Regulation Sometimes Leads to Improved Processes

Author:  Lynne Levy, Senior Business Process Product Manager at Aspect

A few weeks ago, the final piece of the 2008 amendments to the federal telemarketing rule took effect. As a result, telemarketers no longer are able to make calls that deliver pre-recorded messages (robocalls) without a previously obtained signed, written agreement from the recipient. In instances where the consumer has provided written consent, the pre-recorded message must provide the consumer with the ability to opt-out either through a toll free number or through Interactive Voice Response (IVR) or key pad entry. This is no joking matter as the fines can be quite steep – up to $16,000 per call. It is important to note that this regulation applies to business-to-consumer calling vs. business-to-business interactions.

Believe it or not, I actually think this change is good for the telemarketing industry. This new amendment will compel companies to really get to know their customers and give them the chance to show their customers that they are good organizations with which they’ll want to do business. It will also force companies to run more targeted calling campaigns to the consumers who are most likely to be interested in their offers. By reaching out to key segments of customers with live agents, there is more of an opportunity for companies to explore their customers’ pain points, increase their sales through solutions-based selling, and strengthen customer relationships. When used correctly, this type of personalized approach results in positive brand building – again, the kind that makes people actually want to interact with a company.

I also think that companies using the right tools in their contact centers – tools with telemarketing compliance capabilities – will see that their compliance process will be largely automated. Centers should be using capabilities like high accuracy answering machine detection (AMD) to identify when a consumer, answering machine or voicemail service has answered the call. And by taking advantage of extensive list management capabilities that allow for highly segmented lists that can be updated automatically. Or high transfer speeds to quickly move answered calls from the predictive dialer to a live sales person. According to the new amendment, 97 percent of telesales calls that are answered by a live person must be connected to a live sales person within two seconds. In addition, there needs to be a way for a call, when being handled through a voice portal, to enable the consumer to add his/her number to the Do-Not-Call Registry.

Other technologies are designed to help companies increase the effectiveness of their campaigns while ensuring regulatory compliance. For instance, advanced pacing algorithms allow companies to track call result history over time and predict the best phone number and hour of day to place calls. With some solutions, such as Advanced List Management within Aspect Unified IP, that information is automatically used to create optimized calling strategies that are based on campaign objectives and prioritized by user-defined criteria. Then, those optimized accounts are fed to the predictive dialer for execution, and record levels are dynamically adjusted as agents log in. The automatic adjustment ensures that enough agents are available to handle successful outbound contacts as they are made so that abandonment rates remain acceptable.

Success in this new paradigm will not be based on technology alone. Agent training will also be key. Companies will need to provide agents with in-depth sales and product knowledge so they can up-sell and cross-sell products that customers actually want. Relying on canned scripts could result in constantly trying to sell consumers something they don’t need, which negatively impacts brand perception and a customers’ desire to conduct business with a company.

This new amendment will definitely impact the way contact centers conduct business. Has it affected you? If so, how?

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Instant Communication is Exciting, but Optimizing Your Workforce is Key

Author:  Brett Williams, Director of Product Management at Aspect

We are in the midst of an exciting technology revolution.  One that is transitioning us from a world with finite boundaries where voice and data networks are separate, technologies are siloed and business processes are manual; to one of limitless possibilities where phone systems and software applications are combined, and can be easily integrated with routing platforms and other productivity tools. This new age is presenting a unique opportunity for companies to automate routine business processes, or achieve what many UC and interaction management experts refer to as communications enabled business processes (CEBP). But, tunnel vision for the combination of UC and interaction management platforms has caused some to temporarily overlook the importance of a UC together with workforce optimization, as well as the significant benefits that contact centers can achieve from this marriage.

Let’s back up for a minute and talk about one of the first CEBPs that came out of the contact center.  It involved the implementation of a structured process around customer escalations. The combination of UC and customer interaction management, has given contact center agents the ability to connect with experts outside their department for help resolving complex customer inquiries. Agents are now empowered to use their desktops to determine the presence of experts in the enterprise, and to instantaneously contact the appropriate people for assistance. From a business perspective, this is important because it provides contact centers with a structured, real-time collaborative environment, which enables them to resolve customers’ questions the first time, rather than requiring multiple follow-up calls.

Now, imagine implementing an expert escalation strategy without some sort of workforce optimization plan to back it up. There are a lot of management-related issues to think about. For example, experts should be scheduled at particular times of the day and week to ensure that they are available when escalations are most likely to occur.  This type of structured approach also keeps experts from being disturbed by escalations outside of their scheduled “escalation hours” so they can focus on their “day job” when not working on escalations. In addition, companies that are implementing a formalized expert escalation process  will require some sort of method for recording agent-to-expert and customer-to-expert interactions for both liability and quality control purposes. And finally, since the end goal of engaging with these experts across the enterprise is to improve customer satisfaction, there needs to be an effective process for measuring the performance of the experts and their impact on overall customer satisfaction and contact center efficiency. A workforce optimization solution can ensure that all of these things occur.

