TRANSFORMING

FROM CALL CENTER

TO CONTACT CENTER

BEST PRACTICES GUIDE

 TRANSFORMING FROM CALL Best Practices Guide
CENTER TO CONTACT CENTER

Table of Contents
Executive Summary 3

Opportunities & Challenges of the Call Center 4

Creating a Modern Contact Center 10

Contact Center Application Selection Criteria 12

Analyst Bottom Line 14

Action Plan 15

About 20
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY TRANSFORMING FROM CALL CENTER TO CONTACT CENTER BEST PRACTICES GUIDE 3

Executive Summary
If loyal customers are the lifeblood of a successful marketing program,
call centers are the heartbeat. It is within the call center that happy
customers become either loyal advocates or disenchanted.

All too often, however, call centers are viewed by marketing profes-
sionals as an afterthought instead of a key to customer loyalty, customer
satisfaction, and as a lead generation.

Modern marketers must move from seeing Customer Care as a

secondary supporting function to one of primary importance to
marketing programs and lead generation, along with other digital
marketing and sales activities.

This How-To Guide challenges marketers to view the call center as a

potential source of revenue and lead generation as well as the hub of
Customer Care.

This report discusses the misperceptions around call centers, and shows
modern marketers how to transform their call center (cost center) into a
Modern Contact Center (profit center) by recognizing its strategy in lead
generation and customer experience.
OPPORTUNITIES & CHALLENGES OF THE CALL CENTER TRANSFORMING FROM CALL CENTER TO CONTACT CENTER BEST PRACTICES GUIDE 4

Opportunities & Challenges of the Call Center

Call Center Challenges
The traditional call center faces many challenges in the current busi-
ness environment. These include:

Increasing complexity, rate of change, and regulatory compliance
issues, especially in Healthcare and Financial Services, which can
diminish customer service agent performance.
Call center information resides in many systems where the volume
of information is high and the velocity of change is rapid. It can be
difficult for employees to find the right information in a timely manner.
Numerous IT systems that complicate business processes, which
agents need to be able to perform in order to serve customers well.
Financial and downtime cost of agent replacement when lack of
training or skill make job replacement necessary.
Focus on increasing customer satisfaction at all levels of the organi-
zation, especially within Customer Care, but often without increased
staff or resources.
Increased contact velocity and volume. This trend also amplifies
information erosion and accelerates the spread of misinformation
across multiple channels.

Training requirements that make initial agent on-boarding, as well

as cross-training and multi-skilling, increasingly difficult, time-con-
suming, and expensive.
OPPORTUNITIES & CHALLENGES OF THE CALL CENTER TRANSFORMING FROM CALL CENTER TO CONTACT CENTER BEST PRACTICES GUIDE 5

The Modern Contact Center

Forward-thinking organizations see the need for a tight alignment among Demand Metric defines the Modern Contact Center as:
Marketing, Sales, and Customer Care departments.

To demonstrate the need for this change, they are repositioning the
call center as the primary contact for customer interaction.
This is more than a cosmetic name change. The Modern Contact Center
shows a fundamental shift in strategic thinking and implementation. It
impacts staffing, resources, organizational alignment, and the deploy-
ment of new technology.
the staff, strategies, and technologies that
create a Customer Care Communications Hub
within the organization, where customer service
is viewed, staffed, and resourced as a critical
part of the customer sales journey, not limited to
after-sale support.

Demand Metric’s Customer Engagement Maturity Model highlights that

world-class organizations, “fully align marketing, sales, and customer
The Modern Contact Center is intelligent, forward-thinking, and central to
care with cross-functional responsibility for sales and revenue.”
customer activity. It is a true communications hub where knowledge, infor-
Furthermore, the Maturity Model identifies that World-Class organiza- mation, and solutions flow between the customer and the company.
tions also, “utilize comprehensive, end-to-end system integration of all
customer engagement related platforms with tight integration to CRM
systems, marketing automation software, and ERP systems.”
OPPORTUNITIES & CHALLENGES OF THE CALL CENTER TRANSFORMING FROM CALL CENTER TO CONTACT CENTER BEST PRACTICES GUIDE 6

