Is it Really Possible for Everything in Your Contact Center to be Real Time?

Author: Brett Williams, Director of Product Management

Last week, I wrote a bit about how workforce optimization can (and should) be used in conjunction with unified communications (UC) to support any contact center’s expert escalation strategy. After I posted my blog, I realized that I had left out another, extremely important use for this technology pairing – speeding up the ability to solve business issues.

It stands to reason that if you can see which colleagues are available, you can more readily reach them to resolve problems. That’s clearly true on the customer front. So, my question for you is: Why wouldn’t you take that concept one step further and apply it to improve your everyday contact center operations? For instance, your supervisors could use UC and workforce management capabilities to literally make staffing changes in real-time as they recognize the need for those changes through real-time service level monitoring. Let me give you an example of what I mean.

Here’s a specific situation concerning a large, multi-site financial services organization with a fraud-monitoring queue. Suppose an analyst monitoring the queue determines that call volumes are dramatically higher than anticipated, and has been told that a security breach was the root cause of the increased volume. Prior to UC, the analyst would have had to view a spreadsheet with a list of supervisors with agents that service the queue, view the supervisor’s schedules to determine which ones were working, look up the supervisors’ phone numbers in a directory, and dial their phone number.

That’s not the case anymore. Because UC-enabled workforce optimization solutions combine the logic that is stored within the application with the UC application, the analyst is able to communicate with the appropriate supervisor(s) with just a few clicks of her mouse. As a result, the analyst and the supervisor gain the ability to collaborate and instantaneously solve the problem. In addition, the supervisor can begin adding agents to the queue in a matter of seconds rather than minutes. As we all know, any timesaving is significant in critical situations.

Are there scenarios within your contact center where you can envision the benefits of these capabilities that you can share?

Comments (0)

(1 votes, average: 1.00 out of 5)

 Loading ...

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!

Comments (0)

(1 votes, average: 4.00 out of 5)

 Loading ...

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?

Comments (1)

(1 votes, average: 4.00 out of 5)

 Loading ...

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?

Comments (0)

(3 votes, average: 3.00 out of 5)

 Loading ...

Need To Cut Costs? Look For Unique Situations.

Author:  Bob Kelly, Vice President, PerformanceEdge Group

Costs … costs … everyone needs to reduce costs. But where else can you possibly cut?

It’s no secret that, in the contact center, staffing costs typically represent 60 to 70 percent of the overall budget.  For years, centers have employed workforce management systems in an effort to reduce those costs. The results have historically been good. In fact, many contact centers using workforce management have reported savings that range anywhere from 10 percent to 30 percent.

Increasingly, however, in today’s environment, contact centers are tasked with optimizing other areas of their budget and maintaining or even increasing agent productivity while they do it. If you’re in this boat, there is one key area you should be focusing your efforts – facilities.

Up until recently, centers have typically permanently assigned seats to individuals, largely because of the administrative overhead associated with managing tens, hundreds or even thousands of seats. It’s high time to change this old way of thinking. With new workforce management products, it is entirely possible for you to implement flexible seat sharing without having to sacrifice control or spend endless hours planning. Why would you want to do this?  By getting rid of permanently assigned seating, you can increase seat utilization, which in turn helps you reduce your facilities costs. 

You’re, of course, wondering about losing agent productivity.  A new workforce management product now extends the benefits of traditional areas of improved agent productivity, such as real time schedule adherence, to flexible seating environments. But they also add new avenues for you to improve agent productivity in this type of environment by reducing the amount of time agents must spend looking for their seats in the morning.  Specifically, agents can view their schedules and seat assignments online, or check their assigned seat from home while preparing for their next day’s shift. This new breed of workforce management product can also be used to help place agents in seats that are most appropriate for them. For example, a less experienced agent might need to sit closer to his or her supervisor while a special needs agent might require a specific desk configuration.  All of these items can help improve the productivity of agents and supervisors within the contact center.

When are you going to infuse some flexibility into your organization and optimize your facilities costs?

Comments (0)

(2 votes, average: 4.50 out of 5)

 Loading ...

Celebrate Your Agents’ Independence

We all like the idea of autonomy and the notion of our time being “our own”. Nowhere is this more critical and more true than in the part of your business where each person’s demeanor can impact your company’s brand in the eyes of your customers – in your contact center.

On Friday, we will observe Independence Day in the U.S. Whether you’re in the U.S. or abroad, you my want to take a few minutes this week to think about how you can enrich your contact center agents’ independence and, in turn, enhance the experiences they deliver to your customers. These four things will get you off and running to celebrating your agents’ independence and empowering them in the ways that best suit your company.

1. Schedule the self-serve way: Empower your agents to independently manage their schedules online or via phone using a self-service system.
2. Encourage a little healthy competition to get in the independent spirit: Let agents themselves bid on shifts they want, vacation times, overtime work and schedule changes within controlled parameters.
3. Let agents see if their performance is worth an award: Enable agents to check on their progress toward set productivity goals and bonus attainment. They may just make it to Disney World this year, after all.
4. Take it easy: Don’t do anything manually that can be done in a more efficient manner. Streamline and automate schedule changes and notifications to reduce administrative costs and increase productivity.

One of the best ways to boost morale and reduce turnover is to empower your agents to control their own schedules, and to check their performance progress and other information pertinent to their work. Regardless of where you are located, in honor of Independence Day in the U.S., celebrate your agents’ independence by implementing the right technology supported by a strategy and culture that fosters autonomy and individual growth. You might be surprised at what a hero you become.

Comments (0)

(3 votes, average: 2.33 out of 5)

 Loading ...

