by Steven Fitzgerald, CTO, Consistacom
Call centers leak cash and customer goodwill in ways that are invisible to upper management. By fixing them you save significantly and improve service. Each involves the design or administration of your ACD, the telephone switching system.
1. Carrier takeback transfer is a service introduced in the old days of small ACDs at each center. You pay a fee for the carrier to take back a call and send it to a different ACD. When introduced this was inexpensive relative to the cost of toll-free per-minute charges and dedicated inter-ACD trunking. With current large centralized ACDs serving multiple centers and cheap toll-free minutes it adds cost and is usually unnecessary.
2. Human ACD – Some enterprises think administrators must help ACDs route calls. Consider the insurance industry where agents must be licensed for the state the caller is in, and many are licensed in multiple states. The ACD understands multi-state configurations and will optimize call distribution. Instead agents are humanly configured for only one state at a time, constantly changing through the day. This results in huge labor costs, sub-optimal distribution that leaves callers in queue too long or agents without calls, routing mistakes and lower quality of customer service.
3. Agent misconfiguration – With very few exceptions configuring agents on the ACD is done manually, which means many errors. A very small percentage of errors results in huge waste.
4. Guessing games – When a change in call flow programming goes wrong, technical staff can waste time trying to find the error. This is especially true when the break isn’t noticed for days and then shows up in a periodic traffic report. Most other IT systems have an audit trail that will identify who changed what, when, and how to undo it. ACDs do not and the result is a lot of guessing and experimentation that can break even more.
5. Failed business continuity – Large enterprises use multiple large ACDs to handle the same types of calls. They want the same call handling brand and feel on each but do it by manual programming. They sometimes even use different call handling programs. It is humanly impossible to successfully synchronize the caller experience on multiple large ACDs. Your image suffers while paying high-priced technicians to pursue an impossible goal.
Contact the author at tooltalk@consistacom.com.
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