Delivering a Cost-efficient, Four-Star Customer Experience with Workforce Optimization Capabilities

Customers rarely see what goes on in the back office but it’s often hard for them to overlook the influence of behind-the-scenes activities on their contact center experience. In some ways, this situation reminds me of a restaurant visit. Most of us subconsciously set an inner timer for what we think is a reasonable period to wait for our order. If delays seem excessive and service is subpar, our satisfaction suffers no matter how great the food tastes. It’s the total experience that makes or breaks our status as regular customers.

Of course, a restaurant operates very differently from most retail establishments and other businesses. Typically there’s no true back office, but the wait staff, kitchen crew and management must constantly work together in real time to immediately process customer transactions and resolve issues. More than one attempt to heat cold soup could chill a customer’s opinion forever, so first complaint or contact resolution is imperative. Most businesses’ back-office processes are much more sophisticated and they usually affect customer satisfaction less directly, but their influence on the overall customer experience, and employees’ abilities to manage it, is just as significant.

The overly complex back-office systems and processes that are typical of many organizations potentially create or exacerbate inefficiencies and drive up costs. Due to the complexity, it’s often difficult for an organization to be appropriately staffed to meet customer demand.  Since staffing tends to represent the most expensive budgetary line item, overstaffing can be very expensive.  At the same time, understaffing can result in poor customer satisfaction.   

Automated solutions that offer full workforce optimization, including workforce management, performance management and quality management capabilities, can increase back-office productivity and decrease costs. They help improve customer service levels while decreasing required staffing through predictive modeling. Businesses have better insight into tasks and employees and the forecasting, scheduling and tracking flexibility to manage and measure performance against specific goals. And employee performance and morale are supported through automated online coaching and the ability to manage their own schedules using predefined rules.

We’re seeing evidence that a consistently quicker, more accurate response to customer queries is a reliable benefit of automated workforce optimization solutions. Organizations can deliver exceptional service levels and an extraordinary customer experience without additional resources or costs.

How have you equipped the back office to feed the total customer experience? I’m interested in hearing about related performance, productivity and satisfaction outcomes for both your employees and your organization.

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Driving Strategic Business Outcomes with Agent Performance Management

There are hundreds of metrics a contact center can focus on, but how do you determine which are the most important? Well, before deciding on that, you need to identify – as an organization – what you’re looking to improve; what’s impacting the strategic direction of your company?

Say it’s decided that customer satisfaction is the key focus. While every facet of the company will play an important role in the end customer’s satisfaction, each function or employee will have different responsibilities. Let’s break this down even further – specifically to the agents within the call center. How are you going to make sure they perform effectively?

Automated performance management solutions can draw on data from different sources across the contact center to provide a unified view of performance, while aligning the results with goals and other targeted business outcomes. These tools allow executives to set the strategic agenda using key performance indicators (KPIs), which they can align with the business strategy.  For example, if the goal is to improve customer satisfaction, it might be advisable to have front line agents focus on customer empathy scores, following the script, and customer survey scores.  If agents meet these operational goals, the organization will accomplish its customer satisfaction objectives. Agents can also view personalized feedback that helps them track performance, and when needed, participate in automatically triggered coaching. The contact center is able to evaluate and improve individual agent performance, while guiding employees to work together to achieve broader objectives.

Here are some best practices for managing and maximizing your agents’ performance:

• Ensure that agents fully understand goals prior to the performance period. This ensures they focus on these metrics and are more likely to accomplish them.

• When choosing KPIs, make sure the KPIs drive the behavior you want to see. Choose KPIs that front-line agents and supervisors will understand and that are in support of your strategy.

• Set up your performance management system to automatically alert you when agent performance falls below target, which frees supervisors from having to sift through reports.

• When conducting performance reviews and coaching sessions, be sure the sessions are fully documented, so staff can go back and see the problem and plan for the resolution.

While many organizations realize the importance of optimizing performance of their contact center agents to improve operational efficiency, reduce costs and manage the extended workforce, fewer organizations employ performance management to align resources to strategy and improve the effectiveness of agent performance. In fact, a 2009 report from Ventana Research indicates that agent performance management is still an untapped strategic tool in many companies.

