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Employee Contact Center Structure and Level of Automation

Introduction

The use of a call center, help desk, or service desk to provide a focused point of contact for internal and external customer inquiries can be effective in reducing costs and complexity, as well as a method to capture and categorize reasons for process variations and defects by formalizing the response process and analyzing the reasons for inquiries.  Some other real benefits are improvements in customer satisfaction levels and the ability to positively impact the image of Shared Services, allowing for a shift to delivering services that have greater impact and value.

Increasingly, companies are moving away from call centers that are designed to handle a large number of phone calls, to contact centers, still highly capable of managing voice calls, plus interactions through other channels including email, chat, instant messaging, or a variety of new intelligent automation solutions.  With employees as a company’s most important resource, making appropriate investments in the design of an employee contact center can pay big dividends that are significantly greater than just increased efficiency and cost reductions in associated HR, Payroll, or Travel processes.

iPollingTM Results Review

Peeriosity’s iPollingTM was recently used to understand both how companies utilize employee contact centers and the level of automation used.   While 21% of responses indicate that one global contact center is used, the most popular response, at 38%, was to organize employee contact centers by multiple regions (for example, Americas, AsiaPac, etc.).  At 14% of member companies’ centers are organized by one or more countries and not entire regions, and 10% of employee contact centers support separate business units.  For 14% of responding companies, employee contact centers are not used.  Here are the details:

iPolling: best description of the utilization of an Employee Contact Center Structure

While every conference and consultant is actively pitching advanced technologies like chatbots and artificial intelligence, for responding companies, no one indicated that their employee contact center was highly automated with the use of leading-edge technologies.  17% indicated they were moderately automated with strong use of advanced technology, with 70% indicating they have a limited amount of automation beyond what would be considered standard call center technology.

iPolling: level of automation utilized by the company's employee contact center

Here are a few of the poll comments from Peeriosity members:

  • Leverage regional help desk centers (primarily for IT) that can be utilized for other service areas like HR. Limited automation is used in our current IT help desk process.
  • Several call centers that support various functions: eComm, Back Office, HR/Payroll/Benefits, etc.
  • Limited advanced automation across our centers currently, but plans are in place to drive automation significantly over the next year.
  • We have one contact center serving 58K employees. We have a fairly robust telephony solution; however, we’ve yet to activate all of its capability to move us into a more moderately automated call center.

Closing Summary.

While the formal contact center approach isn’t embraced by everyone, there are significant benefits available, including being a focal point for process improvement initiatives and ensuring consistency and accuracy of customer response, both of which can contribute to lower processing costs.  Other benefits include an increased positive perception of Shared Services, resulting in higher levels of customer satisfaction.  While difficult to measure, the greatest benefit is likely to be the positive impact on the large number of employees who use the contact center (as opposed to the employees who work there), which can improve their overall efficiency and job performance. 

Does your company have an employee contact center?  How is the center organized to support company employees, and what technologies are used to deliver contact center services?

Who are your peers and how are you collaborating with them?

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“iPollingTM” is available exclusively to Peeriosity member company employees, with consultants or vendors prohibited from participating or accessing content. Members have full visibility of all respondents and their comments. Using Peeriosity’s integrated email system, Peer MailTM, members can easily communicate at any time with others who participated in iPolling.

Peeriosity members are invited to log into www.peeriosity.com to join the discussion and connect with Peers.   Membership is for practitioners only, with no consultants or vendors permitted.  To learn more about Peeriosity, click here.

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