The Connections in Practice | The Web & Call Centers

A book is not the perfect place to talk about such a dynamic and fast-changing subject as the relationship between call centers and the Internet. In any case, one way to see the impact of the changes is through the flurry of products that have come out recently, and the changing relationships between companies as they cross from one product category to another.

For example, a Web-browser-based publishing tool makes collecting and sharing customer data within the call center, and throughout the enterprise, as easy as accessing a webpage. Envision Telephony’s SoundByte Enterprise Web Desktop lets centers publish customer contact information in a browser page format or “Web desktop.”

The new format simplifies the transfer of customer information from the call center to the enterprise. Departments outside of the call center can use Web Desktop to get customized access to data necessary to make more strategic, timely business decisions. The kinds of data at work here are primarily digital call recordings and call center performance reports.

Executive management, marketing and product development, for instance, can track customer response to promotions, monitor service quality and query customers through this system. Web Desktop is part of Envision’s SoundByte Enterprise call center suite, an automated call monitoring system that collects and publishes information about customer contact with a company’s agents.

Core elements of Web Desktop include call evaluations and graphical comparisons of individual versus group performance. Supervisors can also add training tools, demonstrate productivity reports, publish department specific issues, and highlight morale topics. For example, supervisors can feature “agent of the month”, incentive programs, and other events.

VocalTec’s Surf&Call Center lets online shoppers make toll free calls directly from a website into any telephone or formal call center. A Pro version goes on to let online shoppers speak over the Internet to call center agents as well as jointly surf webpages and fill out online forms in a secure environment.

Surf&Call Center uses the same standards-based IP telephony network infrastructure that carriers can use to target a variety of audiences with services such as phone-to-phone, fax-to-fax, PC-to-phone, and Internet Phone Call Waiting.

The SDK also allows system integrators to customize webpages and agent desktops to support Surf&Call Center’s voice and joint data collaboration capabilities.

As previously stated, the market for Web-enabled call center solutions is expected to grow at a compound annual growth rate of more than 110% through 2004, according to Frost & Sullivan stats. Interestingly, this product is aimed squarely at the carrier market and the call centers those carriers spawn.

Primus’s WebPack is a set of tools for creating knowledge bases and publishing them on the Internet, complete with natural language search capabilities. The gimmick is that you’re supposed to be able to complete said knowledge base within a single workweek.

The advantage to putting the knowledge out in front of the call center is simple: customers will use it to try to solve their own problems before coming to an agent for help. This cuts down on call volume.

(Though I suspect that the duration of the remaining calls would be somewhat higher, because those calls are likely to be the thorny ones that can’t be worked out using an automated system.)

One early user of the WebPack system reported that for 65% of its customers, the self-service option directly solved their problem.

Another Internet front-end product takes a somewhat different approach. FaceTime’s Message Exchange service tries to meld all the newer modes of Internet communication — instant messaging, for example — into a logical package that can be parsed by a call center.

Consumers engaged in online shopping at a FaceTime-enabled website instantly receive live and/or email-based sales and customer service assistance by connecting to the company’s call center. The FME service suite routes, queues, and reports on inbound email and instant messaging interactions, helping sites prioritize customer requests and manage service levels.

Most interesting is Instant Messaging Management, enabling ecommerce sites to manage real-time, live text-based communication between a CSR and a customer. FaceTime accepts, routes, and queues these requests to the appropriate CSR, and provides supervisory functions and management reporting. (A lot of the actual interaction can be automated.)

The other main component, Email Management, manages inbound or forms-based requests from consumers.

The FaceTime Message Exchange features a real-time monitor that shows supervisor and managers current queue and agent status. It can also monitor customer specified service level targets and alert the supervisor when these targets have been exceeded.

FaceTime is an application service provider (ASP) for Internet customer service. In other words, FaceTime is an online service, not a product. That’s good, because it means you can be deployed in days, scale up or down and avoid implementation hassles with the IT department. 

The Web & Call Centers

When the first edition of this book was published, not that many years ago, the idea of a connection between the Internet and call centers was theoretical, and not very well thought out. The most common way of thinking about the issue was to imagine self-support applications: literally, email-based posting of customer support cases, and the ability of a customer to search a database of problems and solutions by themselves.

Just a few years ago, it was possible to talk about the different ways of delivering customer service without mentioning online support at all. When you did mention it, it was in the context of CompuServe forums or company-sponsored bulletin board systems. The Internet explosion that’s brought us webpages was still a year or so in the future. That’s how fast things have changed.

A call center is not a place. It is a set of functions. It is the process of selling to people who are not in the room with you. And of serving their many varied needs. A call center’s primary function is to create and keep customers.

Right now, that function requires a physical presence, a location — an actual set of seats filled with people to help customers. Agents that have access to stores of data about the customers and the company, and the points of intersection. These people act as gatekeepers for the two-directional flow of information — as intermediaries and interpreters.

What if those functions could be accomplished without people? Or with a vastly fewer number of people, so that those who are left are true experts who add value to the transaction, and who don’t merely funnel that transaction along.

This is the goal experts are reaching toward when they tout the Web as a useful adjunct to the call center — the promise of a workforce deployed in exactly the way that is most useful and efficient. Customers who solve their own problems, who in essence sell themselves, and a specially trained cadre of agents dedicated to doing what only humans can do.

To some extent, the call center industry has been flirting with this notion for years, with varying degrees of success. First there was fax, then fax-on-demand. Want information about our company at 2 am? Rather than pay to staff off-hours, make information available for retrieval by the customer himself. It’s fast, cheap and gets generally high satisfaction marks from the customers.

On the other hand, some of the lessons learned by newer ecommerce and etailing (hate those words) companies haven’t yet been taken to heart. As a benchmarking survey commissioned by Swallow Information Systems has revealed, organizations are turning a blind eye to customer complaints and not treating inquiries seriously.

The survey found that 93% of companies in the business-to-consumer marketplace gather customer data, but only a third convert opinions into improved customer-led policies. 89% use the Internet as their prime way of contacting customers, but most have no procedure for resolving online complaints and inquiries, and over 25% have no dedicated customer service policy at all.

The survey was conducted across 28 companies, including SOCAP (The Society of Consumer Affairs Professionals) members, blue chips and market leaders, including retail, telecom, travel & leisure, financial services, FMCG and manufacturing industries.

The research suggests that the problem is caused by a ‘quick-fix’ approach to complaint resolution, where staff members find a solution then move on to another task, rather than upgrading the service for every customer. Another key cause cited was a lack of awareness of the technologies available to receive and respond to customer contacts, and how customer information can be shared between departments.

“It’s alarming that companies are underestimating the value of their customers to such a degree,” said Ros Gardner, vice president at SOCAP UK. “The customer is an organization’s most important resource, and they should be aware that listening to their opinions is one of the best indicators of success or failure, and where improvements should be made.”

“Companies are projecting an image of good service, but too often customers are being ignored,” said Bill Bostridge, VP of sales at Swallow Information Systems. “Providing a channel for customers to contact you is the first step to good service, but collecting data without listening to their opinions is a pointless exercise. Managing customer contacts is the key to turning around services that customers actually want and need.”

Then there’s IVR. It’s great for routing calls to agents, shortening call times, getting people into the right queue, etc. But it also allows people to self-serve for simple database lookups like an account balance, an order confirmation or shipping status. Or to diagnose a technical problem.

But still, there is an unstoppable trend toward providing an automated response to customer interactions. The reasons are clear:

Automated responses are cheaper than agent-provided ones.

They are always the same for all callers. Two people who call for directions from the airport to your office won’t get different routes from different reps.

Automation is always available, even when you’re closed.

Of course, there is a downside. Some people miss the personal touch. And any problem or question not planned for in the rules-based structures of your system requires human intervention anyway.

The Web is the third advance in self-serve automation. It has many of the advantages of fax — it’s a dynamic, easy-to-maintain format. It is available to huge numbers of potential customers. And it surpasses fax or IVR in one critical area: it has enormous multimedia capabilities (sound, graphics, video, and more). It is rich in the one quality IVR lacks — the ability to control applications that require visual presentation or extensive keyboard output, or both.

Customers can order products. They can download software. They can read catalogs.

Clearly there is a need for alternate points of entry into the call center. You can think of the call center as the focal point of a “customer contact zone” where a lot of

interactions take place. Ultimately, as more kinds of call center applications are developed that bypass the agent, a given customer will have more choices for entering the zone and concluding the interaction. Some points of entry may be better for making a sale — document retrieval by fax-back, for example. Others are better for customer support, like IVR.

