How companies can become part of their customers’ circle of trust
by Wayne Lockhart on June 27th, 2011
As individuals, we look to our network of friends and even friends of friends for advice on most anything—primarily because these people are within our established circle of trust. It has become clear that consumers place higher value on input from an individual even one or two levels removed from themselves than on marketing or support materials provided by an organization.
With growth of social networks, our ability to ask for advice or obtain help from this group has expanded beyond any expected scope only a few years ago. As a result, businesses are trying to understand how these new broad conversation mediums, and the vast interconnecting of “friends” they enable, affects how they need to support customers and sell to their target audience.
The expression “bad word spreads faster than good” has been around a long time, but these linkages and conversations have accelerated the process. Due to these evolutions in communications, businesses must do more to manage their brand and to address criticism and dissatisfied customers.
Companies need to be active on social media channels in both a promotional and support model. An organization needs to provide channels for customers to come to it with issues on their own terms, admit its mistakes, and address where it has not met expectations. If the company fails to respond and provide detail about how the issue was resolved, future researchers will assume that the company was unresponsive, which can reflect negatively on the organization.
Organizations are reevaluating the roles of marketing and customer contact in how they engage with customers and prospects through these channels. The traditional “one to one” conversation between call centers and customers has now, through the use of technologies such as Twitter and forums, morphed into a “one to many” conversation that continues to live long after the conversation itself has moved on. As a result, organizations are looking at the role and skills required to work in this mode and attempting to determine if the traditional call center is even the right venue for these discussions.
Ultimately, customers are going to get the advice they need from sources they trust and have the ability to engage within their chosen fashion. Successful organizations will evolve to adopt new communication channels in order to meet the needs of their customers.
Why contact center technology is the new power windows
by Wayne Lockhart on June 14th, 2011
When I was growing up and getting my driver’s license, features like power windows on a car were restricted to higher-end vehicles. They really weren’t a pervasive technology, but obviously that has dramatically changed. Today you would be very hard-pressed to purchase a new car that didn’t come with power windows as standard equipment. In fact, you might even have to pay extra to not have them.
But how does that relate to contact center technologies? In my mind, small groups that provide a service to their customers are often using the call center equivalent of a window crank–hunt groups, simultaneous ring, or something similar. Now as contact center functionality is more prevalent, available at a reasonable cost and with a smaller footprint, groups like these can benefit from using it. And I suspect the availability of these capabilities will become the new norm–just as power windows have.
Groups that never considered themselves call centers are now utilizing functionality previously only available via expensive and often proprietary hardware-based solutions. Help desks in IT, human resources, and travel are all examples of parts of an organization that can take advantage of the evolving, ubiquitous nature of this technology.
I believe one of the greatest points in a product manager’s career is when they deliver a product intended for specific purpose but the market finds new and interesting ways of using it. That is the tipping point and, in this context, the point where call center technology truly becomes adopted and adoptable by groups not traditionally considered a call center.
The evolution of the ‘remote’ agent
by Wayne Lockhart on May 23rd, 2011
I’ve been in the contact center industry since there were literally just call centers. As the industry has matured, new media channels available to consumers to contact an organization have made an impact – often transforming the call center into a multi-modal contact center – but the evolution of the technology itself also has played a major role in revolutionizing available offerings. Gone are the days of purpose-built hard phones, dedicated copper lines, and fixed-function hardware to enable a call center, and with them the limitations on how agents must work to be members of a call center group.
No longer does technology mandate that agents must report to a brick and mortar facility. Instead, current technology allows an agent (or knowledge worker) to be literally anywhere, thus opening the door to new and creative approaches to serve today’s consumer.
John Gage, during his tenure with Sun Microsystems, advanced his vision statement that “The network is the computer,” a concept truly enabled by transparency of location that ultimately empowers “remote” agents. I suspect that most minds jump to “work at home” as the conceptual model for a remote agent, but it isn’t always (or even often) the case.
As contact center technology has become more transparent and pervasive, it has found its way into groups and departments that were never traditionally considered contact centers. These are often departmental solutions within a larger organization such as human resources groups, IT help desks, corporate travel, and so on.
Compared with a customer-facing service organization, these internal teams tend to be smaller – from just a few to 100 agents – and often geographically dispersed. As such, traditional call center technology did was not suited to meet the needs of these specialized groups.
To serve the needs of these groups requires a new paradigm: contact center solutions that aren’t tied to a physical location, don’t require proprietary hardware, and aren’t cost-prohibitive. With Aspect Contact 2011, groups can enhance their ability to support their customers while sharing the load with teammates regardless of how “remote” they are, and doing so at a justifiable price point.
This paradigm allows these help desk–type groups to focus on servicing their internal customers and truly allows technology to be an enabler, streamlining operations and enhancing the service levels provided to customers.
Aspect Contact 2011 now available for small and midsize contact centers deploying Microsoft Lync
by Wayne Lockhart on May 17th, 2011
Wayne Lockhart, Aspect’s technical product manager, highlights the capabilities of Aspect Contact 2011, a solution developed for smaller and internal contact centers that integrates seamlessly with Microsoft Lync.
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.