Providing Exceptional Service as a Small Contact Center or Help Desk
by Mike Butts on May 11th, 2012
To the customer, the size of your contact center is irrelevant. Callers can’t see how many agents a company employs, what kind of office space they’re housed in, or the sophistication of your network and technology. The only thing that matters to the customer is an agent’s ability to provide a satisfactory resolution to their issue.
However, this doesn’t mean that small contact centers (those with 100 agents or fewer) are exempt from their own unique set of challenges, in addition to many of the obstacles that frequently plague large corporations. Small contact center may often face:
- Limited workflow. Larger operations may have the luxury of managing call volume by transferring callers to available agents. In a small contact center with a limited number of agents, call handling and efficiency are key. Being able to quickly identify and route service requests to available agents is essential.
- Cost of technology. For centers with limited resources, many technology platforms can be cost-prohibitive, or the deployment and implementation may be excessively time-consuming and disruptive to workflows. Fortunately, an effective solution doesn’t need to be overly cumbersome and expensive to provide callers with an exceptional customer experience.
- Lack of support. Scaled-down platforms designed for larger contact centers might seem like the right choice, but they may still be complicated to deploy and fail to provide full 24/7 technical support. Bringing all agents up to speed on new technology quickly to avoid downtime can also be a challenge without the benefit of on-site or computer-based training.
In addition to these considerations, agents need to be prepared to expertly handle service requests from multiple channels. For a smaller organization, this likely means that every agent must have the capabilities to effectively respond to voice calls, e-mail, web chat and instant messaging.
One way to achieve streamlined customer contact practices and operations is by taking advantage of the capabilities found in Microsoft Lync. Organizations with enterprise-wide Lync deployments now have the opportunity to boost their ROI by deploying a low-cost contact center application that runs on top of the Microsoft Lync network.
We’ll talk more about this Lync-based solution in the upcoming webinar on May 31, Transforming Your Small Contact Center or Help Desk into a Strategic Weapon.
By maintaining a sharp focus on the individual customer’s experience, small contact centers and internal help desks can provide levels of service and satisfaction that rival their larger counterparts.
The Art-of-the-Possible Comes to the Contact Center
by Mike Butts on February 10th, 2012
Business leaders make decisions based on past experiences. Even when we think we are being innovative, we are still innovating from what we know and what we’ve seen succeed.
To illustrate this point, CIOs have jumped on the opportunity to increase organizational productivity by deploying one-stop SharePoint portals. SharePoint portals have migrated from simple document repositories to internal communications sites and external corporate web sites. Some businesses, such as mine – a former Microsoft consulting agency – ran its entire operation using SharePoint. Research shows that businesses that once viewed SharePoint as the “go to” place for content are extending its role into “the place where business gets done”. SharePoint makes it easy to envision the art-of-the-possible and perhaps even remove the word “impossible” from our vocabulary.
Given SharePoint’s ubiquitous presence in corporate IT environments, and the drive for customer intimacy, it’s time to bring the art-of-the-possible to the contact
center and tackle productivity and efficiency in an entirely new way.
All too often, contact center productivity is hampered by departmental silos, lack of enterprise knowledge, little to no access to subject matter experts, no real-time metrics, untracked manual processes, limited training and much more. Let’s envision a day where your contact center agents and management teams have a single, “one-stop” interface they use to begin and end their work day, that easily manages all of the different technologies they tap into throughout the day. SharePoint is that key enabling platform that allows everyone within the contact center to stay focused on the task at hand: delivering business value to customers and the enterprise.
Let’s explore some of the possibilities.
- Agent and Supervisor Communication and Collaboration – Create a My Workspace page where agents can access what they need from the corporate CRM database, access their Outlook email messages and assigned tasks, and readily see who’s available for IM chats, voice calls, screen shares and more using Microsoft Lync unified communications capabilities without ever needing to switch screens or open all of those applications individually. Now, consider getting more creative with this My Workspace page – integrate real-time agent metrics, company announcements, team statistics, employee and team recognition, work and vacation schedules, contact center and project schedules, and so much more. The beauty of SharePoint is that it can consolidate all of the information and process needed, and expose the right piece and the right bits of information to the right user. No longer are you hindered by disconnects between agents and supervisors – every player sees what they need when they need it.
