Contact centers have always been among the best candidates for any communications technologies that offer flexibility in scale; the seasonal nature of many businesses makes wild swings in peak traffic a fact of life for many technology managers responsible for contact center connectivity. So the new technologies of the cloud are appealing to many contact center managers, who find themselves in an ongoing quest for flexibility at the same time that they also need to support new contact media like text chat and even video.
New Era Tickets, a division of Comcast Spectacor company based in the Philadelphia suburb of Exton, PA, runs a call center of 80 seats that expands to about 140 seats during busy times. Like their better-known rival Ticketmaster, New Era's clients are event venues, and one of the trends in this market is that these facilities want to build their own brand and brand loyalty among event-goers, according to Thatcher Young, Director of Contact Centers at New Era.
In pursuit of that strategy--and in pursuit of cost savings--New Era decided to in-source its contact center, which had been completely run by a third party. The company had found itself paying for the maximum level of service at all times, with no adjustments during the summer, when the indoor venues that New Era represents are typically slower as concerts move outside. "It wasn't very flexible," Thatcher Young said of the deal.
However, once New Era decided to move away from the full-outsourced model, the company quickly concluded that it didn't want to deal with the demands of bringing both the agent function and the supporting technology in house; New Era balked at both the cost of procuring the ACD and related technology, as well as the management burden of trying to in-source both agent management and technology operations. "Teaching the folks here to run a contact center [i.e., the agent function], we needed to not have to worry about our telecom," Thatcher Young said.
So New Era opted for a hosted contact center technology solution from Interactive Intelligence. Just by splitting off the technology piece from the agent management piece, New Era saved 20% on its telecom costs, because they're able to be more flexible in using resources, and the pricing reflects this, according to Thatcher Young.
Things are changing fast in the world of event ticket sales and venue management, and so the way New Era serves its venue customers needs to change as well, Young said. Part of the appeal of Interactive Intelligence's solution is that New Era was able to add features simply by turning on software: The contact center added a text chat feature and will be queuing emails by the end of June; Thatcher Young also expects social media to play a growing role in the service New Era provides to venues.
That's because one of the trends in venue management is that the facilities are trying to build their own brands; it's becoming important to them that event-goers develop an affinity for the particular venue, on top of their desire to see a particular performer or attraction. New Era numbers among its clients the Wells Fargo Center in Philadelphia and the Rose Garden arena in Portland OR, both home to major sports franchises as well as other attractions. Venues see social media as a key way for them to build this brand loyalty of their own.
Of course, social media is also another potential variable introduced into the business for a ticket agency like New Era; it's another communications channel that fans may use to get the word out about an event, which drives call volumes that can be unpredictable. As a hypothetical, Thatcher Young offers a scenario where fans of, say, Britney Spears, learn that she's canceling a local concert and the news goes viral on social media before the venue can make the official announcement--potentially driving a major traffic spike before the venue may be prepared to deal with the flood of calls seeking ticket refunds. In this instance, it's critical that New Era's frontline supervisor be able to see incoming call volumes in real time; "We have to have the ability to react instantaneously to changes in the environment," he said. All New Era supervisors have access to the Interaction Supervisor portal into the Interactive Intelligence hosted system, letting the supervisor shift trunk groups or make other adjustments as required to deal with these kinds of situations.
A contact center can do high-level resource reallocation based on seasonal variations, but nobody can predict these sorts of events--a cancellation, or a radio station running a promotion for a concert without bothering to tell anyone, driving a traffic spike--so there will always be a heavy component of real-time human intervention for ad hoc resource shifts in New Era's contact center, Thatcher Young noted. A slow period in New Era's contact center might be 200 calls in one day; on the other hand, a major event can pull 1.5 million calls a day.
Maintaining flexibility is especially important in New Era's case because the company makes a commitment to its customer venues that each will have a dedicated queue within the contact center system--rather than all calls going into a pool--and so no venue's call will be treated any differently than any other venue's. New Era's is a white-label service in which the New Era agent answers the phone with the name of the venue for whom the call is coming in.
Though there's been significant improvement in cost, this wasn’t the only factor Thatcher Young considered when New Era was looking for a technology solution for the in-sourced contact center agents. He also knew that support was going to be critical, and so he tested Interactive Intelligence in various ways, including simply calling the help desk at 5 a.m. various times, just to see what kind of response he'd get. He was reassured that these calls were consistently answered by "someone who can actually think and understand," validating the quality of the 24/7 support Interactive offered. "It's good to have that feeling of backup there," he said.
On the drawing board for the future, New Era is going to start using at-home agents, and outsourcing the contact center connectivity lets New Era devote its near-term planning energies on ways to optimize their agent operations, while not having to worry about the contact center technology. Since moving to the hosted contact center, New Era’s IT director and modest (2-member) IT staff have not had to devote their limited time and resources to that part of the enterprise network.
"We have been able to focus on the business, rather than the technology," he said.