The Modern Contact Center has five key characteristics that set it apart
from the legacy call center:

Intelligent Information Flow Context Aware

In the Modern Contact Center, information overload is Traditional call centers struggle with many information-
replaced by an intelligent information flow where the related challenges, including too much information,
information presented to the agent is right-sized for the irrelevant and out of date information, and constantly
immediate need and in the right context for the multichannel changing regulations, practices, and procedures.
environment.
Yet, traditional call center agents are expected to quickly
According to Demand Metric’s recent study, the Enterprise (within milliseconds) find the right information for the
Digital Marketing Benchmark Report, “The B2B enterprise customer.
is very likely to use multiple digital marketing strategies, with
Context aware functionality enables higher levels of
over three-fourths using three or more strategies.” Clearly,
performance because it filters information by key criteria
the digital marketing environment has become extremely
(employee role, type of inquiry, customer history, etc.)
multi-faceted, which the Modern Contact Center can help
to address specific issues with relevant information in
to integrate further.
real-time.
Additionally, customers’ needs are met through the
Relevant information is offered based on corporate process
intelligent application of data effectively mined in real-
and compliance rules and guidelines. Context aware
time. With the intelligent information flow, agents don’t
functionality also supports the intelligent information flow
need to search for information from every database, and
by enabling rapid information retrieval, understanding,
training on effective information access replaces rote
and training (while filtering out nonrelevant ‘noise’).
memorization of facts that often change frequently, making
their memorization problematic.
OPPORTUNITIES & CHALLENGES OF THE CALL CENTER
Multi-channel
Information in the Modern Contact Center flows freely
between the customer and the company, regardless of
touch point or device, offering greater message consistency.
Customer information is shared by all internal points of
contact, including Marketing and Sales and Operations.
This omni-directional information flow increases the
quality and speed of customer service activity and sets
the stage for the Modern Contact Center’s role in lead
generation.
Virtually Supported
Organizations are increasingly leveraging the power
of the cloud to outsource or decentralize key business
processes. A result of this is the proportion of agents now
working from home is growing.
The power of the cloud to eliminate geographic
constraints is a boon to Business Process Outsourcers
(BPO) and their clients.
TRANSFORMING FROM CALL CENTER TO CONTACT CENTER BEST PRACTICES GUIDE 7
Increasingly Cloud-based
Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) applications provide users
with cost, flexibility, and scalability benefits.
Updates to cloud-based software are ongoing. The days
of multiple software versions and “dot” releases are
numbered. Cloud applications are future-proof. In addition,
hosting customer information in the cloud instead of, or in
addition to, on premise increases availability and disaster
recovery.
Contact Center agents always have access to the most
relevant information no matter where they are located.
This eliminates the need to constantly update manuals
and other materials as things change, while easing the
burden of supporting the increasing number of home-
based agents.
Cloud-based Contact Centers support the range of
mobile devices that most customers use today, making
the experience with the Contact Center transparent to the
customer and increasing engagement.
OPPORTUNITIES & CHALLENGES OF THE CALL CENTER
Role in Lead Generation
The Contact Center has a critical role in demand generation, as well
as lead nurturing and post-sale opportunities (renewals and upsell and
cross-sell opportunities). This role is driven by several key needs:
Creating loyal satisfied customers who will provide direct referrals
and social influence in favor of the company or brand due to excep-
tional customer service.
Providing the customer care view in the company’s holistic picture
of customer experience, which can be used to determine better
performing offers and calls-to-action for Marketing.
Offering suggestions for product/service improvements that drive
the customer, product, or brand into new market niches. The Modern
Contact Center should be recognized as an “in-house” focus group.
Supporting the entire customer journey, especially the postsale
experience.
TRANSFORMING FROM CALL CENTER TO CONTACT CENTER BEST PRACTICES GUIDE 8
The Contact Center can be an influential component of the lead genera-
tion process and the overall buyer’s journey. In Demand Metric’s recent
study, the Sales Experience Quality Benchmark Report, “70% of the
time, it takes months or years to restore the relationship after a bad sales
meeting.”
Furthermore, the study found that, “In about half the cases, the vendor
is eliminated from current and future opportunities as a result of a bad
sales meeting.”
If Contact Center teams are trained and equipped at the front end of
this meeting process, their existence will benefit the overall buyer’s
journey and lead nurturing process to avoid these common pitfalls.
When the Modern Contact Center is fully equipped at the front end,
they can help ensure a consistent message is delivered to customers
throughout their journey, and capture prospect information to be shared
with Sales and Marketing.
OPPORTUNITIES & CHALLENGES OF THE CALL CENTER TRANSFORMING FROM CALL CENTER TO CONTACT CENTER BEST PRACTICES GUIDE 9