- Knowledgebase – How many times are agents and supervisors looking through stacks of notes or hunting around shared drives and desktops for that one document they need? With a centralized knowledgebase, you can turn all this information – including documents, videos, and the notes that pass between the people within the contact center – into a centralized source for both information and collaboration. SharePoint’s powerful search engine allows employees to search information using visual search clues such as meta-driven navigation, thumb nails, previews and click-through relevancy to quickly find and refine search results. And the beauty of SharePoint is that the capabilities you use in-house can quickly be turned on for external consumption. Imagine the same powerful search and collaboration driving a customer self-help portal.
- Analytics – Without knowing where you are, it is difficult – if not impossible – to know where you need to go next. Putting analytics front and center – and putting them into the hands of those who make changes– can transform the culture from one of guessing to one of knowing. Within SharePoint, analytics can be integrated such that they are always visible and always available. For example, display agent and team performance metrics like upsell revenue and average handle time directly on the My Workspace page to align behaviors with strategic objectives. Provide holistic interactive dashboards and scorecards to front-line supervisors and management personnel so they are equipped with the best information to make the best decisions.
- Workflow Automation – Prevent process delays (and lost revenue and customers) while reducing human latency and errors by automating mundane, manual and complex business processes. Business processes such as opening new accounts, credit approvals, accounts receivables, policy management, etc. can involve a number of different workflows, employees with different skill sets, and several different departments. Use SharePoint’s workflow automation capabilities to move business steps through a series of logical and repeatable steps to ensure that business processes do not get bogged down or lost in the shuffle of everyday work. Use SharePoint to push tasks to agents while supervisors use a dashboard to watch service requests move through the system. Workflow automation is great for connecting the contact center to back office operations. It can help ensure that the organization is managing the customer experience holistically – from the initial inquiry through fulfillment – with full visibility along the way.
- Training – Turnover within the contact center remains a pain point even in this challenging economic environment. As new agents come on-board, few can afford the productivity delays that are common. In-person training and reinforcement is hard to manage and sending out document after document is impractical for both the trainer as well as the trainee. With SharePoint, you can reduce the time it takes to onboard new agents and increase effectiveness of existing staff by assigning short training videos to watch and you can easily test understanding with integrated testing. This entire process can be done through SharePoint. Videos can educate staff on new products, offers, campaigns, contact center etiquette, best practices and more. Create a personalized list of recommended videos to supplement training efforts. Make these training videos part of employee performance records and review cycles.
Chances are, your company already has a SharePoint deployment and the possibilities we have outlined have you thinking about the art-of-the-possible for your contact center and maybe even your organization. Possibly the greatest benefit of SharePoint is that you can design and deploy a strategy at a pace that works for you.
I would love to hear your ideas on how SharePoint is being used or could be used in your contact center. Drop me a note.
Till next time.
Mike
Role Reversal: Microsoft’s Skype Acquisition Will Transform the Contact Center
by Mike Butts on January 25th, 2012
About this time last year, I wrote a blog titled “Will video transform the contact center? Don’t believe the hype.” I was very skeptical that video is everything and stated emphatically that it would not replace voice in the contact center. While video may not replace voice in the contact center, my thoughts were radically changed last May.
Little did I know at the time that Microsoft was in the midst of making an $8.5 billion investment acquisition of Skype. No company makes that kind of an investment unless they are playing to win and win big.
(Skype’s revenue was only $860 million at the end of 2010.) This acquisition brings Microsoft 700 million consumers that use Skype technology for their voice and video calls. As we know Microsoft has not officially released details on how it plans to integrate Skype into its product stack, but we do know that Skype will play a key role in Microsoft Lync, Office including Outlook, Windows Phone, and Xbox.
Once Microsoft integrates Skype video technology into its product and hardware (phones and Xbox) stack, it will bring consumers even closer to companies. Forward-thinking organizations will have new opportunities to seize customer loyalty and wallet share. In the near future, consumers will use Skype via the Web, Windows Phone, or Xbox to communicate with businesses. As a result, companies that deploy a Microsoft Lync unified communications infrastructure will have the right tools to collaborate with customers across the same Skype video stream.
