Driving Value at the Front Line of Business
Under today's relentless market pressures to do more for less, many enterprises are still looking for the next big thing that will propel business with high growth rates and fat profits. The need for this type of accelerated value creation is further highlighted by the extreme competitive battle for market share, customer share and revenue share occurring across many industry segments like telecom, banking, insurance and healthcare.
Smart executives understand that if they are going to drive extraordinary value for the business in this new environment, they will need to go beyond business as usual.
The kind of companies who will win in this new environment are the ones in which gains will be made and margins upheld by creatively engaging the customer, connecting with each one on a personal level and responding to individual needs. And to accomplish this, innovative companies are re-thinking how they can engage the customer, re-thinking the key roles involved, and have come to a revealing conclusion:
A vastly untapped resource for value creation is the call center.
And it makes sense. Because call centers deal directly with customers, they are in a perfect position to help drive value at the front line of the business - they provide both immediacy and personal contact. But call centers have a tough legacy to overcome if they are to play a key role in this new business climate. Many call centers continue to be singularly focused on the volume of transactions as a function of cost control and it is reflected in the metrics traditional call centers operate by - calls per hour, average speed of answer, average handle time, and more.
Forward thinking enterprises have already begun to tap the call center as an engine of growth by changing the ways they operate and the standards by which they operate. Rather than measuring the speed of a call, for example, they are also evaluating what happens during a call. Things like does the customer have a need for that could be met by an additional product or service?
How well the call center handles these interactions as part of a larger service objective is critical to the entire organization's drive for value creation and success.
A simple review of call center math shows the importance of a revenue and customer loyalty generating functions in the call center. Consider an enterprise with 4,000 call center agents. If we assume a reasonable workload of 50 to 60 customer touches each work day then the organization makes more than 200,000 customer touches per day - more than 40 million per year.
With this kind of pipeline for growth in place, it makes sound business sense to tap into and fully leverage this asset.
But to do so, organizations need to shift the call center reality from a volume - driven environment to a value - based business.
So the fundamental questions for executives are:
- How can the call center create value for the customer?
- How can the call center create value for the business?
Successful companies are addressing these challenging questions and finding answers in the call center that are leading directly to competitive advantage.
What about you?
