Business shared services centers are being increasingly adopted to drive down costs and improve efficiencies across contact centers. More than 30% of U.S. Fortune 500 companies have implemented a shared service center according to the English Institute of Chartered Accountants. Shared services centers for customer support and issue management drive organizational benefits that extend beyond cost and productivity.
1. Cost Reduction
Probably the most cited reason for implementing a shared service center, support costs are typically reduced by eliminating redundant work and streamlining processes. This leads to a reduction in the number of customer service agents required, the contact center’s single biggest cost.
2. Agent Productivity
The elimination of duplicated efforts and re-engineering of support processes leads to more productive agents. Shared services centers can significantly impact average handle time and first call resolution rates, leading to happier customers.
3. Standardized Processes
Shared services centers rely on process standardization, eliminating any issues that would otherwise arise from clashing processes. The standardization makes it easier to report on and understand trends throughout the support organization. This is turn makes it easier to identify the steps necessary to improve customer service levels.
4. Stronger Compliance
A common practice in shared services centers is the use of service level agreements (SLA’s) to assure internal or external customers of the quality of service. SLA’s are often managed with business workflow rules that automatically route issues throughout the organization. This helps ensure service level agreements are honored, strengthening compliance.
5. Visibility / Transparency
Having standardized processes and a centralized system allows the organization to achieve a level of transparency difficult to achieve with dispersed systems. This provides management with a complete view of the support organization with few gaps in visibility. As a result, bottlenecks and inefficiencies are easier to spot and remove, in turn improving the quality of customer support.
6. Elimination of Silos
A common problem solved with a shared services center is eliminating process and information silos. By centralizing and consolidating processes, customer information is made available throughout the organization which can improve issue resolution times and customer service levels.
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