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.
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.
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.
Key 2011 Contact Center Trends—and What They Mean for 2012 and Beyond
by Tim Dreyer on December 29th, 2011
Over the past year, several trends emerged that will shape the customer engagement landscape for the foreseeable future. A number of factors, fueled by technology, have elevated the importance of the contact center, making it the hub of customer engagement efforts. Aspect’s executives and thought leaders weighed in on the new challenges facing companies as well as the steps they should take to position their contact center to serve today’s consumer.
The growing importance of the contact center
As consumer expectations continued to increase, progressive organizations came to the realization that the entire organization needed to be engaged in supporting customer engagement. This is easier said than done, as most companies have organizational structures that support 20th century business operations. Nancy Dobrozdravic weighed in on the strategy, tools, and organizational realignment that must occur to strengthen customer relationships:
- The Age of the Customer Elevates the Importance of the Contact Center
- If the Whole Organization Is Responsible for Marketing, What Role Should the Contact Center play?
- Marketing and IT Converge in the Contact Center
- Empowering the Entire Organization to Serve the Customer
Compliance with shifting contact center regulations
Technological advances are presenting new opportunities for contact centers, but existing laws on outbound calling and collections have created ambiguity and potential risk. Mike Sheridan and Lynne Levy shared their insight on how companies could make sense of the current regulatory environment and maintain the flexibility to adapt to changes:
- Ensuring Compliance in Contact Center Operations
- What contact centers need to know to stay compliant
- Features that every contact center should have in place to aid compliance
- How Companies Can Use Social Media in the Contact Center
Workforce optimization
Companies looked to the contact center not just to improve customer interactions and experience; they were also interested in achieving greater transparency and accountability to boost efficiency. In a series of posts, Doug Whitaker laid out the tools and functionality contact centers need to get more out of their workforce:
- How a High-Performing Contact Center Directly Supports Business Strategy
- Empowering the Contact Center with Vital Workforce Optimization Tools
- Four Critical Components of a Next-Generation Contact Solution
Be sure to check back to this blog throughout the year to get more insight on these and other topics. All the best for 2012.
Four 2012 Resolutions to Improve Customer Experience
by Jane Hendricks on December 19th, 2011
When the ball drops in Times Square to usher in 2012, many of us will raise our glasses for a toast, give a loved one a kiss, and mentally promise ourselves to work out more, eat better, and spend more time with family and friends. After all, every New Year, we resolve to be better. Some industry experts are predicting that 2012 is the year that the quality of the customer experience becomes king. As organizations begin planning for 2012, I would encourage all to keep these four simple resolutions in mind to help deliver a quality customer experience in the coming year and beyond:
Strive to be healthier
For an enterprise today, health is measured through customer loyalty and share of wallet. By nurturing loyalty and increasing customer spend, customer value grows, which helps increase revenue and is rewarded with accolades within the boardroom and in the press. Resolve to grow customer value with every interaction. Provide your customers with interaction on their own terms rather than on terms dictated by aging, disconnected technologies. Make sure you consider the total customer experience – not just customer-agent interactions, but also the fulfillment process as well – and use what you know about customers and the employees who serve them to make every interaction better than the one before.
Learn something new
Data is growing exponentially within the walls of your organization. Every interaction – whether through the contact center, a self-service portal, or through a sale – can contribute to what you know about customers and help you uncover something you don’t. The right technology can access data stores such as recordings, marry data together for a holistic view into customers and operations, and apply new views and analytical techniques (such as predictive analytics, interaction analytics, behavioral analytics) – not just once, but consistently – to turn numbers, words, and sounds into better decisions. “By combining quality monitoring, analytics, and social media, many companies get a true assessment of the customer experience they are delivering for the first time,” writes Louis Columbus, senior manager of the Microsoft Enterprise Marketing and Adjunct Professor Graduate Program at Webster University.
Be more adventurous
For contact centers, social media represent a new frontier for customer outreach. Customers are turning to social media with questions, issues, and problems – often because they don’t want to wait in long phone queues or have to explain their issue over and over again through multiple engagement channels. Since 2008, United Breaks Guitars has been used to showcase the danger of ignoring social media. In 2012, that example needs to finally be put to bed. Using social media for customer experience management is not an insurmountable challenge – it’s possible. It is time social media becomes a bona fide, integrated customer service channel.
