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.
Good Data = Good Customer Experience
by Tim Dreyer on April 30th, 2012
“How can we best use all this data?”
That’s as big a question as any right now in customer service circles. In the Web-driven world, data is everywhere, and it promises to be one of the foremost tools in helping companies match rising consumer expectations.
Forrester’s Kate Leggett says there are four keys to good customer service: good technology, good customer service processes, a well-managed organization that values its employees, and good data. While companies often account for these first three elements, too many overlook the importance of data. As customers use smartphones, PCs, social media and landlines to contact your customer service department with their questions and concerns, companies can compile data from all of these channels to create a more uniform and well-informed service experience.
By working with data management professionals, customer service can sift through the mountain of data to pinpoint the most effective solutions based on past customer inquiries. That way, when a customer reaches out to your contact center, you have not only all their past interaction data at your disposal but also the data-sourced solutions from other customers with similar issues, allowing for a faster resolution.
Ultimately, better use of data means greater efficiency, higher customer satisfaction, and a better customer experience—and in today’s world, customer service and customer experience go hand in hand. And when this information is shared across channels and across the enterprise, companies can create a world-class customer experience and satisfy the expectations of Consumer 2.0.
Bridging the Gap between Social CRM and the Enterprise
by Jim Foy on April 23rd, 2012
Any casual observer can see the impact social media has had on the way we as consumers create, retrieve, and share information in our day-to-day lives. Companies enthusiastically jumped into social media to use it as a marketing channel while consumers have just as enthusiastically engaged those same companies (and legions of fellow consumers) to make known product or service issues or questions they want addressed.
For example, look at a recent U.K. study of social media customer service published last month by Sitel and TNS. It found that more and more consumers are using social media to get
information or resolve issues with companies. The study shows changing behavior as people are adopting a “tweet first” approach when looking to get information from — or resolve an issue with — a company. In fact, 17 percent of the Gen Y segment responded by saying companies should improve response time when a query is posed on Twitter.
Predictably, service-minded organizations are turning to common ground by building or expanding their presence on social outlets like Twitter and Facebook. Initially, these moves were more reactive than proactive as a way to stem negative, brand-damaging posts from going viral. But as customer engagement begins to deepen on social platforms, companies are seeing the benefits of a proactive social-service model. They are adapting a more collaborative approach, allowing their customers to play a part in shaping and managing their own customer-company relationship.
Just employing social CRM is not what makes a social business, however. Weaving social ideas and practices into every part of a company’s operations internally as well as externally is what classifies a business as truly social.
From customer service agents to IT to finance and beyond, every person within an organization is an integral part of making a business social and, for that matter, making a business successful. Removing the silos and replacing them with an enterprise philosophy that promotes collaboration will bring all that is good about social CRM home to the (social) enterprise. This collaboration-powered enterprise allows for expertise and knowledge to be shared and socialized across any and all departments – all of which ultimately translates to an enriched customer experience. It also means delivering much sought-after answers to those consumers’ questions and issues we talked about earlier. So, we have come full circle here.
All of this reinforces our view of next generation customer contact – that is, always looking for ways to bring people (within and outside the enterprise) and information together to improve the customer experience in ways not previously possible. It removes communication and workflow bottlenecks and produces smarter, more efficient business processes and ultimately, more profitable customer interactions.
Microsoft “Lyncs” Employees to Workplace Harmony
by Tim Dreyer on April 10th, 2012
Why is Microsoft one of Chicago’s best places to work? Aside from the pride of working for a globally recognized technology brand and the cool G-Note you can score for making a successful hiring recommendation, there is one element of Microsoft’s work environment that helped the company claim a top-five spot in Crain’s Chicago Business’s annual Best Places to Work in Chicago list. And that reason is Lync.
Microsoft’s Lync, a next-generation communications platform connects people anytime, from virtually anywhere. Lync provides intuitive communications capabilities across presence, instant messaging, audio/video calling and a rich online meeting experience including PC-audio, video and web conferencing.
And while this brings internal employee collaboration to new levels of productivity and customer contact from standard service to deeper engagement, it also helps Microsoft employees strike a harmonious work-life balance. By enhancing contextual conversations and allowing easy sharing of files, desktops and controls, there is very little lost in working remotely. Productivity through telepresence brings flexibility to Microsoft employees, making them happier employees.
Want to see how Aspect works with Microsoft to bring solutions like these to the market? Check out some of our clients who are reaping the benefits of Lync-based unified communications.
