“When’s the right time to centralize different divisions or receptionists into a centralized center?”

This is a question that a lot of companies struggle with and mirrors the simple question of

“Should I start a contact center?”

The easy answer is: It depends.

I know. It’s a co-out. It is, however, true as well. The fact of the matter is that businesses have different expectations, requirements and designs. Some companies manage their personell through different budgets and are not interested in consolidating the numbers. Others would prefer to have centralized costs that can be evaluated for actual talk costs and values.  Some organizations have a large, matrixed management structure where the agents or administrative professionals handling calls are best managed by the small groups. Others take a different approach and want a singular management section that handles the service fashion.

Not only that, the question becomes what are your goals? Would it make a difference? Are there cost benefit savings? Is there a customer satisfaction improvement aspect? Are you trying to reduce headcount? Improve efficiency?

There are hundreds of reasons for putting a contact center together — and there are probably just as many not to.  You need to evaluate your process goals, your cross training potential, and your concepts.  In my opinion, if you have multiple locations taking calls and any of the groups have downtime where others don’t? You have a very obvious area of efficiency that can be gained.  If you have multiple locations regardless, you should consider looking at a centralized option.

Hire someone to come look at your numbers.  Ask a friend that has experience with this sort of thing if you need to.  It’s worth looking at.

A new study from Accenture (NYSE:ACN) ACN found that 59% of people had actually stopped doing business with companies in the past year due to poor service. That’s based on a survey of 3,500 consumers on five continents. Just under half of those polled said their service expectations were met only sometimes, rarely or never.

59%! That’s an amazing number.

Even more surprising, 6% of retailers don’t have any set schedule at all in tracking customer satisfaction. That’s according to an annual survey of 137 retail firms by the National Retail Federation and IBM (NYSE:IBM)

Can you imagine not tracking your customer satisfaction at all? At least come up with an unscientific polling method …

ForeSee Results is a firm that measures online customer loyalty for retail Web sites. In 2007, its aggregate customer satisfaction rating fell by 1.3% to 74%. The rating declined for nearly half of 40 online retailers last year due to higher consumer expectations, ForeSee Results’ CEO, Larry Freed, said on a recent conference call.

That’s not too surprising. We, as a society, are beginning to realize that just because we’re doing business online doesn’t mean we shouldn’t have the same level of expectations of service and quality as we would when going into a store.

In a recent survey of 2,000 mobile phone users in the U.S., 96% said they wouldn’t hesitate to switch carriers to get a better experience. In fact, 72% had already made a switch due to a negative experience.

Another call center technology firm, Amdocs (NYSE:DOX) DOX, found similar results in its survey of more than 2,000 consumers in the U.S. and Britain. About four in five consumers were satisfied with their service levels. Yet one in three said they would switch to another carrier to get better services for mobile games, entertainment and ads.

Cell phone companies are very hard hit by this.  There’s a lot of competition and being satisfied with your carrier is crucial.

What does all this mean? It means focus on your best agents and get them to realize that they are TRULY a crucial part of the business, rather than just an after thought as is all too often the case.  Make sure that they have the training, support, technology and budget needed to do the job right.  It will pay off in spades.

The biggest pitfall that companies doing this need to be aware of is something that I’ve also noticed in the last three places that I’ve been where this type of brainstorming session has been put to use.

Identifying 10 priorities to improve and then only hitting 10% of them.

It’s great to have some major goals.  That’s the point. But if your list of goals is unattainable because you’re trying to do to much with the resources available, you’ll simply be compiling the exact same list next year … and the year after … and so forth.  Pick the top three priorities that need to be done.

If you get them done before the end of the year, have a second meeting — there’s no rule that says you can’t optimize your priority list more than once a year.

If you don’t get them done, you need to look at whether the priorities are actually priorities or whether you’re simply putting them up because they “might look good” if they were accomplished.

Having a list of priorities and things that really need to get done because they are the “worst” of last year means that they really should be focused on.  Get them done.  If you don’t, not getting them done will end up on the “worst” of the current year — morale will suffer, your priority list will simply cease to have importance, and you’re just wasting everyone’s time.