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Reverse Escalation in Call Centers

I was talking to a friend, who used to run large call centers and outsourced part of them. We started Talking about call center consulting and how when I was a consultant we always focused on selecting call center software based on feature and functionality. We provided limited operational feedback.

The topic of skills and escalation came up. We then discussed how today most companies have tiered support: You call Level 1, if Level 1 cannot solve your issue you are sent to Level 2 and so on. He suggested that reverse escalation was probably a better way of handling customer calls ie you are routed to the most skilled person and if they cannot solve your issue on the call then it is escalated to a less skilled person that does the research to solve your problem. This way you have the highest rate of ?first call resolution? possible. This is exactly what Contactual has been doing with a number of its customers with its ?Skill Level? routing.

Reverse escalation could be counter intuitive in call centers but that is typically what other industries do. When I started at Accenture as a Staff Consultant I was not allowed to talk to customers directly or until I was cleared by my superiors but I did most of the work and analysis, the same is true in the Banking industry. The most skilled people talk to the customers and are supported by analysts if they need work or reasearch to be done in the background.

Although reverse escalation might not be the right thing to do for every call center it certainly seams the right thing to do for some Tech Support situations and worth you taking a look at it in your environment.

We then talked about Gartner and their new survey about SaaS.
Gartner?s Survey of SaaS

Gartner just released the results of their survey on SaaS. They conclude the following:

1. SaaS is mainstream.

2. SaaS has ?Underwhelming customer satisfaction scores?

3. SaaS may be ?too costly?

I am not sure how they came to those conclusions.

First there are many markets for SaaS but I believe that only the SaaS CRM market (with Salesforce.com leading the charge) is ?mainstream?. Most SaaS markets and namely the one Contactual plays in are still in its infancy with only about 2% of the Call Center Seats [put reference] in the world beeing serviced by a SaaS solution.

Second there are a number of people jumping into ?SaaS? none the least the traditional on Premise software vendors such as SAP, Genesys Lab and others and they are getting SaaS wrong. They are trying to backfit their Enterprise On Premise Software into a ?Hosted Solution? and Calling it SaaS. I am not surprised that customers would be ?Underwhelmed? by such solutions. Similarly the price points of such a Hosted Solution would be very expensive as it is trying to get Enterprise Software to Behave like ?SaaS?.

I wish that Gartner and other analysts made the difference between true SaaS offerings like salesforce.com, NetSuite and Contactual vs the Managed Service solutions that are offered on top of legacy enterprise software. I believe that the findings from the Survey would have been quite different, I would venture to say that they would have been exactly the opposite.

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