Technology is Changing – Don’t Be Left Behind

Author:  Gary Barnett

If history is any indication, there is no doubt that the world economy will come back. When that recovery occurs, you want to make sure that your company is in the position to capitalize on the opportunities that present themselves. A little planning can go a long way. So, take the time now to step back, evaluate the technologies and processes you currently have in place, and begin making the necessary investments to cut long-term costs, improve processes, and position your company for future success.

1. Recognize the value of data – There’s a strong likelihood that your contact center is your company’s most valuable source of customer data – yet your organization may fail to make the most of it. Make sure you are taking advantage of the richness of today’s analytical and reporting tools – from data consolidation and analysis solutions, to business intelligence reporting and speech analytics tools. When used correctly, these tools enable your agents to access near-real-time feedback on what your customers are saying and doing through automated processes. Your customers will be happier with your service, and your company will save valuable management time and money over the short- and long-term.
2. Future-proof your technology – Make sure whatever you invest in today will still be valid tomorrow. If there are realistic ways to make your current infrastructure ready, do it. If not, take the time to determine what your ‘go forward’ strategy is. You might be surprised that newer technologies often have lower install and maintenance costs – and enable higher levels of customer service – thus providing unquestionable ROI in tough and healthy economies.
3. Extend customer service beyond your contact center – When contact center agents can’t answer a particular customer inquiry, it’s important that they have immediate access to knowledge experts outside the contact center so they can maintain service standards. That calls for unified technology solutions – and technology that supports ‘presence’, enabling advisors to see what experts, with what skills, are available at any point in time.
4. Ensure your contact center operations are unified – If customers look at your organization as a single entity then it’s important that your customer contact centers operate as a single entity too. Regardless of how far apart your offices and buildings are, ensure that you have modern technology solutions that can unify all your customer contact points, CRM systems and management reporting – ensuring that calls are answered promptly, by advisors with the right skills, and up-to-date information, wherever they happen to be located.While you may be wincing at the idea of spending any money right now, spending it on the right initiatives will result in lower long-term costs, a more effective organization, and happier, more loyal customers, which equals more revenue.

Is your business still in a holding pattern, or are you beginning to actively plan for the future?

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It’s Time to Free IT!

Author: Mike Sheridan, Senior Vice President of Marketing and Strategy

I was recently at a tradeshow speaking with a number of operations managers who described some of the challenges they are facing in the contact center: slow speed of technology deployments, costly maintenance contracts, difficulty tracking the effectiveness of individual agents, and a lack of metrics, goals and actionable data. In these extremely challenging times, everyone is looking for a way to save a buck. Some organizations need to identify immediate cost-savings opportunities, while others are looking more closely at what they can do over the long term.

Plus, another challenge that we hear regularly is that companies have to continually think about the end-of-life of their contact center software, PBXs and teleconferencing solutions. One large financial company told us that 72 percent of all their technology was at or nearing end of life.

The good news is, there is a better way to address these concerns in the contact center – and unified communications is the driver. By combining specific capabilities into a unified communications application that uses software to target operational objectives (such as customer service, collections and sales), organizations can better drive company goals and objectives, start using the solutions quicker and reduce the costs associated with implementation and maintenance.

For example, by uniting capabilities like inbound and voice portal and call centers can coordinate a customer’s experience from self-service through to live agent assisted service and even bring in experts from outside the contact center to improve first call resolution and enhance the overall customer experience. Or, by bringing together outbound, voice portal and campaign management capabilities into a unified communications application, organizations can automate early stage collections and provide a more effective past-due account targeting strategy to reduce delinquencies and write-offs.

Not only does combining these capabilities from one vendor into a single unified communications applications allow organizations to target very specific business processes, it also helps them get the technology they need up and running quickly, and leverage the advantages of standards-based IT-ready software solutions. In fact, we’ve seen customers at Aspect reduce maintenance costs by 20 percent and improve productivity by 10 percent by using unified communications applications.

Since so many companies are looking to get the most ROI out of their benefits quickly, it makes sense to deploy an application tailored to specific business goals and requirements. Is your company seeing these challenges that the operations managers mentioned above?

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Finding the Balance Between Resources and Customer Satisfaction

Author:  Bob Kelly, SVP of PerformanceEdge Group

In a tough economic environment, we all know it’s important to try to maximize the resources we have available, while at the same time finding the balance of delivering a significant customer experience.  Plus, all too frequently, companies implement call routing solutions, outbound dialers and siloed workforce optimization products in their contact centers with no real coordinated strategy for making the most of the wealth of information that these products yield. Understanding and aligning the contact center with corporate objectives is the key to driving its overall performance, while also finding the right balance in managing slim resource availability. 

