BPO Call Center : Employer Expectations

Most organisations today are under great pressure to keep costs of operation to a minimum. In the past, call centres were always seen as cost centres, a necessary evil that had to be tolerated to enable customers' calls to be managed effectively. This emphasis on low cost operations persists to this day, and today causes organisations to encourage customers to use self-service channels.

However, some organisations are now realising that with 80 percent of all customer contacts being managed by the contact centre, there is great potential for the contact centre to be very strategic in long-term customer retention. And with sales functions in the contact centre, it is increasingly becoming a profit centre.

With this recognition comes the pressure on contact centre managers to maintain target service levels in response time while the pressure to manage ongoing costs remains.

A major trend which is emerging in response to these pressures is the multiskilling of agents. Multiskilling (depending on the skills) results in:
a higher percentage of contacts resolved at the first point;
the ability to vary the tasks assigned to agents; and
the ability to utilise the time when an agent is not on the phone to do other productive work, thus reducing overall costs.