All B2C companies have a short window of opportunity to prepare their organizations to use video as a service differentiator, productivity booster, and revenue generator. Companies need to act now to gain a leadership position in customer service before their competitors leap onto this emerging communications channel. Doing so will allow your company to take customer service, communication, and collaboration to the next level because people who use Skype (850 million and growing fast) will want to communicate via video.
Microsoft Lync will provide the perfect integrated platform to allow your contact center (and the rest of the enterprise) to collaborate using Skype video and the rest of the UC capabilities such as presence, instant messaging, screen sharing, remote desktop access and more. These 850 million consumers are opening a new frontier for your organization.
Here are a few thoughts for how video can be used in the contact center:
Create a personal relationship with your agents and company. I don’t know about you, but I always feel like my challenges are going to be resolved faster if I can see and make a personal connection with someone who is taking my order or assisting me in some other way. Video allows this to happen without traveling from location to location.
Increase collections. I wonder how much collections would increase if you can look a debtor in the eye when he makes a payment promise? I have to think that collections would increase significantly because of this direct, more personal interaction. This goes back to creating a more intimate relationship.
Enable opportunities to up-sell. Have a new product or campaign? Use an on-hold video to inform customers about additional products and services. Get really creative by pushing a relevant video based on a caller’s purchase history. The potential here to drive revenue is unlimited. Your marketing department is going to love this.
Facilitate troubleshooting. Push a video to a caller that instructs them how solve their current challenge. Video can also help reduce call volume by allowing your contact center to push visual installation or assembly instructions to callers.
Support learning and agent development. Record and capture videos in your contact center to educate current and new agents on best practices and supervisor to agent training.
So how do companies prepare? At a recent conference, Microsoft proclaimed that “60 percent of enterprises are going to make a unified communications decision in 2012.” I encourage all CIOs and customer experience decision makers to investigate and deploy the Microsoft Lync platform now. Get your contact center and enterprise personnel comfortable using the vast array of unified communications capabilities now so video becomes a natural extension once Skype is incorporated. Implementing Lync in your organization is not that difficult, and in many cases you can recover your investment within six months. And last but not least, your employees will absolutely love the new capabilities.
Till next time.
Mike
2012 is the Year Lync Will Enjoy Widespread Adoption
by Mike Butts on December 12th, 2011
This time of year calls for reflection and looking ahead to the New Year. In my last blog, I took time to wish Microsoft Lync a happy first birthday by reviewing the key Microsoft Lync developments that occurred over the past 12 months. And now it’s time to look forward.
So in keeping with holiday tradition, I want to make one prediction for 2012. The next twelve months will be the time when shrewd CIOs from organizations of all sizes, shapes, and across nearly all industries begin seriously considering adding Microsoft unified communications (UC) to their organization.
In reality, all CIOs should have been thinking unified communications before now. The Microsoft Lync unified communications platform grew at a 25 percent clip this year, and Microsoft executives are projecting this product platform to follow SharePoint as their next billion-dollar business.
So what changed this past year that should spur CIOs into action in 2012? I can pinpoint five primary drivers:
- Industry recognition for the value it delivers. Microsoft Lync is generating excellent reviews from the analyst community from firms such as Gartner, who recently placed Lync into the leadership ranking within their Magic Quadrant for Unified Communications, surpassing incumbent UC vendors such as Avaya and Cisco. Savvy CIOs are starting to prepare their infrastructures for the Microsoft IP-based system so their organizations can reap significant cost and productivity benefits.
- Hard savings that fall directly to the bottom line. The opportunity to generate extreme cost savings is simply too tempting to pass. Aspect, using the Microsoft Lync platform, is saving more than $2 million dollars per year on external conferencing, eliminating T1 lines for local and long-distance calling, PBX maintenance, and reduced mobile phone charges. If your company’s experience is anything like Aspect’s, you’ll be able to recoup your investment within nine months.