The Web offers an amalgamation of these techniques. Where the Web first began to take hold was with help desks. These smaller centers, already strained by escalating call volumes, were in the vanguard of agent-enhancement technology. Problem resolution software frees technical experts from the drudgery of answering repetitive questions, letting them get to the business of solving more complex problems. It puts them in a position to add value to the customer transaction, rather than merely pipeline a piece of existing information to the customer.

But what about other call center systems like ACDs? If a caller has a choice of how to get into that customer contact zone, where will the switch fit in?

The answer has turned out to be twofold.

First, there is the omnipresent email. (Itself a revolution in communications technology; if it weren’t for the fact that the Web has pictures and sounds, we would be marveling at the amazing transformation email has wrought in our society.) In call centers just the last two years has brought something that’s sometimes called the “Internet ACD” or “Email ACD.” Bad terms, but they do describe fairly well what’s going on.

What they do is perform the same types of targeted routing that the telephony switch does for calls. They take large volumes of email as it comes in, parses out some form of meaning (who is the sender, what is the subject, etc.), determines whether it can be answered with an automated response, and if not, sends it along to someone who can handle it in an effective way. Routing tables show whom can handle what, and how often.

These systems also track and audit the response to those emails. So you can set an organizational parameter, for example, that all emails have to be “handled” within a certain timeframe.

The other major thrust has been a tentative exploration of one of the Web’s major attractions, which is live chat. The idea being that a customer visiting your webpage would click on a button to initiate a text chat window, having a semi-real-time conversation with a rep back at the call center through a text typing session.

There are several advantages to this. One is that a single rep can handle multiple chat sessions at once, because many of the responses can be automated. (One vendor showed me a system where a rep could handle six at once — a recipe for burnout and turnover if ever there was one.) The other advantage is that it is relatively simple technology, that connects it to a rep’s desk, in contrast to the much more complicated Web callback systems that attempt to connect a Web surfer to a call center through an actual telephony connection.

As you would expect, vendors are closely watching Internet technologies, looking for ways to integrate their switches with Web-enabled applications. As one manufacturer suggested, it is when the consumer can (and does) cherrypick from a combination of entry points — fax, email, Web or voice call — and expects to switch from one mode to another during a single “interaction” that advanced ACDs will need to be tightly integrated with the Internet.

What will happen is that human interaction will be reserved for where the agents can add the most value.

Announcement Systems And Messages On Hold

The most basic building block in the suite of technologies I call voice processing is the announcer. An announcer simply answers an incoming telephone call and plays a recorded message.

Digital announcers use a computer chip to store the recorded message. Other systems use tape to store the message, similar to the way an answering machine does. (Word of advice: stick to digital. Tape is too delicate, too cumbersome, and hard to edit. Digital is not just the future; it’s the present.)

You can have the system play a message and simply hang up, or ring the caller through to your phone system after playing the message if they choose to stay on the line for more information.

Announcers can also work with ACDs to play messages to callers in queue. You can program a message to simply thank the caller for holding, play on-hold music, or even better, play recorded promotional messages.

Because an announcer is so simple, it doesn’t have the high-tech appeal of other voice processing technologies. But announcers are vital to most call centers and many other businesses because they play music and messages to callers waiting on hold or in queue for a call center agent.

Call centers turn to sophisticated technologies like computer integration to save a few seconds per call — and may spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to do so. But few stop to think that a simple announcement on hold that tells callers to have a credit card ready can save that same call center five seconds per call at almost no cost.

When choosing an announcer the most important thing you’ll need to decide is the amount of recording time you’ll need.

The Call Center Jigsaw Puzzle

Putting the pieces of a CTI system together involves an amazing degree of coordination between products and vendors at several levels.

The bottom layer consists of the fundamental hardware and conjunctive elements: the boards that process the voice and data channels; the servers and networks, often ruggedized to reflect the mission criticality of what they are used for; and the standards and open APIs that link different vendors’ equipment together. The most common boards used in CTI systems are from manufacturers like Dialogic, Natural Microsystems, Lucent, Brooktrout and several other specialty companies, depending on the application.

Parallel to that sits the dual networking infrastructures: the phone switches and the data networks. The phone switches are usually PBXs or dedicated high-volume call routing switches called “automatic call distributors,” or ACDs. Phone service is also a core component. Not just because it’s an obvious necessity, but because increasingly, the carrier networks are being upgraded to deliver advanced call processing services through the network. Sometimes this works directly to the advantage of the smaller business — if messaging or call routing applications can be run from the network, you need to invest less in premise-based equipment. You can implement “high touch” services like call centers without spending so much on high tech infrastructure.

The data networking infrastructure, like the phone system, is probably already in place: LANs, intranets, external Internet connections and websites, desktop browsers and firewalls.

Between these two networking areas lies the middleware layer. The products in this category are what most people think of when they say CTI — the very specialized applications that draw data out of host systems and coordinate it with incoming telephony information, then format it for both sides. Originally, many of these products focused on coordinating between a single vendor’s switch and a single host format. As a rule of thumb, the older and more widespread the databases, the more important (and more complex, and customized) the middleware has to be. This has accounted for a lot of the tension surrounding the installation of CTI. For companies with decades-old legacy systems and extremely customized databases, installing CTI meant that to achieve any of the benefits, you had to go through a trying period of intimate customization between the switch and the database.

Increasingly, middleware connectivity is being sold as part of the switch, and middleware companies themselves are being acquired by larger companies above and below them on the CTI component chain.

The next level of product in the CTI hierarchy is the application layer. This is the software that actually does the things that make people more productive, things like messaging or speech recognition, automating sales forces or taking orders through the Web. It’s a good idea, when pondering a transition to CTI, to start here, with a concrete idea of what you want the system to accomplish. It’s akin to buying a PC based on what kind of application you want to run. You pick out the spreadsheet and word processor that has the features you need, then buy a PC that makes those features work best. CTI is no different. The best approach is to identify the applications that suit your business and then build up and down to integrate those apps with the infrastructure you already have.

Along with these layers of technology come the consulting services and systems integration know-how that ties it all together. For the most part, CTI is not an off-the-shelf accomplishment. It does require intimate connections between different technical realms — which are usually managed by different people, with different sets of priorities.

Outdialing Systems

As an outbound call center manager or supervisor, you get more than a little annoyed when your agents can’t reach the people on their call lists. You know it’s not your agent’s fault. Much of their time is taken up trying to get through to a prospect to make a sale or collect a bill, and the longer it takes them to do their job, the more it costs.

Even if you have a small call center, a typical agent only reaches 25 to 35 people per 100 attempts, which could take hours. Enter predictive dialing: automation provides the same 100 calls in about 90 minutes, routing your agent only the ones that reach a human voice.

Today’s dialers are much more sophisticated than they were fifteen years ago. Predictive dialing automates the entire outdialing process, with the computer choosing the person to be called and dialing the number. The call is only passed to the agent when a live human answers.

Predictive dialers screen out all the non-productive calls before they reach the agent: all the busy signals, no-answers, answering machines, network messages, and so on. The agent simply moves from one ready call to another, without stopping to dial, listen, or choose the next call.

True predictive dialing is merely one kind of automated dialing — there are others; but predictive is the most powerful and the most productivity-enhancing. True predictive dialing has complex mathematical algorithms that consider, in real-time, the number of available telephone lines, the number of available operators, the probability of not reaching the intended party, the time between calls required for maximum operator efficiency, the length of an average conversation, and the average length of time the operators need to enter the relevant data.

Some predictive dialing systems constantly adjust the dialing rate by monitoring changes in all these factors. The dialer is taking a sort of gamble: knowing that these processes are in motion, and knowing that there is a certain chance that a call placed will end in failure, it throws more calls into the network than there are agents available to handle them, if all the calls were to succeed.

Sometimes the prediction is wrong, and there are fewer failures than expected. In this case the called party will pick up the phone, say hello, and be hung up on when no agent is available. One of the intricacies of predictive dialer management is fine-tuning the aggressiveness of your dialer’s algorithm.

Predictive dialing has been nothing short of revolutionary in the outbound call center. When agents dial calls manually, the typical talk time is close to 25 minutes per hour. Most of the rest of that time is non-productive: looking up the next number to dial it; dialing the phone; listening to the rings; dealing with the answering machine or the busy signal, etc. Predictive dialing takes all that away from the agent’s desk and buries it inside the processor.

When working with a predictive dialer, it is possible to push agent performance into the range of 45 to 50 minutes per hour. I’ve heard of centers going as high as 54 minutes per hour. (You can’t really go higher than that, taking into account post-call wrap up time.)