Benefits to the Modern Contact Center

The Modern Contact Center offers several key benefits for the Modern
Marketing Organization. These include: Given these advantages, it is time to rethink the call center’s
role in the organization and, particularly, its role in supporting
Reduced time agents spend in information discovery to increase
marketing efforts to drive new leads and revenue.
the speed of response to customer inquiries.

Better personalized interactions via Contact Center activity inte-

gration with CRM and Marketing Automation profiles to customize
emails, offers, and calls-to-action.

Better multi-channel access through the integration of social, email,

mobile, live chat, and call records to determine customer behavior for
lead generation.

Increased behavioral analytics when Contact Center data is included

in the marketing metrics mix.

Preservation and constant capture of institutional knowledge in

Customer Care, Marketing, and back-office functions.

Creation of an Information Hub that allows interconnected depart-

ments to benefit from Contact Center information.
CREATING A MODERN CONTACT CENTER TRANSFORMING FROM CALL CENTER TO CONTACT CENTER BEST PRACTICES GUIDE 10

Creating a Modern Contact Center

Successfully transforming the call center to a Contact Center that better
supports marketing programs and lead generation requires a series of
well-orchestrated steps.

Follows these four best practice steps to begin this transformation:

STEP 1 Evaluate Your Call Center Operations

The first step in creating a Modern Contact Center is to evaluate the

current role your call center has in your marketing and business strategy
efforts. These questions are central to that evaluation:

What role does the Contact Center play in your Sales, Marketing, Is that information timely and accurate?
Product Management, and Operations today?
How well are customer activity records (CRM, Marketing Automation,
What impact is Contact Center data having on strategic business, and Customer Service) integrated?
product, and marketing decisions today?
Is the Contact Center staff trained and prepared for all multi-channel
How well coordinated is the information flow internally across interactions like social, mobile, and video?
Marketing, Sales and Customer Care, the back office, and/or the
Is there a process for identification and handoff of potential revenue
Contact Center?
opportunities from the Contact Center to Marketing and Sales?
Do all departments have access to the right information at the right
time? If not, why not?
CREATING A MODERN CONTACT CENTER
STEP 2 Change Your Point of View
The second step in call center transformation is changing the percep-
tion within the organization. It’s much more than a rebranding or a name
change from call center to Contact Center.
Rather, it’s a new perspective: thinking of the Contact Center as a
central Communications Hub for Customer Success. For this to occur, it
requires an “outside in” perspective, which involves taking the perspec-
tive of the customer and their journey, not the perspective of the organi-
zation and its products, systems, and processes.
For this reason, we recommend strategically positioning the Contact
Center as part of the Customer Success organization (with cross-func-
tional responsibility), which highlights its role in the customer journey,
the development of customer relationships, and loyalty & advocacy, as
well as demonstrates its ability to increase customer lifetime value.
TRANSFORMING FROM CALL CENTER TO CONTACT CENTER BEST PRACTICES GUIDE 11
STEP 3 Create a Strategy for Alignment
Alignment among Marketing, Sales, Customer Care, the back office,
and the Contact Center is a critical best practice for success. Alignment
must occur on strategy, process, systems, guidance information, and the
information flow.
Organizationally, a cross-functional team with an executive sponsor and
champion must be designated.
Intelligent information flow is particularly important in the multi-
channel environment. The added velocity, volume, and complexity of
multi-channel communication, especially social media, increases the
risk of misinformation spreading in ways it otherwise would not.
Be sure to develop an efficient and consistent process for information
access and delivery, as well as provide proper training for customer
service agents tasked with addressing customer issues in a multi-
channel environment.
STEP 4 Choose the Right Systems, Platform, & Applications
A fourth best practice in call center transformation is choosing the plat-
forms and tools that can support the foundation of a communication and
customer success hub. Use the selection criteria listed on the next page
to evaluate potential platform vendors.
CONTACT CENTER APPLICATION SELECTION CRITERIA TRANSFORMING FROM CALL CENTER TO CONTACT CENTER BEST PRACTICES GUIDE 12

Contact Center Application Selection Criteria

The Contact Center applications your organization selects will help
determine the quality of your customer care user experience.

