The Global Association for Contact Center Best Practices & Networking

The Big Bad Wolf

"I will huff, and I will puff until I blow your house down."You might recognise this line from your childhood … or from stories you read to your children today.It is what the big bad wolf says as he torments the three little pigs while trying to blow down their houses.Fortunately for the three little pigs, particularly the first two, they are safe because the third little pig was smart enough to build a brick house.

So what does this have to do with customer contact solutions? … Infrastructure.

What is Infrastructure?

The right infrastructure provides the means to ensure your customers receive excellent, efficient service – today and over time.

According to Webster's Dictionary, infrastructure is:

a)An underlying base or foundation.

b)The basic facilities needed for the functioning of a system.

For customer contact centres, this includes everything from communications systems, routing software, networks, servers, telephones to client PCs, as well as management and reporting tools, agent desktop productivity tools and customer relationship management applications.

For the three little pigs, the right infrastructure was obvious … a well built brick house, not to mention a large fireplace!

A proper infrastructure lasts far beyond the individual components and solutions.The right infrastructure enables you to accommodate future needs in a well-organised manner.Thus, to create a solid infrastructure, one must:

• Develop a solid strategy

• Build a scalable, modular, open environment

• Integrate at critical points

• Assess technical resource requirements

• Test in a safe setting

• Validate support strategies

Develop a solid strategy

Do you know your long-term customer contact strategy?We would all be billionaires if we could predict the future; however, ask yourself these questions:

• How much business growth do I anticipate (volume and geographic change)?

• How could our customer's communication and buying patterns change over time?

• Who could be our future customers?

Many businesses provide five-year business forecasts, but then fail to develop the parallel five-year infrastructure plan.Decisions regarding technologies and partnerships have profound effects on future profitability and competitiveness.The infrastructure you select becomes the foundation for this future.

Strategic planning process is not a one-time activity.It is a continuous process of needs assessment, solution design and planning, development, integration, support and review & audit. If you need assistance with strategic planning, there are plenty of consultants in the market – do not hesitate to ask for help.Remember that your consulting partner must understand and actively participate in all cycle phases.

Strategic planning provide an opportunity to mention a popular topics -- tradeshows.Tradeshows produce the fascinating strategic planning phenomenon – that is, the "child in a candy store" phenomenon.Too many individuals return home from shows thinking they want, let alone need, every little new technology or application presented on the show floor.Don't get drawn into this mental blackhole!

You should thoughtfully absorb what is presented at the shows, but then sit down and logically incorporate the new ideas into a well-defined strategic timeline … but be careful!There are three questions that should be used to guide your planning:

1. Does the technology match my customer profile?

2. How would the new technology integrate with my existing centre applications and business procedures?and finally,

3. Does the new technology help maximise the lifetime value of my customers?In other words, is there a business justification?

If you do not know the answers to these questions, then you had better find out.Too many organisations have seen inappropriate investment drive performance down, not up. 

Build a scalable, modular, open environment

Once you understand your customer contact requirements and develop a working strategic plan, incorporate it into your infrastructure decision.The crucial components of every solid infrastructure are:scalability, modularity and openness.

In your personal life, you would not buy a house that had to be destroyed and rebuilt every time you wanted to add a few rooms or a new garden – would you? Why take that approach with your customer contact centre?

How scalable is your infrastructure?A modest ten percent annual traffic growth over five years means you require in five years a solution that can handle over 60 percent more contact volume than today.Taking this one step further -- twenty percent annual traffic growth means you require in five years a solution that can handle two and one-half times the volume as the initial solution!

This does not mean you must install a Tower of London sized centre from day one – No.Rather, you need an infrastructure that is scalable to capacities consistent with your strategic plans.Scalable means you can grow your centre in logical steps by adding capacity when you need it – in manageable and efficient increments.

Modularity and openness go hand-in-hand.Modularity means you can seamlessly add new technologies and applications to your solution.Openness means that, keeping with the tower theme, you do not have a Tower of Babel nor do you have a language that only person can speak.

As you add new applications such as automation, web integration, e-mail and video to your centre, you reserve the freedom to choose the solutions in the marketplace that are the best fit for your business needs.This is only achievable if your infrastructure supports industry standards regarding communication languages, protocols and interfaces.

