You manage request? Incidents and IT problems? Make sure the query from monitoring your internal users or to your customers through a call center or a limited group of support staff? This article will help you sharpen your vision and enhance your service and support activities, distinguishing the concepts of call center and service center.
Centre de Services et Centre d’Appel
The difference between a service center and a call center is difficult to grasp. ITIL offers a standardized nomenclature service center, indicative for a better service delivery. To follow the current market trends, companies must be prepared to move from reactive to proactive business support services’ support.
As the service business strategies are based almost entirely on the performance offered by the business services it is entirely natural that they turned to the Information Systems department to define the tools that their will maintain the agility required to meet these corporate requirements and stay competitive.
Différences entre centre de service et centre d’appel
Particularity of the Context
The size of a company and the type of service it provides will strongly influence the structure surrounding the Service Center and the Call Center. Some will be more comfortable separating and defining clear roles for each of them. Others will be more comfortable to get by, for reasons of resource availability or efficiency. Regardless of the choice made by the company, an effective demand management tool is required as much for one than for the other.
System Integration
If the two departments are separate, it is important to ensure that a silo structure will not reduce the effectiveness of their service. A centralized service is increasingly more and more common.
As they are closely linked to operations and usually the cost center, it is important to integrate the tools and generate the reports needed for a healthy performance management.
How to improve efficiency?
- Manual automation processes
Automation of standard and recurring tasks frees resources and reduces operating costs. Risk management is also improved by this process, reducing the risk of error and forgetfulness by human error.
- A performing knowledge base
It is accessible through the self-service portal allowing a reduction of open tickets. It is integrated at the ticket closure process allowing the resources to improve the content dynamically.
- A KPI structure based on the SLA and not on the incidents<
While KPI incidents are limited, for example, the number of incidents by Priority, Impact and Urgency or the number of incidents by Type and Category or Service, the KPI on the SLA analyzes the impact on resources, both financial and human by measuring, for example, the average cost per incident and the percentage of requests solved in the time by the resource group.
Several solutions can be implemented to improve business services’ support and optimize its rendering so that it can be proactive and not reactive. The most effective are:
- The establishment of a self-service portal can lead to a significant decrease in call volumes, thus reducing the operating costs of the IT department, allowing the redistribution of these amounts to value added initiatives.
- The creation of a live Knowledge Base and its constant updating within the application when processing requests is available to users on the self-service portal.
Is this the end of the Call Centers and the birth of a new hybrid model?