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Article : The Call Center's Contribution To Strategic Business Units

As more organizations are discovering all the time, there's a heck of a lot more to handling contacts than improving the satisfaction and loyalty of those customers -- as important as that is.  As a primary customer touch point, the call center has significant potential to provide other business units with valuable intelligence and support.  This can include input on customers, products, services and processes -- information that, when captured, identified, assimilated and turned into usable knowledge -- can literally transform an organization's ability to identify and meet customer expectations and demands.

Sure, some organizations have made this a priority for years -- e.g., the GE Answer Center has, since the mid 1980s, been capturing information in the call center and using it for everything from product improvements to targeted marketing campaigns.  Similarly, Amazon.com, since it's inception in the mid 1990s (yep, they handle lots of telephone, email and other types of contacts) has referred to the call center as an "R&D machine," providing information useful for continuously improving services, processes and self-service capabilities.  It's an exciting area of management -- and is likely to be one of the most important aspects of call center management in coming months and years. 

Overall I believe we, as a profession, are just discovering the tip of the iceberg in terms of realizing how powerful our contribution can be to other business units.  The processes, technologies and human know-how behind capturing, deciphering and communicating information from customer contacts are works in progress.

 

Significant Contributions
The following table summarizes key benefits and support that the call center provides to other business units -- assuming, of course, that the call center's strategic potential is leveraged by the organization.  Many of these issues involve capturing and disseminating intelligence gathered in the course of handling contacts.

Table Label: The Call Center's Contribution to Other Business Units

Business Unit

The Call Center Provides These Benefits...

Marketing

  • Provides detailed information on customer demographics
  • Tracks trends (purchases, customer service and support issues, etc.) and response rates
  • Enables permission-based, targeted marketing
  • Supports segmentation/branding
  • Provides customer input on competitors
  • Provides customer surveys and feedback

Financial

·         Captures cost and revenue information by customer segment

·         Contributes to the control of overall costs

·         Serves as an early warning system (positive and negative)

·         Is essential to successful mergers and acquisitions

·         Contributes to shareholder value through strategic value contributions

·         Is essential in establishing budgetary strategy and priorities

HR/Training

·         Contributes to recruiting and hiring initiatives

·         Contributes to skill and career path development

·         Contributes to coaching and mentoring processes and expertise

·         Helps foster a learning organization (e.g., through systems, processes and pooled expertise on products and customers)

  • Contributes to training and HR expertise and processes

Manufacturing/Operations

·         Pinpoints quality and/or production problems

·         Provides input on products' and services' usability and clarity

·         Contributes to manuals and procedures

·         Highlights distribution problems and opportunities

  • Facilitates communication related to capacity or production problems

Research & Development (R&D)/Design

·         Provides information on competitive direction and trends

·         Highlights product compatibility issues and opportunities

·         Provides customer feedback on usability

·         Differentiates between features and benefits from the customer's perspective

  • Identifies product and service differentiation opportunities

IT/Telecom

·         Furthers organization-wide infrastructure development

·         Furthers self-service usage and system design

·         Provides a concentrated technology learning ground

·         Provides the essential human bridge between diverse processes and systems

  • Is a key driver in IT/Telecom investments

Legal

·         Enables consistent and accurate customer communications and policies

·         Serves as an early warning system of quality problems

·         Identifies and addresses impending customer problems

·         Provides a rapid response to news/media reports

·         Contributes to internal communication

·         Serves as a training ground for customer service policies

Organizations that do a reasonable job of leveraging the call center's input are finding that the benefits are significant -- and varied.  Consider, for example, the impact on the organization's overall workload and quality when the call center helps manufacturing pinpoint quality problems.  Or when it enables marketing to develop more focused campaigns.  Or serves as an early warning system of potential legal troubles (e.g., consumer safety issues).  Or helps IT design better self-service systems, based on the help the call center is providing to customers who opt out of these systems.  In short, when the call center has an eye on the larger implications of quality and innovation, it will positively impact the entire organization's workload, productivity and quality.

 

Steps to Creating Value
To create this level of strategic value, call center leadership must, of course, communicate the contribution of the call center across the organization.  Building internal visibility and collaboration requires ongoing communication with key individuals and departments.  And an important prerequisite to getting support from managers both inside and outside the call center is that they have a basic understanding of the call center's role -- and the value implications when quality at the point of customer contact is given the broadest possible definition (e.g., do coaching, monitoring and objectives at the agent level support these major strategic opportunities?). 

How do you get started?  First, the call center must take responsibility for providing the appropriate data to each department in a timely manner. (This is one of the most effective ways for other departments to realize the strategic value of the call center.)  Call center managers must actively seek out the key people in other departments to share the benefits of the call center to their business units. Initially, this information is communicated most effectively through in-person meetings that focus on how the call center can work with the department to accomplish the most for the organization.

 

Other steps/tips include:

  • Ensure that disseminating information is a priority in your call center.  If the call center is not delivering this information in a timely, easily understood manner, then it is not leveraging its potential. In fact, it is hampering the organization's ability to strategically position itself for the future.
     

  • Don't get overwhelmed.  When it comes down to it, there is an infinite amount of information that you could provide to each business unit in the organization. Instead of focusing on the volume of data, work with each department to determine what information will have the most impact.
     

  • Don't get caught up in perfectionism.  Spending too much time tweaking reports can lead to frustration and unnecessary delays. Begin this process with the assumption that reports will be refined as the relationship continues.
     

  • Footnote assumptions and unknowns.  Ensure that everyone involved understands where the data came from and what considerations are present. Strategic decisions based on misinterpreted reports can be worse than if there were no reports at all.
     

  • Ensure information is absolutely truthful.  Focusing on specific aspects of data to make a case or sway opinions will ultimately damage the call center's integrity.
     

  • Build teams and continually improve processes for capturing and analyzing value-added information.  Individuals with the knowledge and abilities to uncover better ways to communicate and analyze data contribute enormously to better decisions.

There are several additional prerequisites, in the realm of "do your homework" that will enable you to provide valuable information across the enterprise.  Be familiar with your organization's annual report -- what are the organization's highest goals and most significant challenges?  Be sure to acquire and review any departmental mission statements and published objectives you can get your hands on.  And interview colleagues in other business units -- e.g., what are their biggest challenges?  What projects and developments are they excited about?  What would they have information on, if they could get it?  In short, become an expert on your organization and the people who are part of it.

 

Looking Ahead
This is not a new area of call center management -- but then neither is improving customer loyalty or building innovative products in services.  Contributing valuable information to strategic business units will remain on the forefront of call center management because the contacts we handle today represent the latest read on our customers and how well we're serving their needs in an ever-evolving economy.
 



About the Author

Brad Cleveland is President of Incoming Calls Management Institute and publisher of Call Center Management Review. He has consulted to organizations ranging from small start-ups to multinational corporations, and has advised governments in the U.S., Canada, the United Kingdom, Germany, Australia and New Zealand. Brad has appeared on PBS, CNBC, Knowledge TV, the in-flight programs for major airlines, and in a wide variety of business and industry journals, including the Washington Post, LA Times, Wall Street Journal, Inc. Magazine, and Kiplinger's Personal Finance.

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Published: Friday, March 14, 2003

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