Remember the third little pig with the brick house.While he developed a solid infrastructure for his immediate needs, one of his failings was that he did not anticipate growth – that is, he now has two siblings as roommates in a house built for one!

Integrate at critical points

Human civilisation has constructed many walls, both famous and infamous.Without getting into an in-depth psychological analysis of mankind, let's focus on the walls that businesses build, or at least let persist, in their customer contact centres.

Within your centre, information and process domains exist that, for the most part, perform their respective functions satisfactorily.However, to understand your customers and anticipate their needs, it is crucial to integrate these functions.The more integration, the more elegant is your system workflow – increasing efficiency and competitiveness.

Some common examples of integration functions are:

• Intelligent routing by integrating routing logic and customer knowledge.Customer-specific database information such as:the agent with whom they last spoke, the customer's account status, the products the customer purchased, and so forth are all key information points that should impact how a customer contact is handled. 

• Synchronised voice and data transfer provides agents with the immediate knowledge to intelligently answer and process the customer transaction.The automatic display of customer specific and context relevant data screens improve agent efficiency and effectiveness. 

• Blending inbound and outbound customer contacts enhances agent utilisation and profitability. Why have agents do crossword puzzles while waiting for the next call to arrive?Use that precious resource to place outbound marketing or overdue account debt collection calls.

• In multiple centre environments, workload balancing provides a more efficient use of resources, as well as improved customer and agent satisfaction.

Whether the above integration examples are included in a centre's first phase or strategically planned for a future phase, the capability to support such requirements must be part of the initial infrastructure.

Assess technical resource requirements

You are ready to build your dream home.An architect has designed it; you purchased the property and building materials; and the local council has issued the necessary permits.You are ready to start, right? … Wrong!Who is going to build your dream home?Infrastructure is not just servers, networks, personal computers and software.The most critical infrastructure component is people … remember, the two legged things that need tea and coffee once and a while!

Every customer contact centre, regardless of complexity or size, requires a professional infrastructure to operate.Albeit key to the centre's success, far too many businesses focus all their attention on the centre managers and agents, while neglecting the professional infrastructure necessary to design, implement and maintain the centre. The resources you require vary depending upon the solution you wish to implement.Not all resources need be internal.Many systems integrators are staffed to supplement in-house professional resources.Here are some key elements to consider.

• Systems Integration and Application Design: The "I" in CTI stands for "integration", meaning the knowledge and skills to combine the intricacies of at least two technologies – probably more.You need to consider timesavings, costs, agent procedures, resource utilisation, process automation and service quality, just to name a few.These factors must be identified and weighed by skilled individuals to determine the best transaction process.

• Project Management:The single most critical element of a centre creation is involvement of people who use or affect the solution's inputs and outputs.Creating and managing a project team that includes centre managers, supervisors, technical support staff, agents, consultants, and yes, even customers, is a skill unto itself.All too often, Project Management is an afterthought and is assigned to individuals whose expertise lies elsewhere.

• Vendor Co-ordination: Integrating components from multiple vendors is very common, but not simple – Have you ever build a house?.To save time and minimise risks associated with multiple-vendor solutions, consider using a business partner who can co-ordinate the various vendors, from design and purchase through installation and support.

The bottom-line … you need not do it all, but you need to consider it all!

Test in a safe setting

Would you feel safe if Boeing or Airbus tested a new plane by having its first flight carry 300 passengers from London to New York?Probably not, particularly if you were on that flight! While there may not be lives at stake – or at least not literal lives – why put your business at risk by inadequately testing a solution before exposing your customers to it.

Creating the right environment to validate any new solution is important. There are two basic choices, 1) create a parallel environment within your business, or 2) team with a business partner that can provide these services.The latter is usually the most cost effective.A strong business partner should have both certification processes to validate multiple vendors' applications and business labs to design, install and validate your solution.Otherwise, you may find your centre being the guinea pig for someone else's experiment.

Back to the Big Bad Wolf

Infrastructure need not be a dirty word.With proper planning and strategy, a solid customer contact infrastructure is an asset, not a liability.

As for the story of the Three Little Pigs, all ended well for the pigs. The same cannot be said for the big bad wolf.But if the big bad wolf represents your competition, low customer loyalty, employee dissatisfaction and poor customer lifetime value, then is not its ultimate demise the whole point of the story?