High Availability: A Must for Customer Contact
by Chris O'Brien on March 15th, 2012
Like a finely tuned symphony, the success of complex contact center operations depends upon the flawless performance of many moving parts – from the way calls are routed through your ACD, to the way each agent interacts with your customers. Every piece must function with precision and also adapt to changing conditions.
Regardless of how finely tuned your organization is, it only can only take one system outage or power failure to bring customer-facing operations to a halt. That’s when a next-generation, high-availability solution becomes vital.
The importance of high availability
We’ve talked in-depth before about how high availability is virtually synonymous with disaster recovery from an operational perspective, as well as a customer experience perspective. Particularly in industries such as finance, government, health care and other high-touch fields, the critical demand for continual uptime is an all-too-familiar refrain. Agents must maintain active, ongoing conversations with customers even in the event of an outage. Customers in the queue need notification of their status. And supervisors and agents need to be alerted to any changes in system functionality that could affect customer interactions.
As I said, lots of moving parts.
Unplanned network outages, power failures and unscheduled downtime all have the potential to impact your customers by limiting availability. While the terms reliability and high availability are sometimes used interchangeably, the difference between a so-called reliable system and one that meets high-availability standards is its ability to maintain operations and quickly recover normal functioning following a failure – limiting downtime to hours, or even minutes, over the course of a year.
Miercom Performance Verified
Recently, we asked Miercom to conduct a full evaluation of Aspect® Unified IP 7® to verify that it delivers the mission-critical high availability demanded for today’s customer contact environment. The critical factors for a highly available system that Miercom identified as part of its evaluation included:
- Maintaining active conversations between customers and agents
- Preserving contact statistics
- Continuing to initiate recordings
- Enabling supervisors to maintain management capabilities, such as viewing agent status and information
- Alerting supervisors and agents of any changes to the system status
In response to the battery of simulation-style tests Miercom conducted, Aspect Unified IP 7 earned Miercom Performance Verified certification. The solution proved to be resilient, providing the mission-critical high availability demanded for business telephony and customer interaction.You can view the complete summary of Miercom’s test report here.
Maintaining contact center uptime
On March 27, experts from Aspect and Miercom will be hosting an informational webinar on High Availability for the Contact Center: Ensuring Customer Service Continuity to share their insights on meeting evolving customer expectations, with advice to help you limit or eliminate the experience of downtime for customers interacting with your contact center.
Putting the “solution” in Resolution
by Aspect on February 28th, 2012
The following is a special guest post from Paul Stockford, President and Chief Analyst at Saddletree Research.
First call resolution (FCR) has become a big deal in the contact center industry worldwide. Many contact centers now use FCR as an operational efficiency measurement rather than more traditional metrics such as average handle time (AHT). Despite the growing popularity of FCR as a contact center key performance indicator (KPI), there are many uncertainties surrounding it, not the least of which is how to make it happen and how to measure FCR when it does.
Saddletree Research works very closely with the National Association of Call Centers (NACC), a not-for-profit industry membership organization based at The University of Southern Mississippi. In late 2011 we conducted a joint research project among 125 contact center end-user executives that explored a number of industry issues, including FCR. We discovered that 51 percent of respondents are currently tracking FCR one way or another. Some use customer surveys to try to track FCR, some use data analytics, and some use quality monitoring. Most interesting were the many comments we received from companies that are trying to implement and track FCR but are struggling with how to go about doing so.
Putting the measurement issue aside for the moment, I have long believed that the important first step in the quest for FCR is to find a way to make it happen and the most efficient way to do that is to rely on unified communications (UC). The beauty of UC is that it allows the customer service representative to access the resources necessary to resolve a call while the customer is still on the line rather than having to call the customer back, or have the customer call back, at a later time once the necessary resources have been accessed. UC enables new levels of efficiency in the customer service process, streamlining enterprise communications to the benefit of the customer and the agent’s performance metrics.
Aspect has become the de facto market leader for UC solutions in the contact center, attracting the attention of companies such as Microsoft for partnership arrangements and, as of last week, attracting the attention of Dell Services. Dell Services has partnered with Aspect to deliver a Microsoft-based UC solution to the contact center and across the enterprise. This partnership will significantly increase Aspect’s visibility and opportunity in and beyond the customer service function.
Lining up partners like Microsoft and Dell Services should also heighten the awareness of UC as a FCR solution in the contact center. The contact center industry is typically slow to embrace new concepts and solutions but the endorsement of UC and, by extension FCR, by such industry luminaries as Microsoft and Dell Services should go a long way toward accelerating the adoption of UC as a FCR enabler in the contact center.
