The call center industry is a typical example of a labor-intensive sector. More than 60% of the overall call center budget is spent on personnel costs. The remainder goes to technology, facilities and of course telecoms & networking. Despite many investments in areas such as CTI, scripting, work force management, skill-based routing and so on, customer satisfaction has not really improved over the recent years. Most heard complaints are: long waiting times, first call resolution, quality of service and staff-related issues such as attitude and competences of the Customer Service Representative. 
Although there is now much to do about web-self service, the "Why Talking To Your Customers Is Ruining Your Business" report by Forrester indicates that roughly 50% of the customers (regardless of generation) still prefer speaking to a call center rep in stead of using web self-service (5%),writing an email (6%) or chatting with an agent (3%).
In the current economic climate, call center managers are under increased pressure to reduce costs, improve operational efficiency, leverage business intelligence and most importantly, provide excellent service to prevent the customers from running away to your competitor. Nothing new... but how can you do this in an industry challenged with high employee turnover, skilled labor shortage, low engagement and increasing need to outsource work as a response to increasing call volumes?
Well one way is to implement enterprise wikis and social software in the call center. Dell - with over 5000 call center reps - introduced wikis as part of its knowledge management strategy. Results are staggering: as a result of this improved internal (mass) collaboration and knowledge sharing, they were able to cut call handling times with 2 to 3 minutes. Thanks to the wikis, CSRs spend less time searching for information. Dell estimates that they save up to $4.000.000 per year as a result of this new approach to knowledge management and information sharing.
Besides the fact that wikis save the organization money - they let tacit knowledge surface and help to improve the customer experience in many ways: first call resolution, quality of service and well-informed staff to name a couple of them. I don't know how much they have spent on their social software platform but with prices ranging between $15 and $100 per user for typical social software suites... this smells of a good pay back and great ROI. Can Enterprise 2.0 be the silver bullet for call and contact centers? At this very moment, it looks like the concept has not really penetrated this industry... is it because the call center industry is a laggard in this field or is it merely a lack of awareness on the potential of enterprise social software?
Although there is now much to do about web-self service, the "Why Talking To Your Customers Is Ruining Your Business" report by Forrester indicates that roughly 50% of the customers (regardless of generation) still prefer speaking to a call center rep in stead of using web self-service (5%),writing an email (6%) or chatting with an agent (3%).
In the current economic climate, call center managers are under increased pressure to reduce costs, improve operational efficiency, leverage business intelligence and most importantly, provide excellent service to prevent the customers from running away to your competitor. Nothing new... but how can you do this in an industry challenged with high employee turnover, skilled labor shortage, low engagement and increasing need to outsource work as a response to increasing call volumes?
Well one way is to implement enterprise wikis and social software in the call center. Dell - with over 5000 call center reps - introduced wikis as part of its knowledge management strategy. Results are staggering: as a result of this improved internal (mass) collaboration and knowledge sharing, they were able to cut call handling times with 2 to 3 minutes. Thanks to the wikis, CSRs spend less time searching for information. Dell estimates that they save up to $4.000.000 per year as a result of this new approach to knowledge management and information sharing.
Besides the fact that wikis save the organization money - they let tacit knowledge surface and help to improve the customer experience in many ways: first call resolution, quality of service and well-informed staff to name a couple of them. I don't know how much they have spent on their social software platform but with prices ranging between $15 and $100 per user for typical social software suites... this smells of a good pay back and great ROI. Can Enterprise 2.0 be the silver bullet for call and contact centers? At this very moment, it looks like the concept has not really penetrated this industry... is it because the call center industry is a laggard in this field or is it merely a lack of awareness on the potential of enterprise social software?