Practical Applications for On-Demand Solutions

Author:  Gary Barnett, CTO at Aspect

Not too long ago, a Top 5 bank decided it wanted to focus more on maximizing “share of wallet.” In order to do that, the bank needed to align its voice portal with its overall bank strategy, a process that required getting rid of multiple, inflexible legacy dual-tone multi-frequency (DTMF) systems. The bank ended up replacing these systems with a tightly integrated on-demand inbound self-service solution that included a financial services voice portal. The pay off was huge. The bank’s customers noticed the change immediately as they began to experience a single phone call view of their entire bank relationship, rather than just bits and pieces of disparate information. As customer satisfaction increased, the bank saw impressive results. It experienced a 10 percent increase in its voice portal containment rate, and a dramatic decrease in the average time customers were spending in the voice portal, driving $25 million in cost savings per year. The bank also was able to reduce callbacks by 25 percent, and increase the cross-sell response rate by 7.5 percent, driving $56 million in new bank revenue during the first year after implementation.

Another example is an online global travel company that saw a big business impact when it began using an on-demand voice portal for customer care. When the company entered the market in 2001, it immediately recognized that outstanding customer experiences could help set it apart from its competition. The company’s differentiating strategy was to deliver timely information to its customers within seconds of a change. In order to achieve this goal, the company began using data from its customers’ travel itineraries to provide the most relevant information, and then utilized an on-demand proactive customer care solution to communicate that information to customers via high quality recorded messages. Since the company has implemented the on-demand solution, its sales have doubled per year, while inbound call volume has remained approximately the same. What’s more, 80 percent of the company’s customers have indicated that they would refer a friend and 25 percent said they would use the company to book another trip within 12 months.

We’ve seen several of our customers use on-demand solutions for collections. It’s widely known there is significant value in proactively contacting delinquent customers within the first 15 days of their delinquencies. Some companies are using on-demand voice portal solutions in early stage collections to deliver reminder messages about outstanding bills and provide customers with the option to pay by phone or make arrangements to pay. These types of automated interactions sometimes result in more in-depth discussions with agents. However, managing initial contact on demand with automated messages or self service reduces the burden on agents and enables them to focus on the mid- and late-stage delinquencies, which are often more complex to solve.

How do you feel about using on-demand solutions?

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Jumping Into the Clouds

Author: Gary Barnett, CTO at Aspect

At the Gartner Symposium last week, Cloud Computing was listed as the number one strategic technology area for 2010 (up from number three in 2009). Among other things, Gartner said that companies should figure out which specific cloud services might give them the most value. Voice portal in the cloud is one such service and, in my opinion, it’s here to stay.

You may be wondering why I am so confident about voice portal capabilities in the cloud. It’s largely because I see so many benefits. To start with, voice portal in the cloud gives businesses a choice between an OpEx model versus a CapEx model, allowing them to avoid spending their limited budgets on equipment such as additional servers and telephone lines. Leveraging voice portal capabilities in the cloud is also a great way for companies to get up-and-running quickly because it doesn’t require on-premise hardware installation, provisioning or integration.

I think it’s important to note that not all cloud voice portals are equal – there are hosted solutions and on-demand offerings, but also hybrid solutions that use a combination of hosted and premised-based options designed to help companies ease into cloud computing. Hosted and on-demand offerings are basically the same in overall concept (they are both “in the cloud”) but vastly different in terms of flexibility, cost-effectiveness, performance and reliability. With a hosted solution, your capacity is limited. So, handling unexpected or temporary spikes in traffic will be a challenge. Plus, it’s a real headache to determine appropriate capacity. In addition, a hosted solution requires that you pay for technology upgrades and that ultimately performance and reliability is limited.

An on-demand solution, on the other hand, allows you to adjust your capacity in real-time, as the needs of your customers and your business change. You don’t pay for the capacity that is dedicated to you; you simply pay per minute for what you use. In addition, you get the benefits of scale, evergreen technologies and business continuity, as well as carrier-grade reliability. As a result, you can create and deploy more effective self-service applications that drive more savings and return on investment to your organization.

If you’re a bit uneasy about making the jump from on-premise computing to cloud computing, a hybrid option might be your best approach. Microsoft’s Windows Azure Platform, which is expected to be commercially available next month, is one such example. In this type of solution, the voice portal application resides on premise, but the storage is in the cloud. It’s a great option for companies that want to try out cloud computing or just save money on storage/server costs.

