Impressing the Boss is Always a Good Thing

Author:  Jamie Ryan, CIO at Aspect

There are certain infrastructure upgrades and decisions that you need to consider as you develop your unified communications (UC) strategy. One of the biggies is the use of Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) Trunking.

For Aspect, SIP Trunking was a no brainer. Our company was looking at Microsoft® Office Communications Server 2007 R2 as a way to consolidate some of our unwieldy technology and streamline processes, but we were also extremely focused on potential cost savings. SIP Trunking was a logical way for us to take significant costs out of our telecommunications activities.

To us, one of the really appealing elements of SIP Trunking was that it enabled Aspect to completely consolidate our voice infrastructure and still look “local” when our infrastructure was really thousands of miles away.  This is resulting in a much more efficient use of capacity.  And, in doing so, we have been able to get rid of lots of hardware (which as you know is expensive to maintain), as well approximately 70 percent of our separate voice, video and data connections at remote sites.  I love the idea that we only need to manage one WAN connection for each of our sites, instead of various voice, video and data circuits.

And, my boss (our CEO) is pretty psyched about the fact that Aspect has seen a significant drop in local and long distance costs because of reduced number of circuits and better usage rates as a result of our use of SIP Trunking. We expect this to amount to be hundreds of thousands of dollars in savings over the next several months and years.

In addition, with all of the consolidation, employees have been able to keep Direct Inward Dial (DID) lines.  This provides improved call handling flexibility and efficiency. We have also seen better call quality of voice-based IP communications because each SIP Trunk is a dedicated “channel”.

As you can see, SIP Trunking and OCS are already providing Aspect with some pretty impressive benefits.  But, I am convinced that the real value will be in what lies ahead –federated multimedia communications.   What role do you think SIP Trunking will play in getting us there?

Comments (0)

(1 votes, average: 5.00 out of 5)

 Loading ...

What’s Wrong with this Customer Service Picture? The Final Chapter

Author:  Gary Barnett

After spending one hour on the phone speaking with three different agents, the poor customer in my trilogy blog posts expected that her problem had been resolved. Not the case.

When she received her monthly credit card bill on Saturday afternoon, our customer noticed a charge for the full amount of her cancelled trip.  She immediately called the customer service phone number on her bill, and was told that her problem needed to be handled by the Membership Rewards department, which was not open on Saturday. The customer was asked to call back on Monday.

Two days later, when the customer called back, the Membership Rewards agent told her she needed to speak with the Travel department and transferred her. After the customer explained the billing error for the third time, the Travel department agent told her that only the Membership Rewards department could help.

The customer’s patience was wearing thin.  She explained to the agent the ordeal the company had put her through and asked to speak with a supervisor. The agent argued for several minutes that she could provide more assistance than the supervisor because she had “figured out the problem and knew that it could only be resolved by another department.” The customer finally wore the agent down and was transferred to a supervisor.

Once on the line, the supervisor reiterated to the customer that this was an issue for another department. The customer asked the supervisor for her direct phone number and pleaded with her to take ownership. The supervisor refused and the customer agreed to remain on hold.

Along came the hero of this story – Carlos in Membership Rewards. By the time this poor guy joined the party, the customer was irate and planning to cancel her credit card. But, Carlos jumped into action. He quickly identified the issue and told the Travel department supervisor to how to fix it. After the supervisor fought with him for a bit, she begrudgingly agreed to take care of the problem. Carlos insisted on remaining on hold while the supervisor took care of business. During that time, Carlos apologized to the customer for the two-hour ordeal (in addition to the one hour it took her to cancel the trip), told her that the company really appreciated her business, and (this is key) offered her a sizable number of bonus reward points to stay with the company. Carlos was vastly different than the previous seven.  He was well trained, had a genuine interest in resolving the customer’s problem, and he made a gesture that showed the customer that he did, in fact, value her business.

This long and harrowing tale teaches us some very important lessons:

• The right kind of technology can drastically improve communication and service, and significantly enhance the customer experience. In this case, better communication tools would have resulted in much faster resolution and a much happier customer.
• Empathy is a powerful weapon. When used inappropriately, it can cause serious damage but when used correctly, it can save (and perhaps more importantly maintain) customer relationships.
• Monitoring and training is essential at every level of the organization.

My question for you is: what safeguards have you put in place to prevent your customers from experiencing such a series of unfortunate events?

Comments (0)

(1 votes, average: 4.00 out of 5)

 Loading ...

What’s Wrong with this Picture? Part II

Author: Gary Barnett

There is a lot of research showing that customers view the personal qualities, categorized as Empathy and Advocacy, as the most important attributes when it comes to customer service. Customers have indicated time and time again that they want to work with companies that understand their situations, care and want to help.

When our customer from last week’s blog mentioned to the service agents that she wasn’t feeling well, she appreciated that each agent told her that they were “sorry to hear that.”

Unfortunately, one of the agents followed up his concern by questioning the customer about whether or not she had been to see a doctor – a question more appropriately asked by a close friend or a family member than a service agent. One of the other agents voiced her sympathy, and then asked, “You don’t have swine flu, do you?” For the record, the customer did not have the swine flu.

These reactions raise an extremely important question. Have your agents been given parameters to help them understand where the imaginary “empathy line” is? In other words, are your agents trained to show your customers that they care and want to help without making them feel uncomfortable?

It appears that it’s time for the credit card company in our tale to ramp up its use of recording and quality monitoring and spend more time evaluating its employees’ performance. This will help the company see, based on real-time customer feedback, that their agents reactions are, at times, inappropriate. If the company had been monitoring, they would have heard that the customer was a bit shocked during the interactions, providing a clear opportunity for additional coaching because just monitoring the call is not enough.

Once problems are identified, they must be addressed. By making better use of Coaching and eLearning tools the company can train its agents to be empathetic without being inappropriate. By teaching their agents how to respond to customers in a more positive way, the company can drastically improve its customer experiences.

Next week, I’ll share with you the service nightmare that ensued when the customer received her bill and noticed she was charged for the hotel reservations that took one hour of her time and three customer service agents to cancel. It is true that the service in this tale gets much worse before it gets better, but there is a (somewhat) happy ending. Luckily for this company, a customer service hero stepped in at the last minute and saved the day.

Comments (1)

(1 votes, average: 4.00 out of 5)

 Loading ...