Want Next Generation Customer Experiences for Your Customers? Turn the Channel
by Mike Sheridan on May 15th, 2012
It’s no secret that the speed businesses and customers communicate in today’s hyper-accessible information age has brought noticeable challenges to the contact center and many companies are still grappling with how to adjust. Part of the problem lies in the lack of true departmental integration companies currently have to overcome to create a free-flowing customer information exchange. Companies must update and break down the silos in their operations, and more than ever, examine the state of their current company-customer relationships in order to stay competitive.
Reinventing company-customer relationships 
As communication channels expand to include the latest digital mediums, customers are raising their expectations of businesses and calling for more direct, intelligent interaction and easier, customized communication. There is a growing consumer demand for companies to establish a deeper knowledge about their habits and histories in order to better engage them at an individual level at specific points of interaction. Not only does this require companies to record preferences, habits, complaints and problems across multiple platforms, it also necessitates the consolidation and contextualization of that data into a comprehensive and usable customer profile.
Establish next-generation customer contact
Let’s get historical for a second. First generation call centers were a one-to-one model. A customer called and they got an agent. Through evolution, the contact center created an opportunity for a one-to-several solution where customers could be transferred to other agents in other parts of the enterprise. And now most recently, contact centers have added email and chat, maybe even SMS. But in order to achieve true next generation experiences, organizations need to evolve to create a one-to-all model that can reach the entire enterprise.
By connecting the customer and the company in multiple ways and more importantly the ways the customers want to connect and removing internal barriers and silos between the enterprise and the contact center, unified communications becomes a central pillar of the next-generation organization. By unifying multiple channels into a singular platform while maintaining and optimizing access to a database full of knowledge, businesses can incorporate things like social networking or self-service applications within and not ‘next to’ a customer-centric communications model.
As a result, the contact center, and the enterprise as a whole, experiences greater efficiency and real-time agility. This model streamlines the processing of unstructured data (e.g. social) that is acquired from interactions within the contact center. The large volumes of data are sorted and structured into business intelligence, providing the organization with critical knowledge in real time. The information will then be readily available to service customers beyond the contact center and throughout the entire organization.
Make Room for a More Social CIO
by Mike Sheridan on May 7th, 2012
In a recent blog post on CIO.com, Michael Hugos talked about how current economic factors, in combination with the rapid growth in social media and associated support technologies are creating an opportunity for CIOs to take a leadership role in bridging these industry trends. Hugos cites a recent Gartner report that in three years, the CMO on average may have a bigger technology budget than the CIO. He also notes that with the growth in cloud and BYOD initiatives, social technologies are quickly creeping into enterprise operations.
The convergence here is really setting the stage for social business. Extending order status, customer service, and the like to where customers are is innovative. However, this model could still end up just being another push of information if customers aren’t offered an opportunity to also engage with the company if they should so choose.
As I covered on my previous post, Social Business is not just social technology in the enterprise. It is primarily connecting the enterprise by providing employees the tools like information acquisition in real time, crowdsourcing, contextual intelligence, and knowledge sharing that they use in their personal lives, in ways that creates deeper customer engagement.
This offers opportunity for CIOs to connect these enterprise applications with the social platforms customers are using to engage the companies they do business with. Because of the growing use of social as a customer service medium and the data and engagement opportunities it presents, it is clear that social media can no longer stand alone in marketing and with the help of the CIO, it needs to be a cultural and technological part of the entire enterprise.
Social Business Part II: From Sociability to Reality
by Mike Sheridan on April 4th, 2012
In my last post on social business, I talked about social business being a powerful global conversation: a conversation that allows us to share information at blinding speed. I mentioned one example of social business being the evolution of contact center to engagement center. But theoretical conversations don’t get us very far without a plan of action, do they?
OK, you want to socialize your enterprise but where do you start? Your organization likely already has a CRM application, but in order to create internal social collaboration, a truly social business environment, we need to expose the connectivity capabilities if they don’t exist already.