While the Modern Contact Center touches on and extends to all infor-
mation related systems, this guide focuses on business process guid-
ance and information access systems and platforms that improve
customer service performance.

Evaluate potential solutions according to the following criteria:

1 Intelligent Information Flow. Does the solution support the intel-
ligent information flow? If so, the solution should be right-sized.
This means that the solution should be able provide the right infor-
mation at the moment an agent needs it, and should be able to
present that information in the right context for the multi-channel
environment.
2 Speed of Information Access and Retrieval. With the intelligent
information flow, speed of information access and retrieval is
dramatically improved with a guided learning system that takes
the agent through the process by recommending the next action
or task. This type of “guidance system” gets agents up to speed
faster with less training and support, and eliminates unproductive
search by providing the most current and relevant information
from the repository in real-time.
3 Context Aware. The knowledge base should recognize agent
profiles and information needs, and respond with relevant infor-
mation filtered by details such as role, screen activity, experience,
and expertise. This means every agent is presented with the best
information for their current task.
4 Ease of Use. The Contact Center platform should offer advanced
global search and intuitive “wizards” for information retrieval that
do not require detailed training and education of Contact Center
staff. Independence from, or minimal reliance on, internal IT
support is highly desirable.
CONTACT CENTER APPLICATION SELECTION CRITERIA TRANSFORMING FROM CALL CENTER TO CONTACT CENTER BEST PRACTICES GUIDE 13

5 Ease of Content Maintenance. While it is critical that your agents
find the guidance system manageable, it is just as important that
your process owners and subject matter experts also find it easy
to use in creating, maintaining, and publishing the guidance infor-
mation itself. In today’s fast-paced Contact Center environment,
flow and speed of content sharing holds the key to always being
able to meet customer needs and compliance obligations.
7 Omni-channel routing capabilities. The information flow should
be accessible throughout the multi-channel environment. Both
the external and internal information flow should be planned and
supported to maximize agent efficiencies.
8 CRM, ERP and BPM system integration should be supported.

6 Embrace the Cloud. Cloud-based Contact Center systems ensure

that information is relevant, timely, and accurate. This reduces key 9 Social Media, live chat, and mobile integrations to support
challenges related to information complexity, compliance require- customer journey and lead generation should be supported.
ments, and policy or data change management. Other key bene-
fits of embracing the Cloud include:
10 Reporting and analytics should be tracked and tied to SLAs and
Faster, flexible deployment that shortens time to value.
agent performance metrics.
Scalability to expand or contract based on demand.

Extensibility and ease of integration with complementary appli-

cations and systems to leverage existing investments without
the involvement of internal IT resources.

Fewer and lower costs of administration and ownership,

reducing CAPEX and increasing bottom-line revenue.

Future-proofing. Customers always use the current “version”

of software because it is constantly maintained by the cloud
software vendor.
ANALYST BOTTOM LINE TRANSFORMING FROM CALL CENTER TO CONTACT CENTER BEST PRACTICES GUIDE 14

Analyst Bottom Line

Call centers and Customer Care teams are some of the most crit-
ical customer-facing teams within a company. They are where the
customer turns first to get questions answered and issues resolved.

These operations can have the highest impact on customer

engagement and experience with a company or brand. Yet, they
are often under-staffed, under-resourced, and challenged with
constant change and complexity.

It is time to rethink the call center.

Demand Metric recommends that organizations evaluate the

performance of their call center and Customer Care teams as
the key drivers of customer experience, engagement, and satis-
faction, as well as the potential drivers of company revenue.