What does your expert escalation plan currently look like and what adjustments are you planning to make?  I’d love to hear from you!

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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?

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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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Taking UC to the Next Level by Streamlining Business Processes

Author: Kevin Schwartz

In my last two blogs, I talked about Personal unified communications (UC) and Collaborative UC. Both are essential building blocks for an important concept that extends well beyond the individual or the workgroup – Enterprise UC. The third stop along the UC journey, Enterprise UC, or communications enabled business processes (CEBP), involves embedding unified communications capabilities into business processes that extend across functional groups within your enterprise.

Why would you want to do this?

Just think about how much more efficient your organization would be if you improved your communication-intensive business processes, your business processes that are prone to latency when people get involved, or both. What if, for instance, rather than having to hang up the phone, research an issue, then call a customer back, your contact center agents could use instant messaging (IM) and presence to connect with knowledge workers outside your center in real time? Your agents could quickly get the information they need to resolve your customers’ inquiries, your customers could get on with their day instead of sitting by the phone waiting to be called back, and your business could reap big rewards resulting from increased customer satisfaction and loyalty.

You could also use UC capabilities to further eliminate latency and accelerate problem resolution by removing people from processes where they aren’t essential. A good example relates to product inventory.  If you embedded presence, conferencing and IM into your systems and applications, you could address issues based on pre-defined conditions.  When your product inventory fell below a certain level, your ERP system could look at the presence of the people who can automatically resolve the issue.  It could initiate a telephone or online notification, and then inform the appropriate sales manager to contact the customer with the change in status.

In addition, you can use UC to accelerate processes that require multiple steps and/or approval levels.  For example, a typical sales process requires many steps, from capturing customer requirements, creating a proposal or quote, establishing pricing/discounting, to confirming production and delivery timeframes.  Each of these steps requires the participation, expertise, and approvals from multiple individuals.  In many organizations, precious time is wasted during and between these steps and approvals during which a more nimble competitor may close the deal.  Embedding UC directly into each step in the process can improve quality, remove latency, and ultimately result in competitive advantage that impacts sales.

There is no doubt in my mind that Enterprise UC is an exciting stop on the UC journey.  But, it is also one that requires significant planning, a certain level of maturity in the use of presence and other tools, and an emphasis on employee training and cultural preparedness.

What processes do you think you can streamline with Enterprise UC?

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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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Simplifying Life and Cutting Costs – All at the Same Time. What’s Not to Like?

Author:  Kevin Schwartz, EVP of Aspect Global Professional Services

How many times have you been working on a presentation or other project – on a tight deadline – when you realize there is information you need from another person or department? Of course, because you want the information quickly, it’s always seemingly impossible to find the right person to help when you need it most. Efforts to track someone down via telephone result in your getting stuck in voicemail jail or playing a never-ending game of phone or email tag.  And, attempts to “ping” people via instant messenger (IM) somehow end up in one-way conversations between you and cyber space.

If you know what I’m talking about, it’s clearly time for your company to set sail for the second stop on the UC journey. Workgroup Productivity, also known as Collaborative UC, builds on Individual Productivity, which you’ll remember I discussed in my last blog write-up, to deliver improvements across an entire workgroup. It uses the same tools as in the Individual Productivity stage, but also incorporates others, such as audio and video conferencing, and even SharePoint, to support collaboration and team activity, and improve productivity.

How would Workgroup Productivity help you more efficiently and expeditiously complete the above-mentioned project?  Instead of spending your time trying to locate people to help, you could use Microsoft Office Communicator by itself or couple it with Microsoft Office Communication Server (OCS) to check presence status, determine who is available, and begin an IM discussion. If you needed additional information, you could seamlessly share your presentation material and escalate your online communication into a voice or even a video conference. 

In addition to making life easier for you and your colleagues, Workgroup Productivity could result in significant measurable reductions in travel and training costs, real estate and facility costs, and telephony and audio conferencing charges. Beware, however, that if you want to achieve certain business outcomes and optimize productivity, you’ll have to plan appropriately and provide employees with training on how to use and manage their presence status so they can control and optimize how, when, and where they are contacted, and also enable appropriate logging and reporting capabilities.  Taking these actions will help you meet your security and compliance requirements, and eliminate excessive and unnecessary “pings” to available resources.

Collaborative UC lays the groundwork for your next destination – Enterprise UC.  Are you ready to learn about how UC can streamline your business processes?

