IP, Virtual, & Consolidated: The new standard in financial services contact center technology

Customer service excellence is a core strategy for financial services institutions worldwide, and so contact center decision makers in the industry are under pressure to increase customer satisfaction and reduce costs at the same time, all while managing increasingly complex day-to-day operations.

This may sound like mission impossible, but one of the most effective ways to further all of these challenging and sometimes conflicting objectives -- service improvement, cost reduction, and operational streamlining -- is through the deployment of a virtual contact center.

A virtual contact center is a contact center in which the agents are located in multiple locations, but managed and utilized as a single entity. With one logical center across many locations, staffing resources are used to their maximum efficiency. Since calls are shared across the entire pool of agents rather than across geographically specific ones, the traffic is more evenly divided, moderating the workload for all agents. Busy signals, wait times, and calls not served are reduced, which not only raises customer satisfaction, but also decreases the caller negativity that can wear down even the best agents.

A virtual contact center can draw upon full-time customer service agents housed in several centralized call centers, both captive and outsourced, additional full- and part-time agents at each local branch, and numerous designated product knowledge experts throughout the organization who act as part time agents. Indeed it is the ability to unify all these resources within a single virtual call center, and thus to be able to draw upon the appropriate resource at the appropriate time for each call via intelligent skills-based routing, that makes this strategy so effective. Since calls are routed to the right person regardless of location, fewer calls have to be escalated, and a more inquiries are converted to business in less time. 

Because it allows agents to work in any location, even at home, the virtual contact center model increases the pool of available agents, reduces recruitment costs and ongoing labor costs, and improves employee retention and satisfaction, thus reducing training costs and, again, improving customer service. In the financial services industries, this so-called “home-shoring” strategy is becoming an increasingly attractive alternative, but only when the agents at home are full participants in a unified, virtual contact center.

Virtual also means flexible. The mergers, spin-offs, reorganizations and redeployments so common in the financial services industry are rarely painless. But they are far less painful and costly on an organization's contact centers when those contact centers are virtual and their technology resources are therefore location-independent.

Virtualization also supports and reduces risks associated with the major trend to offshore outsourcing of agents. While the cost reduction opportunity of offshore outsourcing is appealing, vital concerns remain about loss of control, operational complexity, and quality of service, especially in the very sensitive area of financial services. Creating virtual contact centers mitigates these risks, because it enables managers to retain complete operational visibility and control of activity across the globe via easy-to-use, web-based administrative and reporting tools. It also allows seamless global call routing, so that callers can reach the most cost effective and appropriately skilled agent wherever in the world the agent may be, and be transferred quickly and seamlessly, when necessary, to any other agent located anywhere in the world.

The IP advantage
Because IP networks are inherently virtual, virtualization is more cost effective and easier to justify as a capital investment with the deployment of an IP-based solution. As financial services enterprises enhance their own high performance IP networks, the IP advantage increases.  And there are other benefits to this inherently virtual technology.  New generation software-based platforms like CosmoCom’s CosmoCall Universe don’t need CTI middleware to integrate with the IT environment, and unify all communication channels in a single platform.   

A traditional premise-based enterprise deployment is not the only route to virtualization, however. Any discussion of virtualization should also address the hosted services option. Hosted IP Contact Center On-Demand services are increasingly available from major service providers with global presence. These services not only reduce the capital budget requirement of contact center infrastructure to nil, but also provide instant virtualization because they are fundamentally engineered to support agents in any mix of physical locations.

Whether they follow the traditional premises model or the new hosted on-demand model, IP-based solutions are the affordable and fast-deploying virtual contact center platforms that can make the vision of a completely global, fully distributed, yet logically singular contact center a practical reality for banks, brokerages, insurance companies, and other financial service institutions of every shape and size.

Consolidation -- Multi-virtual centers
Some forward thinking financial services enterprises are taking the next step and consolidating their call centers into one “multi-virtual” platform with CosmoCom’s multi-tenant, all-IP platform. Honed in the demanding carrier space, CosmoCom’s multi-tenant platform can support not just one distributed virtual contact center, but any number of them. Most large financial services institutions have several contact centers addressing completely different applications. From a staffing perspective, it may not make sense to combine them. But it can make a lot of sense and save a lot of dollars to consolidate the technology infrastructure, even if the staffing is completely separate.

A multi-tenant contact center platform like CosmoCom’s provides web-based self-administration to each individual tenant, so for tenants it’s just like having their own dedicated platform. Combining the workloads of multiple applications by combining multiple tenants on the same platform generates great economies of scale across all the contact centers operating within an organization, because the peak loads of these different applications never align perfectly.  There are also economies of scale in implementation and support personnel, because the investment in staff training and experience keeps on paying dividends across more and more applications.

The virtual contact center needs an all-IP platform to make it economically feasible. But don’t stop at merely virtual. If virtual is good, multi-virtual is better. Multi-tenant technology with tenant self-administration makes this unique and important innovation available to financial services contact center professionals today.

Summary
This article began with the provocative statement that your contact center is obsolete if it’s not IP, Virtual, and Consolidated.  You now understand that your contact center needs to be IP because that is what enables you to reap the benefits of being Virtual and Consolidated.  You also understand that these benefits are available both with traditional premise-based technology infrastructure and with technology outsourced to a hosted service provider.  With so many benefits to be realized, and so many different ways of approaching them, you may now agree that “obsolete” is not too strong a word to describe the situation, and that IP, Virtual, and Consolidated will be the guiding principles of sweeping change across all financial services contact centers in the next very few years.

--
By Steve Kowarsky, Executive Vice President of CosmoCom, and a frequent industry speaker on virtual contact centers. http://www.cosmocom.com