Comment: Click-to-call

Click-to-call, the technology that effectively provides contact centre operators with instant phone leads, has been around for some while and, not surprisingly, has proved successful for a range of businesses across different markets.

The traditional way for organisations to fulfil click-to-call requests has been for their customers to select the click-to-call button on a web page and then enter their details on a web form for an agent to call them back at a later time. This call request is then ‘batched up’ with all the others and loaded into a dialler for outbound calling when resource is available.

This kind of service works OK at a basic level, but if you’re serious about click-to-call then you need to do your forecasting correctly and have agents in place to handle likely call volume increases. At a minimum, click-to-call customers should be kept informed of what’s likely to happen when they fill in a web form – for example, a simple message saying “our agents are busy at the moment, can we call you back between 7 and 8 this evening?”

Click-to-call is an excellent example of the kind of process that organisations now have to manage due to an increase in ‘customer-initiated channel hopping’. As individual consumers we’re more and more demanding, and whether it’s a phone, e-mail or web transaction, we all expect the organisations we deal with to understand that we’re likely to be engaging with them across many different channels, and will want them to maintain some level of continuity in our dealings with them so that we can avoid the frustration of having to start a transaction again when we jump from one channel to another.

That’s why it’s advisable for organisations not to treat a click-to-call programme as an isolated initiative. So the first requirement is to understand what’s actually going on in your contact centre right now. Do you have agents available to handle click-to-calls, or are there appropriately skilled executives elsewhere in your business who could fulfill these requests?

Once suitable resource has been identified, you need to find a way of blending any click-to-call requests with your day-to-day customer interaction traffic. Done correctly, this can effectively convert your traditional outbound click-to-call response activity into a series of inbound requests that can be processed alongside your standard call programme.

The technology is already in place to support this kind of integration, whether it’s a multimedia routing engine that can successfully deliver the click-to-call interaction along with relevant customer details and a copy of the web page they are currently viewing, or the ability to engage immediately with an MSN-style web-chat with the customer.

Other new relevant technology areas include consumers taking advantage of lower-cost IP telephony using services such as Skype, as well as SIP presence technologies that will be able to tailor the click-to-call response depending on the type of device customers are using. Whatever the technology, organisations will need to adapt their intelligent universal queue systems to support these click-to-call opportunities.