Typically CRM applications do:
- Maintain Master Customer Records
- Provide Interaction Tracking through a variety of channels
- Support Process Automation for Case management using workflows and tracking activities
To create an enterprise socialsphere though, we’ll need to be able to save chat, email, and voice exchanges automatically into the CRM without relying on the agent. We should be able to create and present prompts – like upsell – based on a customer’s profile. And we need pass parameters like account information from IVR or Chat context messaging automatically to pop the preferred account screen for the agent on call acceptance
Web 2.0 digital functionalities like these are already pervasive on the Internet, so the idea here is to create an anytime, anywhere access environment with a single, internal routing engine. Doing this will ensure content and context continuity, flexible engagement strategies, and workforce optimization that will harness the social energy of employees, allowing them identify, retrieve and deploy resources in real time for optimal customer engagement.
Companies can do this by:
- Learning from every interaction. Knowledge is everywhere and the ability to synthesize the intelligence about your customers, your resources and your processes from your interaction systems are the metrics that can help you continually improve results.
- Gathering that intelligence. Putting data into context provides a view into your operations can help establish specific KPIs that will allow you achieve better, more consistent performance measurement.
- Putting learning into action. Applied learning is what really creates a social business atmosphere. By putting alerts and notifications in place, identifying, rewarding and cross-pollinating best practices and informing, coaching and influencing how transactions are routed creates active, thriving and intelligent workflows.
Social business success isn’t just about agents, social business also extends to the experts throughout the enterprise, the content creators and all back office resources who play a part in managing the customer experience. A social business platform leverages CRM and incorporates a robust, workforce optimization platform that minimizes customer service disruptions. By helping ensure that an organization consistently matches the right resource to the right customers at the right time, true synchronicity in the agent-expert universe can be achieved.
You can learn more about the architecture behind a social business environment here.
All Business is Social But How Social is Your Business?
by Mike Sheridan on March 19th, 2012
Tweeting for dollars, blogging for bucks. The common misconception regarding the idea of social business is that it’s simply selling through social media. And while selling to consumers is a part of it, social business is much more than that. Social business is the idea of is taking the principles, technologies and behaviors of consumer social media and applying them to the enterprise. That is, replicating social collaboration within your enterprise community. Does that mean selling? It could, yes. Does that mean enabling Words with Friends for the shipping department? Probably not.
So what are those collaborative technologies? When the idea of Enterprise 2.0 was put forth by Andrew McAfee back in 2006, he made the realization that not only were Web 2.0 technologies like search and instant messaging in use but many of them were already in the enterprise stack enabling communication, knowledge sharing, etc. He noted that these applications, if applied internally, can knit the enterprise together and create employee collaboration that wasn’t possible before.
So really, when we think about Enterprise 2.0, we need to look to the new consumer or Consumer 2.0. This is the consumer who uses Facebook to connect and crowdsource decisions, uses Twitter to build circles of experts and Foursquare to update friends on location and status. He or she uses smartphone-enabled search apps and gets reviews and recommendations in real time quite often at the same time.
What is important to point out here is that the idea of social business is not just social technology in the enterprise. It is primarily social empowerment of the employee. It’s all about letting them use the tools like information acquisition in real time, crowdsourced, contextual intelligence, and knowledge sharing that they use in their personal lives, in ways that creates deeper customer engagement. And it is about tying this social enterprise to a company’s customers.
Enterprise 2.0 is about that powerful global conversation: a conversation that allows us to share information at blinding speed. The effect is that the consumers get smarter and in some respects, get smarter faster than the companies that are trying to serve them. Where Enterprise 2.0 and Consumer 2.0 meet is where the change in customer engagement happens: engage your customers not only in the mediums but also in the manners they prefer. They have a knowledge base, your agents have a knowledge base, they get real time answers, the contact center gives them real time answers.
Social business exemplifies itself most readily in the evolution of contact center to engagement center. In next week’s post, we’ll look how to apply the tools and create the applications to optimize your CRM platform and take advantage them.
Planning for SIP Trunking: Considerations to Take into Account
by Mike Sheridan on January 27th, 2012
This article originally appeared in the Nov. 2011 issue of INTERNET TELEPHONY.
No matter where I travel in the world, telecom managers’ eyes gleam when the topic of SIP trunking arises. So it wasn’t much of a surprise to me as I looked at a SIP Trunking Snapshot to see that the viewpoint on adoption is still, for the most part, looked at from a futuristic standpoint, but that more and more people are expressing excitement about it. Alright, so we know that there is the potential for immediate and significant cost savings in the business. But what does it mean for those highly regulated outbound contact centers?
