Answers: Click-to-call technology

click to call

Question: I manage the in-house call centre for a large retailer, and I’ve recently been told that the business is thinking of investing in click-to-call technology for our website. What I want to know is how the system is likely to impact on the call centre in terms of call volumes.

I’ve read up about the technology and have a reasonable understanding of what it can do for us as a business. Other than that, how should I prepare both myself and my teams for the new technology? Is there anything I should be doing now to make the transition easier when it happens? Also, is there anything I should be asking the chief technology officer (CTO) and financial director to think about before they make the purchase – the kind of things that will actually benefit the call centre?

Any help you can provide would be much appreciated.

Answer 1 Courtesy of Adam Faulkner, founding director at the consultancy Sabio (www.sabio.co.uk)Click-to-call, the technology that effectively provides contact centre operators with instant phone leads, has been around for some time and, not surprisingly, has proved successful for a range of businesses across different markets.The traditional way for organisations to fulfil click-to-call requests has been for their customers to select the click-to-call button on a web page and then enter their details on a web form for an agent to call them back at a later time. This call request is then ‘batched up’ with all the others and loaded in to a dialler for outbound calling when resource is available.

This kind of service works okay at a basic level, but if you’re serious about click-to-call, then you need to do your forecasting correctly and have agents in place to handle likely call volume increases. At a minimum, click-to-call customers should be kept informed of what’s likely to happen when they fill in a web form – for example, a simple message saying: “Our agents are busy at the moment. Can we call you back between 7 and 8 this evening?”

Click-to-call is an excellent example of the kind of process that organisations now have to manage due to an increase in ‘customer-initiated channel hopping’. As individual consumers, we’re more and more demanding, and whether it’s a phone, e-mail or web transaction, we all expect the organisations we deal with to understand that we’re likely to be engaging with them across many different channels, and will want them to maintain some level of continuity in our dealings with them so that we can avoid the frustration of having to start a transaction again when we jump from one channel to another.

That’s why it’s advisable for organisations not to treat a click-to-call programme as an isolated initiative. So the first requirement is to understand what’s actually going on in your contact centre right now. Do you have agents available to handle click-to-calls, or are there appropriately skilled executives elsewhere in your business who could fulfil these requests?

Once suitable resource has been identified, you need to find a way of blending any click-to-call requests with your day-to-day customer interaction traffic. Done correctly, this can effectively convert your traditional outbound click-to-call response activity in to a series of inbound requests that can be processed alongside your standard call programme.

The technology is already in place to support this kind of integration, whether it’s a multimedia routing engine that can successfully deliver the click-to-call interaction along with relevant customer details and a copy of the web page they are currently viewing, or the ability to engage immediately with an MSN-style web-chat with the customer.

Other new relevant technology areas include consumers taking advantage of lower-cost Internet protocol (IP) telephony using services such as Skype, as well as Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) presence technologies that will be able to tailor the click-to-call response depending on the type of device the customer is using. Whatever the technology, organisations will need to adapt their intelligent universal queue systems to support these click-to-call opportunities.

Answer 2
Courtesy of Ian Davis, director of product strategy at the technology firm ATG (www.atg.com)

As you will have seen from your own research, click-to-call technology
allows a consumer to click a button on a website, e-mail or banner and
initiate a conversation with a salesperson or customer care agent,
either via the telephone or computer. More importantly, click-to-call
technology provides an increasingly vital new channel to help consumers
go from browsing to buying, boosting conversion rates and profits for
the company.

Youmay fear that this technology will increase your call volumes, putting
pressure on existing call centre staff. However, bear in mind that
click-to-call can reduce call handling time by up to 60 seconds,
helping agents to deal with calls much more efficiently. Having said
that, click-to-call capabilities should not be plastered all over a
company’s website. The trick is identifying web behaviour towards the
end of a buying cycle that indicates a customer is indecisive about
purchasing, and recognising at which stage the business should
intervene and offer support.

The idea of involving a real person
in the online buying process is to increase a shopper’s confidence and
reduce shopping cart abandonment, which analyst house Forrester
estimates runs at over 50%. Carefully selecting the point at which
click-to-call should be offered not only makes the technology more
effective, but ensures call centre agents do not have to deal with an
onslaught of calls from every customer curious about what click-to-call
can offer.

With regards to preparing your team, click-to-call
should actually make the job of call centre agents easier. The
technology enables agents to view a wealth of information about the
consumer such as what products they have been searching for, what page
they are currently viewing and at what stage they are in the buying
cycle by intelligently monitoring and analysing customers’ online
behaviour. This ensures that from the moment a call centre worker
connects to the customer they can immediately provide the necessary
help and information.

Furthermore, implementing click-to-call
can help to improve staff morale. With more knowledge of the consumer
at their fingertips, agents can solve specific customer queries more
quickly and easily, leading to greater job satisfaction. Finally,
customer satisfaction will be improved. Not only will this lead to
increased customer loyalty and retention, but a rise in up-sell and
conversion rates. This direct impact of click-to-call on a business’s
bottom line would definitely be worth highlighting to the finance
director.

27 Jan 2007

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