Consolidation

[Mark Tabak]

I am looking at consolidating my call centers into one national call center. Is there a map/checklist that helps to guide you through this process? The time frame for this is 7 months.

[mnehr]

That is a very short timeframe that you have.
I am not sure if there are specific guidelines because each industry has different needs regarding customer service.
I have dealt with many service-oriented companies (wireless, paging, internet) who consolidated their call centers only to regret it in the long run.

What is impossible to put into numbers is the personal attention that representatives give to their local customers, as well as not overwhelming representatives with too much information for too many market areas. From an accounting perspective, yes, consolidating call centers seems to be an positive economic move. From a human perspective, however, you have to weigh what responsibilities will it place on your representatives.

For most industries, call center representatives are not always the cream of the crop. With a lower paying job, like CSR, you are more bound to be hiring people who are newer into the workforce, with little or no college. The simple fact is that in most areas, anyone who is experienced with college degrees will be looking for something better. How much information/systems can the average CSR handle?

Much of my speculation on this comes from being in the quality area of call center operations, and is overlooked by GMs and accounting departments all the time. You must take into account the quality level that consolidated service reps can give versus regionalized representatives who are not required to know as much information. None of this may apply to your industry, but I would, with out question, weigh what quality impacts centralizing your call centers may have.

[Matt Schmitz]

You're biting off a whole lot of work consolidating a national structure to a central stucture. Most businesses try to stay at 300 to 800 agents per site. Going above those numbers will really put a strain on your recruiting and management resources.

It's the difference between running a battleship, lean and mean and highly manueverable - and running an aircraft carrier, a floating city that might be easier on the finance department's paperwork but can take forever to turn around and is very difficult to control and manage.

Ask yourself this question: can recruiting find 20 agents a week to support a 500 seat center, or 100 agents a week to support a 2,000 agent center? You will notice that my numbers aren't linear. That's because attrition in larger centers is higher...

Matt

[carriec]

Have you ever consolidated call centers before? What are the underlying reasons behind consolidation?

E-mail me and I can give you some pointers.

cchitsey@aol.com