What is a Consolidated Call Center?

Read Time: 8 Minutes

Table of contents

To make the best use of their resources, many larger organizations with multiple call centers may choose to consolidate their various teams into one location. Today, we’re taking a look at what consolidated call centers do, when it’s appropriate to consolidate, and best practices for doing so responsibly. Let’s jump in.

Key takeaways

• Difference between consolidated and converged: Consolidated call centers are comprised of multiple locations that have been merged for efficiency and cost reduction. Converged call centers use systems that have integrated a variety of communication channels into one platform.
• Benefits of consolidation: Consolidated call centers provide simpler workforce management, reduced costs, more consistency of training and quality assurance, and more unified customer data.
• Considerations before consolidating: When consolidating, businesses should ensure that they have clear objectives, have evaluated their technological needs, created a detailed plan of phased implementation, addressed employee concerns, and provided comprehensive training on new systems.

What is a consolidated call center?

A consolidated call center is a centralized call center operation, formed by merging multiple locations and teams into one, allowing for a more unified service delivery. In doing so, companies can significantly streamline their operations.

Since consolidation reduces overhead costs across the board, companies who consolidated their call centers to a centralized operation can save a lot on equipment, facilities, software, and other costs, making consolidation a much more cost-effective option. Additionally, the consolidation of a larger pool of agents under one centralized call center allows companies to more easily scale operations during periods of higher volume. Finally, with everything under one roof, it simplifies the task of keeping the customer experience at a consistent quality for all customers.

Converged vs. consolidated contact centers

What is a converged contact center?

A converged contact center is one that uses a platform that integrates multiple channels of communication (like phone, email, chat, etc.) into a single system, where agents can view and interact with each channel through a single interface. When you describe a contact center as “converged”, you are highlighting the contact center’s use of infrastructure and tech to centralize their data and communication channels into one platform.

Key differences between converged and consolidated models

While a single contact center could be fairly described as both “converged” and “consolidated”, both terms are highlighting something different about their operations.

When we talk about a converged contact center, we’re focused on how the contact center uses technology, pointing at how they integrate their various communication channels into one platform, crafting a smoother multichannel customer experience.

A consolidated contact center, on the other hand, is identified by their organizational approach, making special mention of their physical and operational unification of multiple teams and locations.

When to use each model

Though the types of businesses that use converged or consolidated contact center models do overlap, particular needs will usually motivate businesses to use either model.

• When to use converged contact centers: Converged contact centers are ideal for the types of businesses that offer support across multiple communication channels, as integrating those channels under one system is a major efficiency boost. The ideal candidates for a converged model are usually fairly customer-focused, prioritizing seamless CX and a high degree of personalization for each customer. Finally, growing businesses tend to gravitate to a converged model for it’s scalability.
• When to use consolidated contact centers: While any business with multiple contact centers would be wise to consider streamlining their operations to reduce costs, consolidation is especially useful for larger businesses who have multiple scattered locations and teams, since they tend to benefit the most from optimizing their cost and resources. Consolidated contact centers are also useful when the customer issues that the company handles are fairly similar across their various service regions. Being under one roof allows those companies to standardize their processes to ensure a more consistent CX.

The value of converged and consolidated contact centers

Some of the most beneficial value propositions of converged and consolidated contact centers include enhanced customer experience, cost-efficiency, and scalability.

Enhanced customer experience

Both converged and consolidated contact centers offer a richer customer experience. The unified teams of consolidated contact centers provide a more consistent quality of service, and the integrated platforms of converged contact centers make omnichannel communication a smoother, more seamless process.

Cost-efficiency

Both models can significantly reduce the overall cost of doing business, with converged contact centers creating more efficient, cost-effective workflows, and consolidated contact centers saving a lot on overhead expenses like processes, staffing, and technology.

Scalability

Whether for their technological advantages or their lean operating costs, both converged and consolidated contact centers are flexible enough to adapt to new growth and scale accordingly for seasonal fluctuations.

Why do businesses consolidate call centers?