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Boosting Individual Productivity Can Have More of an Impact than You Know

Author: Kevin Schwartz, EVP of Aspect Global Professional Services

If your company is like many out there, you’ve been actively planning your Unified Communications (UC) deployment for quite some time. But the odds are that because technology is advancing at such a rapid pace, you don’t really know exactly what your end state will look like, though you’ve got a pretty good idea. You are certainly hoping that it will result in communication and collaboration nirvana – the kind that yields such operational improvements that cost savings go through the roof, employee productivity pushes off the charts, and typical customers turn into brand zealots. Now, while that may be a stretch, it’s certainly not beyond the realm of possibility that you’ll see significant improvements in each of those areas.

To get there, you will need to travel through four different progressive stops, the first of which relates to Individual Productivity, sometimes referred to as Personal UC.

No doubt you’re familiar with, and have been using tools like instant messenger for quite some time. UC takes IM further by integrating it with telephone capabilities and presence engines, such as Microsoft® Office Communications Server, and Unified Messaging.

Of course, you may be wondering why Individual Productivity is such an important first step. Productivity alone does not typically unlock the full benefits of unified communications, however, it does serve as an extremely important foundation for an enterprise UC strategy. Of course Individual Productivity can result in real time savings for your employees in everyday activities. For example, it enables them to “click to call,” using their mouse to initiate phone calls rather than wasting time looking up phone numbers and then manually dialing. Or, allows them to convey their availability, willingness to communicate with others, preferred contact methods, and conversely see if someone is available so they can quickly and easily initiate contact. It also gives employees unified access to emails, voicemails and faxes, which provides them with all the information in one inbox, saving them time and improving their responsiveness.

You may already be using some Individual Productivity tools and, while there are certain benefits that this initial stop delivers (including some de facto workgroup productivity benefits), the real value can only be achieved when Individual Productivity is a precursor to one or more of the other three stops on the UC journey: Workgroup Productivity, Communications Enabled Business Processes, and Enterprise Transformation. Individual Productivity builds user experience with basic UC capabilities and tools, and it serves as a solid building block upon which Workgroup Productivity can be seamlessly added.

How are you planning to boost your employees’ Individual Productivity this year?

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Put Your Seatbacks and Tray Tables In An Upright Position; Contact Center Convergence Is Beginning To Take Flight

Author:  Gary Barnett

It looks like the contact center is converging with the enterprise thanks to UC. Take, for example, the idea of tapping expertise found in knowledge workers throughout the enterprise – a concept that has been a holy grail for many. The challenge has been identifying when a knowledge worker with the required skills is available to assist and how best to communicate with them.

After all, I know very few people who will agree to tell their employer when they will start work and end the work day, when they are on a phone call, when they are in a meeting, when they want to go to the water cooler, and so on. Of course, by accepting their job, contact center agents agree to do all of the above and more. But, through their sharing of presence via Enterprise IM tools such as Microsoft Office Communicator (OCS), knowledge workers are “telling” everyone else in the business both when and how they are available for communications. The trick then, is to integrate the contact center technologies to enterprise presence engines.

This integration suddenly allows organizations to bring together communication channels and technology to enrich the customer experience with the expertise that knowledge workers can offer. It gives contact center agents a newfound ability to access the availability of experts within the enterprise according to a presence engine. When an available expert is found, the connection is established according to the preferred media type.  Whether by phone, IM or video, the agent can discuss the inquiry with the knowledge worker and, if necessary, conference in the customer’s call. This whole process can improve first-call resolution and ultimately enhance the customer experience.

In the end, the most critical part of this evolution is to manage it, so as not to create a higher tech version of the isolated individual worker – totally plugged in, yet working solo. There is clearly a growing interest in solutions that can improve communications-enabled business processes across the whole enterprise, not just in the contact center.  But, for the immediate future, there is definitely an education process ahead of us when it comes to UC, and it’s all a work in progress.

Where does your enterprise currently stand with its UC strategy?

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Bringing Clarity to Unified Communications Implementations

Author:  Kevin Schwartz, EVP, Aspect Global Professional Services

Today marks an exciting day in Aspect’s history as we [officially launch] our new unified communications (UC) services and systems integration practice.  We’re particularly proud of this new offering because it will allow us to help our customers turn the potential of unified communications into real business results: enhanced knowledge worker productivity and improved business processes.

We’re seeing that many of our customers are either in the process of developing their unified communications strategies, or are in the beginning stages of their implementations. Because UC touches so many diverse and siloed technologies and processes throughout the enterprise, we expect that many companies will experience some bumps in the road as they translate their UC strategies into actionable plans. They could potentially encounter challenges around where to start, what specific functionality to deploy, where can they seen the most bang for their buck, and the most efficient way to roll out the plan.

These new unified communications services are designed specifically to help with these challenges. They are focused on addressing aspects of the UC rollout ranging from strategy, planning and architecture to implementation and integration across the enterprise and in the contact center of key UC-related applications, including Microsoft Office Communications Server (OCS). 

Have you run into any of these challenges during your UC rollout?

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