to increase usage — for most call centers, even a 1% gain in use represents substantial dollar savings. Sometimes even partial automation applications can provide a cost savings.

How about contact handling and backend processes? If you are still using the same processes you did 8 or 9 years ago, there is room for improvement. These types of changes can help you manage with what you have during increased call volumes and no funds for additional staff. If, on the other hand your contact center volumes are dropping, how about being proactive? There may be opportunities for outbound notifications or opportunities to tap into your best customers to in-crease wallet share at this time. Have you considered looking beyond your call center to other functional areas of the organization that may be able to leverage your capabilities? You may have opportunities to provide some economies of scale to your peer departments.

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