From the two-second rule to call abandonment to mandatory caller ID, there are many regulations that organizations understand they need to plan for in regards to their outbound customer contacts. It doesn’t just stop there, though. For other operations, like answering machine detection, it’s important to realize that this transformation requires even further planning to make sure that the experience is equivalent in a SIP environment to a time division multiplexing environment.
And it’s complicated. AMD for outbound SIP connections is typically done by requesting early media where the caller asks the receiver to send audio, even before the call is officially established, allowing processing of the received audio as soon as it’s available. To send the audio, the receiving SIP phone collects the speaker’s voice, taking tiny slices of the audio stream and sending it over the IP network as a data packet. In many cases, the audio is compressed so it takes less network bandwidth, but that also may reduce the audio quality depending on the encoding strategy. The latency of transmission with the packets going through a switched network adds to the delay in reaching the caller. There is also a jitter buffer on the receiver used to reassemble the packets into a continuous audio stream before playing them out so the playback isn’t broken up as there is no assurance that the next packet will arrive exactly when needed.
All of these added times could affect the ability to meet certain regulations that may be in place on how fast an agent or IVR must be connected to the person that answers an automated call. These rules often mandate a response within two seconds, making even a 5 percent increase in receiving audio a potential issue. So while AMD over SIP is absolutely viable, it’s something that needs to be carefully planned for to eliminate any extra delays that could potentially put an organization out of compliance.
What are some things that you’ve encountered when moving to a SIP environment? What about while applying AMD in your outbound SIP connections?
The Dramatic Impact of Better Information Management on Operations
by Mike Sheridan on December 16th, 2011
Mark Twain once said that continuous improvement is better than delayed perfection, and I agree. However, getting the necessary information to achieve continuous improvement is not easy. As a leader, chances are the way you gather information is through your team. Sometimes the insights come from meetings that are scheduled, in person, and very high touch, such as a conference call or daylong strategic-planning session. At other times, you receive reports and data at predetermined times. When these methods are successful, you have the information you need to move forward.
But, instead of delaying, imagine how much more productive you could be if this insight was delivered to you automatically. An advanced system would know exactly what information each situation required, almost like it could read your mind, understand the challenge before you, and deliver the necessary information in real time.
Client Services, a receivables management and customer contact company with 800 agents distributed over three states, had operations that resembled the first scenario above. Its existing contact center systems were distributed across three platforms, which made gathering and analyzing data a time-consuming task. Managers and supervisors didn’t have visibility into the types of calls that were coming in and how to address them more efficiently, which resulted in agents spending significant amounts of time on unproductive calls. In addition, the company had multiple platforms that acted as an obstacle to collecting information and synthesizing it into business intelligence.
Beyond greater efficiency and cost savings, Client Services had another incentive for increasing the ability of contact center managers to monitor operations: as more stringent guidelines were enacted to govern collections practices, regulatory compliance took on added importance. In this climate, the company clearly didn’t have the luxury of waiting until the end of the week—or even end of the day—to gauge performance and modify campaigns.
Aspect worked with Client Services to implement solutions that could enhance its contact center operations in several ways:
- Streamlined Collections united outbound dialing, voice portal and advanced list management capabilities
- Unified Command and Control – Real-time Reporting provided managers with a comprehensive, feature-rich view of outbound dialing operations
- Aspect’s automated dialer and Advanced List Management capabilities freed agents from performing manual tasks, enabling them to concentrate on delivering more value to customers
With the benefit of this improved functionality, Client Services has reduced operating expenses substantially while boosting the productivity of its agents. Results include:
- Reduced maintenance costs
- A 300 percent increase in number of outbound calls after just two months
- Consolidated platforms for increased cost savings, efficiency, and improved metrics
- Increased agent satisfaction
- Nearly double the rate of right party contacts
Companies are scrambling to keep up with increased consumer expectations and the current pace of technological change. Access to the right information, generated by modern tools and functionality, can make all the difference.
Learn more about the path Client Services followed to achieve better contact center operations.
Using the contact center to strengthen your market position
by Mike Sheridan on November 15th, 2011
Many people think of good customer service as a fairly simple equation: the consumer has a question or issue, and the contact center agent is there to provide information or resolve the problem. Over the past decade, customer interactions have grown increasingly complex and now involve multiple channels, inbound and outbound calling, and more informed, engaged customers.