Next week, I’ll provide you with examples of how some of our customers are using on-demand solutions and share with you some of their results.

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Delinquencies are Rising – How is Your Collections Center Keeping Up?

Author:  Allyson Boudousquie, Director, Business Process Marketing at Aspect

Everywhere you look, there are stories about rising delinquencies in the United States.  A recently released report from the Mortgage Bankers Association says that eight percent of mortgages are delinquent – the highest rate of delinquency ever recorded in the survey, which began in 1972.  Not so long ago, American Express said that about four percent of their loans were at least 30 days late.  And, according to Equifax, the home equity line of credit delinquency rates just made their largest jump in 10 years.

An economy in peril means that your collections contact center is busier than it has ever been and is most likely struggling to handle the workload.  Don’t pull your hair out yet!  Before you do that, take a good look at the tools you have in place and see how your center can use them to work harder, smarter, and improve your right party contacts and enhance dollars collected.

For example, is it possible for you to take some of the burden off your agents? Maybe you can use your technology to segment your debtors according to risk level.  If you have low-risk or debtors on payment plans who just need simple payment reminders, you can use outbound self-service capabilities to proactively reach out to these customers.  With a targeted automated message, you can remind them of the impending due date and give them the immediate choice to either pay by phone or speak to an agent.  By taking this approach, you can more effectively absorb increased business volumes, while freeing up your collections agents to work on riskier accounts.

The next thing to consider is how successful your center has been when it comes to actually making contact with your more frequent debtors. It’s much easier to work out payment plans when you talk to your customers, rather than leave them messages.  If you aren’t already doing so, you can leverage your outbound dialing and best time to call capabilities to initiate phone calls to debtors at the times and places they are most likely to be reached. The odds are that it will help you to drastically increase your collections yield.

Finally, don’t underestimate the value of a well-managed work force. Make sure you’re using workforce management capabilities to optimally schedule your outbound and blended resources.  After all, it doesn’t help your budget or your bottom line if you’ve got agents sitting around twiddling their thumbs, or if your customers are calling you back, but hanging up because your hold time is too long and/or they have to be transferred to a collector that can handle their account

Segmenting debtors, improving proactive outreach and self-service capabilities, engaging best time to call practices and enhancing your use of workforce management are only some of the things you can do to immediately improve the performance of your collections center.  Has your organization developed any best practices or innovative processes to improving debt collection?

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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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Aspect and Tellme Join Forces

Author:  Mike Sheridan, SVP of Strategy at Aspect

Aspect is at the Annual Call Center Exhibition (ACCE) Conference in Phoenix this week where I’m pleased to say that we’ve just announced a new agreement with Tellme, a Microsoft subsidiary.

For those of you who are not familiar with Tellme, they are the leader in the hosted speech self-service space.  Their interactive voice response (IVR) technology platform allows users to access interactive VoiceXML (VXML) applications via telephony or other voice-enabled devices, and provides contact centers with a number of benefits; the first is cost.

Tellme provides a good way to implement the speech technology you want and need without incurring significant upfront costs – a valuable option in these unpredictable economic times.  Instead of making large investments in all the ports necessary for the busiest minute you will have in a year, this solution allows you to avoid a big upfront investment and instead choose to pay a monthly fee based on usage.

Tellme’s hosted voice portal solution can also result in significant savings when it comes to ongoing maintenance costs and frustration. This type of solution prevents your staff from having to worry about or deal with regular upgrades to capacity, functionality or features – Tellme automatically handles these.

But what makes this partnership more than just a Barney relationship*, are the interesting integrations that we will deliver between Aspect Unified IP, our all-in-one software-based contact center solution, and Tellme. For example, later this year we will provide the ability for a call to initially terminate on Aspect Unified IP at your site, but take advantage of Tellme voice self service – when needed – while retaining the ability to track the call in real time (and historically) from beginning to end! Essentially you will be able to better understand your customer’s full experience – from self service to live agent assistance – from one display AND use a common tool to easily change the experience for subsequent customers.

The Aspect Professional Services team will extend their experience and expertise around building premise-based VXML applications to include the Tellme platform.  They will also expand their skills around implementing Aspect Unified IP in conjunction with the Tellme platform, so they can quickly deliver a complete solution.

