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Executive Summary
Success often brings unanticipated growing pains to businesses precisely at the moment they’re experiencing initial triumph in the marketplace. When businesses add phones and operators to existing call centers to cope with growth, they run some predictable risks:
- Scalability Failure: A cheap initial call center investment in a system that can’t handle growth eventually results in increased business costs for both hardware and staff. A telephony solution that can’t respond to corporate growth leads to caller abandonment and loss of sales, especially during spike service periods during holidays or successful advertising campaigns.
- Customer Dissatisfaction and Abandonment: Customers whose calls are repeatedly transferred or whose files are neither current nor readily accessible report that they are dissatisfied with call center personnel. A customer on hold is a customer who will gladly do business elsewhere.
- Mounting Staffing Costs: New employee training and lost employee experience and efficiency are the obvious costs of call center staffing growth. However, pouring money into an obsolete, non-integrated system means foregoing the host of cost-lowering features the latest systems provide.
- Unchecked Calling Costs: Compared to today’s efficient telephony solutions, old systems waste significant amounts of money on incoming and outgoing calls.
Today, companies can prosper from a wide range of computer telephony integration (CTI) solutions. CTI is the full integration of voice and data systems. The convergence of computer systems with call center operations adds increased scalability and muscle to existing business operations. Whether companies replace call center operations from the ground up or add computer integration to existing telephony, the business advantages of implementing the latest CTI systems include:
- Enhancing customer service for client retention and up-selling
- Increasing staff effectiveness and accountability
- Devoting management time and energy to running the business rather than compensating for an outdated communications network
- Controlling call center costs
Estimating the return on investment in new telephony can be tricky, since so much depends upon organizational and infrastructure readiness for today’s converged call center solutions. But the evidence is plain: many companies already enjoy flat-rate calling, automatic call distribution, interactive voice response, and integrated screen tracking made possible by computer telephony integration.
Companies who have implemented today’s powerful telephony are experiencing substantial immediate and long-term savings, increased productivity, steady customer loyalty, and a bottom line boost that more than offsets the expenditure.
Introduction
In response to mounting demands on their call centers, successful companies providing business-tobusiness sales and services are changing their communication strategies. Where they used to give incoming calls equal weight, now savvy businesses strategically sift and route clients based on sales metrics, campaigns, relationship history, and agent expertise. Today’s telephony delivers these communication advantages.
Twenty-first century communications solutions can be implemented without undue organizational strife through the integration of voice and data systems. Companies can create seamless interactions between clients and support staff through immediate and accurate transactions merged with deep data support and dramatically reduced costs. The new model (see Figure 1, below) not only creates an expert and efficient brand experience for corporate customers, it multiplies dividends each time a call is transacted and data updated through the software backbone.
The net gains enjoyed by companies using today’s latest CTI solutions fall into two categories. First, the technologically “today” company with adequate telephony solutions experience fewer real-time emergencies. Second, in-touch companies have more time and resources to explore and implement advanced strategies and capabilities.
Costs Add Up Without the Right Phone System
According to cash flow consultant Andrew Goodin (2006), the average American business turns over approximately one fourth of its customers annually due to poor service, lower rates from competitors, or transfers to more innovative companies. Why? A business that experiences too much success too quickly can grow into a downward spiral of poor customer service, undependable order fulfillment, and interminable call center hold times.
Business growth, ironically, multiplies costs—especially for those companies who outgrow their communications systems. A telephony solution that can’t keep up with either immediate or long-term communication needs invites these predictable problems:
Scalability Failure
If a business buys telephony on the cheap initially, the system and customer service employees can appear to thrive during the initial startup period. However, successful expansion requires additional communications capacity.
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