Organizations need to use the appropriate tools to analyze and evaluate the right metrics, properly train agents, improve business processes, and enhance customer interactions, all with a keen eye on how the contact center can help the organization meet or exceed its strategic goals. Developing successful customer service, collections or sales and telemarketing strategies requires that managers truly understand their contact center metrics in the context of overall business and financial goals.
Looking at the intelligence created in the contact center from a strategic perspective provides greater opportunity for engaging customers, maximizing agent performance, optimizing resources, and improving the quality of interactions and ultimately, the customer experience delivered.

Performance management tools, in particular, can unite all of the data from the different sources across the contact center to provide a unified view of performance, while aligning that to strategic goals.  It gives users the ability to analyze root causes and take corrective actions. For example, an advanced performance management tool can create customized dashboards that show at-a-glance summaries of key reports with personalized content for an agent to help them track their performance, and then automatically trigger coaching initiatives. This can potentially provide a significant competitive advantage for a company.  In addition, it allows a contact center to evaluate and improve agent performance, while at the same time having everyone working towards achieving their strategic objectives.

According to DMG Consulting, “The average payback for contact center performance management (CCPM) solutions is typically 6 to 12 months and the quantifiable benefits, when compared to costs, can produce a return that is 2-3 times the original investment.” 

Being conscious of the impact these solutions can have on an organizations’ performance, as well as the meaningful ROI it can deliver to the business, today Aspect announced it has acquired the assets of AIM Technology, a leading provider of contact center performance management (CCPM) software solutions. Leveraging experience in business intelligence (BI), the founders of AIM wanted to create a software solution that made BI more valuable for contact center users, which they have successfully achieved.  Adding this capability allows Aspect to add a key application to the PerformanceEdge workforce optimization product portfolio that will allow the company to deliver performance management capabilities leveraging Microsoft technology across all PerformanceEdge functions.  And, as companies begin to implement unified communications strategies across the enterprise and into the contact center, performance management solutions are going to become even more important to ensure they have a way to measure the strategic impact UC will have on the business and its top and bottom line.

Has your organization implemented a performance management solution?  What results have you seen?  We’d love to hear more about it.

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Capabilities for Controlling Customer Contact

Author: Roger Sumner

Last month at the Internet Telephony show in Los Angeles, Aspect Unified IP received an award from Miercom, a leading, independent product test center, for Best Supervisor and Real-time Monitoring /Reporting Capabilities in the Miercom IP Contact Center Product Review. While it may sound like I’m bragging, the point of bringing this up is not necessarily to beat our chests proudly (although I would I would be lying if I didn’t say we were just a little bit proud), but really I just wanted to discuss monitoring and reporting capabilities.

On some levels people may think reporting and monitoring are all created equal, but they’re definitely not. As contact centers applications get more complex, customer interaction channels continue to increase and consumer demands are increasing at a ferocious rate, reporting and monitoring are becoming crucial to the success of the business.

Case in point – Aspect customer, StarTek.

StarTek, Inc., based in Denver, is a leading provider of business process optimization, with 19 facilities across North America and 7,500 agents. One of the challenges StarTek faced was managing the increased requests for real-time and customized reports. The contact centers produced hundreds of internal operational and external client reports on a daily, weekly, monthly and quarterly basis, and its customers regularly required new and modified reports. This resulted in a significant volume and variety of reports, production minutes, staffing forecasts and performance scorecards. Unreliable information was not acceptable to a company like StarTek, in an industry where data integrity and stability are critical to success.

StarTek decided to implement an advanced reporting tool that could gather and consolidate information from one or more contact data center applications, including its workforce management tools and automatic call distributor (ACD) to deliver an enterprise-level view of contact center operations. The implementation enhanced the StarTek data integrity and performance on several levels. The solution ensured higher accuracy of the information and enabled its staff to focus on data acquisition while easily addressing changing customer requests. In addition, an improved reporting process helped StarTek reduce costs and report time, and after implementation, the company was able to handle increased reporting requests with the same size team to manage and track all of the reports. The reporting tool enhanced operational productivity, increased accuracy of reports and data information, and improved client satisfaction.

Clearly, the results of implementing monitoring, and reporting capabilities can really make an impact on the bottom line. If a company is looking to get the most out of its contact center investment, it must look at the supervisor, monitoring and reporting capabilities. Otherwise, how can you have an accurate view of your contact center performance and productivity?

How has reporting, or monitoring capabilities helped your contact center? Or alternatively, what challenges is your organization facing in terms of gaining a comprehensive view of your contact center’s performance?

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Focus on the People

Author:  Jim Mitchell

I just reviewed the results for the 2007 Aspect Contact Center Satisfaction Index.  This year’s data is especially interesting to me because it provides an in-depth look at what consumers say makes their exceptional experiences exceptional. 