There is more to the technology than just the pacing algorithm. Predictive machines excel at detecting exactly what is on the other end of the phone, including the ability to differentiate a human voice from an answering machine. They typically decide that the call has reached a person within the first 1/50th of a second — the start of the word “hello.”

Here are just a few of the important ways predictive dialing systems can help you.

• They completely automate outbound consumer calling. That includes the actual dialing, assigning agents and controlling the list you call from.

  You can run multiple inbound and outbound campaigns, and you can specify names on a list not to call. It also schedules automatic callbacks for nonproductive calls. Dialers let you set the parameters for the dialing algorithms to meet the needs of a particular campaign, like the percent of overdials the system sends out.

  With collections applications, for example, you may not care if the dialer has to hang up on a “customer” if there is no agent available. You’ll trade the customer’s good will for a higher volume of calls. But for a sales promotion, you’d want to keep those hang-ups to a minimum.

• You can manage your call center more effectively.

  Standard features include real-time statistics about how each agent, group of agents or list is performing. Also, trunk pooling, which reduces operating costs by processing both inbound and outbound over the same trunks.

• They reduce agent burnout and turnover. Just imagine all the tedium they avoid: finding the phone number, typing it in, waiting for the phone to connect and the number to ring.

  The dialer makes sure that the only calls an agent has to deal with are real calls, with a live customer on the other end. No busy signals, no endless ringing, no answering machines.

  Cutting out that stalling doubles the time spent talking on the phone. Talk time, which is about 20 minutes an hour without a dialer, jumps to 40 to 50 minutes with one. Agents like their jobs better when they don’t have to wait around for the phone to be answered.

• Reach more people in less time. You penetrate lists more deeply in a fraction of the time.

Predictive dialers adjust the balance of agents from one list to another, taking into account factors like list performance, time of day and the success of particular agents.

Small Center? No Problem | ACD

First, let’s start by thinking of the needs of the smallest centers, those for whom the purchase of an expensive, standalone ACD is too much to handle. Luckily, call routing is available as part of the PBX configuration, bringing large call center tools down to the level of even the smallest centers.

Think of the five or ten person collections department, the customer service area of a larger company. They have many of the same needs — and problems — as larger centers. But until now, there have been few call handling tools that deliver state of the art features at a reasonable price.

Their personnel are not always dedicated phone reps. They need flexible solutions that build on the systems already in place, that give them room to grow without putting the company in the poorhouse. The response to those needs is a new variety of call handling system — the ACD without the box, or the PC-based ACD. Thanks to the new-found openness of switch vendors, developers are offering a host of software products that add ACD features to key systems and hybrid switches.

For one thing, it’s far less expensive to bring ACD features into an existing business phone system. There’s no capital expenditure on a big piece of hardware. With larger ACDs, it’s very difficult to justify at the six-agent size or, for that matter, anything below thirty agents. It’s also a lot more flexible than it used to be. You can easily integrate top-notch systems like interactive voice response or voice mail, giving your small center a highly professional appearance.

Critical to call centers is that you be able to add third-party call control. You don’t need to know how to program to set up a rule-based system for getting the right call to the right agent. With the PC it becomes a low-end solution. You can do a lot of things, like provide special treatment to customers based on the language they speak, route calls based on skill sets, or based on time of day for full 24-hour coverage.

What the PBX ACD does is let you dabble in call centers without having to go full bore right away. Make no mistake — one of these low-end ACDs built off a PBX will only get you so far. If you’re going to grow beyond a certain point (50 agents is a good ballpark), then explore the larger, standalone systems. At least explore the low-end offerings from those vendors, because those vendors are offering much smoother upgrade paths than ever before, hoping to capture some of the small center market.

PC or PBX ACDs allow small installs (typically 10 to 15 people) to be placed on the same technological plain as bigger centers. Since many companies already have PBXs that can be enhanced with available software, they can dabble. It’s possible to convert a few users and then decide that if things go well (they usually do), to expand further.

For example, Cintech offers Prelude, by its very name a starter system that encourages people to step up to Cinphony, Cintech’s more advanced software ACD. Prelude is aimed at retail stores, pharmacies, universities, car rental places — places that until now might have gone without features like call categorization and advanced routing.

Comdial’s QuickQ software lets you set overflow patterns between multiple small groups, and lets you change those parameters quickly, with a minimum of required knowledge.

These systems do not deliver everything you’d expect if you used a dedicated ACD, but they don’t have to. Departmental needs are different. Few need multi-site routing, for example. Department heads (who may not be telecom people) need different kinds of reports that have more to do with sales and costs than with call traffic.

There are many small call centers that are just beginning to realize they are call centers. And that they need the same kind of technologies big centers have been using for years. Customers demand the same kind of service, no matter how big you are. This small-scale solution lets them reach more of their potential for pleasing customers at reasonable cost.

What They Offer | Toll Free & Long Distance Services

In previous editions of this handbook, I detailed precise product offerings from the three main carriers. I’m not going to do that this time out, and here’s why. Information like that changes so rapidly that there’s no guarantee that they won’t have changed a brand name, feature set or pricing schedule by the time this book gets into your hands.

Instead, what you’ll find here are broad brush outlines of what kinds of things you can do with their services. Please don’t beat me up if you try to buy these services from the carriers and they’ve changed some from the way they’re presented here. For more details about exactly what they do offer, I recommend visiting their websites. In general here, I’m going to refer to these services as toll free, because that’s what call centers are most interested in. This isn’t a bias against outbound-based centers, it’s just a fact that inbound call routing is more complicated, a more feature-rich set of tools, and because it’s more expensive, you have to work harder to get exactly the right deal.

AT&T. AT&T has the most to lose in any competition for long distance or toll free services. By ridding themselves of Lucent, they said to the world that what they wanted to be was a transmission company, once again a true carrier rather than a phone systems company. And they did that after seeing exactly how cutthroat and expensive a battle for market share can be. So they must really mean it.

One of the more interesting things they’ve come out with is called Transfer Connect with Data Forwarding. Data Forwarding uses ISDN technology along with computer telephony integration to let your agents forward each customer’s data along with their calls. It lets the agent or voice response system that initially receives the call forward the customer information to the receiving agent. This information can range from name, address and account number, or application-specific data like frequent flier information, insurance plan specifics or personal IDs. The data instantly pops up on the receiving rep’s desktop.

They also offer Enhanced Announcements — essentially the ability to use the network to pepper your holding callers with promotional information. This is just one small way to use the power of the carrier network to manage calls. AT&T has tools that route calls based on caller input (what they call Recognition Routing), and those that let you balance loads between centers for optimum staffing.

Quick Call Allocator lets you make changes as often as necessary: routing percentage changes can take effect within five minutes, and your customers won’t experience any service interruptions. This feature is especially useful for call centers that have traffic patterns or staffing levels that constantly change — despite frequent fluctuations, Quick Call Allocator lets you maintain a superior level of customer service.

There are packages that let you route by time of day, geographic origin of the call (down to the exchange), and countless custom preferences that you set and reset any time you like.

Next Agent Available Routing lets you reroute toll free calls to up to 99 alternate locations if the primary location is “busy.” If the primary location is busy, calls are instantly rerouted to the first available termination, decreasing customer “on-hold” waiting time. You can customize NAAR to match your call volume needs: you determine what is considered a “busy” location by defining the Maximum Calls Allowed (MCA). You can set this value in advance and override it at any time. When the MCA threshold is met, all toll free calls will be automatically rerouted to an available termination.

With Network Queuing, you can automatically queue calls without investing in any additional equipment. This feature allows your call center to optimize call distribution and improve call completion rates. Calls can be queued for multiple call centers or for locations with a single queue. Network Queuing can help boost sales by preventing customer hang-ups and increasing call completion rates. Of course, you can do this with premise technology built off the ACD, so you have to plan in advance where you want your call control to be handled.

Sprint. Sprint’s basic toll free offerings are designed for companies whose calls terminate at one location. They are pretty basic, but they’ll suit the vast majority of single-site small- and mid-sized call centers. You get things like DNIS and ANI call identification popped to the agent screen. (A simple thing that can shorten calls by 10 to 20 seconds, and when you add that up, call after call, multiplied by dozens or hundreds of agents, that’s a lot of money.)

You can distribute calls across a trunk group (very rudimentary), and designate a secondary location for calls to terminate in case of overflow. Sprint also offers a Carrier Diversity program that helps manage and coordinate service provided by multiple carriers through a single point-of-contact. You can allocate calls to carriers by percentages you set or based on location, time of day, day of week and day of year. (Very sporting of them.)

