How IT can control contact centre costs in Singapore

As one of the major commercial and communications hubs of the world, Singapore houses a number of contact centres catering to countless small and medium-sized businesses that find it difficult to employ full-time personnel to run their mission-critical customer-service operations.  

Outsourcing their requirements to a specialised organisation is often more economical for these companies, given the complex nature of contact centre technology, which has to interoperate with other applications and solutions.

On the other hand, companies with sufficient in-house resources prefer to manage their contact centres directly, as communications-technology developments have allowed them to reduce costs, without sacrificing service levels. 

One example, Chan Brothers, a leading Singapore-based travel company with a 50-year track record of offering a wide choice of destinations, has 150 contact centre agents in-house using ShoreTel Unified Communications and Contact Centre to deliver seamless communication to its customers, prospects, business partners and service providers. 

Whilst contact centre technology must be integrated with other business applications and processes, it does not have to be cost prohibitive to do so.  Below are the ways in which IT managers can reduce costs, yet maintain a smooth-running and cost-effective operation:

1.     Minimising Hardware

Install a Single Server  

Even though most contact centre solutions designed for small and medium-sized businesses can be operated on a single server, very few are designed as a single-server solution. 

However, a reliable single-server solution can provide all the features needed to operate a fully functional contact centre – lowering hardware costs and IT staff time, since only one server requires backup and maintenance.  

Maximise Softphone Advantages

Recently developed softphones integrate software into agents’ desktops, eliminating physical handsets on the agents’ desks – thereby, reducing hardware costs and decreasing the effort needed to support telephone and contact centre solutions. 

Softphones also eliminate the need for hardwired telephones and their associated costs, which streamlines the provisioning process and simplifies business continuity, as the agents do not need reserved workspaces and can receive calls anywhere, as long as there is a network connection. 

Finally, softphones can also reduce the cost of at-home agents since the phones operate through a VPN, removing the need for home-office telephone lines.

2.    Streamlining Integrations

Start with an Integrated Solution

Contact centre solutions come in one of two designs: interconnected solutions (sometimes called unified solutions) and integrated solutions. 

Interconnected solutions have all the pieces (i.e. IVR, ACD, dialer, and so on), coupled together through APIs, middleware, and other external methods.  Alternatively, integrated solutions are built from a common software foundation, with less moving parts and common interfaces and structure – making them more suitable for small and medium-sized businesses, with simplified maintenance and upgrading, as well as administration efficiency.

Use Open Standards to Expand the Solution

Open standards enable diverse solutions to exchange information, commands, and controls without the need for proprietary translators or specific programming languages. 

Since they are almost accepted universally, open standards are easy to implement and maintain, without the need for hard-to-find support skills.

Include Unified Communications (UC) in the Integrated Solution

UC enables the contact centre to better support customers and provides multiple communication channels – such as voice, text and chat – in one interface. 

Agents who need assistance can find an available supervisor or expert agent through presence, send an instant message with a question or a request for help, and add that person to the customer call. 

However, if not integrated into the contact centre solution, UC can be difficult and complex to implement. 

3.    Reducing Risk

Eliminate Single Points of Failure

IT managers must work with the contact centre manager to design a business-continuity plan, rather than a disaster-recovery plan.  The goal of a business-continuity plan is to keep communication coming into the contact centre and to have agents available to answer the calls during an emergency. 

The key to a successful business-continuity plan is to remove single points of failure by distributing agents into two or more locations, with each able to accept and route interactions independently, even when the data centre is offline.  

Deploy Standard Hardware Redundancy

Many emergencies are very localised; for example, failed disk drives.  A key responsibility of the IT group is to keep the technology up and running. 

Hardware redundancy and RAID technologies have been commonplace for decades and are part of standard operating procedures for IT departments.

Simplified contingency management can be achieved by selecting systems with built-in redundancy for business competitiveness.

4.      Reducing Cost and Agent Turnover

Employ At-home Agents

The use of at-home agents is becoming more popular as contact centre managers discover their advantages and deploy solutions that support at-home agents. 

Whilst there are costs associated with at-home agents, those costs can be offset by savings in real estate and related overhead costs.  In addition, at-home agents enhance business continuity given their remote locations. 

Simplify Mobility

Despite their ubiquity, smartphones and tablets are not standardised, and each has a different way of integrating with the enterprise PBX and contact centre solution.

 Whilst IT managers today have no choice but to embrace the use of smartphones and tablets, it is next to impossible to select a single brand and model company-wide. 

Contact centre employees and managers are increasingly requesting their personal devices be integrated into the PBX and that contact centre desktop applications be ported onto these devices. 

To overcome this challenge, IT managers can adopt solutions that can both reduce integration complexities, and enable a diverse range of mobile devices to connect with the company’s communications platforms.

Conclusion

Technologically, contact centres are one of the most complex business operations.  However, IT managers can keep it simple by minimising hardware and taking advantage of integrated UC and distributed solutions, as well as open standards. 

In addition, using built-in capabilities for at-home agents and mobile devices can help streamline the virtual contact centre and reduce costs, whilst delivering great service to the organisation’s customers.