Table Of ContentThe
Call Center
Handbook
5th Edition
by Keith Dawson
First published 2004 by CMP Books
This edition published 2015 by Focal Press
70 Blanchard Road, Suite 402, Burlington, MA 01803
and by Focal Press
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
Focal Press is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
Copyright © 2004 Keith Dawson
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or
utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now
known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any
information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the
publishers.
Notices
Practitioners and researchers must always rely on their own experience and
knowledge in evaluating and using any information, methods, compounds, or
experiments described herein. In using such information or methods they should
be mindful of their own safety and the safety of others, including parties for
whom they have a professional responsibility.
Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and
are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.
Cover and Text Design by Robbie Alterio
ISBN 13: 978-1-57820-305-5 (pbk)
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Introduction........................................................................................................1
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Part I - The Physical Center ....................................................7
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Chapter 1: How Call Centers Evolve, Or, How To Start Putting Your Center
Into Perspective............................................................................9
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Chapter 2: Destination Call Center................................................................15
Chapter 3: Facilities & Design ......................................................................29 o
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Part II - Routing Calls:Switches & Hardware Systems............39
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Chapter 4: Toll Free & Long Distance Services..............................................41
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Chapter 5: The ACD ......................................................................................49
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Chapter 6: Outdialing Systems......................................................................61
Chapter 7: Computer Telephony ..................................................................79 t
Chapter 8: Voice Processing Fundamentals..................................................97 s
Part III - The Front End ......................................................105
Chapter :9 Interactive Voice Response........................................................107
Chapter 10: Speech Recognition ....................................................................115
Chapter 11: The Web & Call Centers..............................................................125
Chapter 12: The Fallacy of Email....................................................................135
Chapter 13: Giving Video a Second Look ......................................................139
Part IV - Making Sense of the Call......................................143
Chapter 14: More on Computer Telephony....................................................145
Chapter 15: Skills-Based Routing ..................................................................161
Chapter 16: Customer Relationship Management ........................................167
Chapter 17: Order Processing ......................................................................183
Part V - Critical Peripherals..................................................189
Chapter 18: Readerboards and Display Technologies....................................191
Chapter 19: Headsets ....................................................................................197
Chapter 20: On-Hold Messaging....................................................................201
Part VI - Management & Operations....................................211
Chapter 21: Workforce Management Software..............................................213
Chapter 22: Monitoring Systems....................................................................221
Chapter 23: Making Call Center Careers Meaningful....................................229
Chapter 24: Surefire Ways to Motivate Your Reps........................................235
Chapter 25: Realizing The Value on the Front Line........................................241
Part VII - Outside the Center ..............................................247
Chapter 26: Outsourcing................................................................................249
Chapter 27: Disaster & Contingency Planning..............................................259
Chapter 28: Telecommuting Agents ............................................................269
Chapter 29: Self-Service and Self-Delusion: A Final Word............................277
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Introduction Call Center Handbook Introduction Call Center Handbook 1
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Why Call Centers
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Still Matter n
Chances are you have this
book in your hand
because you run, or work in, or have something to do with, a call center.
Chances are also that when people outside work ask you what you do, you
have to explain to them exactly what a call center is, and they don’t always
get it. They focus on the things that they dislike about call centers — those
telemarketing calls they get at dinnertime or when they’re putting the baby
to bed. Or the long time they spend on hold trying to get someone to
explain why there’s an error on their bank statement.
Sometimes call centers get pretty bad press — especially when the economy
turns sour and jobs are shipped offshore. And for every story we can tell you
about the people who work long and hard to make their centers the epitome
of good service, what many people remember is the rude call, or the rare time
when the rep simply can’t fix whatever has gone wrong.
Obviously there’s more to call centers than the face they present to the
consumer. But that’s the reality — that people interact with call centers all
the time, and often come away frustrated and bewildered. That’s one of the
main reasons this book exists: to help you improve the way the call center
operates, and following that, to improve the relationship between your
company and your customers.
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Call Center Handbook Introduction Call Center Handbook Introduction
This book is for anyone who works in a call center. For anyone who sells
by phone. Or who helps customers. It’s about all the stuff that’s used in call
centers, the technology, hardware and software. It’s also about the kinds of
services that call centers buy, things like toll free and long distance services,
outsourced call center help, site selection assistance and consulting. And it’s
about the people who work in centers: how to keep reps happy, interested,
well trained and excited about their jobs. How to make sure that you don’t
spend a fortune in training only to lose those people after a few short
months because some preventable thing you’re doing is driving them away.
A call center is a traditionally defined as a physical location where calls are
placed, or received, in high volume for the purpose of sales, marketing, cus-
tomer service, telemarketing, technical support or other specialized busi-
ness activity. One early definition described a call center as a place of doing
business by phone that combined a centralized database with an automatic
call distribution system. That was pretty good for 1985, but today it’s more
than that. These days we expand the definition in two directions.
First, we expand it to include call-taking and call-making organizations
that were originally overlooked, like fundraising and collections organiza-
tions, and help desks, both internal and external.
And more controversially, we expand it to include centers that handle
more than the traditional voice call — lets call them call centers plus. These
would be centers that handle voice plus fax, or email, live Web chat centers,
video interactions — all the many real and hypothetical customer interac-
tions that are now possible.
Estimates of the number of call centers in North America range from
20,000 to as high as 200,000. The reality is probably somewhere around
120,000 depending on what you consider a call center. Some experts believe
that you shouldn’t count centers below a certain number of agents (or
“seats”). I believe in the widest possible definition, all the way down to
micro-centers of four or five people. Why? Because those centers face many
of the same kinds of problems on a daily basis as their larger cousins: prob-
lems of training, staffing, call handling, technology assessment, and so on.
