Better Management – The Key To Your Customers’ Hearts

Author:  Gary Barnett

About a year ago , I talked about how great it would be if businesses could centralize the application layer that brings the administration of multisite contact centers and their components into a single location. Fast forward to present day, and this approach is not only possible, it’s already being used.

One of our customers, Laser Centers of America (LCA), recently took this approach to better manage its growing business and improve customer experiences. When the company opened its second contact center, it deployed an IT-Ready solution to simplify the migration of 8,000 DNIS numbers, and to minimize the administration time associated with the transfer of agent information into the new automatic call distributor (ACD). Using this approach, LCA was able to disseminate customer data and DNIS information to the new applications rather than input the data into each disparate application. It saved an estimated 160 man-hours alone in migrating the DNIS database information for the new ACD.

This approach not only eased LCA’s migration process; it is now helping the company eliminate redundancy and, by extension, many of the ongoing contact center management headaches organizations generally face.  Today, when one of LCA’s administrators makes a change to data and staffing information, the new data is automatically replicated to the company’s workforce management systems and ACDs across both contact centers. As a result, neither the contact center nor the company’s IT staff have to worry about managing duplicate business rules implemented across contact centers.

Plus, LCA can rest easy knowing that their IT-Ready solutions are entirely secure because these solutions include LDAP/Active Directory definition and authentication, and logins via industry standard HTTPS and SSL.   In addition, eliminating data redundancy means less administration and lower exposure.

The possibilities and benefits that arise from a centralized administration layer are limited only by your imagination – today in the contact center, tomorrow throughout the enterprise.

What steps are you taking to reduce your administrative burdens so that you can focus on exceeding your customers’ expectations and growing your business?

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What The Heck Does It Mean To Be IT-Ready? And, Why Should You Care?

Author:  Gary Barnett

During the past few months, we’ve spoken at great length about the business problems that can be solved when the contact center is extended to the enterprise via unified communications (UC). I’m sure that the idea of being able to do this is exciting to you and your contact center colleagues, but when your IT department hears you talking about the possibilities, they’re possibly cringing.  You see, there is a good chance that they’re concerned that you’re planning to take your big black box and mess up their scalable, redundant, and reliable architecture.

The nice thing is you have the ability to calm their fears by letting them know you’re sensitive to their need for IT-ready solutions. You can tell them you want to deploy solutions that are designed and built specifically to meet their challenges – lowering costs, reducing complexity, providing stronger security and greater reliability, and enabling better responsiveness.

So, what the heck does it mean to be IT-ready? At its highest level, IT-ready is a concept.  It represents the notion that “IT-ready” contact center solutions are designed to fold into the enterprise architectures that are being deployed by IT organizations within companies. This in turn gives IT the ability to better address time and budget constraints, and the opportunity to do more with less.

There are five main criteria that must be incorporated into a solution for it to be deemed IT-ready.  The solution must:

1. Utilize services-based software and hosted solutions to more easily employ virtualization tools and techniques to simplify and reduce your physical footprint. An IT-ready unified solution reduces time- and cost-consuming integrations.  And, hosted solutions allow companies to save on network traffic costs and eliminates expensive networking equipment to diminish your cost of ownership. 
2. Provide standards-based capabilities, giving you the power to deploy your contact center applications on top of your transport of choice – Voice over IP or traditional voice (or even a blend of both). IT-ready solutions use session initiation protocol (SIP) to deliver optimal device and service provider choice, support XML-based open Web services and APIs, and integrate to data stores through ODBC, JDBC and XML.
3. Leverage standard system management, security practices and tools such as LDAP, Active Directory and Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI), and SNMP.
4. Offer high availability and reliability and provide a variety of redundancy features – including disaster recovery options – that increase the fault tolerance and efficiency of the system and minimize single points of failure.
5. Support single- or multi-tenant deployments to provide greater choice and control to organizations.