- Evolving employee work preferences—While the potential cost savings are staggering, there are significant productivity, communication, collaboration, and cultural improvements to be reaped as well. Employees are changing and becoming more mobile: they want to feel valued, focused, and connected in a manner that empowers them to collaborate with coworkers, customers, vendors, and partners to solve business challenges and get work done. Microsoft Lync provides a single client interface that connects your organization using IM, presence, video and Web conferencing, and enterprise voice across a wide variety of platforms (laptops, tablets, smartphones, Xbox, etc). This functionality fundamentally changes how employees collaborate to achieve business objectives.
- Microsoft-Skype deal—The recently closed Microsoft-Skype deal will revolutionize the unified communications industry within a short time frame. Personally, I am keenly interested in seeing how Microsoft integrates Skype into their product stack with particular emphasis on Lync, Windows Phone, and Xbox. Skype brings Microsoft more than 170 million users that use Skype technology for their voice and video calls on a monthly basis. Integrating Skype across the Microsoft product platform should allow Microsoft to dominate the consumer and B2B voice and video market for years to come. No other vendor will be able to touch Microsoft.
- Contact center potential—Unified communications in the contact center is an untapped opportunity to generate productivity gains and use customer experience as a key competitive differentiator. There are an estimated eight million contact center agents across the globe that would relish using Lync’s many capabilities such as IM, presence, screen sharing, video conferencing, and more to resolve customer service demands during the first interaction. Aspect’s contact center solutions built for Lync provide a natural “plug-in” into unified communications deployments for any size contact center operation ranging from multisite, mission-critical operations to internal help desks. Adding a UC-based contact center solution to your UC strategy is many times a no-brainer that allows you to make the most of your Microsoft technology investment.
Attention CIOs. This is your time (and opportunity) to put your mark on your organization, build your career, and maybe even increase your bonus at this time next year. The path forward is simple. The time is now to deploy a Microsoft unified communications strategy to generate considerable costs savings, organizational productivity, and use customer contact as a key differentiator.
Til next time.
Happy Holidays and best wishes for a healthy and productive 2012.
Happy birthday, Microsoft Lync—A look back at key developments over the past year
by Mike Butts on November 17th, 2011
Exactly one year ago today, Microsoft assembled analysts, strategic partners (including Aspect), and the media to attend its formal launch event in New York City, where executives unveiled the company’s newest unified communications technology known as Lync.
I have to admit that one of my more unique memories is receiving an email communication from Microsoft in September 2010 saying that it was changing the product name from Office Communications Server to Lync, since the combination of “link” and “sync” captures the desire that people have for a truly integrated communications experience. At first blush, I had concerns on how effective this name would be, but it seems to have caught on with the media, analysts, partners, and, most important, potential customers.
In honor of Microsoft Lync’s first birthday; let’s revisit significant events and news from the past 12 months (in no particular order).
- Microsoft acquires Skype for $8.5 billion. The business objectives of Microsoft and Skype are highly complementary and no doubt will accelerate Lync’s market adoption. Skype brings its customer base, products, and reach to Microsoft, while Lync offers Skype the full range of enterprise-class communications capabilities.
- The buzz at Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference. There was an unmistakable Lync buzz surrounding every main stage, roundtable, or breakout presentation I attended. The growing momentum inside Microsoft and throughout their partner community is unstoppable, leading Jon Roskill (Microsoft’s corporate vice president, worldwide partner group), to proclaim that Lync will become the company’s next billion-dollar business following the same aggressive growth pattern of another successful Microsoft technology, SharePoint.
- Aspect deploys Microsoft Lync to global workforce within five weeks of release. Aspect deployed Lync to 100 percent of our worldwide employees within five weeks of the software being available from Microsoft. The end result is that nearly 1,900 employees in 20-plus office locations and in over 13 countries use Lync on a daily basis. I seriously doubt that any company deployed Lync on a global scale faster and more successfully than Aspect did. Our employees simply cannot function (or live) without Lync.