Even when interactions occur directly between the agent and customer, companies still face the constant, formidable task of pleasing customers. Now add in an extra layer between the agent and the customer, such as a dispersed network of retailers. That means you would have to provide information to not just customers but also the people that serve them on the front line. Asian Paints, based in India, faced this daunting challenge.
The challenge: Meeting heightened consumer expectations
Asian Paints serves customers in 62 countries through a network of 25,000 dealers. Many dealers call the company on a daily basis, so ensuring that these interactions are efficient is critical. In addition, Asian Paints has 80 sales offices and a total sales force of 500 people that work directly with retailers. For product launches and other consumer efforts, it must coordinate a number of entities to be successful.
The company’s leaders identified an opportunity to strengthen their market position by providing better customer service. Research had revealed that customers were becoming more engaged in the purchasing process and expected dealers to offer expertise on projects.
It was clear that the company’s contact center operations weren’t up to the task, so executives outlined a few strategic objectives:
- Make it easier for dealers to get answers and product information from the company
- Give agents better visibility into dealer history and interactions
- Integrate the entire supply chain—from sales and customer loyalty to consulting—into the customer contact channel
A phased approach to next-generation customer contact
Asian Paints understood that there were no quick fixes for its contact center. Instead, executives developed a long-term, phased strategy to begin to integrate enhanced functionality into the call center. They understood that any solution must have the following attributes:
- Be flexible and scalable to accommodate evolving needs
- Give agents the tools to serve customers more effectively
- Integrate with existing platforms
Aspect partnered with Asian Paints to understand their unique needs and help them devise a solution that would deliver the functionality they needed to serve customers more effectively.
Delivering an immediate impact and laying a foundation for long-term growth
Asian Paints selected Aspect Unified IP and conducted a pilot to integrate it into 50 contact center seats in four locations. Next, it expanded its operations to accommodate 5,500 dealers. The implementation proceeded smoothly, and the effort yielded impressive results:
- Waiting times were substantially shorter
- The window for service availability improved significantly
- Average handle times fell by nearly 40 percent
- Dealer satisfaction increased by 80 percent
More important, the company is poised to move on to the next phase of the rollout with the necessary pieces already in place.
For more on the experience of Asian Paints, click here.
Bringing the contact center in-house to increase performance
by Mike Sheridan on October 31st, 2011
It often makes sense for companies, especially when they’re young, to outsource certain functions. When businesses experience rapid or sustained growth, they can reach a tipping point when the burden of managing the external vendor outweighs the benefits. This dynamic is particularly true of the contact center.
The decision to create an internal contact center brings with it the challenge of selecting the right platform and tools to enable service agents. In effect, the company is going from 0 to 60 in a short time frame, having to install technology in the contact center, put management in place, and hire and train staff. In these instances, any potential solution must be flexible and extensible to accommodate continued growth and changing conditions.
Establishing an in-house contact center
HomeShop18, India’s largest e-commerce company, faced this challenge. The company operates a 24-hour shopping channel with 11.5 million weekly viewers as well as a website that has increased traffic by 300 percent annually, to 2.4 million unique visitors per month.
HomeShop18 had outsourced management of the contact center, both inbound traffic and outbound calls, to an external vendor. Its leaders had recognized that customer experience was increasingly important to the business—repeat customers make up 40 percent of its base. To exert more control over contact center, HomeShop18 decided to move the contact center operation in-house.
Supporting operations with the required functionality
Empowering contact center employees with the right capabilities was a critical piece of the puzzle. Specifically, the solution needed to be able to accommodate requests from multiple streams, including e-mail and text messaging. To optimize the workforce, managers had to have the ability to monitor actions, route calls to the most qualified agents, and provide real-time coaching.
After reviewing available products, HomeShop 18’s leaders selected Aspect’s Blended InteractionTM because of its track record of delivering value at other businesses. Blended Interaction can integrate multiple point products for managing different contact channels, and its universal queue feature organizes incoming contacts across all communication channels into a single queue. It can then route them to the most appropriate agent based on wait times, incoming traffic volumes, and service levels.
Boosting performance significantly
When HomeShop18 compared its in-house call center’s performance with that of the external vendor, the results were striking: agent efficiency jumped 25 percentage points; the call-handling rate increased to 14, from 9; and sales conversions nearly doubled, to nearly 40 percent. Response times to other communications channels were even more striking: Blended Interaction helped reduce call response time for SMS messages from 12 hours to just 20 minutes
Over the past year, HomeShop18 has continued to expand its contact center. Today, more than 750 agents handle a total of 40,000 calls each day from a state-of-the-art facility, and Blended Interaction has been able to evolve and adapt with HomeShop18’s operations to handle this increased volume.