Those smaller centers have to put the same kind of face forward to the cus-
tomer as the largest centers, in order to remain competitive. And more often
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Introduction Call Center Handbook Introduction Call Center Handbook
than not, those small center become medium-sized centers over time.
Call centers are generally set up as large rooms, with workstations that
include a computer, a telephone set (or headset) hooked into a large switch
and one or more supervisor stations. It may stand by itself, or be linked with
other centers. It will most likely be linked to a corporate data network,
including mainframes, microcomputers and LANs.
Call centers were first recognized as organized corporate departments
around 30 years ago, in their largest incarnations: airline reservation centers,
catalog ordering companies, problem solvers like the GE Answer Center.
Until the early 1990s, only the largest centers could afford the investment in
technology that allowed them to handle huge volumes - this was the devel-
opment of the automatic call distributor, which in those days was a cus-
tomized, proprietary phone system designed to funnel as many calls as pos-
sible into a single large site. (In fact, apocryphal industry legend likes to
point to the installation of Rockwell’s first Galaxy ACD at Continental
Airlines 30 years ago as the de facto beginning of “modern” times.)
More recently, with the development of PC LANs, client/server software
systems, open phone systems and browser-based desktops for data access,
any call center can have an advanced call handling and customer manage-
ment system, even down to ten agents or less.
As companies have learned that service is the key to attracting and main-
taining customers (and hence, revenue), the common perception of the call
center has changed. It is rarely seen as a luxury anymore. In fact, it is often
regarded as a competitive weapon. In some industries (catalog retailing,
financial services, hospitality) a call center is the difference between being in
business and not being in business. In other industries (cable television,
utilities) call centers have been the centerpiece of corporate attempts to
quickly overhaul service and improve their image.
It’s a good working hypothesis to assume that any company that sells any
product has a call center, or will shortly have one, because it is the most
effective way to reach (and be reached by) customers.
Just when you thought you knew what you were doing — technology is
redefining the call center, changing it into something bigger, more complex,
and ultimately more customer-pleasing.
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Call Center Handbook Introduction Call Center Handbook Introduction
You could choose to define a center in terms of its physical reality, like the
traditional definitions just given. It is a roomful of people, devoted to the
task of making and/or receiving calls to and from customers. It is the place
where those calls are handled, and the accumulation of technologies that
assist: phone lines, switches, software, human expertise.
Or, you could look at it from the point of view of function — the call cen-
ter as the locus for customer satisfaction. In that view, the center is the
“place” where the customer goes to complain, to place an order, or get help
— even if the agents are widely disconnected from each other, or if the data-
base is halfway around the world from them.
There may not seem to be too much difference between those two points of
view. Until recently, there wasn’t. Whether you subscribed to one or another
definition mattered little in the day to day running of a center. You could even
hold both views without much cognitive dissonance.
Call centers have emerged as powerful, strategic tools in the fight to gain
and keep customers. Running a center has become its own corporate disci-
pline. The call center industry has become an industry — not simply a col-
lection of dissociated vertical markets with similar needs. We’ve seen phe-
nomenal growth in all segments — equipment sales, outsourcing services,
toll-free traffic, customer sales made by phone.
And yet, the moorings are coming loose. Something ironic has happened.
At almost the precise moment that we can herald the arrival of the call cen-
ter industry, we can see, looming out there on the horizon, the signs of
something coming along to replace what we know as the “call center.”
The physical center itself is devolving. Smaller centers are more practical.
You can put a fifty seat center into virtually any town or city in the US, with-
out worrying about telecom infrastructure or labor. Cities, states and most
recently, foreign countries are falling over each other to offer tax incentives
to attract call centers.
Centers can use agents-at-home, virtual agents who sign into a center
from their homes whenever demand requires, the ultimate in just-in-time
staffing. I heard of one company that trains spouses of call center agents.
Those spouses, who already know much about the company, are then
equipped to pick up part-time work on very short notice, and can sign into
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Introduction Call Center Handbook Introduction Call Center Handbook
the call center from their kitchen tables.
This is happening more and more. Technology makes the role of an agent
more powerful — agenting is more of an analytic and interpretive skill, as
well as more interpersonal. They have access to more information about the
customer and the company. And the kinds of questions they are called upon
to answer are different. They are higher level, more complex, often requiring
more decision-making authority for customer service and support.
With so many alternate entry points into a company’s sales/service oper-
ation, we need to rethink the traditional measures of service level, revenue
generated per call, cost per call, and so on. What is the relative cost of a Web
hit, and its benefit? In the same vein, can we afford to treat email requests
for service any differently than we do live calls?
Most of what we now describe as a call is really best described as a trans-
action or an interaction between two parties, you and the customer.
Eventually most customer interactions won’t involve an agent. They will be
electronically processed database transactions.
We have to recognize that the call center is more than the simple place we
defined earlier, a place for making and taking calls. It is best described by its
function — as a collection of people and technologies whose role is to serve
customers.
You are on one side of a chasm, your customers on the other side. There
are many ways to get from one side to the other. The customer chooses
which route depending on what he needs.
There is already evidence that the role of call center agent is changing,
into more of a knowledge worker. Reps are now, more than ever, on a career
track to supervisory and management positions.
Things are changing faster than ever before. As soon as this book hits your
hands, we’ll be ready with a pile of new technologies to write about, new prod-
ucts that are out there, and new ideas about how to run the call center.
As always with any project this size, you might find errors of fact or judg-
ment in this book. If so, please let me know, and if possible I’ll correct them
in the next edition.
— Keith Dawson
Winter, 2004
