BUSIN ESS WH I TE PAPER

FOUR STEPS TOWARD

VIRTUALIZING YOUR
CONTACT CENTER
Improve the Customer Experience, Increase
Operational Efficiency, and Reduce Total Cost
of Ownership

TABLE OF CONTENTS
Executive Summary...........................1
What is a Virtual Contact
Center? ....................................................1
What are the Business Benefits
of a Virtual Contact Center?..........2
How to Get There — Four
Steps Toward a Virtual Contact
Center.........................................................3
Conclusion................................................4
Executive Summary
In today’s world, practically all products and services are commoditized, leaving service as a key
differentiator and making the delivery of excellent customer service an important part of your
company’s strategy. Delivering excellent customer service requires an effective and efficient Contact
Center organization. However, legacy infrastructures increase the complexity and cost of service
processes; outdated technology is not able to support the level of service today’s customers want.
Virtualizing resources across your Contact Center operations — front office, back office, and branch
offices, both internal and outsourced resources — allows your organization to use economies of
scale to drive efficiencies and customer satisfaction.
A standardized and simplified virtual architecture will also reduce the Total Cost of Ownership of
your Contact Center infrastructure. It supports simplification of the telephony environment through a
service-oriented architecture and will deliver against your enterprise architecture strategy whether
in your data center, a hosted environment, or a cloud computing strategy.

What is a Virtual Contact Center?

At the heart of the concept is the idea that work needs to be done by people who have the right skills
and availability, wherever they are in the organization. This would not only deliver the highest level of
customer experience but also use resources in the most efficient way.
However, in most organizations the need to manage and monitor work and resources forces us to
“corral” resources into teams that focus on specific tasks and deliver work to them accordingly. This
work may be phone calls, emails, external correspondence, web chat, etc. This work may be support
or sales, by product/service specialism, ability, shift patterns, etc. All of these drive the Contact Center
to break up the resource pool and in doing so, create inefficiency.
Organizations over the last 20 years and seen the significant economies of scale that can be achieved
from virtualizing resources based on business priorities for service delivery and operational efficiency.
On average, agent utilization improved by four percent and in some cases, well in excess of 10%. And
that was just for call centers; when other media types and resources from other parts of the business
are added in, the potential benefits are even greater.
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Four Steps Toward Virtualizing Your Contact Center / page 2

What are the Business Benefits of a Virtual Contact

Center?
Find the right employee for your customer, no matter
where they are.
Finding the right employee for a customer that contacts your business is crucial in order to
drive efficiency and customer satisfaction. What “right employee” really means depends on a
number of variables, which might be different based on the context of the customer’s question
or your Contact Center strategy. This can drive customer loyalty, first contact resolution for
efficiency, or increase sales.
By creating one virtual pool of resources using a common skill repository you can reach any
employee, anywhere in the organization. This drives efficiency with economies of scale as well
as enabling you to find the right employee right away, which reduces transfer rates, decreases
average handle time, and decreases the effort your customers need to take to get their
question answered or their issue resolved.
Silo Organization Virtual Organization

Administratiion Administratiion

Supervisors Supervisors
Control Center Control Center

Outsourcers Outsourcers
Help Center Agents Help Center
Agents

Headquarters
Headquarters

Mobile Employee
Mobile Employee

Home
Home Branch
Branch

Increased control and agility for the business user

Contact Centers are in a constant state of change to deliver the right level of service. By nature
the Contact Centers has to deal with a number of variables such as a sudden increase (or
decrease) in interaction volume or unforeseen events such as storms or disasters. On the
capacity side of the equation, employees who show up late or report in sick have a negative
impact on the ability to deliver on the service level agreement.
To cope with these day-to-day challenges, contact center managers need to have a set of
“levers” to mitigate their impact by changing overflow thresholds, mobilizing more resources,
and changing the way interactions are delivered to their employees.

Reduce maintenance and deployment cost for

heterogeneous infrastructure
Historically Contact Centers operations have deployed dedicated hardware, like Automatic Call
Distributors (ACDs) and Intelligent Voice Response (IVR) systems, for each location to be
able to manage and control how interactions are handled. Mergers and acquisitions, as well
as departmental autonomy, have introduced a variety of technologies, often not compatible,
being used.
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Four Steps Toward Virtualizing Your Contact Center / page 3

With a virtual, common architecture, all the provisioning and maintenance tasks are performed
in a simplified and centralized architecture. This brings significant cost saving opportunities to
organizations, which no longer require a dedicated technical team to maintain the hardware-
based legacy equipment at each contact center location.

