Identifying the key technologies and initiatives that will deliver budget savings during 2009

Today’s extreme market conditions mean that contact centre operators need to successfully balance making necessary investments to improve their customer service while managing the inevitable business pressures on their revenues and costs. Ultimately it will be those companies that can both compete on cost and still deliver a high level of customer satisfaction that are likely to succeed in the downturn. That’s why it’s essential for contact centre management to identify those areas where they’re already spending too much, and release that value to invest in the projects and initiatives that can improve the customer experience and generate positive outcomes for their business.

For 2009 it is essential that the technology budget remains closely focused on the solutions that can actually lead to outcomes that will directly impact the bottom line – such as better optimised resources, improved systems usage, reduced agent overstaffing and improved attrition, higher levels of automation and enhanced self-service, improved sales conversion rates, and reducing fraud. The good news for organisations is that with established technologies such as Workforce Management, Voice Self-service, desktop integration, SIP-based solutions and innovations such as biometrics, there are still major opportunities for contact centres to realise such savings by doing more with less.

Delivering a demonstrable ROI

The need for projects to deliver a demonstrable Return on Investment has increased the focus on proven technology solutions that will be able to deliver bottom line savings through improved optimisation and higher levels of automation. Another key area that requires additional focus is in the ongoing technology support arena, where many organisations still appear to be paying too much – often up to 30 percent – for their annual support and maintenance contracts. Given that boards are currently reluctant to sanction additional capital expenditure, it will be through effective ROI savings, greater operational efficiencies and smarter procurement that organisations will unlock the funding for new projects, and deliver continued value in today’s challenging economic climate.

For 2009 the focus will be on those technologies and solutions that can deliver a difference in the next 12 months, not later, and organisations are now looking seriously at those projects with longer ROIs. In our opinion the contact centre solutions and operational areas that can consistently deliver on ROI expectations are Workforce Management, the Agent Desktop, increased automation, enhanced security, and more effective system support procurement.

Unlocking efficiencies through Workforce Management

With its ability to reduce agent overstaffing and improve attrition, Workforce Optimisation – and specifically Workforce Management (WFM) - can help organisations to do more with less, leading to real bottom line benefits. At Sabio we’ve seen consistent productivity savings of between five and 15 percent through effective WFM deployments, and WFM ROIs within four months from overtime savings alone. For 2009, WFM can provide a critical differentiator for firms that are looking to optimise the performance of their most expensive asset – their people.

Successful WFM and Workforce Optimisation projects will be key in helping organisations achieve their target efficiency savings, and the good news is that there are certainly real benefits to be gained. Among recent Sabio projects, we’ve seen an implementation that delivered a WFM ROI within four months from the overtime saving alone, while a major 1,000+ agent WFM project not only delivered an ROI in eight months, but now delivers ongoing savings of at least Ł1 million a year through enhanced agent scheduling.

Analysts such as Gartner also acknowledge that solutions such as Workforce Management will also have a role to play outside of the contact centre, suggesting that the broader concept of Workforce Optimisation can be effective enterprise-wide, particularly in key-areas such as the backoffice and branch networks. At Sabio we’re already working with one of the country’s top building societies to deploy a Workforce Management solution in a number of branch locations to assess ways of gaining additional efficiencies. During 2009 and beyond we expect WFM to play an increasing role outside of the contact centre.

Integrating the Agent Desktop

YouGov research commissioned by Sabio, ‘Voice of the Agent 2008’, highlighted that poorly performing IT systems were the biggest cause of job frustration for UK contact centre agents. Key IT barriers to productivity included slow systems and applications crashing, over-complicated and user-unfriendly processes, and poor systems integration, with agents frequently having to cut and paste customer data between different applications. The research also found that over a third of agents are using five or more application passwords to carry out their daily role, with 30 percent spending more than five minutes each logging into applications at the start of the day.

Using agents to effectively integrate different corporate IT components is an expensive and inefficient use of their time, and there is increasingly clear evidence that the latest generation of clean and intuitive agent desktops are having a significant impact on agent productivity, with the real benefits coming from giving agents the support and freedom to do their job better. One Sabio project has already seen a desktop application reducing transaction handling times and helping to increase agent sales rates by almost 50 per cent.

By helping organisations to ‘detox their desktops’, and working with them to develop the processes that will enable their agents to be more effective, it’s possible to achieve such impressive contact centre productivity improvements, with benefits resulting from less agent IT training, shorter call handling times, improvements in first contact resolution and improved customer satisfaction.

Removing barriers to service through higher levels of automation

Speech-enabled IVR solutions are playing an important role in removing barriers to service as customers take advantage of the 24/7 availability of automated systems, their ease of use for solving basic customer questions, and their ability to improve speed to resolution. Providing the solutions are based around a user-centred design, automated systems are increasingly seen as a helpful and efficient part of the service process – instead of an obstacle for callers to overcome – and we expect them to play an important role in handling routine transactional calls, such as customer identification and verification and account balance enquiries – that can take up so much live agent time.

Working with Sabio, for example, one major bank now verifies over 75 percent of its calls within the IVR – saving almost 50 seconds a call. It’s results like this that are driving self-service take-up and delivering clear sub 12-month ROI on speech and automation projects. The differentiator for organisations in 2009 will be how they deploy the agent time they’ve saved through effective automation projects. For some the temptation will be to automate and then cut back on live agents, while others will use the time saved through effective call avoidance to deliver an improved live service. As ever, the successful organisations will be those who succeed in getting the people who need to speak to an agent to an agent, and the customers who will benefit from automation through the IVR system.

Targeting contact centre fraud losses with Voice Verification

Fraud – particularly Card Holder Not Present Fraud - is still a key bottom line issue for contact centre operators, and it’s estimated that it can cost between two to three percent of the bottom line for most financial services based companies. 2009 will see the broader take-up of solutions that effectively isolated the critical transactional elements of a call by either transferring customers to secure, speech-enabled credit card payment lines – delivering new levels of protection for customers, agents and operators - or integrating the latest biometric voice verification techniques for enhanced security.

The latest generation of biometric voice verification solutions make authentication much easier for customers by avoiding the need to ask lots of personal questions. The technology also further improves security by keeping confidential personal details away from contact centre staff – significantly reducing the threat in some areas of criminal coercion for agents. Additionally, because it is physically impossible for users to forget their voiceprint, voice verification has the potential to remove the password reset problem and potentially remove up to 20 percent of the calls that financial services call centres receive when customers call up to change their passwords – a significant call avoidance benefit.

Targeting reductions in technology support costs

It’s surprising how organisations focus intensely on their capital project costs and anticipated ROI returns while often overlooking the bottom line benefits that can result from the better management of operational services such as support and maintenance. We predict that 2009 will be the year when contact centre operators quickly realise that they’ve been paying too much for their technology support. By consolidating support to a single provider, implementing more intelligent services such as real-time monitoring and proactive health checks, or adopting a Managed Service approach, there is the potential for organisations to cut their support costs by up to 30 percent in 2009 – and that can make a real difference.