More advanced service includes what they call Network Call Distributor, a sort of virtual call center facilitator. NCD collects activity information from each ACD in your system every 20 to 60 seconds. It then uses that information to automatically route your toll free calls to the best location at that time. They have another, similar feature that’s for Call Allocation, distributing calls to your toll free number across locations. You specify a percentage of the calls for each location, matching your call volume to each location’s capabilities.

SiteRP is something that’s been around since the early ‘90s, and it was revolutionary when they first came out with it. It lets you route your toll free calls on a call-by-call basis. You define the parameters, customizing the routing system to your specific needs. With SiteRP, you can identify new callers or repeat customers and route each to an agent trained to handle their individual needs. It was revolutionary because it was one of the very first times the carriers allowed call centers to manipulate the network themselves, using their local premise equipment. It was, in fact, a strong competitive feature until the others came out with similar services. This was the first sign that adding intelligence to the carrier network was a way around the free fall in per-minute pricing that went on through the 1990s.

MCI. MCI’s Enhanced Call Routing (ECR) product line provides automated voice response, voice processing, and call routing. It’s their network-based call handling service, and it doesn’t differ a great deal from those offered by the other carriers.

Since coming together with WorldCom, they have been much more active in connecting their data and voice networks, and creating odd and interesting service offerings based on that, than they have on upgrading their standard voice-only toll free and long distance services.

With MCI’s offerings you can move in baby steps from a call center with technology that is exclusively on-site to a call center with virtually no technology on-site. In between you can have some of your functions based in the network, while others are based in equipment on-premises.

MCI also offers extensive outsourcing and service bureau capabilities. From total management of a large call center to on-call service for weekend or holiday traffic, they can handle a variety of application sizes. Available services include direct response, customer service, help desk, order entry and fulfillment.

Toll Free & Long Distance Services | Call Center

After the center’s physical parameters are set, and the agents are hired, the most important element (at least from an ongoing cost standpoint) is the pipeline into the center. The toll free and long distance services that you choose will be so expensive, and yet so rich with features and possibilities, that it’s imperative that you choose carefully, and that you revisit your decision again and again for as long as the center operates.

Toll free service was once amazingly simple. You had one company to buy from, and very little leverage in the kinds of pricing plans and service offerings you could get. By very little, I mean: none. Companies didn’t begin to build call centers until there was a cost-effective means of making nationwide toll free calls, roughly thirty-some-odd years ago.

Wide Area Telephone Service, originally an AT&T creation, was the first iteration of toll free. It discounted long distance service, put the cost onus on the called party, and so began our journey down the call center road.

With divestiture and long distance competition, there were naturally more choices and the price of call center telecom began slowly to descend. And then, in the early 1990s, just as the three main long distance companies competed fiercely in a very public battle for the home consumer long distance market, a not-so-public but just as vicious fight for the call center market heated up, too. It was helped along by resellers and aggregators, which are essentially secondary marketers of long distance service. Resellers would buy bulk minutes from phone companies at a tremendous discount, and resell them at a very small profit margin, making money on the spread. Aggregators would combine the telecom traffic generated by lots of small companies until they were able to go to a phone company and commit to buy big packages of minutes, hence qualifying for the same deep discounts the telcos gave to their largest customers.

All these things worked to drive the cost of a long distance or toll free minute down past 10 cents, in some cases to as low as five. Of course, things are never as simple as they seem.

You almost never buy telecom minutes just bare — they are just the beginning of the process. It’s all in the value-add. What’s a long distance package without some kind of service assurance policy, for example, or without network reliability guarantees?

Or better yet, would you pay more per minute if the carrier let you manipulate the network according to your own traffic needs? Routing calls here for one reason, there for another — that’s a pretty powerful ability and they all have it.

What about being able to hold calls in the network, instead of queuing them up in your ACD? Or park them in the carrier network, while the net queries the ACDs at several centers to determine which one has the right person to answer the call? You can do that too. The more complex the routing dynamic, the more likely it is that you’ll have to go to someone other than the carrier for the actual software that makes it work, but the carriers are now eager to help hook you up. (They were not always so eager; phone companies tend to be less than far-sighted, as technology companies go.)

The carriers have also experimented, with mixed results, with services that actually perform transaction processing, even fax processing, in the network. It’s like having an outsourcer handle your calls and your transactions, but there’s no actual outsourced center; it all happens automatically.

They want you to take advantage of a lot of these advanced services, whether or not they provide the mechanics, because quite frankly, call centers are a gigantic consumer of telecom minutes. The more time your callers spend hanging out in their networks, the better off they are.

Add to that one other critical reason. If you posit the notion that long distance and toll free are pretty much the same from carrier to carrier, that Sprint, MCI and AT&T are all equally reliable, clear, inexpensive and available, then what keeps you from hopping from one to another at the drop of a hat? They hook you by getting you to buy ancillary services. I can foresee a day when the value-added services are more important to the carriers than the presentation of transmission minutes, and they end up giving the minutes away to their best customers as a loss leader. Especially when we enter a world with packetized networks and all sorts of alternative transmission methods that reduce the actual cost of moving a call from here to there to effectively zero.

So what was once simple — buy on price — has become complicated. But wait, there’s complexity on another level. Until 1993, if there was a particular phone number that you wanted to have in the 800 toll free code, you had to buy service from the carrier that had custody of that number. You had no freedom to change carriers and bring your number with you — if you had significant brand equity built into your number (800-CAR-RENT, for example, or 800-MATTRESS), you were stuck.

Until 1993. That was the year that 800 Portability reorganized the way 800 numbers were given out, and changed the whole dynamic of how you acquire and route 800 numbers. Portability meant (and still means) that you have custody of your toll free number. You can keep it if you want to change carriers. This, of course, gives the carriers added incentive to serve you better, to offer more interesting features in their toll free networks to keep you as a customer, now that you’re not a hostage.

Remember also: they need your business. Call centers are monster consumers of toll free and long distance service. They will make deals with you. If they do not serve you well, you can and should leave. In fact, you should absolutely have arrangements with at least two out of the three main carriers for your core service. At a minimum, that protects you against service outages. But it also allows you to compare, month by month, the offerings and prices they charge.

At first there was a lot of concern (generated by AT&T, in part) that portability would cause degradation of service (especially longer call set up times) because each call to a toll free number has to be passed along a more complicated pathway to query a database and determine which carrier routes it before it can be connected. Happily, those problems never materialized. Portability became part of the competitive landscape, and I think was a strong factor in the rush to grab 800 numbers a few years back. That rush, in turn caused the 800 number series to run out and forced the opening of first 888, and then long before anyone thought possible, another series, 877. (Other reserved series are warming up in the bullpen.)

Portability made toll free an intelligent network application. Users with multi-site centers who wanted features like Least Cost Routing, or sophisticated queuing options benefited immensely. Many of these services are expensive, though. In some cases they can add as much as 50% to the cost of a call, putting the options out of reach of many small and medium sized call centers. High volume users have been the main beneficiaries of price-cutting and volume discounts, leaving smaller users with higher costs and no appreciable gain in service.

Through bundled consulting plans and alliances with hardware manufacturers, the three majors are trying to be more to you than just a series of trunks and switches. Offering everything from complete outsourcing of your center to simple “press one for” service, phone carriers are providing more options for call centers than ever before.

Will the call center of the future be paying for carrier services by the transaction instead of by the minute? This is just one of the possibilities raised by the brave new world of call center offerings from the three major long distance carriers.

Future Design | Call Centers

As call centers focus more intensely on retaining their best agents and reducing turnover, human issues will come more to the fore in designing (and redesigning) call centers.

Centers will include more “community” areas: conference rooms, training centers, even classrooms. And as call centers begin to respond to more than just traditional voice phone calls, expanding into areas like email and Web response, as well as possible video calling, the kinds of workspaces that will be required will undoubtedly change. The smart design team will take these things into account now, because a call center is a five to 20 year commitment.

The best way to ensure that a call center is ready to accommodate your needs in 2010 is to allow for substantially more layout flexibility than is typical today.

Components that should be considered include:

• Uniform, ceiling mounted indirect lighting systems that are layout-independent.

• Furniture literally on wheels or furniture systems that can be reconfigured overnight.

• Raised floors that allow ultimate cabling flexibility.

That way, the call center will be completely adaptable to any changing business circumstance, whether it’s driven by new technology, new ways of operating, or changing company cultures and ideas.