How to Get There — Four Steps Toward a Virtual Contact

Center
Implementing a virtual contact center strategy is not like flipping a switch. Based on
budget, realistic pace, business priorities, and strategy, a transformation plan has to be
built and executed on. The following four steps are an example of key milestones in such a
transformation plan:

1. Replace hardware-based ACDs with a SIP-based software solution

The first step towards a virtual Contact Center operation is to build the foundation for the voice
channel. Whilst it is possible to reuse your existing infrastructure and connect your ACDs using
an intelligent contact center solution, you have to determine if the investment justifies the
longer term cost of ownership benefits. Based on economic depreciation, technical capability,
and state, you can design a transformation plan that will result in a common platform. When
selecting a contact center solution, bear in mind that it has to support this strategy so that you
can migrate towards a full-fledged virtual Contact Center environment at a pace that is feasible
and economically justified.

2. Transform to a centralized architecture

Once you have started your transformation journey, it is time to think about centralizing key
components of your architecture. In the legacy world of hardware-based solutions, each
location had to have the equipment as close to the employees as possible. But in today’s
IP-based world all the servers and applications can be run centrally and all an employee needs
is a hardware- or software-based endpoint. Centralizing your architecture also centralizes all
maintenance and configuration management, allowing you to make maximum use of your
datacenter or (private) cloud IT strategy and investments.

3. Identify the optimum skills to resource model

Now that the Contact Center operation has been established, it is time to define the skill to
resource model and design your business rules around the newly acquired virtual resource pool.
Although the business logic is now almost a cliché, valuing customers requires the application
of the well-known Pareto Principle: focus the majority of your resources on the 20% of your
customers who represent 80% of your revenue. In other words, define high-value customers
and always handle these contacts as a priority.
Identify the attributes of your 20% and then continue to look closely at the additional tiers
of customers who interact with your organization. Some commonly evaluated attributes
include: types of products or solutions purchased, credit scores or ratings, income or mortgage
information, geographic location, age or other basic demographic information, and recent
contact history with your organization.
Use these attributes to segment customers and rank each segment based on its value to your
business. This will begin to guide you in prioritizing one contact over another when designing
your distribution and overflow scenarios for your contact center, branch and back office, and
outsource partners.
Once customer segments and value have been determined, you must now consider the value
of the interaction itself. Again, these factors will be unique to your organization. For example,
a premium customer contacting you through the Web may be weighted differently than one
who has moved into your call queue. A caller on hold past a pre-determined time limit may
become a more highly-weighted call than one who just entered the queue.

About Genesys
Genesys is a leading provider of
multi-channel customer experience
and contact center solutions. With
over 3,500 customers in 80 countries,
Genesys orchestrates more than 100
million customer interactions every
day across the contact center and
back office. Genesys helps customers
power optimal customer experiences
that deliver consistent, seamless and
personalized experiences across all
touchpoints, channels and interactions.
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Four Steps Toward Virtualizing Your Contact Center / page 4
In most cases, valuing interactions based on who is calling, the interaction type, the interaction
channel (phone, Web, email), start date/time, and contact aging is sufficient to quantify your
routing solution. However, it is important to look closely at the experience of your particular
employees to ensure all relevant attributes are being considered.
Once interactions have been defined and valued, you can create a matrix of priorities that will
be the basis of your call routing solution. For practical purposes, it is useful to limit the number
of priorities to a maximum of five or six different values.
4. Implement a mission control team
In the new virtualized world you will also have to make a number of decisions on the “modus
operandi”. What autonomy does each location have? How are resources shared and when?
And who decides to start overflowing traffic from one location to the other?
A best practice when deploying virtual contact centers is the implementation of a “mission
control team”. The mission control team has a number of responsibilities such as centralized
skill and configuration management, centralized forecasting reporting and analytics, and the
mandate to make changes in the way work is distributed across the virtualized environment.
When additional resources are required when service levels are under pressure, the mission
control team coordinates the approval, communication, and configuration changes to ensure
proper execution of the change. This team also learns if these decisions are yielding the desired
result and documents these experiences for future use.
Conclusion
For today’s customer, products and services have become commodities and the Contact Center
experience has become a key differentiator in purchasing decisions. As a result, good customer
service has become strategically important for companies. At the same time, many customer
service professionals need to do more with less. Creating a virtual Contact Center environment
allows companies to achieve both goals by increasing the efficiency of the customer service
organization and improving agent utilization rates, while reducing total cost of ownership.
Key Takeaways
• Increase efficiency: Make use of economies of scale to drive efficiency
• Drive a better customer experience: Remove barriers between organizations
and departments
• Reduce Total Cost of Ownership: Standardize and transform your customer
service infrastructure
BROUGHT TO YOU BY
LANtelligence, Inc.
866.510.8547
www.lantelligence.com
Corporate Headquarters 2001 Junipero Serra Blvd., Daly City, CA 94014 USA
Tel: +1 650 466 1100 | Fax: +1 650 466 1260 | www.genesys.com
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© 2014 Genesys Telecommunications Laboratories, Inc. All rights reserved.