Contact and call centers

• Do your customers experience long wait times while on hold with your call center?
• Do you have high turnover among employees in your call center?
• Are your contact center costs increasing?
• Are your customer satisfaction ratings slipping?
• Are you losing customers to a competitor?

Facing intense financial pressures, many organizations have shifted vital service functions to contact centers -- forcing the real need to balance service quality and cost.

Balancing cost and quality.

Trends toward off-shore servicing and the increasing role of the Internet have changed the landscape for customer service. At the same time, intense scrutiny of costs has prompted many companies to use call centers and technology to handle more and more service functions.

As a result, organizations have invested heavily in call-center technology, but without careful planning or an understanding of how call centers can serve as a profit center. Not suprisingly, the results have been mixed, forcing many to take a fresh look at their strategies.

Today, the pressure is on companies to put the right people, with access to the right technology and data, on the front lines of customer service.

Many organizations are finding that the key to accomplishing this is creating an integrated view of customers across channels—making sure, for example, that a customer who receives information via the telephone will find the same information on the organization’s web site.

A consistent experience across channels.

If you are looking to improve customer service while managing costs, take a look at West Monroe Partners.

For organizations that manage service and other points of customer contact through call centers and Internet technologies, we provide an efficient approach focused on:

• Driving current and future business needs.
• Attaining optimal performance and enhancing profitability.
• Linking call center operations with your broader CRM and enterprise strategy to ensure a consistent, quality customer experience across customer touch points with business channels.

Creating this view of customers across channels and databases doesn’t have to be a formidable task. The key is optimizing the underlying processes. We help you accomplish this by:

Creating a customer-centric architecture.

West Monroe Partners works with you to assess and document your customers’ existing experiences and also to define the desired experiences.

Taking the time to define this experience, up front, not only creates a more customer-centric call center and provides guidance for the selection of technology, it also provides a better basis for achieving consistent customer experience across your marketing, sales, and service functions.

Creating a tailored call center road map that supports your desired customer experience.

We create a road map based on both your ideal customer experience and your existing business operations. We will look at:

• Appropriateness and feasibility of off-shoring or outsourcing solutions.
• The most appropriate staffing levels and arrangements—for example, whether your business needs can be served through a network of home agents.
• Technology solutions, including vendor selection, planning, negotiation, integration, and maintenance.

Developing an integrated solution.

We can help you assess your key contact center operations to identify technology, business process, and training improvements. In particular, we can help you evaluate current technologies that can improve agents’ access to information and, thus, their effectiveness on the job. These include:

• Speech recognition
• Virtual agent
• IP networks
• Voice over IP
• Interactive voice response
• Computer telephony interface
• Virtual agent
• Customer information databases

In addition, we can help you align technology with market and trend data to improve point-of-service reporting capabilities, predictive analytics, and, ultimately, relationships.

Look to the experienced partner.

West Monroe Partners brings all the requisite skills to help you fine-tune your call-center operations:

• Broad experience in all aspects of CRM, including marketing, sales, and customer service strategies.
• In-depth knowledge of call center operations and best practices, as well as experience with Internet and telecommunications trends and technologies.
• Practical operations experience in a range of industries, from retail to banking and from manufacturing to health care.
• Extensive experience with data and systems integration.
• And finally, a strong track record for implementing process and technology changes on time and on budget.

Don’t leave opportunities to chance.

Today’s environment and cost structures make call centers imperative for many organizations. With the right strategies, processes, and technologies supporting them, your call centers can be a great source of opportunities.

That’s business in the right direction.

Learn more.

Contact us for more information about customer solutions.