- Rave reviews from the analyst community. Gartner recently placed Microsoft Lync into the leadership ranking within their Magic Quadrant for Unified Communications, outpacing traditional vendors such as Cisco, Siemens, Avaya and Alcatel-Lucent. Miercom, an independent and industry respected research firm that specializes in communications-related product testing and analysis, released a detailed study finding that “Microsoft Lync 2010 is a resilient, scalable, feature rich unified communications system. Microsoft Lync should be in a short list of top three to consider for enterprises communications infrastructure upgrades.”
- Aspect releases contact center solutions built for Lync – A Microsoft Lync product manager relayed to me at the aforementioned Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference that “four of every five unified communications deployments contain contact center requirements.” Aspect Unified IP, a large-scale, mission-critical contact center solution, was released in January 2011 and Aspect Contact, a Lync-based contact center solution for up to 100 agent seats, was released in May 2011. These two solutions allow companies to make the most of their Microsoft technology investment, no matter the size or scope of their contact center, while forming the foundation for Aspect’s strategic alliance with Microsoft.
Of course, no list is without controversy, and I expect this list to be no different. What Lync events or news will you remember most?
What am I looking forward to in 2012? Accessing Lync on my Windows Phone 7 device and attending Lync video conferences through my Xbox Kinect. I may never have to leave my house again. Better yet, I wonder if we can get the Aspect executive team to play a little Rock Band prior to board meetings.
Til next time. Thanks for reading.
How government can deliver better customer service with unified communications
by Mike Butts on November 7th, 2011
Aspect is starting to see an increase in the number of municipalities and local government organizations interested in leveraging unified communications and collaboration technologies to help them connect with citizens and provide higher levels of service.
Just like the private sector, local government offices are faced with the challenges of increased service demands in an era of budget cuts and reduced resources and thus are looking for tools to increase employee communications and productivity.
According to my wife, who has been working as a city director for nearly ten years, city management teams are constantly striving to create a customer experience that strengthens connections with citizens. After all, these residents are continuously influencing day-to-day service activities and longer-term decisions such as elections and tax proposals.
To make these challenges even more difficult, residents want to communicate with city employees using traditional and emerging mediums including their home phone, home computer, laptop, tablet, and smartphone.
Using UC&C to boost productivity and service levels
Here are some ideas how cities can leverage unified communications and collaboration technologies to enhance citizen relationships while maximizing their Microsoft technology platform investment and increasing employee and workflow productivity.
Web chat. A city can implement a “click for assistance” web chat on its website that routes instant messages to designated employees, who can answer questions or re-route inquiries to subject matter experts.
Web forms. The opportunities to streamline and automate business processes are endless. Think about it―a city can connect its website to a backend SharePoint portal to service a multitude of inquiries:
- How do I get an occupancy permit?
- How do I pay my utility bill?
- How do I get a permit to build a deck or a pool or add a room to my house?
- How do I report a power outage, broken water main, or street problem?
- How can I schedule a special trash pick-up?
- How do I register my child for an upcoming event or activity?
The list goes on and on, but the main point is that city officials can create communications-enabled business processes (CEBP) using Web forms to speed response times, remove human latency, and capture key details.
Key opportunities for government organizations
Unified communications and collaboration can provide government organizations with the added functionality to take advantage of improvement opportunities in the following areas:
Contact center. Recently, a number of municipalities have been inquiring about our Aspect Contact solution for small contact centers (up to 100 seats). It makes sense: cities want to maximize their investment in their Microsoft platform, and upgrading to a Lync-based contact center solution can empower the whole enterprise. Aspect Contact enables city employees to resolve citizen inquiries more efficiently by using multichannel inbound routing, IM, presence, voice, and conferencing to answer more inquiries during the initial conversation with the option to engage subject matter experts if an inquiry needs to be escalated.
CRM integration. Once a city has a contact center platform, the next step is connecting its CRM application to the contact center solution. Connecting the CRM application to the contact center can provide employees with screen pops that automatically identify callers while enabling employees to track citizen inquiries, enter service requests, handle event registrations, process payments, distribute outbound email communications, manage vendors, and much more.
Smartphone apps. City management teams have lagged far behind the private sector in deploying smartphone apps. However, progressive cities such as San Francisco and San Jose are building apps that allow citizens to learn more about their city and report needed services such as pothole repairs, graffiti removal, handicap parking violations, and more simply by snapping a photo, entering the needed details, and recording the exact location via GPS using their smartphone.
