Getting A Move On

Many of the selling points of call center’s newfound reliance on IP center around a set of ideas regarding the productivity of workers, which is understandable given that call centers are all about optimal use of people’s time. In the recent history of the call center, “productive workers” has been translated as “cheaper workers,” which kicked off the steady stream of outsourcing to less costly countries, which still defines much of the industry space today.

But the productivity equation has to be continuously tweaked. The outsourcing industry is contending with a groundswell of consumer dissatisfaction with offshored CRM, even though this is a market perception that is exaggerated. “While offshoring has been an ongoing topic of conversation, it appears to have calmed down recently,” says Alban. “Here is the reality: There are approximately five million contact center agent seats globally.

Three million of these seats are in the U.S., while India only has roughly 175,000 seats.” This is compounded by the fact that cheap offshore destinations don’t remain cheap forever. Call center agents in India famously job hop one or more times a year, incurring pay raises with each hop, and Alban estimates that call center labor costs are increasing 12 percent in India annually, compared to 3.5 percent annually in the United States. Labor costs are rising in the Philippines as well, as young graduates move offshore themselves, often chasing new opportunities created by skills shortages in the United States. Alban concludes, “The gap around cost savings is slowly disappearing. As a result, much of the contact center business is moving back to the U.S.”

A call center operator therefore has to use its technology platform to keep nimble enough to source new and/or different agents when in these shifting times. For instance, much has been made of the home-based call center agent as a new source of talent for the industry. While most industry participants concede that the home-based operator isn’t as fully-fledged a trend as would be believed. Demopoulos believes that the trend toward home-based call centers caps out at about 10 percent of the total operators in the United States. But even 10 percent gives operators additional flexibility in hiring. “Many qualified people don’t live near a facility, so the ability to open up a call center operation to home-based workers really opens up the labor pool,” says Atwood. And, regardless of the size of the remote operator pool, allowing mobility in the workplace is seen as a key to future success. “The physical facility–the one where agents are seated at desks, tethered to headsets and computers and watched over by managers walking up and down rows of phones–is becoming a thing of the past,” says Ridley. One of its clients, Sovran Self Storage, a nationwide leading self-storage operator in the United States, links home offices with retail facilities to give those branch stores the same presence and functionality as a corporate call center.

There is another aspect of mobility that an IP sensibility can bring to the call center. “In a SIP/FMC world, converged devices work seamlessly, allowing for new associates to enter the call center environment as needed…. The open, virtual contact center can expand the nature of who participates in a customer call,” says Demopoulos. This allows for other people who need to be brought in to resolve a ‘high-touch’ customer call quickly, from different call environments, and with different devices.

Adds Alban, “With access to VoIP networks, organizations can now redefine what it means to be an agent or customer service representative. The flexibility associated with VoIP enables an organization to access subject-matter experts from anywhere within an organization.” But it also allows the call center to be created around more flexible (and hopefully more profitable) operational principles. “With a virtual call center operation, you can leverage your own corporate assets wherever they are in the world,” says Demopoulos, who recently launched a software-based Open Virtualized Contact Center specifically to address some of these operational issues better than hardware-based ones. “Operators now can share licenses as they log out in one part of the world and log into another,” he says, which means that call center operations defined by actual usage rather that physical seats creates a world of value that didn’t exist in the pre-IP world. This also allows for firms running their own distributed call centers to build in redundancy, he says. “A degree of disaster recovery is facilitated when you have a natural disaster outage in one part of the world and operators in another can simply log in and cover for them.”

All segments of the converged communications industry are increasingly dependent on maturing IP technologies, and in particular the SIP standard-to-be, as they represent the next step change in efficiency. There is a bit of a long boom here. Most industry observers see some way to go to achieve the results the industry needs with the promise that SIP offers. “Some of the historical problems, such as not transferring caller information with the call and the inflexibility of the applications and call scripts to be easily changed, still dog many inbound call centers, [as a result of] legacy IVR systems that many call centers are still utilizing. We expect there will be a significant turnover of those systems during the next five years as call centers move to IP-based solutions, and, in particular, on-demand SIP-based systems,” says Louis Summe, CEO and co-founder of LiveVox (www.livevox), which provides hosted and tailored voice services primarily to the collections industry. “One of the greatest challenges for call centers has been to integrate all the disparate hardware and software associated with outbound, inbound, ACD, and CTI technologies. New standards are allowing integration and deployment of pre-integrated suites that also provide the call center with the flexibility to implement one or more components at a time or to layer new capabilities onto their existing infrastructure without having to replace existing systems.”

But while these advancements can be achieved with little impact on systems, they represent something far more profound to the business of providing call centers, or those whose businesses depend on fast, flexible approaches to delivering remote customer services. Ultimately, this means every business, and these technology advancements mean nothing less than the complete transformation of today’s customer-care experience– or, more accurately, given the dynamism in the space, one more in a perpetual series of complete transformations. V

Ross O’Brien, our Asia/Pacific Editor, is a long-time telecom analyst, consultant, writer, and speaker who regularly appears on CNBC and CNN. He is headquartered in Hong Kong. You can reach him at robrien@vonmag.com.