As the focal point of customer interactions, the contact center serves as the front door to the enterprise through which the vast majority of customer contacts enter. Because of the implications to sales, service, client satisfaction and ultimately customer longevity, many enterprises consider the operation of their contact center as a mission-critical service. The fundamental decision of the enterprise to provide contact center functionality from a center physically located within the enterprise and staffed by company employees, or to outsource the operation, has been debated for several decades. Yankee Group believes a good business case can be made for either approach depending on a long list of variables, including the personality of the company, the industry in which the company operates, the company’s proclivity for capital investment and risk and general economics.
Yankee Group has observed a trend in the customer service industry to employ another approach to contact center operations. More specifically, there is a growing move by enterprises to use both in-house and outsourced centers at the same time in a blended, or hybrid, approach to contact center operations and customer care. Under this approach, contact center managers often segment traffic based on type of call, direction of call (inbound/outbound), customer value, complexity of the call, risk to the company of customer dissatisfaction, time of day, or a host of other criteria, and route calls to the more appropriate center for handling and resolution.
There are several reasons this trend to move to a hybrid contact center environment is occurring, including:
- Infrastructure technology based on VoIP transmission and open standards, such as Session Initial Protocol (SIP), make the efficient interoperation of distributed and disparate centers more viable and this will likely reinvigorate the hybrid model
- The customer’s pressure on corporations to correct the perceived drop in service quality caused by the popular outsourcing trends of the past decade including onshoring, offshoring, nearshoring based on economics, corporate business strategies and cultures
- Concerns about the talent pool and infrastructure challenges of some of the popular offshore destinations, such as India, have led to a growing demand from customers that service providers build a more global approach, which incorporates more onshore and nearshore outsourcing options
- A realization, on the part of the enterprise, that there is a role for each approach and a hybrid approach can capture the best of both and therefore optimize the contact center solution
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