The IncreasinglyClever World of Call Centre Technology
Posted August 17th, 2009 by adminContact Centres have become very common internationally and many businesses outsource their operations internationally in order to reduce costs. One difficult problem with this approach is Contact Centre Quality. It is no use outsourcing to save money if in the process you give your customers to such low quality service that they defect to your competitors instead.
Poor service in call centers is often a management or agent training problem but there are also some interesting technologies available now, such as predictive dialers, that improve the maximum operational capacity of a call centre and so free up budgets to fund high quality agent training.
Dialers use a combination of s/w and h/w technology to predict spare agent availability so that the agents themselves are actively working at high capacity. After all, a contact centre agent occupying desk space but not actually talking to a customer is simply increasing overheads whilst not generating any money.
As with any complex system with many parallel components, economies of scale are there to be seized, especially if the utilisation of individual elements - agents - are not interdependent. Dynamic, real time analysis of agent call times, agent availability and work flows can more often than not show up additional capacity in existing systems. In the Contact Center environment, predictive dialers can deliver huge cost savings without acutally costing a fortune to implement.
Outbound dialers not only schedule calls & allocate them to available agents, they do this in a way that successfully balances the maximum possible agent utilisation rates with the lowest levels of silent calls that keep in line with individual country’s guidelines.
Technology is getting smarter