Performance management tools ensure that everyone is working towards the same strategic goals. A comprehensive application provides complete visibility and accountability at every level of the organization, while diagnosing and correcting problem areas. Businesses that embrace performance management as both a process and tool are more likely to consistently achieve their strategic goals.

What is your organization doing to assess and improve agent performance? What best practices have you implemented?

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What is the FDCPA and Why Should You Care?

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

Collections agencies have been around since the 1920’s, usually bringing in debt that credit issuers were not able to collect for various reasons. The environment then was much different than it is now, however. Most of these agencies had few clients, few employees, and everything was manual. Collectors used index cards to write notes on, and when mail and phone didn’t work, these collectors would become “door knockers”, actually walking to the debtors’ homes to collect on debts.

It wasn’t really until 1977, when the United States Congress cited “abundant evidence of the use of abusive, deceptive, and unfair debt collection practices by many debt collectors”, that regulations were established around debt collections. That’s when the Fair Debt Collections Practices Act (FDCPA) set guidelines on how, when, and where a consumer could be contacted, began to require collectors to identify themselves and the company they worked for, and limited the information that could be given to a person that was not the debtor.

Due to these new rules of collections, businesses had to change the way they viewed their collectors.  They needed to refine business processes, including introducing new technology to optimize the use of their collections agents as well as ensure they comply with the FDCPA because failure to meet regulation requirements could result in big fines. In fact, they still can – the largest fine to date is $2.25 million.

The good news is that today’s technology is better than ever, which means that compliance can be virtually automatic. A variety of capabilities like quality monitoring, list management, and performance management tools, are configured to help organizations meet FDCPA requirements. In particular, some areas that require particular focus include:

• Dialing and tracking based on your customers’ time zones. Your system must be able to differentiate time zones, and base calling on those time zones, in order to both meet FDCPA and individual state requirements.
• Scheduling callbacks to avoid harassing your debtors.
• Reducing work phone calling at the account level or through exclusion process to ensure prohibited numbers are not called.
• Monitoring and tracking to ensure collectors are not using abusive or profane language, revealing specifics of the debt to any third parties, or using language that could be considered threatening.

The goal of technology used in collections call centers is to help mitigate risk and improve collections as much as possible. How else can companies like Aspect help? We’d love to hear your suggestions.

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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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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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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?

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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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What’s Wrong with this Picture? Part II

Author: Gary Barnett

There is a lot of research showing that customers view the personal qualities, categorized as Empathy and Advocacy, as the most important attributes when it comes to customer service. Customers have indicated time and time again that they want to work with companies that understand their situations, care and want to help.

When our customer from last week’s blog mentioned to the service agents that she wasn’t feeling well, she appreciated that each agent told her that they were “sorry to hear that.”

Unfortunately, one of the agents followed up his concern by questioning the customer about whether or not she had been to see a doctor – a question more appropriately asked by a close friend or a family member than a service agent. One of the other agents voiced her sympathy, and then asked, “You don’t have swine flu, do you?” For the record, the customer did not have the swine flu.

These reactions raise an extremely important question. Have your agents been given parameters to help them understand where the imaginary “empathy line” is? In other words, are your agents trained to show your customers that they care and want to help without making them feel uncomfortable?

It appears that it’s time for the credit card company in our tale to ramp up its use of recording and quality monitoring and spend more time evaluating its employees’ performance. This will help the company see, based on real-time customer feedback, that their agents reactions are, at times, inappropriate. If the company had been monitoring, they would have heard that the customer was a bit shocked during the interactions, providing a clear opportunity for additional coaching because just monitoring the call is not enough.

Once problems are identified, they must be addressed. By making better use of Coaching and eLearning tools the company can train its agents to be empathetic without being inappropriate. By teaching their agents how to respond to customers in a more positive way, the company can drastically improve its customer experiences.

Next week, I’ll share with you the service nightmare that ensued when the customer received her bill and noticed she was charged for the hotel reservations that took one hour of her time and three customer service agents to cancel. It is true that the service in this tale gets much worse before it gets better, but there is a (somewhat) happy ending. Luckily for this company, a customer service hero stepped in at the last minute and saved the day.

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