Does multi-channel have to mean multi-cost?

As constant phone calls, emails and letters flood into the office, an overwhelmed retailer ponders the true benefits of having a variety of sales channels. While these multi-channel offerings provide the consumer with greater choice and access to the company’s products and services, the retailer is facing unmanageable volumes of communication with the customer as a result of its catalogue, internet, and store outlets. Under theses circumstances, it becomes necessary for retailers to consider outsourcing consumer interaction to a dedicated call centre so that the company can focus on its core business operations.

However, with the pressure on to keep costs down, retailers need to be sure that they are outsourcing the right functions, maintaining high quality customer service and not merely adding to their business costs. Managing Director, Laurin McDonald, explains how SITEL UK’s strategy is designed to maximise the value of consumer interaction and how multi-channel integration is employed to increase transactional value and enhance the client’s brand.

Businesses today must operate across a variety of sales channels not only to increase consumer reach, but also to match or exceed the offerings of their competitors. According to the Interactive Media in Retail Group (IMRG), 73% of UK businesses now provide information about products and services for customers over the internet. The IMRG has also estimated that UK internet sales in 2004 were worth £17 billion, with 16 million UK online shoppers placing over 400 million online orders. These figures show that the traditional channels of physical stores and catalogues should be complimented by an online sales capability in order to target a larger customer base.

As a result, greater numbers of phone calls and emails pour in due to a store, catalogue and web offering. Yet the customer service and delivery standards need not be compromised in the midst of this channel expansion. When the load becomes too heavy for a business’ internal workforce to handle, it can be effectively managed through an outsourced contact centre. In doing so, businesses will find that by outsourcing certain in-house functions costs can be dramatically reduced in both the short and long term, allowing them to realise increased revenues.

One of the immediate cost savings that impact companies when working with an experienced contact centre partner is reduced time to implementation, whereby savings are realised in areas such as staff costs, training, technology and facilities. A dedicated call centre business, like SITEL UK, already has a comprehensive set-up in all of these areas to manage customer interaction across the full range of its clients’ sales channels to enhance, extend and protect its clients’ brands.

In the area of HR, an outsourced partner offers experienced employees who are expertly trained not only in customer service, but also in a client’s products and services. SITEL UK employees are essentially knowledge workers – dedicated and highly professional call centre agents who have a comprehensive grasp on their client’s offerings, key message proposition and business culture. These knowledge workers use this understanding of their client to assist every customer at every interaction, whether by telephone, email or post. For example, in the FMCG sector, SITEL works with clients to stimulate employee participation through visits to client sites, role play scenarios and product testing to provide an in-depth understanding of the product or service, client and customer culture and business goals. In this way, businesses are benefiting from the outsourced partner’s expertise in delivering a wide range of customer contact activities, saving the time and money it usually takes to train staff for an in-house operation. Additionally there is a reduced time to implementation as a call centre partner like SITEL is trained to absorb and deliver client information quickly and efficiently.

Furthermore, SITEL is experienced in recruiting employees by using a range of staff evaluation tools including psychometric tests to assess a candidate’s personality and skill set to determine if a career with SITEL and in the call centre industry is right for them. By undergoing such a rigorous process, only people that are highly motivated are selected. This ensures increased staff productivity as the people selected are motivated by their environment, colleagues and clients and thus businesses will experience both short and long term benefits. Initially, a company can be confident that its brand will be enhanced through a service team that is committed to maintaining valuable client-customer relationships. Businesses should also expect increased revenues, as contact centre employees leverage their experience to increase first time call resolutions on all customer interaction and to reduce duplicate activity.

Another integral part of establishing a successful contact centre is having access to the proper technology. Whilst retailers may have the equipment to successfully set up multi-channel consumer outlets, the telephony and internet platforms required to process incoming and outgoing correspondence generated through ongoing marketing activities is expensive and entails recruitment of expensive IT personnel, in-depth training and on-going future-proofing of applications, middleware and hardware. Outsourcing companies like SITEL already have these elements in place and will also leverage their relationships with existing telecommunication partners in order to utilise telephony platforms that retailers are not privy to.

SITEL in particular, uses some of the most resilient and leading technologies in the industry to support its telephony and internet platforms. Among these is SITEL’s Global Private Network (GPN), which is a Multi-Protocol Label Switching fully meshed network that supports the highest level of service for the prioritisation of call or email traffic. Once connected to the SITEL GPN, clients can benefit, where appropriate, from access to multiple SITEL sites around the world, while simultaneously allowing connection to client premises by utilising the nearest ‘point of presence’ (POP). Additionally, SITEL utilises an Avaya CM2 (S8700) which provides full skills based routing functionality; even though the contact centre agents’ end points may be in two different continents, calls can be routed to agents in any location as if they were based in the same office. In working with this leading VoIP equipment, SITEL’s reporting is centralised, allowing any combination of reports to be produced by location and skill group.

Utilising such leading technologies puts SITEL in a position to offer its clients faster project implementation times, reduced costs as clients only pay for the portion of the network they require, reduced call transfer costs by utilizing the VoIP network and increased opening hours due to the GPN which allows for the “follow the sun methodology”. It is worth noting that if a business wanted to provide their own GPN with similar resilience, scale and flexibility they would need to spend in the region of £30 million for the technology alone, let alone the staff to manage it and the third party relationships required to maintain it. This means clients can realise increased revenues at reduced costs.

Moreover, retailers should not overlook the necessity of functional work facilities for their contact centre operation which, when factoring in rent, can significantly add to their financial costs. By outsourcing the contact centre, the facilities, technology and staff are immediately available to the client. For example, SITEL works with a major snack foods client that underwent a massive product recall of 300,000 crisps cases with 48 packets per case, totalling 24 million packets. The SITEL team were facing a potential 20 million plus phone calls, making the campaign too big for any other UK teleservices group to handle. On top of this, the client also wanted to recall the product via Freepost, so SITEL needed to find enough warehouse space to handle the potentially enormous volume of returned crisps. The SITEL team set about contacting affiliated sites to work out how to provide a solution. 80 workstations had been secured on the same day SITEL received the brief, as well as two London sites. Pulling together all its human resource experience and channels, a team was put together for the client in less than 24 hours. The result was that the press made very little of the whole incident, with the news by and large staying off the front pages and the national news programmes. This shows that outsourcing a contact centre service, no matter what the channel of communication, can be faster and more efficient – saving the client time and money whilst enhancing consumers’ perception of the brand.

An ongoing relationship with an outsourced call centre also provides retailers financial advantages in the long term. One such benefit is the ability to scale up or down according to business needs. SITEL works with many clients that require flexibility in staff, technology and facility offerings during a “boom or bust” period or to accommodate seasonal fluctuations in demand. In the circumstance of a business “boom”, clients will need to scale up on their contact centre service in order to take advantage of increased customer interaction. Whilst in a “bust”, companies may require less from a contact centre operation due to downscaling on both the financial and human resources side. The benefit of outsourcing is that stability is maintained internally among staff such that any business fluctuations do not result in redundancies among in-house call centre positions. During a “bust”, SITEL simply reallocates staff from a particular client campaign and can add more staff during a “boom”. The result is that SITEL adds to its clients’ staff morale and job security, while the client can easily reduce or increase its external contact centre investment at any time and benefit from their initial set-up investment in operations, training and supporting systems.

Retailers will find that outsourcing to a contact centre can ease the burden of operating across multiple channels in terms of cost, time and human resource management. Multi-channel does not have to mean multi-cost and with an outsourced service provider like SITEL as the customer contact centre partner, multi-channel becomes multi-beneficial.