Lines of Fire

State of the Art

With an automated call center, your customers will always have an answer and you'll never miss another sale

Cara Biden, an electronics sales rep in Tacoma, Wash., enjoys a good cigar as much as the next person. She's particularly partial to the Hemingway Short Story, a medium-bodied cigar from Dominican Republic manufacturer Arturo Fuente. Biden thinks the Short Story packs a lot of body and taste for a cigar of its stature--at roughly 4 inches, it's on the shorter side of the spectrum for cigars, whose lengths can reach 18 inches--and she appreciates its efficient smoke. "It's a 30- or 40-minute cigar, versus a one- to two-hour one," she notes with pleasure.

The only trouble with the Short Story, as far as Biden is concerned, is that thousands of cigar smokers share her sentiments. It's a notoriously difficult-to-find cigar, and stores that do manage to keep Short Stories in inventory jack up their prices--Biden has seen some go for as much as $16 apiece. That's why, earlier this year, when she saw them advertised in Famous Smoke Shop's catalog for $4.25 each, she wasted no time in calling the retailer's toll-free number.

Biden was immediately greeted by a recording asking her to choose among four options ("press 1 for catalog requests, 2 for sales," and so on)--automation she ordinarily finds off-putting. "I'm normally not in favor of those, but at least at Famous Smoke Shop, you get a body in a reasonably short time," she says. Her coveted Short Stories were out of stock, but the sales rep on the other end of the line couldn't have been nicer, and politely suggested several alternatives Biden might like to try.

Since then Biden has called the New York City-based Famous at least half a dozen times, and each time the story is the same--no Short Stories. Yet she remains an enthusiastic customer, largely because of the one-on-one attention Famous pays its customers. Every time she phones, a system known as an ACD (for automatic call distributor) immediately kicks in to answer the call and route it to the appropriate contact among the company's 32 employees. That might be a sales rep ready to take an order, a customer-service specialist processing returns, a voice-mail box that handles catalog mailing-list requests, or the owner, Arthur Zaretsky, himself, who no longer spends his day chained to the phone--the way he used to before the system's installation, in October 1996. Instead, he can focus on new business developments, like the Web site, complete with on-line humidor (an electronic inventory of cigars for sale), that Famous put up last fall. "Before we had the system, it was crazy and impossible to handle calls in a meaningful way," says Zaretsky, rolling his eyes and visibly shuddering. "No one knew how many calls were coming in or being lost."

Things couldn't be more different now. In addition to its routing capabilities, Zaretsky's "call center," as such systems are increasingly being referred to, has sophisticated analytic features that track in real time such statistics as how many calls are coming into the office at any given time; customers' average time on hold; and reps' time spent idle, unavailable, and handling a call. "I have more information than I know what to do with," concedes Zaretsky. "But the point of all this mumbo jumbo," he says, pointing to a computer monitor displaying his call-center statistics, "is that our customers are taken care of in an efficient manner, that our operators are calm, and that we serve the market better so customers choose us."

It appears to be working: revenues have increased 20% each year in the nearly two years since the company installed the system, and overhead is down, since the analytic tools of the ACD, by revealing peak and slow calling times, have enabled Zaretsky to determine optimum staffing levels. In the past year alone, the increased efficiencies have doubled the reps' average sales-to-calls-answered ratio. "I worked 14 hours a day, seven days a week, for many, many years," says Zaretsky, walking through the company's physical call center. The cubicle-filled room holds 10 trained sales reps, who, wearing headsets, sit before keyboards and screens filled with minutiae about 130 cigar brands as they take orders and chat with customers about the merits of a Macanudo or an Olor Vintage. "This thing has changed my life."

ACD. Dnis. Erlang C. Screen pops. Jumping the queue. Like any burgeoning phenomenon, call-center technology has spawned its own vernacular. But while the acronyms and argot are relatively straightforward (see "Definition Directory," below), the definition of an actual call center appears to be a moving target. "No one really agrees on what a call center is," notes Brad Cleveland, president of the Incoming Calls Management Institute (ICMI), a consulting firm in Annapolis, Md. "With potential multiple sites, they're not really centers, and they take more than just calls."

Call centers are "really more like contact centers," states Carter Lusher, vice-president of the Gartner Group, an information-technology and research firm, "accommodating customers accessing companies via phone, fax, the Web, E-mail, even interactive video kiosk." The idea is to make customers' interactions with companies seamless and uniform, no matter which method of communication they choose. For example, while the integration of Famous's Web site and call center is still in its infancy, when a customer calls the 800 number listed on the site, the call is routed by the ACD to a separate queue with agents (or their voice-mail boxes, if it's after hours) who are not just cigar savvy but Web savvy as well. Orders made on-line are automatically logged and are processed by Famous's mail-order software, Mathen Group's MailBasics, in the same way that phone orders are processed. (For the record, more sophisticated Internet-integrated call centers enable a customer to do everything from contacting an agent with the click of a mouse to downloading Web documents by voice--but this technology is still several years away from being widely implemented. For a look at what lies ahead, see "Ringing in the Net," below.)