Social media. Most cities now encourage citizens to follow their Facebook page and Twitter feeds, but few city officials are monitoring and participating in social conversations. There is so much to be learned and gained from monitoring and participating in social conversations that city public information directors are now communicating (connecting) with citizens through social media to protect and enhance the city’s brand while communicating service requirements to city employees who are best equipped to respond.
I don’t know about you, but I’m looking forward to the day when I can interact more effectively with city employees to make my town a better place to live, work, and play.
Til next time; thanks for reading.
Why companies are considering UC-based contact center solutions
by Mike Butts on September 29th, 2011
Microsoft’s unified communications technology, Microsoft Lync, is maturing and gaining excellent analyst and media reviews: it was recently recognized as a leader in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant. Microsoft’s senior executives were proclaiming at the recent Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference (WPC) that Lync would be their next billion-dollar business, following the same aggressive growth pattern of SharePoint.
If these projections are accurate, many, many Microsoft-centric organizations will be deploying this technology within the next few years. It only makes sense if you think about it. Microsoft Lync naturally plugs into your existing Microsoft platforms including Outlook, SharePoint, Dynamics CRM, and others. And take it from someone who uses Lync on a daily basis, the user experience and stability are simply outstanding.
At WPC, a Microsoft Lync product manager shared that “four of every five unified communications deployments contain a contact center requirement.” It doesn’t matter whether this contact center requirement is for multi-thousand seat contact centers or a 20-seat local branch office, 80 percent of all of unified communications deployments need a contact center solution.
So why are many organizations looking to deploy Microsoft unified communications technology in their contact center and across the enterprise?
- Capitalizing before competition. Unified communications capabilities in the contact center is an emerging application that can create competitive differentiation for progressive companies. How long this window stays open is anyone’s guess, but I anticipate it will begin to close within the next 12-18 months. The time to start planning strategy is now.
- Replacing older technology maximizes cost savings. We’re finding that more and more companies are turning to Microsoft unified communications technology for their contact centers because they are frustrated with rising continual and functionality costs associated with updating their older PBX technology. The costs to continue doing business the same way are becoming cost-prohibitive.
- Increasing customer loyalty. Companies are increasing customer satisfaction, first-call resolution, and loyalty with UC-based contact center solutions that enable them to route and answer multichannel (traditional voice, IM, email, chat, etc.) service requests based on business rules that follow specific agent and/or customer criteria.
- Engaging enterprise subject matter experts. Some advanced UC-based customer contact solutions such as Aspect Unified IP and Aspect Contact leverage SharePoint portals to enable contact center agents to search for and engage enterprise subject matter experts when they are confronted with service requests that need escalation. (Best practice: many companies are starting to segment and schedule subject matter experts to ensure a resource is available when needed.)
- Empowering customer experience managers. A simplified administrator tool centralizes system administration across one or more systems while on-demand, real-time, and historical reports help contact center managers make more informed decisions to help drive agent productivity, efficiency, and cost savings.
- Working together. While I’m not sure this last point is a driver, it may be the most important piece of the puzzle. To design a unified deployment that maximizes organizational productivity and cost savings while creating competitive advantages, contact center and IT leaders must work together. No discussions about deploying a unified communications strategy should happen without IT and the contact center being joined at the hip, since the contact center is the spot where thousands and thousands (sometimes millions) of customer transactions and conversations occur on an annual basis
This is a fascinating time for unified communications with contact center functionality. The growth of unified communications will undoubtedly increase over the coming years, and it’s going to be interesting to watch which progressive companies grab market share and customer loyalty by adopting unified communications solutions in their contact centers.
Till next time.
Mike
Customer contact in education? You bet
by Mike Butts on September 6th, 2011
There’s something about early September that takes me back to the carefree days of being in college, especially when there were no exams till mid-October. I better move on before I digress too far.
