W

hat's in a name? Sometimes it's a lot. Call centers are rapidly becoming better known as "customer contact centers" or the even swankier "multimedia customer contact centers." But why the change?
      It is one more example of how the Internet and e-business have impacted yet another industry. The new name indicates that customer service, tech support and other back-end operations are no longer restricted to the use of phones, but have grown to encompass e-mails, the Web and teleconferencing.
      "There is definitely a shift in how companies are taking calls," says King White, vice president with Trammell Crow's Site Selection Consultant Group. "In 1999, based on a Purdue study, 75 percent of contacts from customers to call centers were done by phone, while 11 percent were done by Web, 8 percent by e-mail and 6 percent by other methods. It's projected that by 2002, 38 percent of inquiries will be handled by the Web, 32 percent by phone, 22 percent by e-mail and 8 percent by other methods."
      This means that corporate real estate executives who wish to add value to a company must not only find the correct spot for a call center, but in the long-term the call center must be Web-enabled. The importance of Web-enabling call centers was made clear by a recent Datamonitor report that shows businesses lost US$1.6 billion online in 1999 because they didn't Web-enable their customer contact centers. The number was estimated to reach $3.2 billion in lost revenue by Christmas 2000. In Europe, businesses may have possibly lost $4.1 billion in 2000 by not Web-enabling their call centers, says Steve Morrell with Datamonitor's London office. "This will be more than $60 billion by 2004 assuming there is no change," he adds. "Eight percent of attempted online transactions are abandoned because the customer wanted to talk to someone but couldn't."
      Take for example, 1999's Christmas shopping season. "There were lots of issues around service delivery and they haven't fixed that yet," says Andy Shapiro, senior manager with Deloitte & Touche Fantus Consulting. "So we're seeing a tremendous amount of handholding that's necessary. It's been proven that customers will frequently cut and run before they complete an online purchase and that call centers can reduce the amount of cutting and running by 25-50 percent."