Learn more about HomeShop18’s journey here, and be sure to let me know if you have specific questions.
How UC in the contact center delivers real benefits
by Mike Sheridan on October 17th, 2011
Recently, when I was given a Toyota Prius by my rental car company, it got me thinking. At its introduction, prospects for mass adoption of the Prius seemed to be slim. Yet it has sold more than 1 million cars in the United States since its introduction and been the leader in transforming the auto industryfrom gas guzzlers to hybrid and electric vehicles.
Part of the challenge of any new technology is the perceived gap between what it promises and what it can actually deliver. That’s why there’s no substitute for the real-world results: the proof is in the value a product can actually deliver.
On this blog, I and my colleagues have talked extensively about the benefits of the next-generation contact center built on a unified communications and collaboration platform.
1) The ability to tap the collective intelligence of the organization using tools such as rich presence and ask an expert
2) The transparency and flexibility to optimize the contact center workforce and respond quickly to spikes in volume.
3) The analytics capabilities to monitor and improve contact center performance.
While we’re supremely confident in the capabilities of our products, I understand that people need concrete facts about the impact such technology can have on their organization.
That’s why I’m happy to share the story of HarborOne, one of the top credit unions in the country. Several years ago, its leaders began planning their organization’s transition to unified communications. At the same time, they identified the functionality their contact center needed to boost its performance and improve customer service.
HarborOne chose Aspect’s Seamless Customer Service powered by Aspect® Unified IP® for its contact center, and the results have been impressive:
Enhanced ability to monitor interactions. The contact center can now track each interaction from start to finish, and the system’s in-depth reporting capabilities help translate this data into business intelligence.
Significant cost savings. The organization has saved more than $100k annually on travel by moving to video and Web conferencing enabled by unified communications
Better service levels. The new platform has helped HarborOne’s contact center reduce missed calls by 2 to 3 percent
Improved disaster recovery. HarborOne’s new platform provides complete redundancy of contact center operations, increasing business continuity.
The value that HarborOne achieved is no anomaly. As more and more businesses adopt a unified communications platform, they will be well positioned to integrate the contact center seamlessly into their operations. A decade from now, all organizations will have these capabilities. However, those that move now to enhance their contact center will see the impact not only in better customer interactions but also on the bottom line.
For more on HarborOne’s experience, click here.
Ensuring compliance in contact center operations
by Mike Sheridan on October 12th, 2011
On a recent business trip to England, the topic of conversation turned to compliance in the contact center. The evolving regulatory landscape for customer contact and collections in both Europe and the United States continues to make this a formidable challenge. The following developments and statistics should give businesses a reason to reevaluate their current efforts:
In a recent survey of U.K. contact centers, nearly 37 percent of respondents believed that their operations were in compliance with the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI-DSS). However, 89 percent indicated that they didn’t understand the law’s requirements or penalties.
On data security and confidentiality, the U.K. Financial Services Act restricts the recording of interactions when sensitive details such as credit card information are involved. Since many contact centers record interactions as a matter of course, they must take extra precautions when storing data to avoid violating the PCI-DSS.
In the United States, the Do Not Call list, created by the Federal Communications Commission in 2004, now has nearly 200 million numbers on it. This has severely affected telemarketing, but the growth of cell phones is impacting customer service and collections too. In fact, Pew Research recently reported that 83 percent of U.S. adults now have cell phones.
And the cloud exacerbates compliance even further. In August the PCI-DSS released new guidance about virtualization. Much more to come on this front.
So what do all these developments mean for the contact center? Vendors should build (and companies should ensure) that any solution is:
- Flexible—As legislation and regulatory agencies struggle to keep pace with technological advances, it’s impossible to predict what the next year or five years will hold.
- Nimble and responsive—Rigid platforms that can’t be easily adapted to emerging needs can impede companies from pursuing opportunities.
- Transparent—Ignorance of violations is no defense, so contact center managers must be aware of agent interactions and detect potential risk.
In compliance, vigilance and an understanding of regulatory and enforcement trends are critical. The right technology solution must provide the capabilities to support these efforts.
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.