There can be many reasons for an organization to decide it is time to create a call center or contact center. Perhaps organic growth, a new product, service or acquisition is resulting in calls swamping the switchboard, or customers are tracking down the administrative offices to trace an order, or email volumes are surging and going unanswered?
By creating a call or contact center and being able to direct and centrally manage all call, emails, chats and other channels of communications, organizations can realize both financial savings and improvements in service quality and customer satisfaction. Whatever the cause, once an organization has determined it is time to create a call center, the next steps can be both daunting and critical.
There are more than 800 discrete tasks associated with building a call or contact center. Common challenges include: Accurately sizing your call center requirements, Determining which channels to support, Identifying the telephony and technologies required to support your business activities, Mapping your business processes impacted by the call or contact center, Identification of the integrations and links required to CRM or back office systems, The physical design of the call and workflows, Design of the physical call/contact center space, Creation of an organizational design and the people requirements. People are the largest cost in any call or contact center. People requirements include: job descriptions, identification of skills required for each role, compensation modeling, quality management, workforce management (forecasting and scheduling) and the reporting required to provide the business with the knowledge to make data-driven business decisions related to the call center / contact center and the customers they support.
Taylor Reach assisted thousands of organizations to design, develop, implement and improve their call and contact centers. We have developed a proprietary approach to simplify and streamline modeling and decision making around what can be a very arduous 6 to 12 month process, resulting in lower cost to implement and higher effectiveness and efficiency from day 1.
Common Fails
In supporting our clients in the development and implementation of new call centers and contact centers we have seen a number of challenges and decisions that can adversely impact the development process. These challenges include:
The preceding is by no means an exhaustive list of challenges associated with creating a new call center or contact center, but the examples cited above are some of the common failures that can spell disaster for a new center initiative.
Author: Guest Author
Published On: 13th Jul 2016 - Last modified: 18th Feb 2020 Read more about - Archived Content
I do agree that businesses and business owners face several challenges when starting out. Every point you made was valid. Although it is very difficult for me to understand why some companies fail to implement plans for Growth is insane. Like you mentioned, call centers are tough work and have high turnover. The company must be marketing in the right region and be able to offer some incentives to remedy turn-over. Some centers in my city offer bonuses and incentives for retention. This company still have turn-over, but it’s much less than some centers. I feel incentives are very useful to sustain the company and help it grow.