Key Data points to consider while setting up a call center in India

This article is intended for all those business users who are intending to set up a Contact Center and want to make objective decisions based on data. The data presented here is based on our experience of serving 150+ customers on our Cloud based Virtual Contact Center in India - http://cloudagent.in 

If you are looking at factors to consider on whether you need a Call Center at all in the first place, you can read our blog - http://blog.cloudagent.in/2013/02/does-your-business-need-contact-center.html

By the time you finish reading this article, you should be able to calculate and decide on the number of agents required or number of PRI lines required or number of calls you can handle using a certain number of agents etc.

Based on our observation we have given averages across verticals ( We are lucky to be serving customers across 20+ verticals, for case studies - http://ozonetel.com/casestudies.php). The key parameters that have been considered are efficiency of handling calls (% answered calls), Pickup times, Total handling time per day of an agent , wrapup times etc.

For an Inbound Contact Center, our observations are as given below: 

Wrap up Time is the time agent spends after the call on writing additional information etc about the call.

Call Handling time is Agents Talk Time + Wrap Up Time .

The conclusions you can draw based on this data is that a business requires its agents to work on its process as well along with taking the calls - hence agent utilization will not be more than 30-40% max. for an inbound contact center. So handling customer calls is only part of the contact center executives job. It is very important that you know what percentage of your agents time will go attending calls and what % is required to work in the process updating customer data - be it orders, deliveries or leads.

Based on this data, you should be able to estimate what are your call center needs. For example, if you need to receive 1500 calls with a success rate of 90% ( answer 90% of 1500 calls -1350), with an average duration of 3 minutes per call, agent utilization rates of 40% and total agent login time of 480 mins ( 8 hours) - You will need 21 agents approximately. With the same data but utilization of only 30%  - you will need 28 agents.  
To ensure that you can calculate your call center needs, we have given here a basic calculator which will tell you the number of agents required or number of calls you can handle for a given set of agents etc. You can access this calculator here - http://ozonetel.com/app/calculator.php

Please do note that this is a basic calculator and does not consider queue times  etc. If you are a real pro, then simply google for a Erlang calculator and use one of the numerous calculators given on the web. In our next article, we will definitely provide our version of an advanced calculator.

Virtual Call Center for a leading bus ticketing & software solutions provider in India

Going ahead with the Cloud Agent success stories, we will cover one of the first movers to Cloud Agent (http://cloudagent.in ). 

The customer is well known in the bus industry across operators and users. They are one of the first and  pioneers in providing end-to-end software and other value added solutions for the Bus Transport Industry by leveraging the latest technologies. The company also provides technology solutions to more than 50 large private bus operators in India, 4 state transport corporations and 2 international operators. The end-to-end software solutions include e-ticketing systems, fleet management solutions, vehicle tracking systems, passenger information systems, logistics management backed by a 24x7 customer support centre.

They were operating support centers for all their bus operators. The key challenge for them was to identify to which bus operator the call is for and accordingly give a welcome message. Also visual feedback to the agent on the name of bus operator etc was not available and hence agents had to just say a " Good morning" instead of the desired " Good morning, welcome to xyz travels". 

Apart from this, for the state transport corporations providing Toll Free number integrations with a auto redundancy was a major challenge. Once the customer moved to the cloud, Ozonetel was able to offer backup routing from another city in case of the primary landing number ( PRI line ) going down. 

The key benefits derived are:

1. Customer was able to run a call center with the same set of agents for multiple operators 
2. Auto fail over for Toll Free Numbers 
3. Intelligent IVR which recognizes the operator for whom the call is and accordingly plays the messages 
4. Centralized reporting which gave management access to intelligent reports which helped in the scaling process. 

The customer was able to scale with our platform from a initial set of 5 agents to 120+ agents now. We are proud to have been able to help the customer scale at this level and also continue to serve them for the last 2 years. 

For a detailed case study, please download from - http://ozonetel.com/casestudies.php . Select the document as 'Travel'

Cloud Contact Center Implementation for a leading Grocery e-tailer in India

The aim of every business will/should be to provide an excellent experience to their customers in every medium of communication with them and also ensure that it is unified across the channels - be it calls or email  etc. 

We will showcase how one of our customers, a leading grocery e-tailer in India has achieved this using Ozonetel's Cloud Agent product (http://cloudagent.in - The first & only Contact center product on the Cloud in India). 

The customer service department was facing a challenge in integrating Email support tickets, Call support tickets and their order management system info. which needs to be accessed by them during their numerous interactions with the calling customers. To ensure a high quality customer service, they needed a solution which could route calls, emails to agents and at the same time also integrate with a CRM which could store all the above data. We at Ozonetel, could easily identify the integration points with the CRM & Cloud Agent and implemented a solution in a very short span of time. The end result was a unified communications suite which was integrated with the CRM and the business was able to improve their customer service tremendously.

