How can HR be more Customer Focused?

The answer to this is that it, again, depends on your definition of HR.
If it is the first, then there isn’t a huge impact that HR can have on being “customer focused” in my opinion. The biggest area where they can make a difference to the customers is by being responsive and quickly addressing the internal problems.  This, indirectly, helps fix problems that could otherwise negatively impact a customer.
If it is the second, however, a HR professional can be leveraged.  Their skills in training and development as well as performance management can be put to use developing both on- and off-line training for customers.  They can also focus on trying to understand where the current customer offerings are missing opportunities and help identify the best areas of ROI.
Human Resources is, admittedly, a challenging area that is a strong support role for the company with a difficult transition to becoming a leading customer focus role.  Anyone else have thoughts on great ways to turn HR into a customer focused organization?

“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.

Support is the least involved and consulting is the most involved, with account management in the middle.

Based on his descriptions, I agree with those definitions. That having been said, all too often, these roles are blurred and not nearly as defined.  At the organization that I’m currently consulting at, the overall call center comprises of over 150 employees that have some with defined roles (you’re Software Support; you’re outbound Sales; you’re Account Management) and others without.  One of the key teams that I’m involved with manages outbound sales, inbound technical support, in and outbound billing, inbound customer support, and inbound/outbound technical consulting.  Based on the three definitions, they’d do all three at the same time, although the Account Management is not a 1:1 ratio.

My experience differs somewhat from Douglas’. I’d separate the roles as follows:

Client Services: This comprises of both technical support and customer relations support. This role may be support or it may be account management, but it takes on the entire realm of responsibilities for helping the customer through.  This role would be required to work with the customer’s to solve any immediate problems as well as identify possible areas of opportunity for future sales or immediate up-sells.   This plays into the shifting focus from sales or service to sales and service. If the customer requires a higher level of knowledge than they’re able to handle, they would pass it over to the other roles.

Pre-Sales: The pre-sales role would be the role in which agents are responsible for working with the customer’s to identify what the best solution is and then helping them purchase it.  In part, this falls under Douglas’ “consulting” role, but is more limited.  They need to understand the customer’s needs well.

Consulting: In this role, I agree with him.  The consulting role, if taken to the level that it should be, is extremely complex as it requires the understanding of your customer’s needs, a comprehension of sales and balance, and also the capabilities of what products might work with your systems.

The structure would be the same as Douglas, though, in order of difficulty.  Client Services, pre-sales, and then consulting.