Call Centers - Outsourcing

Outsourcing the call center function has become an effective method by which companies are cutting their operational costs without impeding customer service. However, the legacy systems that store historical customer information are a major impediment to the smooth hand-over and running of the call center. These systems contain sensitive customer data, not originally designed for external access, but without the data the new customer service agents can not offer the quality of service required.

The best solution to this data access problem is to create a new Graphical User Interface (either Windows or Web-based) that seamlessly accesses the internal systems and presents the customer data in an intuitive format. The GUI client application can restrict access to the data, ensuring that only the information needed to perform a given function is made available to the user.

For service providers that handle different lines of business from the same call center there is a big end-user training hurdle to overcome. Accessing each specific customer database through its own front-end would require each agent to learn multiple applications. Such extensive training is uneconomical in a call center with high staff churn rates. This training burden can be relieved by developing a single, consistent Graphical User Interface that can access multiple customer databases. With this approach, each agent can learn a single application and still handle calls for different customers. The economy of scale that comes from blending calls from different customers enables the contract to be run as efficiently and profitably as possible.

Example

MITEM has several customers that are perfect examples of how to implement an efficient outsourced service. One such example is NCO Financial Systems, the world’s largest provider of revenue cycle management solutions.

NCO uses MitemView to quickly and non-invasively integrate with their customer's legacy systems. NCO delivers customized solutions to clients in the financial, healthcare, education, retail, commercial, utility, government, and telecommunications sectors. Despite this diverse client portfolio, they have been able to build a single call center application that handles all of their business. When they win a new contract it takes only days to connect their call center application to that customer’s systems. They avoid any additional training on the part of their call center agents, and they are able to offer processing fees that are less than their competition.