Needs of Smaller Contact Centers

Long thought of as cost centers, senior management now understands that the quality of all customer touch points is critical to achieving revenue, profitability, and customer care objectives. As the voice of the company, agents are uniquely positioned to strengthen or weaken brand loyalty and corporate image. In many cases, the agent is the primary or only human contact that customers have with the enterprise. If the interaction is favorable, the customer is likely to remain a customer. If unfavorable, the company stands to lose a valuable customer and have to expend resources to replace the lost customer. There can be no compromise on call quality, smaller businesses need to compete with larger organizations with vastly greater personnel and financial resources. The rule of thumb is that 20 percent of customers account for 80 percent of sales. In a smaller business the loss of even a single large customer can have serious financial consequences to small businesses.


Reports can be generated manually. However, at some point these methods become unworkable. Live monitoring of call center service operations consumes hours of unproductive supervisor time listening for calls worthy of evaluation. Spreadsheets and inexpensive scheduling software work reasonably well for static environments but call centers are anything but static. Changing vacation schedules, keeping track of time-off requests, accounting for non-call time, and making intra-day adjustments based on call flow becomes a near-impossibility. Manual reporting is another time hog.

There is no magic cut-off point - much depends on the nature and call volume of the center - but industry experts generally concur that after 20 - 30 agents manual methods are simply no longer effective. A few years ago even the smallest full-featured quality monitoring systems; workforce management systems, predictive dialers, and CRM software were priced in the high five or low six figures. The available solutions were built on platforms designed to accommodate several hundred agents and could not cost-effectively scale down to the needs of the smaller and mid-size call centers.

However, in just the past three years vendors have recognized the opportunity to address this largely under-served market with solutions that can be cost-justified. There are also more acquisition options today. Hosted solutions, while still in their infancy, provide a pay-as-you go alternative. Leasing provides comparable monthly costs to hosting without the need for substantial capital outlays. Paying for the applications over the life of the equipment protects against obsolescence and permits the call center to finance the acquisitions out of generated savings.

Call centers are mission critical to organizations and industry of all sizes. In a world where competitors can be anywhere the quality of customer care delivered by both formal and informal call centers is one place where a smaller company can readily outshine its larger competitors. Sites of 150 agents or less comprise 95 percent of all the world's call centers and employ over half of all agents. Most indications are that small call centers make up a growing segment of the call center industry.

All call centers regardless of size have the same basic needs of call center services to drive customer satisfaction, grow revenues, control costs and capture and convey valuable market intelligence. For too long, the industry has not paid enough attention to the unique needs of this large and fast growing market segment. Products were too complex and too costly. This meant that smaller call centers had to make do with slow and efficient manual processes. Fortunately, vendors now offer integrated suite solutions with just the right combination of functionality, capacity, features, and for smaller businesses. The suite approach offers significant advantages over purchasing solutions one at a time.