Essentially the Aspect/Tellme partnership provides upfront cost savings, better resiliency and all the reporting and routing advantages of a unified approach brought together in one offering. What do you think? Would you consider a hosted speech solution?

*A Barney relationship is one where the companies declare that “I love you” and “You love me” but nothing post-press release ever happens.

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There’s Something To Be Said for Proactive Customer Service

Author:  Jim Mitchell

When Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Bank recently postponed their concert dates in Ft. Lauderdale and Orlando, FL, Ticketmaster proactively reached out to concertgoers to let them know. 

There was, of course, the public notification. Someone shared the information with the media who then communicated it to the public-at-large.  But, what if a ticket holder was busy with their everyday life and just didn’t happen to catch the news for a day or two?  Could they have driven all the way to the concert only to be disappointed and have to turn around and head home?  That’s not particularly appealing, especially if the concertgoer traveled a long way to get there.

My friend Cathy could have been in that situation. She works a demanding, full-time job and has a small child.  Cathy had been looking forward to the concert for months and had arranged for a baby-sitter weeks in advance.  Cathy was disappointed when her insomniac friend, who heard the news of the postponement in the wee hours of the morning preceding the concert, called her the day of the event to say she’d learned that the concert was temporarily off.

But Cathy’s friend wasn’t her only source of information. Cathy also heard directly from Ticketmaster, where she had purchased her tickets online.  The ticketing company sent her a brief, but important email.  In the correspondence, they notified Cathy of the postponement, said that the tickets would be honored for the new concert date, provided the reason for the delay, and gave a link to an online form so that she could submit comments or questions. 

The great news is that Ticketmaster is clearly embracing proactive customer care and with today’s modern contact center technology, they had a lot of choices in how they could have provided that service.  Not only could they take the proactive email approach, they could have also used a proactive outbound calling campaign using a dialer and an IVR to deliver targeted, automated messages containing this important information.  And there are a number of variables available there as well:  they could use the dialer and IVR with the option to speak to an agent or they could just use the outbound dialer to automatically connect the agent with the customer when they answer the phone.  They even could have leveraged speech recognition in addition to touch tone.  And of course all of these options are very easy and straightforward when using a unified platform. 

Other customer service organizations should take note of Ticketmaster’s proactive approach.  It made Cathy a much more satisfied customer.  If you were a ticketholder to this event, wouldn’t you have appreciated Ticketmaster’s proactive customer service?

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Using Self Service To Satisfy, Rather Than Stymie

Author:  Jim Mitchell

In my last blog I spoke a bit about the overall results from the most recent Aspect Contact Center Satisfaction Index Europe, mostly as they relate to contact center personnel. I think it’s also important to explore the business impacts of automation as determined by the research.  Self service is a delicate topic because of the love-hate relationships consumers have with the automated systems that serve them. European consumers are no exception,  but they have given vendors and contact centers insight into three important guidelines that can help companies win their affection:

1. Develop and deliver self-service tools that are easy to navigate, well-architected, and meet their needs 
   Why make consumers wade through long menus and a million different choices before giving them the one they actually want?  Provide consumers with the most commonly requested information up front in a proactive menu, immediately after they have been authenticated. Then, deliver a short list of options for consumers to select from if their inquiry is not satisfied.  Surveying consumers on a regular basis will help you ensure that the information you’re providing is meeting their needs, and will allow you to change your menus and/or architecture as required.
2. Make it easy for consumers to reach a live agent from your automated system
   Customers should be able to quickly and easily access a live agent at any point during an automated interaction. Research shows that, believe it or not, some consumers are never given the option to access a live agent from an automated system.  Others are forced to follow a series of prompts in order to exit the voice portal and reach a live person. Consumers who are able to bypass the automated system and easily access an agent are nearly two times more likely to conduct future business with a company.  I’m not sure why contact centers would deny consumers this access. While it may save money on agent costs short term, it will cost customers in the long run.
3. Reduce the amount of information consumers are forced to repeat when they transfer from an automated system to a live agent
   Self-service systems should be designed to transfer already-provided consumer information to agents in conjunction with the telephone call.  The research shows that most consumers do not like having to repeat identifying information – 40 percent of consumers who are asked to repeat information after being transferred from an automated system to a live agent will conduct less business with a company.

When it comes down to it, automation should be a choice for your customers rather than a forced decision, and it should simplify their transactions rather than make them more difficult.  And when done well, consumers welcome the opportunity to use it.  What are some of your speech self-service best practices?

