Contact Center Strategy: Covation - By: limi

Strategic planning for contact centers has become increasingly important in today's complex environment. End-user customers are expecting faster, friendlier service from knowledgeable service representatives that efficiently resolve the customer's needs. In contrast, pressure to reduce costs has created a vacuous exodus from the domestic U.S. footprint and attempts to repatriate those lost jobs are confronted with arduous challenge of budget restrictions associated with cost savings generated through offshore labor arbitrage. Couple this dynamic with an extremely fluid technology environment wherein it is capital intensive to maintain or achieve a competitive position. Throw in the reality that today's labor market is uniquely comprised of five generations and you have the making for a "perfect storm" scenario.

Covation is inimitably positioned to address these complex matters. If you are looking to launch a new call center or reengineering your current operating environment, a sound blueprint augmented with a clear and concise forward-looking vision are critical components inherent to your ultimate success. As such, strategic planning for new/expanding call centers and/or center consolidations are now of paramount importance in crafting a construct that drives cost effective, high quality service.

Mergers & Acquisitions - We have expertise in both the buy side and sell side, with a particular concentration in both the Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) space and Financial Services. Collectively, we have represented companies as large as $20 billion global media conglomerates down to the $10 million team looking to structure a management buyout. Our primary value add, after selling dozens of companies as founders/executives/principals, is the real world know how gained only through starting, growing, and ultimately selling a business combined with the years of transaction experience in the advisory role.

Business Process Optimization:

Our Business Process Optimization Practice delivers thought leadership through our proprietary evaluation methodology and in-depth analytics that will ensure your operations achieve measurable and sustainable improvement. This global performance solutions practice is committed to enhancing the end-to-end service delivery model to drive efficiency, reduce costs, and increase revenue for clients. We enjoy a breadth of experience in business process mapping/management, process improvement/control, and enterprise transformation, which collectively yield an optimized performance management ecosystem.

Our experience in business process optimization will result in shorter process cycle times, embedded quality improvement, efficient document/information/work/call flow, reduced labor costs, enhanced revenue generation, verification/validation of cycle and work task completion, improved customer service, and expanded capacity/utilization all derived from a set of various proven Kaizen-oriented methodologies such as Lean Six Sigma, Balanced Scorecards, and TQM.

Corporate Finance & Advisory - Simply put, we help companies strategize and fund the growth of their business. Collectively, our partners have raised over $500 million privately in equity, mezzanine, and senior securities in industries as diverse as enterprise software, healthcare, commercial banking, manufacturing, real estate, and just about anywhere in between. We focus on companies that are generally "under the radar" for big Wall Street firms. Our niche is in funding strong management teams that are generally looking to inject between $5 million to $50 million in financing. We have access to both the individual and the institutional investor, which makes our ability to match the proper funding solution for our clients a key differentiator.

Cross-Channel Analytics & Collaboration:

Over the past few years, our clients have necessarily established new channels to communicate with their customers. Cross-channel analytics and collaboration is truly a differentiating element of our global consulting practice. Our cross-channel analytics and collaboration practice incorporates the latest in reporting and collaboration methodologies across related or disparate data points to identify otherwise indiscernible trends and issues that are impacting positively and/or negatively the end-user customer experience. Moreover, we incorporate both content and contextual correlation analyses.

Our cross-channel analytics and collaborative capability creates a holistic view of the customer experience across multiple customer touch points. Covation utilizes the latest in technology for retail or web interaction analytics in addition to speech analytics, text mining/text response, call flow analytics, and desktop/agent analytics. Our agent-level processes further incorporate detailed phone interactions, email messages and online chat sessions to accurate, logical, and actionable workflow or knowledgebase adjustments - the resultant outcome of which is to improve customer satisfaction, increase operational efficiency, and optimize marketing and sales effectiveness.

Leveraging insight from all customer interactions gathered across all touch points, our analytics will drive workflow improvements that impact website optimization (including but not limited to social media customer care), customer segmentation, and customer experience feedback/realization, which will often lead to modified KPI relevance and strategy and the creation of value-added predictive analytics across key reporting metrics.

End-User Customer Experience Enhancement:

It has been our observation that your customers are increasingly becoming more demanding with regards to how they are treated regardless of the type of touch point - phone, in person / in store, e-mail, or on the web via self-service or chat. Supporting a multi-channel environment has become table stakes for the modern-day call center service delivery model. Notwithstanding, it adds significant complexity to an already bewildering labyrinth of ongoing, multifaceted customer transactions and interactions already taking place and at an accelerated pace never seen heretofore in our economy - the result of which is a serious challenge to drive a consistent and compelling end-user customer experience across multiple touch points and communication channels.

Covation has the requisite knowledge and skillsets to evaluate and develop enhanced customer experience strategies for our clientele. We work closely with our client to optimize the end-user experience and to ensure that it becomes routinely executed across the service delivery lifecycle - consistently. We participate in the development of gap/needs analyses, use cases, and product/service requirements to determine the optimal design methodology and approach.

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For more information about Covation's broad range of business services and solutions, click here now: http://www.covation.com

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