The results were mind boggling - a 50% increase in customer satisfaction ( This was measured based on number of customer complaints). Also the management was able to get a deep dive view of the entire customer service, thus enabling their decision making with objective data. 

Now, the customer has expanded to 2 more cities with the same system and no changes required. They are running a multi city contact center with a unified view across cities on how their business communications are functioning.

For a detailed case study, please download from - http://ozonetel.com/casestudies.php . Select the document as 'Grocery'

Does your business NEED a Contact Center?

You are at the inflection point in your business,where your product or service offering is a hit with customers and now there is a regular funnel of customers signing up for it. Things are great.

Moving ahead as your customer base increases, your support requests increase too. So far, you have published your personal number, but as you scale, that’s not enough. Good customer support is what will retain your customer, and we all know cost of customer acquisition is much higher than customer retention & ‘happy customers will also become your brand ambassadors’

One of the most common questions we come across the company’s is

Is it time to start a dedicated contact center?

Different flavours of the same question are –

How do we qualify the business needs and decide whether a dedicated setup has to be created for your Customer Support? Or

When is an integrated business and operational support system needed for your business?

To make it easier for you to answer this very important question, we have created a checklist below. Please spend some time thinking about these questions and fill up the checklist. This will give you an idea about your need to set up a contact centre.

To understand whether your business needs a contact centre, Please check on the following:

Customer Experience when they call your business:

1.     Have your customers started complaining that they are not able to get through the number published for support (Its busy most of the time or no one picks up)?

2.   Do your customers have to try your number multiple times to get connected to support team?

3.   Are your customers asking to talk to the same person who spoke with them last time?

4.  Does your customer have to wait while PBX keeps ringing different phones and finally connects to the reception who again transfers to a phone that never picks up?

5.    Does your Customer have no confidence that there would never be a proper response when he calls up. He feels lucky if he is connected to right person?

6. Have you decided to hire dedicated staff just to take customer calls.

Your expectation from the system handling customer calls:

1.   Do you expect all your customers to be greeted and let them know that they reached the right number,  when they call you?

2.    Do you want your customer to have predictable experience every time, with high level of confidence that whenever they call, they would receive proper treatment.

3.    Do you want your customer to be greeted with their name when an agent answers the  call?

4.  Do you want to have faster ROI, with better Agent efficiency & Productivity?

5.  Would you like to help your agent to handle more calls without being stressed out?

6.  Do you want to know if the support team is performing as per your expectation and is not over or under staffed?

7.  As management, is there a sales conversion from these calls – do you want to track it?

8.  Do you need audio recordings for quality check, future reference, for support ticket closures?

If the answers to 50% or more of these questions is Yes , then definitely you need to setup a contact center.

Contact Center system:

In simple word contact center system is a set of multiple systems that work together to provide predictable customer experience. Where customer knows what to expect next and how he will be able to get the right response for his query.

Technically,Contact Center system monitors the resources such as agent, phone lines etc. and distributes the calls efficiently and to the right agents. It provides real-time feedback to the caller to keep in updated of his call status (such as queue location or expected wait time). Allows caller to make a choice e.g. Press 1 for Sales, Press 2 for Support etc.

For customer perspective he is in control and drives the conversation, this could be by choosing the right IVR option, knowing the wait time in queue and selecting the option to call back dropping out of the queue and much more.

From agent perspective it makes sure that all agents are loaded equally by making intelligent distribution of the call. It provides tools and controls that help agents to respond to the calls efficiently such as customer information screen pop, control bar that let agent control the call using keyboard instead of shuffling between the keyboard and phone keypad and many such features.

For management they get the absolute control over the process and performance. They can design the business rules based on various parameters (such as platinum, gold or silver customer) and make sure that customer gets the treatment they deserve. Monitor that the service level and quality goals are met. Take informed decision on, if the current contact center setup( in terms of infrastructure and manpower) is enough or redundant for his current requirement.

Contact Center System –High Level Perspective 

Once you have right setup in place, you have built a strong base to transform your Support center into an industry standard Customer Contact Center.

Phases of Transitioning to a Customer Centric Organization

  

Now that you know when to go for a Contact Center Solution, do ensure that the same system can Scale with flexibility for meeting your ultimate objective of a Customer Centric Organization.

But when does your contact center system transforms into a Customer Experience Management System? What is the difference?

Next week, we will look at how we can upgrade our contact center solution to a Customer Experience Management System.