Businesses may consolidate their call centers for a variety of reasons, but their most common motivations are to simplify management across their various teams and the regions they serve, and to reduce their overhead costs from excess facilities or staffing. Additionally, many businesses consolidate for the purposes of improving the consistency of their service, which becomes far more manageable with a centralized training regimen and standardized processes.

Call center consolidation benefits

Benefits of call center consolidation include having unified customer data, optimizing your workforce management, and improving the overall training and quality assurance for your call center.

Unified customer data

As part of call center consolidation efforts, it’s important to combine any previously siloed customer data into one centralized system. In doing so, consolidated call centers greatly improve their insights and customer profiles from fully-integrated customer relationship management (CRM) systems.

Optimized workforce management

From one location, call center management can more effectively anticipate customer demand, making it a simpler task to intelligently allocate resources to their entire team accordingly.

Improved training and quality assurance

Instead of delegating training and quality assurance measures to management in various locations and leaving standards up to a certain degree of interpretation, a consolidated location with a single team can more easily maintain a high training standard and a consistent level of service quality.

Considerations when consolidating contact center operations

While consolidation has many benefits, consolidating your contact center operations is not a decision to made lightly. When done indelicately, a consolidation initiative can have big consequences for both the business itself and the people who work for it.

H3: Assessing technology requirements

Before consolidating, make an audit of all of the tech and software your teams currently use and check those tools against each other and any upgrades you hope to make to determine their compatibility for integration. This will give you a basis for which tools you currently have, whether or not they will play nicely together in the event of a consolidation, and what changes (if any) need to happen to prepare for one.

Geographic and cultural challenges

Consolidations are big changes, especially for the agents and employees who are being asked to work in new environments and with new teams. Even when everyone involved comes from the same country, there will be some friction and growing pains. When planning a call center consolidation, be sure to plan for regional nuances and possible language barriers during the unification process.

Employee impact

Consolidations have a tremendous impact on employees. A call center consolidation can save companies a lot of money, but sometimes those savings might come at the expense of some employees’ employment, especially when the reason for consolidating is redundant or excess hiring. For that reason, it’s imperative that any business hoping to consolidate their call center operations should judge whether the consolidation is entirely necessary before proceeding. If so, it’s vital to manage any concerns that employees have about potential layoffs, as well as alerting each party of any role changes or retraining programs.

Transition plan and timeline

Once it’s clear that a contact center consolidation needs to happen, planning should begin in earnest. Management needs to outline clear steps and provide a roadmap for any employees effective. Communicating the consolidation timeline will help everyone to orient themselves and make their own plans around the merger to avoid unnecessary downtime or disruptions along the way.

How to implement a consolidated call center

First you need to define your objectives. Then, evaluate your technology and apply a phased implementation approach. Lastly, analyze and implement a detailed training and support program.

Define clear objectives

Start by determining exactly what your goal is in implementing a consolidated call center. Are you after cost savings and looking for ways to streamline your processes and reduce redundancies? Are you hoping to improve your services and make use of tools that are more feasible in consolidated environment? How about scalability?

Once you know what your main goals are, you can more easily make plans with those goals in mind, and communicate the “why” of the consolidation to any stakeholders.

Evaluate technology needs

Technology is at the forefront of a successful consolidation, so it’s important to know if you have the right tools for the job, or if additional tools or upgrades will be necessary to stick the landing. Once you understand your tech needs, be sure to select solutions that support centralized operations and omnichannel communications.

Phased implementation

To minimize downtime and disruption to your team’s workflow, it’s best to implement changes incrementally instead of all at once. Begin with single tasks, processes, or departments. Once those aspects have been integrated and you’ve ensured that things are running smoothly through tests and monitoring, you can gradually expand to other aspects, until everything has become unified.

Training and support

Consolidations, by definition, place your teams in new and unfamiliar situations, and require them to learn to use new tools and work together through new processes. That’s why it’s essential for newly consolidated call centers to equip their teams with the knowledge necessary to operate in a consolidated setup.

Are you considering a call center consolidation? See what ROI CX Solutions can do to help you optimize your operational efficiency!