A business professional can positively affect your contact centre bottom line

Good generalists rely on skilled professionals and experts in business for a very simple reason: they are keenly aware that managers may well be able to identify a problem, but are often too close to the coalface or operations of the business to see the root cause of that problem or resolve it adequately.

When they are fully capable of solving the problem, they often lack the time needed to do so. Business specialists, on the other hand, know how to zero in and resolve the challenge quickly and effectively. They bring fresh methodologies, insight gained from previous experience and even new and useful technologies. However, specialised business knowledge alone won't deliver a successful outcome - industry insight and experience are vital.

Typical challenge

A typical challenge in a contact centre may be improving agent processes; for example speeding up wrap-up, reducing agent error, reducing average call length, automating repetitive manual tasks or improving first call resolution levels. This may entail adapting processes, modifying or integrating systems. In a contact centre providing support for banking customers, asking a business analyst that works in the bank's back offices to assist may be of limited use. Without insight into the contact centre environment, finding a suitable solution or developing new services will be very difficult.

How much value can a professional add? It's hard to give an absolute measure, but processes can always be improved, so there is always value to be added.

• A Jasco Enterprise client was using several applications on the agent desktop. Agents needed to navigate through the different applications for security checks, to enter transactions and for record keeping. As a result much of the process was not followed and the agent time spent on administration was excessive. By doing the necessary process work and supplying the right technology solution, the client was able to increase the time agents could talk to customers, rather than navigate applications. In addition risk was reduced by ensuring the security processes were followed every time.
  
• Another client needed to improve the efficiency and success rate of its outbound agents. By improving the process and identifying the right technology solutions, staff productivity was more than doubled, agents sold more and turnover increased. This client was able to do twice the work with the same number of agents.

In our experience - and Jasco Enterprise has been in contact centre and enterprise telephony enablement and optimisation for three decades - speeding up bad processes is no answer at all. Moreover, throwing more technology at the problem is also not fail proof. In fact, today only a small proportion of the available functionality of technology systems in contact centres is actually being exploited. A specialist - a professional with the right experience - will deliver you a tailored solution that works.

For more information, go to Jasco at www.jasco.co.za.