The Existing Center | Call Centers

Those ideas are fine, if you’re building a center from the ground up. But what if, as is more likely, you’re rehabbing a center that’s been around for a while, or outfitting an expansion of a center?

Luckily, there are still plenty of facilities factors under your control.

Lighting. Indirect lighting is the best if you can afford it, if not you should use florescent pink tubes and parabolic lenses. These lenses diffuse light straight down to eliminate glare. Full spectrum fluorescent tubes are available from some manufacturers that give a natural sunlight-like illumination.

Full-spectrum lighting is color balanced so there’s no yellow tint and less glare than with florescent lighting. The tubes fit into existing fluorescent fixtures.

Noise. Nothing is noisier than a roomful of people all talking at once. It’s hard on the employees, and it makes callers think they’re calling a roomful of people. There’s nothing so unprofessional as a call center that sounds like a.... call center.

If you want both the caller and the rep to feel more comfortable, try acoustic wall paneling, and if funds allow, white noise machines to diffuse noise. Using sound-absorbing foam or tiles on the ceiling, walls and other soft surfaces, and carpeting, keeps the sound from bouncing around. Plants are also good for the air and absorbing acoustics, but that’s a minor fix at best.

What some centers use are the same kind of foam tiling found in recording studios, though this can give a closed-in look to the place. In a cubicle environment (which most call centers are), talk to the manufacturers of the workstation units themselves about what kind of acoustical absorption properties they build into the wall coverings.

And of course, noise-canceling microphones in the headsets will help keep the apparent volume down, though that’s not strictly speaking a facilities question.

Seating. Your full-time agents spend at least seven hours a day at their cubicles sitting. The chairs you choose mean a lot. A chair affects posture, circulation and pressure on the spine.

I recommend chairs with height-adjustable armrests, split backs that hug your back (to relieve pressure on the spinal column), a moveable seat and an adjustable back angle.

I’m not saying you have to go out and buy everyone a $1,000 Herman Miller chair, but don’t put your agents in a $39 OfficeMax special, either. That’s putting you on the fast train to a high turnover rate.

Monitors. The top of the screen should be at eye height or slightly below and about 18 to 24 inches from the eyes (30 inches if you are concerned with electromagnetic radiation and your monitor is unshielded). The monitor should swivel to help reduce reflections. Once again, this is a small thing, with a really minimal added cost. But buy them the biggest monitor you can, especially if they’re going to be looking at a screen that pops a lot of critical customer information into a lot of tiny windows. The larger the monitor, the larger you can make the type in all those tiny windows. Seventeen inches ought to be the minimum.

Wall height.High walls between employees reduce noise, but they also cut agents off from one another and reduce collaboration. Sometimes the best way to deal with a call is to lean over the partition and ask another agent.

In the past, it was also important that agents be able to see a centrally hung readerboard. Now, with scrolling screen tickers full of ACD info, you’re not so dependent on that, so you can consider not only higher walls but a less formal cluster organization of the cubicles. One generally accepted height is 42 inches. That gives a certain amount of privacy without shutting the agents off from what’s around them.

Agent input. Agents ought to have some say in how call centers are designed. They’re not the only ones who benefit when you give them input — managers and supervisors get happier, more productive employees and fewer compensation claims.

Today, more and more call centers are collecting input from their employees before buying workstations, for the simple reason that they want to keep those employees as long as possible. Because call center agents must perform repetitive phone and keyboard tasks and spend all day (excluding breaks and lunch) at their desks, using ergonomic equipment is crucial. You’ll get happier, healthier and more productive employees. In the long run you’ll save a bundle in time and money since you’ll have lower turnover and better morale.

Considering there are more employees suing now than ever before for repetitive stress injuries (reported incidents of RSIs are higher than ever, accounting for 60% of all occupational illnesses) there’s no better time to offer courses in prevention and/or re-evaluate your center’s set-up.

The workstations. There are a lot of options in buying and coordinating the placement of the actual seats where agents will do their work. I’m not talking just about cubicles here; call center workspaces are carefully designed and constructed for the particular needs of this industry by a number of specialty companies.

This kind of thing is often overlooked, or put aside as managers think more about the critical (and expensive) technology and hardware they need. It’s easy to forget that labor is the single biggest ongoing expense in a call center. Intelligent workstation design is an easy way to reduce costs over the long term by keeping turnover low and employees happy. The type of workstations you choose can facilitate team building or discourage it.

There are three types of workstations: the cluster, a pinwheel like setup with four to six work areas sprouting from the core in the middle; the rectilinear, a traditional panel system with four wall panels at each station set up in rows; and the modular or free-standing workstation.

One vendor says that cluster workstations are beneficial to companies, like large catalog or insurance companies, which need to put many telephone- and computer-intensive workers in the same room. That’s because clusters let you fit more people into less space, but the people don’t feel cramped.

In fact, the cluster arrangement lets you save 10% to 25% of your floorspace and doesn’t give you that mousetrap/maze effect that rectilinear workstations sometimes create.

The gentler floor plan makes it easier for people to walk through the call center and between groups, fostering teamwork.

One downside to the circular workstation arrangement is that the partitions between stations are sometimes too high, making communication between agents on the telephone difficult. With the cluster it’s easier to talk between workstations, but hard for people to come in.

Rectilinear, or panel, workstations are a good choice for centers that need more space for each agent or that need more flexibility in panel and desk heights. The design of a center around these stations is more forgiving, and easier to change as conditions change. The work surface can be moved between notches in the side panel to accommodate wheelchair-bound agents or agents of different heights. Rectilinear workstations are popular choices for engineers, managers, people who need extra room for storage cabinets and anyone who has conferences with co-workers. You also find this the preferred style in technical support centers, where the reps have to refer to a lot of external materials — binders, reference manuals, and so forth. The type of workstation you choose should complement your company’s team-building style.

• When evaluating workstations:

• Look for a style that’s easy to install and reconfigure. Look for something that doesn’t have too many parts and pieces, but where you can add overhead shelves and in/out boxes.

• Make sure the equipment can be connected within a panel, rather than to a box that sits on top of a desk.

• Buy through a local dealer so you’ll have nearby on-going support. And a dealer can help with things like placement of workgroups for departments who need to communicate regularly.

• Look at it as a strategic investment. Chances are, you’ll have it for the next ten years, so you don’t just want to look at price. It should be pleasant and functional.

• Get panels with metal frames because they’re more durable than wooden ones. Also, get fabric panels that can be re-covered if damaged. And again, examine the acoustical properties of those panels.

What Affects Design? | Call Center

The ADA. The Americans With Disabilities Act (ADA) is a federal law that can affect call center design. Most important, the ADA is civil rights legislation, not a building code. You can’t get around it by moving from one location to another. It’s also very vague, forcing you to go out of your way to respond to whatever circumstances present themselves.

Some states have building codes that require ramps, accessible restrooms and other accommodations for the handicapped. The ADA does not require you to have any of these things — but it does make it illegal to reject a qualified applicant because your facilities are not accessible to him or her.

That means that you have to plan ahead. You have three choices. You can put these facilities in at the beginning, when it’s going to be the cheapest and least disruptive. You can put them in when you find you need them, that is, when you hire someone who needs them. Or, you can ignore them completely, and face the lawsuit.

Sometimes teleservices firms find out too late that their choice of workstation doesn’t accommodate a wheelchair or a random floor plan makes it difficult for a blind TSR to get around. Good call center design recognizes the relationship between people and the physical constraints of the workplace.

Safe work environment. Human safety should be your first priority. Make sure everything is fire resistant, that the exits are appropriately open and marked, and that all fire safety regulations are followed. And that call center personnel are aware of fire safety procedures.

This is so basic to facilities design I shouldn’t have to mention it. But I will anyway.

The call center’s application. For order entry applications, for example, one expert recommends at least 35 square feet for each person’s workspace. But for customer service, you might need more, up to 45 square feet. That’s because service and support reps often have to refer to manuals, documents, and other peripheral materials that should be stored within easy reach.

You’ll also want to account for the number of people in groups or teams, and the position of supervisors and team leaders. You’re going to need room for meetings, for example. And you’re going to need semi-private call center stations that can be isolated during training or coaching sessions.

Corporate cultures may dictate particular placement, and that too should be recognized when planning the layout.

The relationship to other departments. Remember, once the center is active, you’re going to be watching the length of calls as a key component of costs and productivity. If call center agents are running up and down halls to another part of the building regularly, you didn’t plan well. If they need to be in constant contact with the fulfillment department, for example, work that out ahead of time.

