Customer Contact Centers: Optimizing the Customer Experience
Over the past decade, few departments within a financial institution have grown as quickly and become more business-centric as the customer contact center. Annual inbound calls to companies in all categories have grown exponentially from 11 million in the mid-1980s to over 30 billion in 2006. Apart from the branch, the customer contact center is now the point of entry for most customer communications. Telephone banking customers now make any and all forms of inquiry or contact, oblivious to the type of connection, and expect meaningful responses.
As Speer & Associates, Inc. (S&A) has reported, call centers today are much different from a decade ago. Customer contact centers are facing a multitude of pressures caused by larger customer bases, higher volumes, and more complex technology, both in application systems and network options – and all the while with an eye toward controlling bottom-line costs. The variety of contact points, such as Web sites, email, voice response and live agent chat, now available to customers, further complicates the management of inbound and outbound services that are offered by the more aggressively competitive financial institutions.