For those contact center professionals struggling to find a solution that enables the implementation and tracking of FCR in the contact center, it’s here and it’s called UC. Unlike solutions such as customer relationship management (CRM) which underwent years of overblown hype before settling into its role as a useful enterprise solution, UC’s benefits are easy to articulate and quick to attain. Partnering with full service suppliers such as Dell Services makes Aspect a convenient one-stop shop for UC in the contact center. Beyond that, Aspect’s partnerships with industry luminaries such as Microsoft and Dell Services should remove the FUD factor for contact center buyers.
The timing for Aspect’s Dell Services partnership is ideal as it aligns with what our survey reveals to be increased interest in FCR in the contact center. The fact that UC goes hand-in-hand with FCR won’t hurt Aspect’s efforts in the least.
Latest FCC Report and Order: What This Means for Your Business
by Serge Hyppolite on February 23rd, 2012
In a Report and Order issued February 15, 2012, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) sought to create uniformity between the FCC and Federal Trade Commission (FTC) rules for autodialed or prerecorded telemarketing calls.
In the two years prior to this decision, many telemarketing companies have been required to adhere to FTC regulations, which have been more strict than those enforced by the FCC. This order brings the FCC’s standards for autodialed or prerecorded telemarketing calls in line with the FTC’s standards.
In essence, the new FCC Report and Order requires the following conditions for all autodialed or prerecorded telemarketing calls to wireless and residential lines:
- Company must have express prior written consent from the consumer. An existing business relationship is no longer considered consent.
- Consumer must have the ability to verbally opt out during a recorded call; or, if a voicemail has been left, the consumer must be able to call back and opt out.
- Company must maintain an abandoned call rate of 3% or lower for each calling campaign, over a 30-day period.
- Calls made by health care-related entities to residential lines relating to the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA) are exempt from TCPA requirements.
Who is Affected?
Many contact centers may already be in compliance with these new, more strict FCC rules. Businesses that have been required to comply with FTC regulations will experience no change in operations from the FCC Order.
Those that will be impacted fall into a group of businesses that the FTC had classified as “exempted groups.” These groups include common carriers, banks, credit unions, savings and loans, companies engaged in the business of insurance and airlines, and agencies conducting intrastate telemarketing calls.
This subset of businesses, including telemarketers, that have been operating as exempted groups and following the FCC’s less restrictive guidelines over the past two years will be directly affected by the FCC’s new Order.
Still Awaiting Further Decisions
The FCC’s new Report and Order does not address the TCPA telemarketer liability standard issue, which still remains under consideration at the FCC. This issue requires the FCC to determine whether companies would be held strictly liable for the actions of the third party telemarketers they contracted for services, or whether an agency standard would apply, which would shift the liability to the third party.
Although the decision regarding enforcement of an agency standard could have far-reaching consequences for the telemarketing industry, we are monitoring this decision closely and will bring you the latest information as it becomes available.
Next Steps: Achieving Compliance
As a leading provider of solutions that enable proactive outreach for sales, customer service and collections processes, Aspect can help companies achieve optimal productivity while complying with the latest TCPA rules. Our unified solution, Aspect® Unified IP®, offers a number of advantages that will help you ensure compliance.
For example, organizations can set call filters to avoid contacting consumers who have not provided express prior written consent. Parameters that control the pacing of the system can be set to operate within the two-second and 3% abandoned rules. And a built-in IVR self-service component enables consumers to opt out in an automated fashion.
Learn more by downloading Aspect’s complementary report, Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA): Guideline for Aspect customers on the latest FCC Report and Order.
For specific guidance on how to configure your environment to comply with these regulations, we encourage Aspect customers to contact their account representatives or appropriate Aspect partners.
We also invite you to attend Aspect’s informational webinar, Achieving TCPA Compliance, scheduled for March 7. Register for this event now.
High Availability Helps the Contact Center Meet Consumer Expectations
by Chris O'Brien on February 22nd, 2012
There’s an old saying (or curse), “May you live in interesting times.” This is particularly apt for the world of customer experience. The pace of change virtually guarantees that things will be interesting for the foreseeable future.
Consumers are embracing new technologies and new ways to communicate, and the impact is far-reaching: with the world of information available to them, consumers have become much more proactive in finding answers for themselves—and much less patient when companies can’t resolve their issues.
As reaching out to the contact center becomes a last resort for customers, the stakes grow higher. Consider recent research by Datamonitor/Ovum, which surveyed 5,000 consumers across 16 countries on their attitudes and expectations for customer service. From the study:
“In virtually every country, customers ended at least one relationship per year due to poor service. Across all countries surveyed, about 7 in 10 consumers have ended a relationship.”