The Empathy and Advocacy (people-related) scores really caught my eye – year-over-year across the board, consumers only rated contact centers marginally higher.  The more compelling story is that consumers who have had exceptional experiences score contact centers significantly higher on each Empathy and Advocacy attribute than other consumers. Why?  According to the research, these consumers say that the company with which they have had the exceptional interaction understands their needs, cares about them and their issues, delivers valuable product knowledge, and has good follow through. 

So, how can your company earn a spot on the “exceptional experiences” list?  Try some of these tricks:

Proactively reach out to your customers – make the most of your predictive dialer.  Start using it to welcome new customers to your company, verify the status of orders, confirm payments, or inquire about the quality of a service call.  Not too long ago, I purchased a gift card from an online retailer.  I immediately received an email confirmation of the order.  But, I also received a follow-up phone call from a customer service representative thanking me for my business.  Impressive!

Step up agent coaching and training efforts – take full advantage of your quality monitoring tools.  Use them to record, review, and report on customer interactions so that you can provide real-time coaching or identify areas for ongoing training.  Over time these efforts will help your center improve your level of service and enhance customer satisfaction.

I have a few more tricks up my sleeve, but I thought it might be fun to keep you in suspense.  More next time…

In the meantime, drop me a line if you’ve got some of your own ideas about improving Empathy and Advocacy scores.

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One Huge Mega System – Is that Really the Answer?

Author:  Gary Barnett

I’m sure you’re familiar with a contact center’s core interaction technologies – the automatic call distributor (ACD), the self-service application, the predictive dialer, as well as email and chat capabilities.  These technologies are the primary vehicles through which many customer-company interactions take place before reaching an agent.

These core interaction technologies are themselves supported by a number of additional technologies, such as workforce management, quality management, performance management and analytics, which are designed to help the business improve its processes and find the balance it needs for efficiency and effectiveness.

I’m sure you’re wondering why I’m providing this tutorial on the infrastructure of the contact center.  Here’s why.  One of the biggest challenges facing a contact center is figuring out how to keep all of the information maintained and shared between these various components in continual lockstep while the contact center continues to operate in a 24×7x365 dynamic environment.  For example, when a new representative is hired, the agent identification typically needs to be populated in each contact center application – a very onerous task.  And today, because so many companies have multiple contact centers in distributed/remote locations, the task of managing these systems has become incredibly complex, enormously time consuming and fraught with error.

One solution to address this problem is to create one huge mega contact center system that is used to essentially manage everything.  This approach obviously creates its own set of issues.  This system would probably not be able to scale to meet future agent levels.  And, it would generate considerable challenges if it failed while trying to support the company’s customer-facing business processes – a failure that would obviously put the business at risk.  In addition, if the existing software solutions come from different vendors, it is likely that many of these existing, fully-depreciated, and still fully-operational software licenses would need to repurchased in a mega scenario.  That is a big capital expenditure. Ouch!

What businesses really need is a centralized application layer that brings the administration of all contact centers and their components into a single location, addressing the need to eliminate complexity and reduce overhead, but at the same time keeping the individual contact center applications in place. This approach enables individual contact centers to continue to operate in the event of an outage, and eliminates the need for a business to repurchase the same software licenses again.

But you tell me…  Does mega system spell mega trouble?

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Paying Agents for All of their Time

Author:  Jim Mitchell

TMCNet recently published an article about disgruntled Dell contact center employees.  The agents allege they have not been paid for all of the time they have worked, and point the finger at the inaccuracy of the company’s Kronos timekeeping system.  I wanted to weigh in on the subject because Dell is an important and long-time Aspect Software customer and we know from experience that they care about both their contact center agents and their customers.

The truth is that it can be challenging for contact centers to ensure that their agents are being paid for every single minute they spend on the job – helping customers online or via telephone, attending meetings, or even participating in training activities.  A few minutes that are inadvertently not captured here or there can add up to a full hour or two by the end of a week, several hours by the end of a month, and almost too many hours to count by the end of a year.  Translate these hours into money, and you’ve got agents who have unintentionally missed out on a substantial amount of pay, and may be feeling a bit blue because of it. 

And while we all know that it is important that employees are paid for all of the time they spend on the job.  I think it is equally as important that they are given financial incentives that are tied to key performance indicators (KPIs), and are based on whether they are selling to, or providing service to customers. It’s not enough to simply provide incentives – you also need to allow your agents to participate in the process by giving them the tools to see how they or their teams are performing against their objectives, both in time worked and goals achieved. 

By implementing performance management to work in conjunction with your timekeeping and workforce management systems, you can empower your agents to control their own schedules and give them ready access to information regarding their work.  Any discrepancies can be noted, discussed and corrected in real-time, allowing agents and companies to avoid further conflict.

