Call Center Growth Patterns

I am wishing to engage in an online discussion with other call center professionals regarding the growth patterns and trends of inbound call centers globally.

For instance our email contacts are increasing quite dramatically as the preferred mode of communication in the online retail aspect of our business. Email has been around a while now but the public appears to be shifting from phone enquiries to email enquiries in droves lately. This changes our hiring, staffing, and budget requirements quite substantially as we try to anticipate the trend. Are others finding this to be true for their operation, and what other trends are you noticing?

Ellen

[santunes]

I think your challenges are being faced by many call center operations (internal and outsourcers). My comments regarding this trend is to begin to view emails as you do phone calls. Don't keep someone waiting three days for a reply email just to keep your great phone 'service level'. Call centers need to begin viewing emails as an important chance to meet or exceed your customer's expectations. Another note here: if you are taking too long to answer emails, many of these people will call in, therefore increasing your number of contacts and lowering both your service level and your customer satisfaction. There are many tools now available to manage emails in a queue that routes them to appropriate agents and tracks the email 'service level'. If you don't already have this kind of software, I'd suggest looking into it...it may help you manage this increased volume.