If you can’t physically bring the two departments any closer, then explore some kind of automated networking solution that will tie people and systems together — that may alleviate some of the distance trouble.

What support systems do you need? Will you need a cafeteria? Consider long term plans and the company-wide flow of traffic. How many conference rooms will you need? Where is the copy room, the time clock? Will you have central or local filing?

All these questions must be answered in advance. But it’s critical that these questions be answered by call center management as well as by the architects and the company’s upper management.

Facilities & Design | Call Centers

The furnished environment your agents have to work in for four to eight hours a day affects their attitude more than whether the technology they are using shaves a few seconds off call duration. Their comfort, or discomfort, within that environment has an undeniable effect on the way they deal with customers. And of course, on turnover, which affects long term hiring and training costs.

But there’s more to call center design than picking out pretty colors and sleek workstations. The right call center furnishings can help the work get done faster and better. Employees are happier, they are out sick less, they sell more and serve your customers better. Here are some of the important factors that go into a successful design.

One thing I’m not going to get into here will be networking and cabling. This is a thorny issue, and one that changes as frequently as any other technology outlined in this book. Suffice it to say, make sure of these three things:

1. You choose workstation units that allow easy access to cabling and phone wires.

2. Your architect and design team are fully aware of the kind of voice and data networking that you want to install, and that they are sensitive to the peculiar needs of expensive telecom and computer equipment. (In other words, don’t put the ACD in a room next to the HVAC system or the cafeteria).

3. Whatever your wiring plant, make sure it’s upgradable without having to rip apart floors, walls and ceilings to do it.

It’s also been argued by some architects and designers that the physical layout of the call center can have a direct effect on a company’s profitability.

One study done in 1990 of 70 million square feet of office space found that the cost to build and maintain office facilities is only 15% of the total, with the remaining 85% going to salaries. The argument would then go that, if you focus the design so as to have as beneficial an effect as possible on the workforce that comprises that 85% outlay, you can make the business case to spend more up front on layout and design with the expectation of back-end savings. Substantial research has been completed that demonstrates the effect design can have on increased productivity of building occupants.

Times have changed. In the past you could say the chairs, the lighting and the design of the workstation were the most important elements of call center design. Those things are still important, but issues of health and safety are increasingly on people’s minds these days. Yes — even in call centers.

One architectural firm I spoke to ballparked the cost of fitting out office space for call center use as ranging from $22 to $38 per square foot. Assuming the average cost of $30 per square foot is borrowed at 9.5% for 10 years, an increase in the staff productivity of 15% will pay the debt service for the entire construction cost necessary to improve the space for call center use, they say.

Locations That Want You | Destination Call Center

United States. Where there used to be definite areas within the US that were call center-friendly, these days there’s no real reason why one area is better than another. At this point in the booming economy, few areas are so depressed that they can supply a steady stream of workers at low cost. But for sheer volume, the south and southwest seem to attracting the most centers.

Cities like Las Vegas and Phoenix have surged in population, and in the number of new call centers taking up residence there (or in the surrounding suburbs). There are few good studies that show where call centers actually are; instead, they tend to show where centers could be, focusing on relative cost between regions. So I tend to rely on anecdotal evidence to tell me which areas are more “popular.” It’s important, then, to keep in mind that most companies that run call centers don’t call a lot of attention to their centers. The industry has an imprecise sense of where the centers are clustered.

There are clusters in the Midwest and upper tier of states, through Iowa and Nebraska, South Dakota and Kansas. The states in this region have historically worked hard to attract centers with incentives and on-the-ground assistance getting facilities open and running.

The move to the Sunbelt is a late 1990s phenomenon. It’s driven by lower costs for real estate and (I think) the same thing that keeps people moving into those regions — good quality of life issues, lower cost of living than in the cities on the coasts, lower taxes and the perception of more business-friendly authorities.

Within the US, though, there is a greater diffusion of centers than ever before. The factors that go into call center site selection now include one that was relegated to the bottom of the list ten years ago: corporate convenience. With telecom plentiful, labor expensive and real estate a non-issue, you can put your center near an important client, a critical supply warehouse, a distribution point, or the CEO’s summer house.

Canada. The Canadian call center business is not just an offshoot of the American industry. It’s a strong, growing industry in its own right, capable of serving both the domestic Canadian market and the cross-border North American market. Also, you can take advantage of a completely open border, a citizenry with a high education level and a multitude of language skills.

Ontario, the nation’s largest province, is host to many centers. One city, Welland, is home to Canadian Tire Acceptance, a dispatch center for roadside towing assistance that serves (mostly Canadian) customers through an 800 number accessible in either the US or Canada. Ontario boasts that its province-wide payroll taxes and benefits costs are, on average, 37% less than in the US. This disparity can work in the favor of an American company looking to reduce costs by opening a new center or relocating the functions of an existing center.

Farther west, Manitoba has, since 1993, been very active in trying to attract new call centers to their centrally located province. Manitoba’s position just north of the American upper Midwest is perfect for telemarketing to and from both coasts, which was a lot of the rationale for the industry to thrive in the American Midwest. If you need full time zone coverage, you can function just as effectively in Canada as you do in Omaha. Winnipeg was recently the site of a new 500-seat center built by Air Canada.

As an example of the kinds of incentives available, the airline launched the center in cooperation with the Call Centre Initiative of Manitoba and the City of Winnipeg. The provincial government assisted with start-up and training costs by providing a $3.5 million forgivable loan through the Manitoba Industrial Opportunities Program. In return, Air Canada committed to create 500 new jobs over three years.

In the east, New Brunswick and Nova Scotia have emerged as strong sites for call centers, based on what are reported to be an extreme cost differential between those provinces and the mainland US. NB Tel (the carrier in New Brunswick) cites a recent call center study, which showed that centers in that province can cost up to 50% less to operate in than other locations. They also claim that New Brunswick call centers pay the lowest workers’ compensation rates on the continent.

One of the most important factors in the development of this industry is the aggressive support of the New Brunswick Government. A direct stakeholder in the call center industry, the government encourages businesses to move to New Brunswick by offering high-level call center training courses. Call centers are reportedly the province’s fastest growing industry.

NB Tel partnered with Genesys Canada to offer a technology package that includes a network-wide call center solution called Enhanced Call Center Solutions (ECCS). This offers a multi-tenant call center provisioning platform that delivers a number of enhanced call center services such as screen pops, intelligent call routing and predictive dialing to centers of various sizes, technology platforms and geographic locations. Wherever you are in the world, you can access complete call center functionality using regular telephone lines.

Europe. How big is Europe’s call center market? Around $9 billion, according to a report from the Pelorus Group entitled. European Call Center Markets Great Britain, France, Germany and Holland together accounted for 80% of call center sales revenues within the 15-member European Union.

During the five-year period from 1999 through 2003, sales of call center systems among those Big Four will total more than 1.8 million seats, over $3.6 billion in base revenues, and over $9 billion in gross revenues.

This growth is happening unevenly, and that has a lot to do with the fact that some countries had a head start over others going into this period of expansion.

Their findings indicate that despite the creation of a single, continent-wide currency system, there has really not been a single continental market for call center products. Vendors still have to treat the various countries as what they are — separate entities each with its own tendencies and its own market idiosyncrasies.

Of the four markets, France remained the least developed for the longest time. In the 1997-1998 period, however, it began making up for lost time, and a far larger, more sophisticated market finally began to emerge.

Germany has made the greatest strides in the shortest time. Around mid-decade its limited and over-priced marketplace for call center products fell to an invasion of advanced solutions from abroad. Since then Germany has climbed into the lead for numbers of system sales. It continued to trail Britain in total seat installments and revenues, however, due largely to the more robust high-end segment of the British market.

Meanwhile, Holland’s call center market should continue to show surprising strength for a country its size, due in large measure to the sophistication of its users. It will be a market heavily driven by the under-40-seat range, the report says.

If Europe’s your goal (as it often is), the first question an American firm should ask itself is this: do I need a pan-European center, or do I want to target my center to a single country’s market?

A pan-European center requires you to staff up for calls in a multitude of languages. You’ll need switches and software that can handle skill-based routing, and probably a voice processing system to offer language-based prompts.

Another option is to identify the call’s originating country using the phone network itself. The advantage is that it’s more transparent to the caller if your rep answers right away in the language of the caller, without voice system intervention.

What are your options in Europe? You have several really good ones. The top-tier countries are already so similar in the quality of their telecom, that they are differentiating themselves on the basis of pricing, incentives, multi-lingualism and local regulations that help (or hinder) call center activity.

