Most telecom solutions providers tout savings such as reduced long distance and telco expenses in traditional tactical (OPEX-reduction) business cases. Most of my blog posts aim to elevate communication investment decision making to the strategic level.

One of our clients delivers broadband service to over one hundred cities, with most calls handled locally in small contact centers within the service areas. The customer care leadership recognized that customer service reps skilled at “saving” a cancellation request were rare. When each service center operated on its own, the likelihood was very low that a cancellation request would be matched up with a customer service representative (CSR) with the skill to turn the caller around. The net present value of each subscriber won or lost is nearly $4,000.

The virtualization concept, in this scenario, refers to unifying all of the small contact centers to appear as one set of resources. A short self-service menu picked out nearly 90% of intended cancellation requests. These calls were routed to those select CSRs proven to be capable of retaining subscribers. The save rate tripled from one out of four to three out of four. Put another way, retention rates improved from 25% to 75%. Based on a conservative rate of $3,500 value (NPV of net cash flows) per subscriber, the aggregate value of virtualizing routing calls based on skill set was greater than the entire capital cost of deploying a distributed (VoIP-networked) communication infrastructure.

Allowing customers, partners and even employees’ quick access to the right resources is applicable to nearly all businesses. While the client above is in a heavy customer service (“call center”) industry, all enterprises must improve the ability to communicate with the right resources quickly and on the first call. Being able to problem solve, using the best media, e.g. voice, text, email, IM, video as selected by the customer, is the business value proposition of unified communications.

The moral of this story is that the success described above is an obvious lesson in how communication technology investments aid in the retention of customers. Immediately matching the right resource to a valuable customer scenario was easily quantifiable … Businesses must be proactive in empowering high value customers, knowledge workers, and business partners to collaborate with them on their terms. That takes planning and forward thinking, moving beyond yesterday’s staid communication and information management tools. If your firm doesn’t, your competitor will.

What are your thoughts on telecom virtualization and skills based routing? If you found this post useful, please leave a comment, share with your peers, or subscribe to the news feed to have my future posts delivered to your news feed reader.

The National Division was challenged to manage customer service centers distributed across 20 cities and three time zones as profitably as the other divisions. There was an expectation of leveraging economies of scale based on the contact center footprint. The original business case for a $2.5 million dollar capital investment was heavily based on an uptick in call center efficiencies and revenue generations. To the enterprise’s delight, the more strategic benefits were recognized by business acceleration. The capital investment replaced numerous standalone telephony and ACD platforms with a distributed architecture that centralized contact center applications at the firm’s headquarters. To maintain local customer service, most calls remained at each remote service center with routing, reporting and automated services offered through the headquarters site. The centralized communications center was networked with the distributed offices via private VoIP links. This is a typical configuration for implementing virtual contact centers.

The company knew its customer service traffic peaks were in the first couple of business hours and late afternoons. This left spare capacity for high quality video conferencing, which shared the same high quality private network, in the middle of the day. Rolling out video conferencing systems to all of the remote sites facilitated training of the remote management and customer service representatives (CSRs). Beyond the obvious travel cost savings, the company was able to train its field staff and CSRs on new service offerings and best practices significantly faster and more thoroughly than its previously used training model. The firm was able to add high quality programs and new revenue streams without having to add incremental CSRs. Video training enabled the firm to accelerate the number of new programs faster and with higher than anticipated customer satisfaction rates.

The National Division’s communications infrastructure plays a strategic role in assimilating acquisitions. Plug and Play is the catch phrase the firm uses in the business requirements phase of assimilation. This phrase refers to the ability to quickly and economically add any site into the virtual contact center including the flexibility to handle calls locally or centrally by a live CSR or via automated services. National Division added nearly 40 sites to the plug-and-play architecture in less than 60 days. The ability to plug-and-play accelerated business integration of a multi-billion dollar acquisition by three months, saving tens of millions of dollars in terms of customer retention and staff productivity.

Companies of all sizes need to be vigilant regarding their communications architecture. A big picture strategy across the entire enterprise enables a firm to leverage emerging technologies, in this case high quality video, to accelerate business processes.

My next blog will address how a sound communications architecture addresses the need to do more with less mantra of business in a challenging business environment.

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