Contact Center for SMB
Contact Center for SMB by Blair Pleasant
When most people think of contact centers, they think of a large room (possibly in India) filled with hundreds of agents sitting in cubicles wearing headsets and staring at a desktop terminal. With this image in mind, many small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) assume that they don't have or need a contact center, and that this technology is just for the big guys. Nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, the largest growing segment of the contact center market is SMBs.
All companies, regardless of size, have the same goals – to increase revenues, decrease costs, and improve customer satisfaction and loyalty. While these goals and needs are the same, the way large and small companies go about reaching these goals is different.
Most large businesses have a formal contact center, with agents dedicated to sales and/or customer service, using specialized hardware and software technologies to queue and route calls and interactions, as well as monitor, record, and report on the calls and interactions. For the most part, these tools have been too expensive and out of reach for small companies, which have limited IT resources for managing and maintaining these systems. Until recently, contact center vendors focused on large companies that had the resources to purchase, deploy, and manage these systems. Most of the marketing and sales were focused on these large companies, and these efforts were successful. However, while most contact center vendors were educating large businesses about the need for advanced queuing and routing, workforce optimization, and analytics for collecting, mining, and analyzing customer data, the smaller guys were left on their own.
Many small businesses don't realize they have a contact center and don't see the need for contact center technology. The reality today is that almost all companies have some type of contact center responsible for interacting with and servicing customers.
The way I look at it, if you have a group of workers who take or make frequent calls and handle interactions from customers, suppliers, partners, etc., to help drive your business, you have a contact center. It may be a sales support team, workers in accounts payable, tax accountants at a specialized tax firm, or claims adjusters at an insurance company. It could be a lead generation team, or the scheduling group for a local clinic. These individuals are generally the public face to your company, and should have the tools to help them be more efficient and do their jobs better.
In most small businesses, people wear multiple hats, and require the tools to help them do multiple tasks. The owner of a plumbing business, for example, may spend most of his time repairing sinks, but also takes incoming sales calls when necessary. In some small businesses, human resource or marketing employees fill in and answer customer inquiries when incoming call volumes get high. These companies may not think that they have contact centers, and these workers certainly don't consider themselves contact center agents. However, contact center software and technology can help them be more efficient, effective, and productive.
At a recent meeting, Jeff Valentine, Executive Vice President, Products and Corporate Development of Fonality explained that small- and medium-sized businesses of all types can benefit from using contact center tools. According to Valentine, Fonality was able to show an auto dealer customer that it was losing money because a large number of calls to the oil change service schedulers were being abandoned. By reviewing the contact center call reports, Fonality found that 75 percent of calls going to the service scheduling department were abandoned between 7 and 8 a.m.. This means lost business, as customers got their oil change somewhere else. Working together, Fonality and the auto dealer owner were able to identify the causes, and found that calls were abandoned because the service technicians weren’t logging in, and were busy getting coffee when they first arrived at work rather than setting appointments. By using the contact center reporting tools, the company was able to see that customers were abandoning calls that weren't being answered in a timely manner and was able to rectify the situation.
Valentine explained, "You can’t manage what you don’t measure. If you put a metric to something, you can manage it. While most companies have great metrics from Quickbooks to identify cash flow, most SMBs don't have metrics around customer service." He added, "This is an area of invisibility in SMBs; business owners need to see what’s working and not, and what they can do better. Small businesses don't necessarily need to have workers sitting at a desk with headsets, but they have to look at the business impact of ignoring customer service and sales performance."
In addition to the use of metrics provided by contact center technology, small businesses also benefit from new mobile contact center capabilities. For example, a 30-person software company has 10 remote installers that travel around the country installing the software. By using Fonality's contact center technology and mobile phones with the mobile version of Fonality's Heads Up Display client (HUD Mobile), the installers can handle incoming scheduling and service calls that are routed to them, thus increasing their productivity while traveling.
Contact center solutions lets SMBs route phone calls, and in some cases, emails, and web chat interactions to the appropriate individual based on skills required and the agent's or individual's area of expertise. Business owners can view reports providing detailed information about the number of interactions, how long each one took to be resolved, and other information to help the business be more efficient. Tools such as call recording let you listen to calls for compliance requirements, as well as training purposes, and for when there's a discrepancy between what the customer said and what the agent said. Here's a personal example: the driver for a small moving van company I recently used called me and told me when my furniture would be delivered, but then called me the following day and gave me a different delivery day. When I protested, he claimed that he didn't call me the previous day. By accessing the call recording, we were able to verify that he did indeed call me and had made a mistake (although he still didn't deliver on the originally-promised day).
Until recently, these types of contact center solutions and tools were out of reach for most SMBs due to lack of product offerings, high cost of the systems, and the difficulty in deploying and maintaining the systems. Fortunately, that's no longer the case, and there are many options for SMBs. Traditional contact center vendors have enhanced their "low end" offerings for SMBs, and new hosted services provide attractive options for companies. Hosted services are ideal for SMBs – they are subscription based and don't require a large capital outflow, the service can be up in hours, there is no hardware to maintain, and the hosted provider takes care of everything – including service, upgrades, moves/adds/changes, etc. For businesses with seasonal fluctuation, user licenses can be added or deleted quickly and easily.
If you're an SMB, you may have a contact center and not realize it. Contact center solutions can help your workers more effectively service your customers, helping to create life-long loyal customers.
This paper is sponsored by Fonality.
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