At our ACE customer conference this week, I heard time and again that positively incenting agents to provide pleasant customer experiences creates a win-win for everyone – consumers are happier, which makes agents happier and reduces turnover.  This can be easily effected using performance optimization solutions – ensuring that agents are getting paid for the time they’re working, and giving them a view into their overall performances.

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Looking Ahead – What’s In the Cards for 2007?

Author:  Gary Barnett

At the beginning of each year, I enjoy making predictions about the business and contact center priorities I expect to see during the coming months.  I believe that in 2007 company executives will increase their focus on the contact center as a source of revenue generation, and place more emphasis on the contact center as the predominant way to retain customers.  In order to achieve these objectives, contact centers will focus on the following trends.  While some of these ideas have been gaining momentum for a few years, in 2007 I expect contact centers will approach all of these trends with fresh eyes, incorporating new technologies that will accelerate acceptance. 

Unified – companies that are migrating to VoIP are beginning to take a more complete view of their customers and focus on customer experiences from the consistency and ease of use perspective.  In 2007, the Unified approach will be largely driven by VoIP, a focus on contact centers as a revenue platform, outsourcing, and overall costs.

Performance management – contact centers managers currently have a significant amount of data available to them.  The new year brings with it the ability for managers and executives to access information in different ways, and to use that data more efficiently to determine where their companies really stand with customers and to more effectively reach both service and financial targets.

Agent retention – hiring and training agents and customer service representatives is expensive.  In 2007, contact centers will focus on retaining agents by improving work environments by focusing on technology such as workforce management or quality management solutions. 

Self service – also in the coming year, we will see the continued adoption of speech as companies look at incorporating more speech into self service; and, a closer tie between the web and contact center self service so that customers can start with self service on the web and end up in the contact center.

Do these match your contact center’s New Years resolutions? 

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The Value of Customer Segmentation

Author:  Roger Sumner

My visits to customer sites have led me to notice that customer segmentation means different things to different companies.  Some think of it simply as the ability to route customers based on the reason for their contact – they have billing or account questions, they want product information, or they need technical support.  Others view segmentation as a vehicle for really impacting customer satisfaction or customer value to the business.  The latter approach is more powerful because it allows for more targeted marketing efforts based on characteristics such as personal profiles, buying behaviors, service expectations or cross-sell opportunities.

Companies in various industries can use customer segmentation to maximize customer relationships through the personalization of services.  For example, insurance companies sometimes deliver different levels of service to customers based on the number of policies and the length of time they hold their policies.  And, airlines often identify and reward frequent customers. 

Saks Incorporated is a great retail example.  The company launched a strategic customer segmentation strategy so to identify its best customers and give them special treatment.  Saks has done a great job with this initiative, and has realized some pretty impressive results – a new priority service for its premium customers, an increase in the number of calls handled, and a reduction in average time to answer, to name a few.

A successful segmentation strategy cannot be implemented without the right technology.  Intelligent routing capabilities, such as data directed routing or skills based routing can ensure that your customers are getting to the most appropriate agent or self-service applications, based on their tier or segment.   Using business intelligence tools (analytics) can help you establish customer value.  And, desktop scripting tools used in conjunction with analytics and routing can help you make sure that the appropriate message is delivered for each customer at the time of contact.

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Agents Cheating the System

Author:  Roger Sumner

The metrics you use to evaluate agent performance depend on your type of business, your business strategy and the reasons your customers are interacting with your company. But, a lot of companies are struggling with the notion that their agents may be cheating the system.

Take, for example, a contact center that is dedicated to high-value customers. Managers at this center are not focused on how quickly agents might get off the phone.  Instead, they’re more interested in making sure they’re offering the best possible service.  They want agents to spend more time with customers in order to generate customer loyalty and increase revenue opportunities. 

Some agents in these environments figure out ways to trick the system so that they won’t get as many calls.  If they understand how they are being measured, they may be able to manipulate the system and get good marks without doing much work. In fact, I had a customer tell me that they had ranked a service representative well above the average and, when they drilled down, they found out that she was only handling five calls a day – not such above-average performance after all.

This notion that agents may be cheating the system is leading companies to identify new ways to measure agent performance.  Managers are looking for tools that can help them find the data relationships they need to catch agents who are beating the system – the same agents who are not providing the level of service that companies need to maintain their competitive advantages. 

Managers can now use analytic tools to monitor/track the key performance indicators (KPIs) they have established to determine if their agents are meeting their objectives.  These same analytics and quality management tools can be used to help coach new employees to provide a consistent level of service. 

These new KPIs are being used to create differentiators and triggers that will identify the agents who are truly doing a great job balancing quality with quantity, those who need coaching, and those who are cheating the system.  

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