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Firing Customers Can Set A Bad Precedence

Author:  Roger Sumner

A leading wireless services provider recently “fired” some of its customers, news that was a little surprising to me.  Don’t get me wrong.  I believe that segmenting customers is a good practice, but firing customers outright can quickly become a very slippery slope.

There are basically two issues here.  First is this notion of the empowered consumer, which Gary wrote about a few weeks ago.  The wireless provider I am talking about today reportedly fired a mere 1,000 customers – not a large number when you consider that this carrier has approximately 54 million subscribers.  However, the news appeared almost immediately in several places and the story, as well as the letters that the company had issued to these customers, pretty quickly climbed to the top of Google’s main search page, creating a public relations nightmare.  Some stories and blogs alleged that perhaps the “fired” customers, who were supposedly calling customer service 40 to 50 times per month, were doing so because their problems weren’t getting resolved due to poor service.  Possibly an overstatement, but it doesn’t matter.  The brand has been denigrated, and the reputation of this company’s customer service organization has been publicly tarnished, perhaps unjustly.

Second, with all the new wireless phones and services coming out, what’s to prevent consumers from taking advantage of this precedence?  Consumers could easily begin making excessive phone calls to their wireless carriers in the hopes of getting “fired” so that they could be relieved of contractual obligations.  Hmmm…maybe I should call my current carrier 50 times this month so that I can get out of my contract and activate the iPhone I’ve been dreaming about – the iPhone that offers service only through AT&T.  Just a thought …

The point is that companies need to be careful about how they handle high-cost customers.  If a large subset of customers requires multiple interactions to resolve an issue, then it is clear that a company needs to examine its service.  Perhaps agents need more training, or maybe new technology can be implemented to give agents better access to the information they need to solve customer problems in real-time.  Callback policies may be another option, giving agents the time they require to appropriately research and respond to more complex issues. Callbacks can be used in conjunction with email interactions to keep customers up-to-date on the status of their inquiries.  By assigning ownership, clearly communicating timeframes and setting customers expectations, companies can drastically improve customer service, and reduce repeat, and sometimes costly, phone calls.

One last thought.  There may be a very small subset of customers that is calling just to call, as is alleged in this case.  Rather than fire these customers, why not immediately identify these callers and transfer them to voice self-service options or to outsourcers in other countries where labor is less expensive?  The end result would most likely be a reduction in the cost associated with servicing these lower potential customers and wider availability of agents to help higher potential customers. 

This carrier definitely had an interesting approach, but I don’t think I would recommend it for other companies in the future…there are too many pitfalls.  How do you handle your high-cost customers?

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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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Consumers Really Want Better Automation

Author:  Roger Sumner

The results of the Aspect Contact Center Satisfaction Index are in and the news is mixed.  On the bright side, consumers are slightly more satisfied with their contact center interactions today than they were in 2005.  On the other hand, the Aspect Index shows that there is still a lot of room for improvement – especially when it comes to automation, where contact centers score a paltry “D”.

Obviously, consumer satisfaction can significantly impact your business, hence the importance of keeping your customers happy.  Research from the Aspect Index shows that a consumer who is satisfied with how an automated system works is two-and-a-half times more likely to conduct future business with a company.  And, a consumer who started with a live person instead of an automated system is two times more likely to conduct future business with a company.  Multiplying these numbers times your hundreds, thousands, or even millions of customers makes it clearer than ever that maintaining your existing customer base is the easiest and most cost-effective way to grow your business.

So, how can you increase your grades, particularly those related to automation?  Try revising your existing policies and processes. You can improve the design of your automated system and make it more user friendly by providing your customers the most commonly requested information up front, immediately after they have been authenticated.  For example, say that you work for a credit card company. Your automated system should tell your customer the balance of their card, the last payment made, the date of the next payment, and the amount due at payment. Next your customer should be given a short list of options to select from if their inquiry was not satisfied. This process will give your customers quicker access to the information and resources they need and, as the Aspect Index shows, will increase their satisfaction. 

One final note…if you aren’t already surveying your customers on a regular basis, you should start doing so.  It is important to make sure that the information you are providing via the self-service system is meeting their needs.  If it’s not, you should be prepared to make some changes.   It’s very challenging – if not impossible – to achieve perfection, so it’s important to instead strive for continuous improvement in your contact center.

Do your customers like your contact center’s automation? If so, why?  Let me know!

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