Exony Urges Contact Centre Managers To Take The Power Back

Published 24th January 2008

Best Practice Guide Launched to Help Managers to Create Agile, Customer-focussed Contact Centres...

Newbury, 23 January 2008: Managers and supervisors in Virtual Contact Centres (VCCs) need to “take the power back” to avoid the unnecessary delays and obstacles often presented by in-house and third party technical staff, Exony warned. The interaction intelligence software developer today launched the latest in its Best Practice series aimed at helping VCC managers and supervisors swiftly implement critical operational changes and avoid over-reliance on technical resources. The company sees the delays caused by the cultural gap between managers and technical staff as adversely impacting responsiveness, customer service, agent productivity and, ultimately, competitiveness.

The UK contact centre market saw sustained growth in 2007, including a three per cent increase in the number of centres opening (source: Market & Business Development, January 2008). As part of this growth many organisations are adopting VCCs – bringing together resources from multiple internal and external locations to create agile, responsive solutions to customer interaction management. With expansion of the contact centre and the rise of the VCC, Exony warns of the challenges facing supervisors and managers, who are the individuals best placed to appreciate the necessary call routing changes between numerous sites or remote agents to ensure that contact centre resources are working at an optimal level without long call queues.

However, onsite and external teams are often responsible for adapting call routing, meaning that operational changes often involve lengthy sign-off processes with the need for qualified technical staff to carry out the work – potentially leading to long service delays, errors and a lack of responsiveness.

With technology available now on the market to alleviate the problem, Exony CEO Rex Dorricott believes that VCC managers and supervisors must arm themselves with the tools to manage call routing in real-time themselves.

“Today’s VCCs are more complex than ever before and current archaic processes prevalent in the industry can adversely affect responsiveness and the ability to meet customer demands,” he warned. “In such a competitive market agility is key if resources are to be matched to customer demands. Managers and supervisors can’t take the risk of relying on technical staff, they need to be in control themselves and able to make changes in real-time as customer needs change.”

Exony advises that the right technology solution will enable VCCs to react immediately to current, planned or unforeseen events. Such a system should:

- allow supervisors and managers to change the VCC’s call routing easily, in real-time, and without relying on in-house or third-party resources

- provide parameterised script modification via an on-screen interface, allowing managers to change call weighting and volume between in-house and outsourced sites themselves

- deliver accurate data to enable managers to make informed decisions and take appropriate action

- work with Intelligent Network (IN) and call routing platforms, including Cisco ICM and IP contact centres

- permit routing changes within a secure framework, ensuring changes affect appropriate parts of the organisation, and that only individuals with the required authority can implement changes

The Exony Best Practice Series, issued monthly, can be downloaded from www.exony.com