Shouldn’t you be looking for a better business result from your contact centre support operations?

Why a traditional approach to support doesn’t really cut it in today’s more complex contact centre technology environments…

When we recently polled customer service managers and directors at some of the UK’s largest organisations, over 95 per cent of them agreed that contact centre operations now played a key part in helping to deliver on their company’s business strategy. Technology has played an important part in unlocking the power and potential of today’s contact centres, with organisations continuing to invest in increasingly complex applications to optimise contact centre performance and ensure that their business is agile enough to respond quickly to new revenue opportunities as well as new competitive threats.

In addition to proven core technologies such as ACD systems and diallers, it’s now common for contact centres to run a range of additional applications including Workforce Optimisation, voice self-service as well as a range of bespoke applications. This growing number and variety of contact centre solutions can make aligning your technology capabilities with business goals a complex challenge – particularly in today’s multi-vendor, multi-technology environment, with all the diverse suppliers, service providers, contracts and SLAs, processes and procedures.

For many organisations, this multi-vendor complexity has increased their administrative and service management costs at precisely the time they are being asked to deliver more from their technology infrastructure. In exchange for continued investment in strategic technology initiatives, contact centres are often being asked to self-fund new projects through greater efficiencies and consolidation initiatives. Not surprisingly, contact centre technology managers are now looking at all aspects of their operations to identify areas that can help these efficiency savings.

Not surprisingly, one area of contact centre expenditure that is coming under increased focus is that of support and maintenance for technology products. Traditionally technology vendors have delivered product support on a break/fix basis, but as contact centre operations and processes become more business-critical, this is proving an outmoded model that typically doesn’t take into account that different solutions interact with each other and that a fault or degradation of performance in one area of technology can quickly lead to problems with other solutions.

The result is that contact centre IT staff regularly have to play an investigative role, trying to identify just which of their technologies are involved, and which of their support partners need to resolve a specific incident. With contact centres playing an increasingly transactional role for organisations, it’s no longer acceptable for businesses to suspend operations while vendor support organisations play ‘pass the blame’.

It doesn’t even need something to go wrong for contact centre IT staff to feel the impact of an overly complicated technology and support infrastructure. It’s not uncommon for internal IT staff to spend at least a couple of hours every day just running tests and checking whether their different contact centre technology components are running correctly. While necessary, these are very time-consuming tasks for expensive internal staff to handle, particularly when most applications have different monitoring and management tools that don’t work together and share information.

You might think that all this complexity and the clear customer requirement for an alternative to the traditional maintenance approach presents vendors with a real opportunity to differentiate themselves by introducing more relevant service offers. Instead it’s the opposite that appears to be true.

Given the complex nature of most contact centre technology solutions, vendors – and particularly global technology companies - are finding it hard to consistently deliver a high quality support service that delivers results for both their customers and for their stakeholders. Whereas most consumer customer service is focused on quick response times, even briefer phone calls and high first contact resolution rates, technical support has very different demands.

Problems often get escalated to vendor support because they are difficult to solve internally and often need time to research and resolve. As a result vendors are fronting their technical support centres with call handlers who are charged with qualifying support requests before routing them to a specialist resource or even to the product development team. Many vendors are also encouraging customers to standardise on their latest product releases, along with compulsory software support and upgrade programmes. While this can be helpful in terms of risk mitigation, it can also result in increased costs for customers that aren’t fully aware of all the pricing implications. Also you can have all the premium service you like from Vendor A or Vendor B, but it still won’t help you address your requirement for a single point of contact for support across all your contact centre systems and applications, regardless of vendor.

In response there’s a growing trend for companies to move away from traditional vendors to specialist third-party suppliers for their support requirements. The general view seems to be that if you’re about to be charged more, then you’re probably better off finding a support service that is at least relevant for your changing business requirements!

So what should contact centres be looking for from their third-party technology support partner? Here’s a quick checklist:

• An organisation that can provide a single point of contact for all your key contact centre technology solutions and applications
  
• A support provider that gives you access to skilled contact centre technical expertise not just call handlers who are only there to process your incident
  
• A partner with automated support solutions that can free in-house staff from time-consuming monitoring tasks
  
• A company that can look beyond simple break/fix SLAs to deliver the technology support services that contact centres need to manage operations from a business perspective
  
• And with the ability to focus on early fault identification and prevention so that incidents get fixed before they start to impact service levels
  
• All backed by clear escalation paths and problem management processes based on the ITIL IT service management framework

If your third party support partner can address all these issues, then you’ll be surprised at how little you miss your Premium vendor support services!