The call center money pit
Call centers and help desks are typically very expensive, yet customers often hang up dissatisfied, with a sense of helplessness - feeling that good customer service simply does not exist anymore. Within the call center, managers face a high volume of calls, fluctuations between understaffing and overstaffing, scheduling confusion, a lack of information and demand for skilled workers. To get a better response from customers, many call centers need to decrease the average call time, improve customer satisfaction and empower workers with more valuable information.
Using technologies developed by IBM Research, IBM consultants can aid stressed call center managers and companies to transform an archaic, expensive call center into a modern, cost-effective one. IBM clients can use the knowledge management tool for data to shorten the average call time and increase first-time caller satisfaction, as well as improve the skill set of the call takers by providing them with more information.
Too many calls and a large staff with diverse skills
Optimized management of a call center’s resources and staff can ease many call center woes. IBM Research technology includes the call center scheduler and related speech technologies. The call center scheduler helps optimize the workforce by creating schedules that take into account the agents' skills and work preferences (such as which days they would like to work and which shifts they want to cover). IBM speech technologies can help decrease costs by automating the routing of calls. Those technologies can also increase efficiency for customers requesting information or even for those who need help resolving a problem.
Each of the technologies listed below can be used in numerous capacities and can help solve a diverse range of call center problems. If your company is saddled with expensive call centers and potentially dissatisfied customers, contact IBM Research for help.
Tools and Solutions
Text analysis and knowledge mining (TAKMI) tool: This text-analysis tool takes information from call center agent records, identifies customer concerns, provides early warning capabilities and mines data for trends and patterns. TAKMI has been deployed successfully at several client sites as well as at IBM’s own call centers around the world.
Knowledge management tool for data: This tool for customer support helps provide fast problem resolution based on categorization of data, including structured and unstructured information. Data can be stored in the tool or in legacy systems. The knowledge management tool for data is an IBM Global Business Services offering and is currently in use throughout IBM.
Call center content manager: This tool consists of solutions that work with IBM DB2® Content Manager to provide customer access to documents. An example of one of these solutions is the bill presenter, which simplifies the billing and claims process by allowing customization and self-service for bill payers and makes the process more accurate by allowing billing executives to analyze information. The solutions can also be used to manage reports and analyze the organization’s processes for handling documents.
Voice technologies: Voice technologies help companies increase the efficiency of call centers by automating most of the call routing, a substantial proportion of information request calls, and some problem resolution calls. Although having a human operator is often the preferred method of responding to a request, call centers often rely on automated voice systems to perform initial screening and routing of a call. Currently, voice-recognition systems can handle numerous languages, which makes them convenient for many companies around the world. The voice-recognition technology of IBM Research has been deployed in several forms, including speech-to-speech translation; IBM WebSphere® Voice Server, which enables multichannel information access through voice; and a speech conversation system.
Methodologies and templates for analyzing what consumers value most:This set of methods identifies key variables and time frames that influence when customers will buy and how long it will take them to make purchasing decisions. It also helps companies build models to optimize call center operations based on customer preferences.
Workforce and call center optimization: The call center scheduler provides a set of planning and management tools that runs on Windows® operating systems, and generates optimal schedules for agents while maintaining the required level of service. These tools are ideal for call centers with a high volume of incoming calls that demand a response from a skilled agent. The manager of the call center creates an optimal working schedule by entering the skills and work preferences of the agents into the call program.
Statistics and data mining: Staffing a call center to meet customer service agreements requires forecasting the number and type of requests that will be received over a specific planning period. By studying and analyzing historical data, one can unveil trends and correlations and develop models and estimates. More importantly, by segmenting and analyzing customers' responses to certain events – such as service disruption – the model can capture the changes that occur. IBM Research has a large number of statisticians and data-mining experts who have worked on this type of problem in the insurance and marketing industries. One tool they’ve created using probabilistic estimation is data-mining software that constructs high quality predictive models without requiring that parameters be constantly maneuvered. For more information, visit www.research.ibm.com/dar/.
Stochastic analysis and optimization: After mathematical models have been developed for a call center, many issues concerning management and planning can be analyzed to determine optimal solutions. By consolidating call centers and different classes of calls, companies can help significantly reduce costs and improve quality of service by effectively sharing resources and taking advantage of economies of scale. In such environments, it is essential to determine the optimal use of resources, including the routing and scheduling of calls throughout the organization. This form of resource allocation needs to be coupled with effective short-term and long-term capacity planning, as well as call center workforce management. IBM Research has a large group of stochastic modeling and optimization experts who are working on these problems in various call center environments as well as on similar problems in related areas, including developing mathematical tools to help manage and plan the workforce of companies over time