Changing your Contact Center Reality

Author:  Gary Barnett

This week marks an exciting time for Aspect Software and the contact center industry at large.  During the past 30 or so years, we’ve developed and delivered a number of innovative, best-in-class solutions that have enhanced our customers’ business processes.  Yesterday, we announced our latest – PerformanceEdge™, the industry’s first contact optimization suite that synchronizes workforce management, recording and quality management, performance management, campaign management, and coaching and eLearning.

The rationale for bringing all of these capabilities together is based on some interesting trends we’ve been seeing in the contact center.  Transaction volumes are increasing, forecasting and planning capabilities are typically lacking, reporting is non-existent or is limited due to a lack of real-time insight — particularly where there are siloed contact center systems — technologies don’t support business process initiatives and the existence of multiple contact centers creates increased pressure on managers to deliver meaningful, high-quality customer interactions.

All of these factors have made it particularly difficult for managers to obtain a complete end-to-end view of contact center performance and to make adjustments on the fly as conditions change.  This has also hindered a contact center’s ability to retain their best agents.

We recognized that by packaging all critical performance optimization capabilities together as one, complete suite, we could enable organizations to leverage their complete breadth of information about company-customer interactions to help improve agent retention, enhance service levels and better meet strategic goals.  Having access to all of the historic and real-time data, metrics and recordings across all systems and sites, as well as having a single sign on to administer agents once across all applications, allows contact centers to manage staff more efficiently and decrease administration costs. 

As a result, it is easier for contact centers to be proactive because they know what’s happened in the past, they can see what’s currently going on, plan for future scenarios and take the appropriate action right away to make intraday adjustments. 

The fact is that you can really effect tremendous change in your organization’s performance by synchronizing all of your performance optimization applications. Contact centers will have the tools, knowledge and power to ensure they are meeting both consumer demands and helping the enterprise achieve its objectives.  Using the right data for the right reasons can help contact centers consider everything that is happening and act now to improve performance, meet the soaring expectations of senior executives, and at the same time, make greater contributions to the bottom line.

Have you begun implementing multiple performance optimization solutions in your contact center?  I’d love to hear about some of the results you’re seeing.

Comments (0)

(No Ratings Yet)

 Loading ...

Is Your Contact Center Looking at the Big Picture?

Author:  Roger Sumner

When I meet with customers, we often spend time talking about various contact center-related business issues they are encountering. Sometimes, a common theme emerges. Today, I have one to share with you.  There seems to be an across-the-board, genuine interest in the notion of a broader measure resulting from contact center metrics, which can be better leveraged in the board room as the true effectiveness of the call center asset. 

Your contact center may have already implemented call routing solutions, outbound dialers and performance optimization products, such as campaign management or quality monitoring, without a real strategy for making the most of the wealth of information that these products can provide. Believe me.  You’re not alone.

Deploying the right tools – workforce management, performance management, and quality management – is only the first part of the equation. You then need to use these tools to develop a structured process that allows you to improve overall contact center performance against key business metrics, and ultimately helps you achieve your corporate objectives. 

Developing successful processes requires that you truly understand your contact center metrics and how those metrics relate to other business data.  Then you have to be able to map that data into the Key Business Indicators that reflect your company’s overall business strategy  and financial goals.  Once that is understood, you will have the business metrics that allows every member of the call center team to see how they contribute to the overall success of the business.  For example, if your company wants to increase profitability by 20 percent, decrease operating costs by 10 percent, and improve customer retention rates by eight percent, you should translate these high-level objectives into operational metrics such as Revenue Per Call, Schedule Compliance, Service Level or Agent Quality Scores in order to ultimately drive success across your sales, collections, and customer service processes.  You can then use these operational metrics to develop long-term benchmarks that will enable you create alignment and accountability within your contact center and provide yourself and your C-level executives with comprehensive views of agent and overall performance.

How do you measure success if your contact center is strategic to your business?

Comments (0)

(No Ratings Yet)

 Loading ...

Complying with Labor Laws is About to Become Much Easier

Author:  Gary Barnett

There are different laws around the world that dictate when and how long agents can work.  While these rules and practices are good in some ways by protecting workers; they can also increase the challenges associated with managing a workforce – particularly a workforce whose schedule stringently revolves around call volumes and flows.  Management responsibilities can become even more difficult when companies must comply not only with the rules of their own countries, but also the legislation of an overarching body.

The European Union, for example, has put forth certain protections for workers in all member countries.  They include things such as limiting number of hours employees can work each week (the maximum is 48), limiting the number of consecutive days each employee can work (the maximum is six), and ensuring that employees have an adequate amount of time off between shifts (at least 11 or 12 hours depending on the employee’s age). 

The European Union has also established “Fairness and Equity,” which basically says that companies must find the balance between good and bad.  In other words, managers cannot consistently assign the unfavorable shifts to the same agents; they must be equitably spread amongst all agents.  Unionized companies in countries such as the United States face many of these same challenges.

I’m hearing that these types of circumstances can give you a huge headache while you’re trying to manage your staff and simultaneously ensure proper adherence to all of the rules.  The good news is that workforce management tools will soon be available to automate this process, and enable you to simply input rules for each applicable country.  This technology will also enable you to incorporate fairness and equity logistics so that when you’re scheduling or forecasting, you can consolidate database rules and set the schedule accordingly. 

Are you complying with a multitude of labor laws?  If so, I’d like to hear how you currently do it.

Comments (0)

(No Ratings Yet)

 Loading ...

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?

Comments (2)

(No Ratings Yet)

 Loading ...