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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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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Communications-Enabled Business Processes Meets Your Contact Center …

Author:  Mike Sheridan, SVP of Strategy at Aspect

Earlier this year, we announced our commitment to Unified Communications (UC) for the Contact Center. Shortly thereafter, Aspect Software signed an agreement with Microsoft to accelerate that strategy.  Since that time, we’ve been working diligently to educate our customers and the industry about the value of UC.

Now we are extremely pleased to share with you the next step in executing on our strategy.  We are adding IT-ready, software-based capabilities to our contact center solutions so that we can communications-enable business (CEBP) processes.

How are we doing this?

This morning, we publicly announced that we have acquired the intellectual property of BlueNote Networks, a company that provides open, flexible and scalable software solutions that deliver a rich set of telephony and other multimedia communication services. As a result, we will soon be able to fully leverage BlueNote’s award-winning technology to help you further enhance the way you implement your Unified Communications for the Contact Center strategy. 

Right about now, you’re probably wondering what, exactly, this means and how it can impact your customer-facing interactions.

First, let me say that it doesn’t matter whether your contact center is focused on service, sales or collections – communications-enabling your processes can enhance your customers’ experiences, increase first call resolution rates and improve agent productivity. While these processes are well defined and thoroughly measured in the contact center, they are less well defined or measured throughout the rest of the enterprise. The opportunity, with the combination of the intellectual property from BlueNote along with the Aspect product set and customer knowledge, is to address that gap.

From a technology perspective, this may allow your organization to more easily:

• Take advantage of the combined features of session initiation protocol (SIP) and Web services to better drive innovation in your contact center and across your enterprise, while lowering the cost and complexity of enterprise voice, video and data services.
• Enhance SIP-based voice, video and other real-time interactive communication services within the contact center, as well as extend out to the enterprise.
• Introduce video as an interaction channel for your consumers.

This concept of bringing business processes together with communications technologies is not really new to contact centers or to Aspect.  For more than 35 years, communications-enabling customer interactions has been our focus.  By incorporating these new capabilities into our offerings, we will be able to extend the learning from those 35 years to the rest of your organization.

What does communications enabling business processes mean to your business?

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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.

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(3 votes, average: 2.33 out of 5)

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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.

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Your Customers Might Just Want to Talk – And Be Heard

Author:  Roger Sumner

In my last blog, I mentioned the importance of meeting your customers’ needs with your self-service system.  This is a two-fold challenge.  Of course you need to design your system so that you are providing the information that will meet your customers’ needs.  But, you also need to make it as easy as possible for your customers to navigate their way through your system so that they can access that information. 

Designing an optimal self-service system is a process that takes research and time, and is specific to your company’s industry, company culture, as well as the wants and needs of your customers. You can give your customers the option of touchtone, speech, or both.  But, in order to make things as simple as you can for your customers, you might want to think about using speech recognition in conjunction with speech self-service. By analyzing and understanding human languages, speech recognition can enable your customers to have “conversations” with your voice solution in the same way they would converse with your agents – using complete sentences to ask and answer questions. Some things, like your customers’ account numbers or credit card information, may still require DTMF detection for security reasons.   

While speech recognition has been available in some form or another for quite some time, in recent years algorithms have become significantly more advanced.  As a result, the quality of automated interactions has vastly improved, and the cost of the software has decreased.  These factors, combined with the fact that customer perception of your automated system can greatly impact your business, may mean that it’s time for you to think about deploying speech recognition in your contact center.  

Do you think your center is focusing enough energy on self service?  Are you giving your customers a direct route to the information they need, or are you sending them on an annoying wild goose chase? If the latter, you could be at risk for losing valuable customers.

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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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Verizon’s Got it Right – Part 2

Author:  Jim Mitchell

A few days ago, I wrote about a positive experience my friend Susan recently had with Verizon customer service.  She just called and told me about another good interaction – one that again exemplifies proactive customer service done well.  I’m always talking about using predictive dialers for proactive customer service, so I thought I should share this real life example with you.

Susan subscribes to a Verizon phone plan that allows her to make unlimited calls within the United States and Canada for one flat monthly fee. Last month, she made a few phone calls to Canada, which was a deviation from her normal in-country calling pattern.  Verizon contacted Susan to confirm that she had in fact made the phone calls, and then used the opportunity to try to upsell expanded international services.  This was quite a clever approach as Susan admitted to me that she actually appreciated the call.  She felt like Verizon was protecting her security and trying to anticipate and accommodate her needs.

Does your company deploy this type of proactive customer service strategy?  If so, I’d love to hear about it.

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Keep Abreast of Legislation

Author:  Jim Mitchell

Last month, I wrote about Do Not Call legislation, specifically in Australia, Canada, and the United States.  There is some other somewhat recent, and much more restrictive, legislation in the United Kingdom that affects all types of outbound contact regardless of the business process they handle.  This legislation, which was proposed by the U.K. Office of Communications (Ofcom), took effect March 1 of this year. 

The main difference between DNC and Ofcom legislation is that Ofcom outlines how companies should handle silent calls.  It requires that when a contact center makes an outbound call to someone and is unable to transfer the call to a human agent within two seconds, they must play a message that states who they are, and then hang up.  This is true even if an agent frees up during that time period.

Contact centers that conduct business in the U.K. must ensure that their suppliers and their technology can comply with this new legislation.  They must ask tough questions such as:

• Can your dialer adjust the pacing rate of your calls?
• Can your dialer adjust the ring value of your calls?
• Does your technology record a hang up as an abandon?

I don’t believe that this legislation will become pervasive in other countries because it is too restrictive.  But, if you operate in multiple global locations, I recommend that you keep abreast of legislation as it is issued, and work closely with your service providers to ensure your systems can help you maintain and demonstrate compliance.

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Looking Ahead – What’s In the Cards for 2007?

Author:  Gary Barnett

At the beginning of each year, I enjoy making predictions about the business and contact center priorities I expect to see during the coming months.  I believe that in 2007 company executives will increase their focus on the contact center as a source of revenue generation, and place more emphasis on the contact center as the predominant way to retain customers.  In order to achieve these objectives, contact centers will focus on the following trends.  While some of these ideas have been gaining momentum for a few years, in 2007 I expect contact centers will approach all of these trends with fresh eyes, incorporating new technologies that will accelerate acceptance. 

Unified – companies that are migrating to VoIP are beginning to take a more complete view of their customers and focus on customer experiences from the consistency and ease of use perspective.  In 2007, the Unified approach will be largely driven by VoIP, a focus on contact centers as a revenue platform, outsourcing, and overall costs.

Performance management – contact centers managers currently have a significant amount of data available to them.  The new year brings with it the ability for managers and executives to access information in different ways, and to use that data more efficiently to determine where their companies really stand with customers and to more effectively reach both service and financial targets.

Agent retention – hiring and training agents and customer service representatives is expensive.  In 2007, contact centers will focus on retaining agents by improving work environments by focusing on technology such as workforce management or quality management solutions. 

Self service – also in the coming year, we will see the continued adoption of speech as companies look at incorporating more speech into self service; and, a closer tie between the web and contact center self service so that customers can start with self service on the web and end up in the contact center.

Do these match your contact center’s New Years resolutions? 

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