IT-ready solutions are important for a variety of reasons.  Not only can they significantly reduce the burden on your IT staff, they can also give your contact center and your enterprise the tools it needs to reap all of the benefits of UC and, of course, they can help you make your customer happier and improve your bottom line.

Do you think IT-ready solutions will benefit your organization?

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Three Reasons Companies are Considering At-Home Agent Programs

Author:  Roger Sumner

Regardless of whether they focus on customer service, sales and marketing, or collections, virtually every Aspect Software customer that I have spoken with during the last year has told me that they have, or are thinking about trialing an at-home agent program. I can say without hesitation that a lot of this interest is being driven by the availability, and increased adoption, of Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP).  VoIP is making it infinitely easier and less expensive for companies to set-up at-home and remote agents, and laying the foundation for supervisors to effectively monitor, coach and manage this new breed of agent.

There are a number of reasons that companies are considering work-at-home programs. One Fortune 250 energy company is in the process of planning a fairly significant migration to at-home agents for business continuity purposes. This particular company has two electric utilities that serve areas that are sometimes threatened by hurricanes.  Using at-home agents will enable the company to ensure that it has the coverage it needs during emergency situations because the agents will not be concentrated in any one location.

Work-at-home programs are also becoming viable alternatives to off-shore outsourcing. While off-shore outsourcing can clearly result in significant up-front savings, in some situations it can generate considerable costs in terms of decreased customer satisfaction and lost business. I feel relatively confident that work-at-home programs will encroach on off-shore outsourcing as it opens the door to a new labor pool for the businesses looking to augment their current staff. However, I don’t think it will eradicate the need for off-shore outsourcing all together.

Finally, companies are looking to work-at-home programs because their facilities are too small to accommodate their growing businesses. One very large wireless carrier recently told me that they plan to stop constructing contact centers due to the high cost associated with doing so.  To address this issue, this company is building virtual contact centers, using data centers to house their equipment , and creating groups of agents and supervisor in many offsite locations, including work-at-home solutions. This strategy will enable the wireless carrier to hire more agents and continue to meet the needs of its customers, while simultaneously eliminating the outrageous expenses that can be associated with owning, managing, and operating a contact center.

If you’re contact center is considering a work-at-home program, what is your motivation?

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At-Home Agents – An Answer to Global Warming?

Author:  Jim Mitchell

I have noticed two topics that have been getting a lot of press lately – Global Warming and at-home agents. I started wondering to myself whether these two topics might somehow be related.  Then, it occurred to me that they are – at-home agents can help contact centers reduce carbon emissions.  Now, hear me out on this one…

First, let me say that if you are thinking about employing at-home agents, you need to think about the impact of a number of factors on your business – the technology implications, as well as human resource, security, training, facilities, and legal concerns.  But, when it comes to environment-related issues, the most obvious benefit is that at-home agents don’t have to drive anywhere, meaning that they won’t be emitting carbons from their automobiles.  The tangential benefits are that your company can reduce pollutants and facilities-related costs because you don’t have to provide office space for at-home agents, and you don’t have to heat or cool the space.  Also, morale will be higher because your employees can work from the comfort of their own homes.  I think that sounds like a win-win situation all the way around.

Environmental issues aside, there are also a number of other benefits your company, customers and agents can realize.  You can access a broader, better and potentially more cost-effective resource pool, giving you the opportunity to employ agents who are located anywhere in the world.  Your customers will most likely appreciate this approach because you will be able to provide them with a truly around-the-clock support environment that operates in any and all time zones and language requirements.

Flexibility is also a big plus because with at-home agents you can easily add resources during peak periods or when you need them on the fly. And, your agents can work during the hours that best fit their needs.  For example, people with children could work at night while everyone is sleeping or during the day while the kids are at school; or retirees could work part-time schedules.  Who wouldn’t want this type of work/life balance?  Not only will your agents be happier, they will most likely provide your customers with better service, and they will stay with your company for a longer period of time leading to lower recruiting and training costs for you.