So as hundreds of thousands of students return to their campuses, little do they know how much effort and resources were spent attracting them. All higher-education administrators on the other hand are keenly aware of the intense competition for prospective and current students. Online colleges, private schools, graduate schools, four-year universities, junior colleges, and even international universities compete not only for students; this hand-to-hand combat extends to faculty, staff, and corporate and community donors.
Many higher-education administrators are crafting and deploying customer relationship management (CRM) strategies because they are fully aware that student enrollments, endowments, and donations keep the lights on. These CRM strategies, known within the industry as “student life cycle management,” enable institutions to enhance the overall experience from prospective student to alumni to the corporate world.
So why are institutions implementing student life cycle management solutions such as Aspect’s CommunityOne?
- The falling CRM learning curve. CRM deployments are no longer considered “risky” adventures, thanks to the corporate sector’s proven strategies for deployments, workflow automation, and user adoption.
- Collaboration. CRM deployments provide the optimum platform for all departments (such as faculty, office staff, athletics, alumni, corporate relations, and marketing) to use a single platform to communicate and interact with their constituents.
- Customization. Aspect’s CommunityOne platform is an extensible solution that can be tailored to an institution’s business processes. For example, your athletics department can leverage a Microsoft SharePoint Web portal to manage Web registrations, collect credit card payments, track event tasks, and follow up with registrants.
- Integration. CRM platforms can be connected to other key line-of-business applications such as admissions, SIS systems, and learning management systems to provide a single access point.
- Workflow automation. Institutions can generate significant workforce efficiency gains by defining and automating business processes to ensure that key business rules are followed across the campus.
- Deployment flexibility. The Microsoft Dynamics platform supplies on-premise and cloud deployment options. For those who want to start now, Microsoft offers a 30-day free trial.
- Reporting. Use out-of-the-box functionality or create custom reports on both quantitative and qualitative information to support quicker and more intelligent business decisions.
The best part is that Microsoft recognizes the importance of adding more educational institutions to their client portfolio now and therefore is providing incentives, including significant discounts. The combination of Microsoft incentives and Aspect’s streamlined implementation and training provide quick ROI and a low total cost of ownership.
We’re anticipating explosive growth in North America and across the world on the number of higher-education institutions deploying CRM solutions to manage critical student life cycles. Indeed, Aspect is already working with several organizations to implement CRM solutions.
So as I settle in to watch some college football games this weekend, I think I’m going to ask my alma mater what CRM platform they’re using the next time they call me for a donation.
Til next time.
Mike
Your contact center is sitting on a treasure chest
by Mike Butts on August 10th, 2011
How many of your colleagues still look at your contact center as an overhead expense line item during the annual budgeting process? Granted, your colleagues may concede that the contact center has a definite effect, both positive and negative, on customer attainment, retention, and satisfaction, but at the end of the day it’s still viewed as a cost of doing business. Go ahead and raise your hands. It’s okay, because you now have the opportunity to transform the contact center into a strategic asset that offers supreme value to every department within your enterprise.
How so, you ask? At our recently completed Customer Contact in a Consumer 2.0 World online symposium, Bruce Temkin, managing partner of the Temkin Group and former Forrester analyst, shared as one of his four pieces of advice for contact centers to avoid extinction that they need to be “providing customer insight to the business.”
More customer interactions and transactions flow through your contact center than any other part of the business. Just imagine the power you can harness for the enterprise if you can find a way to organize and report on customer insight that matters to your colleagues. I’m willing to bet that every department—from engineering, sales, marketing, manufacturing, finance, and others—would treasure data that help them make quicker and more accurate business decisions.
Business intelligence (BI), the science of improving business decisions by providing insights to the business, has been around for many years. The convergence of the exploding growth of social media chatter coupled with your contact center’s daily customer interactions make this the ideal time to deploy a contact center BI solution that your product management, sales, marketing, and boardroom desire.
Think about the possibilities. Imagine capturing and synthesizing customer comments about product features, pricing, warranties, or billing problems that contribute to customer lifetime value. Or capturing the reason(s) why they are selecting a competitive product or service. If a contact center BI solution is designed and deployed right, you can save your company thousands of dollars and resources on studies devoted to competitive intelligence, customer satisfaction, brand awareness, voice of the customer, and product road map validations.
