Call Center Consulting
What it is and why is it needed?
The call center – or contact center – of an organization provides a direct link between brand and customer. That makes these interactions central to the success of your business. A positive contact center experience boosts customer satisfaction, loyalty, and lifetime value. A negative interaction increases the likelihood of losing that customer to a competitor.
A customer is 4X more likely to buy from a competitor if they have a problem with something service-related as opposed to an issue with the price or product. (Zippia1)
But modernizing the call center is often not a straightforward proposition. Contact centers are often complicated environments, grown out of a mixture of off-the-shelf solutions and in-house customizations. And if your business has been a part of mergers and acquisitions, each new company adds its own technology, people and processes into the mix. Businesses are left with a system that is difficult and expensive to manage and impossible to integrate effectively with new technologies.
A contact center that has not been optimized puts the business at risk of losing customers, revenue, and competitive advantage.
U.S. companies lose over $62 billion in annual revenue due to poor customer service. (Zippia1)
a growing interest in Contact Center as a Service, or CCaaS. CCaaS is a multi-tenant deployment model in cloud-based environments from which contact centers are hosted and managed. This is a framework that businesses can use to transform contact centers and provide a superior, omnichannel customer experience – no matter where the customer, or the contact center, is located.
What is Call Center Consulting?
Call center consulting is an advisory service offered by an external party. It is intended to help guide a business through the process of updating or upgrading the contact center to ensure:
- Satisfactory customer experience
- Cost controls
- Benchmark /KPI tracking
- Data analytics
- Agent performance measurement
- Streamlined processes
- Improved agility
- Additional features / capabilities
A good call center consultant can provide an accurate assessment of the current state, vendor-agnostic recommendations for an ideal future state, and support throughout the strategy, implementation, and optimization of the new solution.
Even companies that have a modern contact center (or CCaaS, contact center as a service) solutions may not be tracking TCO or ROI effectively, or receiving the expected benefits from their current provider. These companies may benefit from advisory support as well, to ensure their call center investments will serve their business now and in the future.
Call Center Transformation Challenges
Modernizing the call center is an enormous project, that presents a variety of challenges to the organization. These challenges arise from a number of conditions – for example, call center technology is outdated, processes are overcomplicated, employees are entrenched and resistant to change. These conditions lead to challenges which include:
Building alignment.
A successful transformation requires buy-in from key stakeholders across the organization. This includes getting everyone on board at the outset, and keeping them engaged throughout the entire process. This will help the business get the necessary resources – not just budget, but time, effort, and the ability to ride out disruption – to complete the transformation.
A call center consultant can help an organization get initial buy-in to a transformation project by managing regular communication between key stakeholders, and providing the most critical information to each.
Learn more about building alignment.
Vendor comparisons.
Every provider has their own way of speaking about their products and services, which is important to differentiate between brands. But how can a business compare vendors in a 1-1, apples-to-apples, meaningful way? A call center consultant can help standardize solutions from different vendors to enable relevant comparisons, and ensure that the unique features and services that are critical to the business are supported.
Change management.
Successful transformation requires a thoughtful, thorough change management strategy. An estimated 66% of all transformation projects fail, many due to a lack of change management. A call center consulting partner can provide change management strategies, employee training, monitoring of SLAs, implementation support, and ongoing optimization efforts to make sure that changes ‘stick’ and that transformation is successful.
Proving value.
A key factor in maintaining enthusiasm throughout a marathon project is tracking ROI. With accurate, consistent benchmarking and data tracking, the value of a project can be proven over and over. This helps keep participants motivated to keep putting in the effort and helps to manage the inevitable disruption that changes will cause. Call center consultants should help to set up benchmarking and regular reporting of key metrics to ensure the value of a project is measured and communicated.
Technological complexity.
Understanding the enormous variety of solutions available in a modern call center, and creating a strategy that will support current and future needs is an enormous challenge. Most businesses will conduct a call center transformation once – but a call center consulting partner has been through the process over and over again. This means that by engaging a partner, the business has the benefit of a consultant’s knowledge and experience, which is a significant advantage in a complex technological undertaking.
The Business Case for Call Center Consulting
Your choice for call center consulting, ACLIVITI brings together the best minds in the industry to provide clients with excellence in analysis, partnership, and support. ACLIVITI can help you transform your contact center and meet customer service demands; improving loyalty, revenue, and customer lifetime value.
We are committed to ensuring our customers make the best choices to meet their long-term digital transformation goals. At ACLIVITI, we focus on the rationalization of investment and realization of benefits for technology, finance and business outcomes. This means helping clients set objectives, develop a strategy, and choose the right providers and solutions, to build a foundation for success.
Our proprietary APEX™ framework was created to support unbiased assessment and evaluation of solutions and vendors, so that our clients can transform digital contact center and unified communications.
Learn more about the APEX framework, or contact us today!
- https://www.zippia.com/advice/call-center-statistics/