About us - Cloud Agent:

Our product – http://cloudagent.in is India’s first of its kind Contact Center solution on the cloud. We have taken care of all the above parameters discussed, to ensure that our customers can grow on the same system from a small Contact center to a full blown customer experience management system. To know more, email us at sales@cloudagent.in or contact us on our toll free 1800 200 0820.

Enterprise customers Vs Startup customers

Cloudagent has been flexible enough to cater to the contact center needs of both Startups as well as Enterprises. Because of this, we have had the good fortune of working with both kinds of customers. So, we are just putting in our thoughts of what is good and what is problematic about each kind of customer. Some disclaimers before we put up our thoughts.

1. There are no good or bad customers. Any company which puts their trust in you is good enough in our books. The list below, more or less captures the times we felt happy or sad when dealing with each type of customer.

2. The list below is very specific to our product which is a contact center product. It may not be applicable to any other product or any other company.

Enterprises

Startups

So, to put it in a nutshell, Startups decide fast and are willing to take the risk with you, whereas Enterprises are more slow in decision making, but once they decide, they stick with you and pay well.

Improving Agent Efficiency

In a call center, the costliest resource is always an agent. So any good call center software should try to make the job of an agent as easy as possible. The software should be non intrusive with an easy learning curve and provide as much details as possible for an agent to answer the customer queries easily.

  The main components which make the agent communication efficient are

1. Agent toolbar: The toolbar should be intuitive and display the right buttons depending on the context. For example, when an inbound call comes in, outbound call controls should be disabled.
2. Call control buttons: When an agent is in the middle of a call, all call control buttons should be easily accessible.
3. Call script panel: Give hints to agents on how to handle the call
4. Screenpop: Provide caller details populated from your CRM.
5. Disposition screen: Store call details for later processing and reporting.

That is why, in Cloudagent we have spent a lot of time in designing the agent screen.
At the top of the screen is the agent toolbar. The agent toolbar is the first thing an agent notices when he logs in and it is also the thing with which he interacts most often. The tool bar has been kept minimalistic on purpose so as to not intrude upon the workings of the agent. But, it still contains all the necessary information for an agent to perform his call center tasks. An agent can control his status from the toolbar. Also, whenever an incoming call comes in he gets to know the details about the call including the skill of the call, the caller details etc on the toolbar. He also gets call control buttons like hold, transfer, conference, mute etc on the toolbar. So with a single row of buttons, an agent can perform his call center duties from the Cloudagent toolbar.

The rest of the screen is free for the agent to perform his normal routine. Only when an incoming call is there, the screen is replaced with caller details from the CRM. This will give the agent enough context about the caller so that he can answer the queries better.

The agent screen also has space for showing a script to the agent. If there is a script that your agents should follow when answering calls, that can be uploaded to the Cloudagent system and when a call comes in, the script is shown to the agent so that he can follow that in answering the call.

So as you can see, Cloudagent has been designed with the agent in mind.

Once he logs in, he can control his status from the toolbar. Also, there are keyboard shortcuts for all major actions.
Once an agent becomes ready, Cloudagent starts routing calls to the agent and when an agent receives the call, details about the call are shown on the toolbar and the customer details are displayed through a screen pop. Using this information, the agent can answer the customer queries very easily.

After the call is finished, the disposition screen opens up and the agent can finish updating the call details.

Using this workflow, agents can utilize their time efficiently in the call center.

The 360 degree support experience on the cloud

In this world of real time support expected by the customers, it is imperative that your support desk is enabled with the right tools. Given the various advantages of cloud which are being realized, it makes sense to move your support desk on to the cloud completely. To add one more feather in the cap, now cloud agent  can be integrated with Freshdesk as well. To know more, here's the link on how you can do that -  http://blog.kookoo.in/2012/09/mashing-up-freshdesk-with-kookoo-for.html . As you know, Cloud Agent is powered by KooKoo platform - http://kookoo.in and hence all that is given in the blog is possible with cloud agent as well.

When running a support system call center, we will need an IVR, a call center software and after call processing.
1. IVR: Cloudagent integrate well with KooKoo. Using KooKoo, you can build complex IVRs to provide proper treatment to your callers. The IVR can be deeply integrated with your systems to provide contextual information to caller.

2. Call Center: Cloudagent is the worlds first call center on the cloud. The state of the art agent toolbar, coupled with nifty features like screenpops, agent scripts etc allow the agent to handle the call with all the details of the caller presented to him.

3. After call processing: Once a call is finished, the disposition screen is presented and disposition reports are also available. There is also a well defined API support to push the call details into your CRM at the end of every call.

As you know, cloud agent is well integrated with various API's to any third party CRM systems and hence it is only a matter of choice now on how you want to integrate your voice support with the various options available for the CRM systems.To know more, you can contact us at sales@cloudagent.in or directly call us on 1800 200 0820.