I’m even more confident that your contact center can pull this project off because your agents have the necessary skills, training, processes, and tools to quickly collect and organize these customer interactions.
So where do you begin? First, align yourself with a business partner that has deep experience deploying BI solutions. Notice the emphasis on business partner; this endeavor is more of a business project than a technology project. Today’s technologies such as Microsoft SharePoint 2010 can organize and display structured and unstructured information, so your first priority is making sure your business partner understands how your business process maps to your objectives.
The second step is meeting with your colleagues (and executive team, if possible) to discover the key types of information they need to support business strategy and objectives while increasing productivity. Listen closely for their pain points to see if your contact center can contribute information that eases their struggle for accurate information.
Third, start small. Deploy a pilot project with a single department to gain confidence and a raving fan base before moving on to a larger project.
Your contact center is sitting on a treasure chest full of highly valuable customer insight. All you have to do is collaborate with your colleagues to unlock the riches.
Til next time.
Key Lync Observations from the 2011 Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference
by Mike Butts on July 20th, 2011
Last week I and other Aspect team members attended the annual Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference (WPC). This year’s conference, which included 15,000 partners from around the world, was held in downtown Los Angeles in venues such as the Staples Center, Nokia Plaza, and the Los Angeles Convention Center. In fact, WPC is the largest conference to be hosted by Los Angeles this entire year.
WPC is a premier event that allows partners to hear Microsoft’s latest strategic vision and road map from senior leadership including Steve Ballmer, Kevin Turner, Jon Roskill, and many others. Conference benefits include the opportunity to interact and network with other Microsoft executives, product group leaders, and partner attendees.
One of the recurring themes at last week’s conference was Lync, Microsoft’s newest unified communications platform. At Aspect, we use Microsoft Lync across our enterprise and contact centers, so we fully understand the value and power that this technology platform provides our organization on a daily basis. Still, it was exciting and refreshing to feel the resounding momentum building for this technology.
Jon Roskill, Microsoft’s corporate vice president worldwide partner group, said during his keynote address that Microsoft Lync is positioned to become the company’s next billion-dollar business. Microsoft went so far as to compare Lync’s growth to SharePoint because Lync enables enterprises to collaborate and communicate as never before.
CEO Steve Ballmer said that “70 percent of the Global Fortune 500 are now on Lync” and that the recent Skype acquisition only bolsters the growth of Lync by allowing the “consumerization” of IT within the enterprise to proceed.
Kurt Delbene, president of the Microsoft Office division, also referred to Lync as the new SharePoint because it enables enterprises to reduce costs associated with licensing and training while empowering enterprises to accelerate communications and collaboration productivity.
Kirk Koenigsbauer, corporate vice president of the Microsoft Office division, then took the stage to demo several cool Lync scenarios such as the Lync conversation language translator powered by Bing, the Polycom RMX video add-on solution that showed four simultaneous HD video connections with built-in intelligence to pop a larger screen when someone began to speak, and the XBOX-Kinect-Lync integration. And last but not least, by the end of this year you will be able to use Lync on your Windows 7 phone, iPhone, and Android smartphones.
Aspect was also invited to participate at WPC. Aspect’s Wayne Lockhart led a discussion and demo of our latest Lync-based contact center solution, Aspect Contact, at the Microsoft Business Productivity Partner Theater. Wayne artfully demonstrated how Aspect Contact’s tight Lync integration allows small and midsize contact centers to increase service and resolve inquiries whether they arrive by voice, email, or instant message. One Microsoft Lync product manager told me that Aspect is well positioned for the exploding growth of Microsoft Lync because “80 percent of the unified communications opportunities need a unified contact center solution.”
In closing, Microsoft estimates that up to 60 percent of all enterprise seats lack real-time communications capabilities. If you find yourself among this group, then it’s time to consider Microsoft Lync. The momentum is growing, and this technology will help you drive productivity gains across your enterprise and contact center operations.
Til next time.
Improving the way companies communicate internally and externally with their customers is an important objective for all organizations. This blog is focused on levaraging the collective knowledge withing Aspect.