Are you using at-home agents in your contact center?  If so, tell me about your experiences.

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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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Don’t Let the Flu Get You Down

Author:  Roger Sumner

Nearly every day when I read the newspaper, listen to the radio, or turn on the television, I see something about the “Bird Flu.”  I haven’t yet started building and stocking my own personal bunker, but I am strongly recommending that our customers think about and plan for the possibility of a pandemic threat.  In particular, you should consider how your company would continue serving your customers during a time of unusually high absenteeism. 

Pretend you are contact center manager for an insurance company.  The Bird Flu strikes and your incoming call volume spikes as customers attempt to make sure they are covered for an emergency room visit or check on the status of a claim.

Unfortunately, many of your agents called in sick and you don’t have enough people to provide back-up. The few agents who are manning your phones are stressed out, and your customers are getting more and more anxious.  What should you do?

A speech self-service system would be a very viable option in a situation like this.  During a pandemic, your customers (and agents) might be a bit frazzled and have difficulty finding letters and numbers on their telephone keypads. The ability to “talk” to an automated system and have it “talk” back would empower your customers to quickly and intuitively fulfill their own needs.  You could even take this one step further and integrate your speech self-service application with a customer relationship management (CRM) system to provide truly personalized interactions.

Another option would be to use your VoIP solution.  Its offers the flexibility of allowing your agents to work from home, enabling them to continue their customer service without putting themselves at risk.  And, your customers would never know the difference.  Obviously, this would require some pre-planning to ensure your agents have the infrastructure in place to easily transition to working from home.

You could also provide chat capability to agents who are at home.  This would deliver the same benefits as the VoIP solution, but does not require a VoIP quality of service for your at-home agents. Chat is less expensive than VoIP because it doesn’t use as much bandwidth or RAM, and it requires less powerful processors.

I honestly don’t know if the Bird Flu will become a pandemic.  But, I do know that if it does take flight, your customers and your agents would appreciate your forethought.  Bird flu or not you have taken some the first steps towards business continuity for all types of disasters.
 

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Weathering the Storm

Author:  Roger Sumner

Hurricane season is here and once again, the high likelihood of above-normal activity is predicted.  I’ve seen it time and time again where customers think they have an adequate disaster recovery plan in place, but it hasn’t been tested for years or hasn’t been updated in some time.  Whenever I’m out at customer sites, I try to stress the importance of a well-planned and regularly tested plan.

All too often, I see contact centers that assume their overarching corporate disaster recovery plan includes details specific to their departments.  I hate to say that this is not always the case.  I am a strong advocate of checking-in with the keeper of your company’s overall plan to make sure you’ve got your bases covered before a hurricane or other natural disaster occurs.  The questions below are some of the common things you should consider when determining if you’ve got the right systems and processes in place to sustain your business in the event of a crisis.  If you can’t address these with your current plan, you should make some immediate changes.

• How much budget have you set aside to ensure some level of  business continuity?
• Will your systems still operate in the event of a disaster? 
• Have you built in enough redundancy in your systems to ensure immediate failover to an unaffected location, with uninterrupted or only slightly interrupted service?
• Are your agents spread out or in one geographic location?  For example, do you have back-up agents that could handle an outage if one area is hit hard (maybe this is where an outsourcer comes into play)? 
• If your contact centers are maxed out by the disaster, do you have a contingency plan in place that will enable other functions/departments to step in to support telephone inquiries?  These plans should include technology, training and scripting for back-up agents.
• Who is responsible, and what steps will be taken to assess post-hurricane damage and repair systems?
• Can your service provider help establish back architecture?
• Do you understand the lead time for replacement parts and systems for complete disaster?
• Do you test your plan at some level at regular intervals? 

This sounds daunting, I know.  But a little up-front planning and a lot of up-front communication can go a long way.

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