Use the contents of this guide and the accompanying action plan
to transform your call center into a true Modern Contact Center,
and from a cost center to a marketing-focused lead and revenue
generator.
 TRANSFORMING FROM CALL CENTER TO CONTACT CENTER BEST PRACTICES GUIDE 15

TRANSFORMING FROM CALL

C E N T E R TO C O N TAC T C E N T E R
ACTION PLAN
ACTION PLAN TRANSFORMING FROM CALL CENTER TO CONTACT CENTER BEST PRACTICES GUIDE 16

1 Understand

2 Review Understand Your Maturity

3 Evaluate Evaluate your call center/Contact Center, using the questions in the
Creating a Modern Contact Center (page 10) section of this guide
to determine your current level of success.
4 Choose
What role does the Contact Center play in your Sales, Marketing,
Product Management, and Operations today?
What impact is Contact Center data having on strategic business,
product, and marketing decisions today?
How well coordinated is the information flow internally across
Marketing, Sales and Customer Care, the back office, and/or the
Contact Center?
Do all departments have access to the right information at the right
time? If not, why not?
Is that information timely and accurate?
How well are customer activity records (CRM, Marketing Automa-
tion, and Customer Service) integrated?
Is the Contact Center staff trained and prepared for all multi-channel
interactions like social, mobile, and video?
Is there a process for identification and handoff of potential revenue
opportunities from the Contact Center to Marketing and Sales?
ACTION PLAN TRANSFORMING FROM CALL CENTER TO CONTACT CENTER BEST PRACTICES GUIDE 17

1 Understand

Review Your Organization’s Needs to Set Goals

2 Review

3 Evaluate Assess needs across the organization to set your Contact Center
performance goals, and to identify the strengths to be enhanced
and the gaps to be filled. When doing so, consider the following
4 Choose performance metrics of your call center:

Average customer call, wait, and hold times.

“First agent resolution” statistics as a measure of your agents’
competency, cross-skilling, and multi-skilling.
Process error and regulatory compliance breach rates.
Staff knowledge and speed of access to relevant content and
information.
Training and on-boarding of new hires.
Staff morale and confidence as well as staff turnover.
Change management capability of your systems and staff.
Data accessibility for staff and customers across all channels and
devices.
Overall Contact Center performance and improvement.
If your call center is underperforming in any of these areas, new
processes, systems, and tools may be needed.
ACTION PLAN TRANSFORMING FROM CALL CENTER TO CONTACT CENTER BEST PRACTICES GUIDE 18

1 Understand

2 Review Evaluate Potential Vendor Partners

3 Evaluate Use the Contact Center Application Selection Criteria section

of this guide to evaluate potential vendor partners.

Evaluate potential solutions according to the following criteria:

4 Choose
Intelligent Information Flow
Speed of Information Access and Retrieval
Context Aware
Ease of Use
Ease of Content Maintenance
Embrace the Cloud
Omni-channel routing capabilities
CRM, ERP and BPM system integration
Social Media, live chat, and mobile integrations
Reporting and analytics
ACTION PLAN TRANSFORMING FROM CALL CENTER TO CONTACT CENTER BEST PRACTICES GUIDE 19

1 Understand

2 Review Choose Solutions for Your Contact Center

3 Evaluate Choose solutions that will best enable your Contact Center
team to increase agent performance and provide new lead
generation opportunities for Sales and Marketing.

4 Choose
 About ANA

The ANA (Association of National Advertisers) makes a difference for indi-

viduals, brands, and the industry by driving growth, advancing the interests
of marketers and promoting and protecting the well-being of the marketing
community.

Founded in 1910, the ANA provides leadership that advances marketing excel-
lence and shapes the future of the industry. The ANA’s membership includes
more than 1,000 companies with 15,000 brands that collectively spend or
support more than $400 billion in marketing and advertising annually. The
membership is comprised of more than 750 client-side marketers and 300
associate members, which include leading agencies, law firms, suppliers,
consultants, and vendors.

Further enriching the ecosystem is the work of the nonprofit ANA Educa-
tional Foundation (AEF), which has the mission of enhancing the under-
standing of advertising and marketing within the academic and marketing
communities.
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 TRANSFORMING FROM CALL CENTER TO CONTACT CENTER BEST PRACTICES GUIDE 22

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