For a while, Europe was divided into two camps: those countries that had an active effort to attract call centers, and those that couldn’t see the benefits and did nothing. Ireland, the Netherlands, the UK and Belgium formed the core of the first group, France and Germany the second. Now both France and Germany have awakened to the facts of life, and are trying hard to attract call centers, particularly those that serve the lucrative pan-European market.

A couple of years ago, Belgium went to the trouble of building a dedicated facility for call centers, called variously Brucall, or the Call Center Hotel. It was designed as a semi-official outsourcing portal, a place for companies to come and park their centers at preconfigured workstations.

Other countries have had more success attracting outside business, notably Ireland and the Netherlands. In Ireland’s case, they built upon the country’s solid education system, the fact that everyone there speaks English, and the structurally high unemployment rate. Ireland has functioned as a point of entry into the European market for many high profile American companies, for call centers, but also for other kinds of back office functions like data processing.

And the Netherlands has carved out a niche serving companies from Europe and the US that want to serve the continental market from a single center, using agents skilled in multiple languages and a layer of multilingual technology on top of that.

For its part, the UK has prospered because it has a strong domestic call center industry of its own — by some counts, as many as 3,000 to 5,000 call centers focusing on British customers (although it is impossible to know for sure).

The Americas. One of the great open-ended questions of the day regarding call centers is how deeply the North American industry model will penetrate into other emerging markets, particularly Latin America.

For example, El Salvador is grappling with that question right now, as it tries to attract outside call centers as a way of lifting its economy.

The possibilities are tantalizing. On the plus side, the Latin American countries offer a Spanish-speaking workforce to answer calls from the US or Latin America. But there are high technological, human and business hurdles that stand between them and this clean, efficient industry. It seems to boil down to jobs: call centers provide plenty of them, and they’re not bad jobs, as jobs go.

Despite the tax incentives a locality has to dole out, attracting centers boosts a tax base through more skilled workers, and the ricochet of their spending through a local economy.

Outside the US, it’s led countries like El Salvador to an interesting crossroads: does it make more sense to develop a domestic call center industry, or should they try to become outsourcers to a larger market, like the US? Or a mix of the two?

The country has several mid-sized call centers already, mainly in banking and for the national airline’s reservation system. (A million Salvadorans in the US generate a lot of phone calls for flight reservations.)

El Salvador has been making the case for some time that it is a desirable location for an American outsourcing company to open (or take over) a center that would answer calls from either the US itself, or from the wider Latin American region.

The idea behind that is the same as building a shopping mall — you want to have a big name as the anchor tenant, so others will feel comfortable moving in. The El Salvadorians have been negotiating with a couple of the big names in outsourcing, but so far nothing has been signed.

Mexico has had the most success so far, with both a domestic industry and a cross-border business answering calls for the US Spanish-language community.

Other areas like Puerto Rico, Jamaica, possibly Brazil and Argentina have shown signs of joining the international call center industry.

Asia and the Pacific Rim. Call center companies (both those on the user and vendor sides of the fence) often disregard the Asian call center market as either too complex or too undeveloped to merit wide attention. That seems like an increasingly wrong-headed view, as both the Asian and the Australian call center industries have burst into flower in the past few years. These are industries that are not necessarily carbon copies of the strong American industry — they have adapted North American call center tools and techniques to the unique qualities of their particular markets, just as the non-English-speaking European industries did in the 1990s.

Now comes word from a Frost & Sullivan report (entitled Pan Asian Call Center Hardware and Software Markets) that the Pan-Asian market is growing at a rapid clip, driven by intensifying competition following the deregulation, privatization and liberalization of the Pan Asian call center hardware and software markets.

“Corporations are realizing the importance of customer service as a competitive tool in this new market environment,” according to Frost. “The driving need is to provide superior customer service by deploying high-end applications and call center solutions,” they go on.

According to the research, this market produced revenues of $272 million in 1999. By 2006, those revenues are predicted to reach $946.9 million.

“Proactive operators have realized the benefits of implementing call center solutions and have invested aggressively in the same,” say the analysts. “Educating potential customers and changing their perception regarding call centers as cost centers is a key challenge.”

One of the things they found (that mirrors very closely what’s going on in the North American market) is that it’s hard for the very specialized vendors to stay competitive. They are being forced to look at strategic partnerships that enable larger vendors to offer “end-to-end” or turnkey customer care tools. This is much like the CRM/email/Web-integration scramble going on now among the former CTI companies in the US.

To a certain extent this only matters to the companies that want to sell more stuff to hungry call centers. But it’s an important barometer of the degree to which the Asian market, so long considered an “emerging” call center market, has become an actual one.

Not surprisingly, Australia is the most popular destination for US-style call centers in this area. There are strong ties to American vendors of equipment, and numerous outsourcers have set up shop Down Under, taking calls for both the Australian domestic consumer market (often tied to US or European companies) and as a jumping off point for other, smaller markets.

Other areas of note are Singapore, which has a highly regarded telecom infrastructure and the Philippines (noted for its inexpensive labor and favorable pro-business climate). Japan, despite its highly developed economy and world-class telecom, has not been used by American or European companies as a call center gateway (perhaps because of the high cost of doing business there).

India. Broken out here separately because of the tremendous changes that have been going on there over the past few years. For several reasons, this area is worthy of special mention.

Since 1999 the market for call center services in India has been exploding — reports of new companies making software and offering services to both the international and domestic markets came fast and furious.

To get a better picture of what’s happening in that huge and technologically sophisticated country, I asked Ritesh Srivsatava, international marketing manager of PARSEC Technologies to answer some questions by email. PARSEC is a company that offers both products and services, with more than 4000 CTI ports installed in India.

KD: Generally, what is the state of the domestically focused call center industry in India? Are Indian consumers used to using the telephone (and other electronic interaction methods) for customer service and sales support?

RS: Yes, and increasing very fast. Mobile phone growth is also taking off, with SMS services already offered, and WAP being offered shortly. Indian cellular service providers like AirTel, Essar cellphone, Fascel and Hutchison Max are already testing WAP services in the country.

KD: How large is the Indian call center industry? Do you have any sense of the number of call centers or the number of people who work in call centers?

RS: CTI-enabled call centers (true call centers) - 25. Non-CTI, 300-500. According to the National Association of Software and Service Companies, GE Capital International is employing over 1,000 people in its call center in Gurgaon near New Delhi.

KD: Is it fair to say that the call center industry is externally focused, that is, it exists right now to serve markets outside India?

RS: Domestic companies are becoming more consumer focused now. For example, Whirlpool, the global white goods manufacturer, is setting up 5 call centers, Kotak Mahindra — which is India’s largest financial services company — is also setting up 5 call centers.

Educational Institutes, like KarROX and North Star are setting up call center institutes that will provide agent training. Third-party call centers, like Cybiz Call are mushrooming all across the country to provide various services to the customers of small and medium companies who cannot afford to set up their own call centers. Cybiz Call is establishing a network of 35 franchisees across India. ISPs, like Dialnet are setting up centers. Hence, a range of segments is highly recognizing the need of call centers to service their customers.

The offshore business is big but the Indian domestic business is also growing rapidly due to increased competition and hence focus on customer care.

KD: How deeply linked to other back office functions (like data processing) is the Indian call center industry — from outside, it looks as though many of the companies offering call center services began by offering services other than call handling. Is this the case?

RS: Not much. Medical transcription centers essentially have a lot of the infrastructure needed for call centers so there is a synergy there. In financial companies like GE Caps, there is back-end processing also. But that is an exception, not the norm. Back office operations are typically difficult to outsource because of data security issues.

KD: What are the advantages that an Indian call center can bring to a prospective customer outside the region? How do you make the case that an Indian company can do the job for an American or European (or other regional) company, despite the geographic remove? Is it based on labor, or technology, or some other factor(s)?

RS: Some of the factors include the booming IT industry, the largest English-speaking population after the USA, a vast pool of skilled labor (English speaking, and numerically literate), and a low cost of workforce. With overhead, a call center agent costs between $50-100K per annum in the US; in India that would be $10k, plus add $20k for telecom costs and higher infrastructure costs — this means a prospective saving of $20-70k per agent per annum. This saving can be split among the call center and the customer. These are some of the advantages India offers to attract foreign traffic.

Another big potential area is tech support. India graduates about 100,000 engineers each year. These can be used in call centers for troubleshooting/tech support, as the salaries are dramatically lower than in Europe or the US.

In fact, one company in India proposes to hire 300 Ph.D.’s to provide very high-end consulting over the phone/videoconferencing. Given these advantages, India could build a $17 billion industry by 2008 according to the NASSCOM McKinsey Report.