Clearly, it’s not hyperbole to regard every interaction with your customers as make or break. Without the right tools and functionality, the contact center is at a distinct disadvantage in addressing customer issues. Business continuity also takes on added importance: if the contact center platform isn’t robust enough to be dependable in all settings, the company is at risk of alienating customers at critical times.
In a given year, businesses may be susceptible to the impact of natural disasters or other events that threaten their operations. The tornado that hit Joplin, Missouri, in May 2011, reinforced the need for thorough disaster planning and recovery, and contact center operations are a critical function in such situations.
Against this backdrop, companies should ensure that their systems deliver dependability and availability in line with industry standards. What may have been an acceptable level of service even a few years ago might now be lagging behind the competition and consumer expectations. The failure of Amazon’s EC2 cloud offering in April of last year, which continued over a full business day, and the reaction by its customers and media demonstrated how dramatically expectations had changed.
Aspect has long understood the importance of business continuity to contact center operations, and our commitment to providing dependable solutions informs every phase of our development process. Recently, Aspect asked Miercom to conduct a full evaluation of its next-generation solution Aspect® Unified IP 7® to verify that it delivers the mission-critical high availability demanded for today’s customer contact environment. View the complete summary of Miercom’s test report to see how Unified IP 7 earned Miercom Performance Verified certification.
Find out more about how your business can enhance its contact center capabilities without disrupting existing operations, register for the March 27 webinar: High Availability for the Contact Center: Ensuring Customer Service Continuity. Experts from Miercom and Aspect will share their insights on meeting evolving customer expectations, with advice to help you limit or eliminate the experience of downtime for customers interacting with your contact center.
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 Right Tools for Next-Generation Customer Interaction
by Jane Hendricks on January 17th, 2012
Certain jobs require specific tools. For instance, if you see the cable guy coming and he doesn’t have his special bag of wire cutters, cable splitters, and signal testers, you’re probably not going to be watching your stories in HD tonight.
In the business world those tools are changing all the time. As new tools enter the consumer domain―for example, mobile devices and social media―the tools used by the business follow suit. This consumerization of IT is seen in the rapid adoption of the mobile devices, web-based communities, and even instant messaging within the walls of the enterprise.
The force that drives consumer adoption of new technology is a thirst for instant, real-time information and engagement. This anytime, anywhere access to information and people defines Consumer 2.0. As the tools that we use to connect to one another get smarter, our tolerance for slow, ineffective customer service, while already low, drops even further. As a consumer, I expect that if I am able to access competitive pricing and relevant suggestions for complimentary products while standing in line at a store, I will receive the same level of sophistication and intelligence when I have a question or issue.
The contact center has become the option that consumers tap only after all others have been exhausted—the last best hope for issue resolution. So after an individual has spent time on product pages, consumer forums, and the FAQ page of the company website, she is banking on the contact center to provide her with some information that she didn’t turn up on her exhaustive search and to be cognizant of what she has already reviewed.
This environment raises the bar for service agents and what they need to deliver to keep customers satisfied. That’s why some recent figures caught my eye.
Forrester released research findings on the adoption of customer service technologies in the contact center. According to analyst Kate Leggett:
“Our data shows that 55% of companies surveyed use knowledge management; 35% use real-time decisioning and another 40% are actively considering this technology; and, 34% use unified agent workspaces.”
While these numbers are moving in the right direction, they show that a large number of companies are sending their agents into the customer engagement space without the necessary tools. Some thoughts:
- Without knowledge management tools, agents don’t have the benefit of information generated by customer engagements. In practice, the result is multiple agents searching for the same answers to recurring questions—or worse, inconsistent answers to recurring questions—not exactly the model of productivity.
- Nearly two-thirds of companies aren’t using technology to route calls to the best agent based on expertise, performance, and other factors. When agent skills and customer needs are misaligned, you are gambling, and customer experience is the currency. In today’s environment, one negative interaction can irreparably damage the company-customer relationship, so why not lower those odds?
- Last, the majority of companies don’t give agents the benefit of a unified workspace or access to the same kind of tools they enjoy as consumers. Having to switch between screens, rely on phone calls and notes to pass information within their team, and use clunky interfaces not only increases handle times but severely reduces the likelihood of first-call resolution.
Over the past year, we’ve seen a growing number of companies awaken to the realization that effective customer engagement can deliver long-term benefits—happier consumers who spend more money on products and make recommendations to friends.
While the adoption of necessary functionality is lagging behind consumer expectations, the right technology can transform contact center operations. But there’s no time to waste.
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.