During the next phase, the current management structures and responsibilities are also reviewed. Centralized disciplinary and functional responsibilities help to cut down overhead capacities and costs and to make the organization leaner as a whole. The rigid distribution of business topics gives way to skill-based routing oriented to requirements. Measurable consequences are an increase in productivity of agents as well as useful pooling effects. An increase in Servicelevel and the reachability simultaneously has a highly positive influence on the quality of the service as experienced by the customers.   

Viewed in its totality, a restructuring with this format utilizes process re-engineering and extensive flexibilization of existing structures to create a significantly “leaner” organization and a reduction in costs concurrently with improvement in quality.

Efficient virtual interconnection possible through technolo­gical consolidation

“Technological consolidation” or the “virtual contact center” describes the technological re-organization of the infrastructure. Increases in productivity based on intelligent contact volume distribution can be achieved by integration of operative workflow and communications systems such as ACD and PEP, costs can be reduced by automation, and efficiency as a whole can be improved. 

At first glance, technological consolidation or the “virtual contact center” appears to follow a direction diametrically opposed to location consolidation. However, the fact that more than 75% of all customer service units of German companies are performed at a number of various locations makes it clear that an efficient virtual interconnection is urgently needed. On the one hand, decentralized structures have grown up over time and are difficult to change; on the other hand, it is in many cases not at all possible to conduct a concentration of locations. The necessity of efficiently interconnecting the existing structures so as to assure optimal service from the customer’s viewpoint and to increase productivity effectively is clearly apparent. 

Technological re-engineering of the infrastructure of decentralized service center organizations creates the prerequisites to ­realize the required exploitation of potential and improvement in efficiency. The goal of this scenario is to interlink service units virtually with the aid of intelligent technologies. The problem of the decentralization can be technologically equalized across broad areas at the work level and the operative management can be substantially simplified.