KD: Your estimate of the number of call centers seems small in comparison to both the size of the nation as a whole, and other English-speaking markets, like Australia, UK and Canada that have small populations. Is India playing catch-up, and if so, what will it take for the Indian industry to become a major player in the world market?

RS: India lags behind because of poor infrastructure. Telephone density is about 3 per 1000 persons in India. Better telecom infrastructure is a key requirement. Poor reliability, limited bandwidth, high price, and limitations in service make us fall short of current global standards. Apart from that, customer service was a low priority area for Indian companies due to a protected market, red tape and lack of competition. Now things are changing, customers are more demanding.

To follow up on these lags, the Government of India has taken a big step towards a National Telecom Policy. There is a strong commitment to create a strong independent regulator, set up hi-tech habitat centers, build a high speed national backbone, provide competitive international services and remove restrictions.

KD: Increasingly, it appears that the US/Canadian/UK/ANZ call center markets are becoming more integrated through networks of outsourcers, technology suppliers and shared information resources. Does the Indian domestic industry stand strongly alone, or is it trying to become part of this worldwide English-speaking industry?

RS: India is looking to be part of that network. There are already networks being planned by several Indian companies, which span technology, services, training etc.

In fact, PARSEC is very soon setting up a single stop solution and 24 x 7 services for teleservices outsourcing for dot-coms and conventional businesses. PARSEC’s delivery network would be based on an Internet-Native architecture capable of handling conventional and Internet telephony, email and Web. PARSEC has a dedicated agent pool who are domain-trained and are servicing blue chip customers. To ensure guaranteed service levels PARSEC would adopt the best-in-breed delivery processes through the right HR and Quality processes.

KD: As a corollary to that, which is larger — the domestic English-speaking call center industry, or the domestic industry in other languages? Does the distinction even matter?

RS: Currently the English speaking market is bigger, but the distinction does not really matter as English is the language used by business in India.

KD: Does the worldwide move to Web-based contact centers give the Indian market a chance to grab a bigger share of the international customer contacts and build a reputation among multi-national companies?

RS: Yes, online companies are looking to outsource customer contact operations to countries like India. India is gaining a high degree of acceptance to set up international call centers.

GE Capital International services is servicing its international clientele from Gurgaon, India, employing over 1000 people and is soon setting up another one in Hyderabad.

Also, companies like Spectramind are servicing the email queries of dot-com companies from the US in Delhi. Their dot-com clients receive half a million queries every month. Half of them go unanswered. Spectramind is creating a human interface to it. This capability is a great opportunity for India.

PARSEC is also helping two other third party call center companies set up international call centers. PARSEC will provide business, infrastructure, technology and manpower to them to service international customers from India. One is Phonesys, which is setting up a 100 seat call center that will handle outbound calls for telemarketing and credit chasing for its client’s customers. The other one is Call Center India Ltd., a third-party call center that is setting up 16 agents and will migrate to 96 agents within three months of its inception. They will handle outbound calls for marketing websites.

KD: How about technology providers? Does the Indian call center services market look to domestic hardware and software companies for their infrastructure, or do they look to the standard US/UK companies for things like switches and software.

RS: Currently US companies dominate. But Indian companies are catching up, especially in software.

In fact, PARSEC Technologies is a pioneering leader with expertise in providing Server Based Call Center solutions. It is India’s leading and fastest growing provider of the technology in the Computer Telephony industry and has the largest market share in the voice mail systems market in India

That interview, conducted early in 2000, just scratches the surface. I’ve become convinced that India will become as important to the customer contact industry between 2005 and 2015 as Ireland, Canada and the Netherlands were in the 1990s. Some examples of why I think that:

• FirstRing, an interactive call center and ecommerce customer care provider, implemented the first phase of Interactive Intelligence’s communications software solution. The solution automatically routes calls between FirstRing’s headquarters in Sterling, Virginia and its customer support center in Bangalore, India. FirstRing selected Interactive Intelligence because it offers a cost-effective, single-vendor contact center solution that simplifies deployment and support.

  FirstRing expects the new solution to result in up to a 50% reduction in costs for its ecommerce customers via optimal capacity utilization, access to up-to-date customer information, redundancy and security features, and management information tools. FirstRing focuses on servicing Fortune 100 and 500 companies, and currently supports five customers in the US. The company will use the new solution to service calls originating in the US with its professional and semi-professional Indian call center representatives.

• The tool lets calls be automatically routed to the FirstRing site with the most appropriate resources. The solution also provides screen pops to FirstRing agents, giving them vital customer information simultaneous with the call. Predictive dialing features are expected to increase agent productivity, along with built-in features like Interactive Voice Response (IVR) and Fax-on-Demand service.

• Also, one of the major US outsourcers, SITEL Corporation, formed a 50/50 joint venture with Tata International, a part of Tata Group (India’s largest group of companies), to be called SITEL India.

• The new company will provide Web-enabled contact center services from India. The venture will provide technical support and customer care for English-speaking customers throughout the United States, United Kingdom and other English-speaking countries.

• Initially, SITEL India will provide customer care and technical support services using email and Internet-based chat solutions. The venture will add telephone-based channels of communication by the first quarter of 2001. The services of the joint venture will be offered to clients of both SITEL and Tata.

• Together, SITEL and Tata plan to make the investment required to deliver world-class services from India, using state of the art technology and operating practices,” said SITEL ceo Phil Clough in a statement. “Through SITEL India our clients can accelerate their ability to access this wonderful labor market and reduce the risks associated with operating in an offshore environment. India has over 300 million English-speaking inhabitants, a booming IT industry, and a vast pool of skilled labor to draw upon. Operating in India also helps us provide these valuable eCRM technical support services on a 24-hour per day basis. It is a win for everyone.”

• NHancement Technologies, a provider of unified communications and unified information technologies, has implemented a worldwide intercontinental call center operation (the company’s second), with Falah Information Technologies Ltd., an Internet call center business located in Bangalore, India.

• Falah is currently building a 40,000 square foot center to international standards that will service customers worldwide with technical help desk support. It is located in the heart of Bangalore, commonly noted as the “Silicon Valley” of India.

• The NHancement application simplifies the call center transfers between a point of presence (POP) in the United States and that of the call center in India. The center will support 250 agents upon deployment. The solution is being implemented in conjunction with Interactive Intelligence Inc., a developer of automated multichannel customer interaction software.

• The value of the contract is $1.7 million to Nhancement and includes the installation of 250 agent terminals, ongoing training for supervisors and call center agents, and ongoing outsourcing for business development. With NHancement’s software, Falah will realize a rapid return on investment through a cost efficient and time saving application, and will have the ability to route the call to an agent with the appropriate technical expertise to service the customer. A screen pop containing customer history for easy reference arrives along with the call.

• Here’s more evidence. Contact Center University (which is not really a university, but a training unit of Aspect Communications) is licensing some of its course material and curriculum to a company that’s going to train as many as 18,000 call center reps, supervisors and managers. Much of that total will be in India.

• Information Exchange India Ltd., the company doing the licensing, is a provider of eKnowledge services to corporations and institutions worldwide. They’ve signed on to be a Contact Center University (CCU) alliance partner, and will offer CCU’s course curriculum through training academies in Troy, Michigan, and major Indian cities.

• IEIL has licensed the following courses from the standard CCU curriculum for instructor-led training delivery: Contact Center 101; Customer Service 101; The Business of Contact Centers; Understanding Contact Center Technology; Recruiting, Hiring and Training; Inbound Forecasting and Scheduling; and Performance Measurement and Management.

  The CCU curriculum includes intensive coaching in staffing, performance management, equipment optimization, communication and customer service skills, problem-solving techniques, stress management and people management and motivation.

India is developing one of the most robust technical infrastructures for call center operations in the world. In my conversations with Indian technologists and call center managers, I am hearing a sense of confidence. In general, they are founding their new call center industry on advanced technology (moving swiftly to create Web/voice combo centers, for example). The nation also has the advantage of a highly educated, English-speaking, tech-savvy workforce at a lower wage rate than in Europe or the US. This is poised to explode into the industry’s consciousness.

In short, when you’re undergoing a site selection process, open your eyes to all the new possibilities that are out there, domestic and foreign. You should look off the beaten path. There are bargains to be found and attractive locations that can serve very well as the long-term home of a call center. The important thing is to be flexible, and work with the community economic development officials. You don’t need to be in a big city, or in the Midwest, or even in the US. It’s all up to you.