Get rid of bad habits
In all honesty, this resolution is one I make every year. When December rolls around, I am often left with the same bad habits I started with. It’s hard because you need to be able to take an objective look at yourself and identify which habits – the things you do every day, what you rely on – have outlived their usefulness and need to be let go. For contact centers, it’s time to stop thinking of performance metrics as divorced and isolated from customer experience outcomes. Resolve to expand how you assess, train for and reward performance by expanding the measurement equation beyond average handle times to metrics that are relevant to the customer experience. Consider the nature of the interaction, customer need, customer value, and agent behavior as part of your quality assessment and performance programs.
Making resolutions is the easy part; keeping them is where the rubber meets the road. We all know (and I’m guilty of this as well) that most resolutions are cast aside as soon as the clean-up after the party begins. According to psychologists, the secret to keeping resolutions is to break up the goal into smaller steps and to celebrate success along the way. So as we look ahead to 2012, let’s start the planning process and begin the journey. After all, we all know that some resolutions – like being a customer experience leader – are worth keeping. Happy holidays, a happy New Year, and as always – let’s keep these conversations going.
Why Expertise Matters
by Chris O'Brien on December 7th, 2011
In a field driven by ongoing advancement such as the contact center, clients should expect in-depth knowledge of the full range of their needs and customers’ expectations, as well as a first-hand familiarity with network architecture and design, technology implementation, and user adoption experience.
So while relative newcomers pride themselves on applications “built from the ground up,” one should be cautious about employing a solution that is a mile wide but an inch deep. Look for factors such as complex, accurate reporting, seamless UC integration with other enterprise-standard software applications, and extensive workforce optimization functions.
Ask yourself:
How in-depth are its capabilities?
Look beneath the surface. While different providers may call applications by similar names, those with more feature-rich capabilities are measurably superior. The absence of key features can translate to comparable inefficiencies, resulting in lost revenue and productivity.
How in-depth are its Workforce Optimization (WFO) products?
Solutions that offer only limited, proprietary versions of WFO software are not considered best-of-breed. Aspect’s WFO offerings incorporate a broad range of capabilities encompassing recording and quality management, workforce management, and performance management.
Does it integrate with other applications?
As a key strategic partner of Microsoft, Aspect provides seamless, UC integration with enterprise-standard Microsoft applications, such as Sharepoint and Exchange, that most other providers can’t match.
Does it offer a complete, unified solution?
Some providers offer only CCI or WFO components, requiring additional contracts with third-party vendors to deliver everything your contact center needs. This approach can add cost, maintenance, and IT complexity. Aspect applications are fully unified through a single platform for managing all contact center and workforce operations.
This last point is particularly key, as leading industry analysts at Gartner noted in their report “Business Benefits Drive the Alignment Between Contact Center Infrastructure and Workforce Optimization Software,” by Jim Davies and Drew Kraus (14 July 2011.)
According to Gartner:
[O]rganizations can reduce their operational costs and increase business value by turning to their contact center infrastructure vendors for viable workforce optimization software.
We invite you to review a copy of the full report through the month of December at no cost. To download your copy, simply complete a one-time registration for immediate access.
Knowledge, experience, and expertise are not just industry buzzwords. These are factors that make a difference in the real world of customer contact and customer experience. You can help ensure the success of your contact center by selecting a vendor with the proven expertise to deliver a top-tier, next-generation solution.
NGCC road show: Coming soon to a city near you
by Chris O'Brien on July 27th, 2011
With today’s online and teleconferencing technology, I don’t know why business travel spending continues to increase. I suspect there are some people who really do love security lines, recycled air, antiseptic spray, public toilets, and smoking sections. Maybe you are one of them! And if that’s true, maybe we can still be friends.
Some of my Aspect colleagues―several of whom are no longer on speaking terms with me because of what they call my “traveltude” ―are currently making their way across North America on a business trip of epic proportions. You may have heard of it. It’s the Next Generation of Customer Contact series. By the time all counts are in, our travelers will have personally delivered an overview of Aspect’s solutions (along with a complimentary breakfast) to directors and decision makers in 17 cities.
So why is Aspect, a company at the vanguard of addressing the needs of the next-generation consumer, going throwback? This hand-delivered approach is actually very Consumer 2.0 – anticipating what you, the consumer, need and expect, and bringing it directly to you with minimal effort on your part.
It’s not easy for any organization to maintain its footing in today’s ever-shifting consumer landscape. The contact center seems to be the key to that stability. By connecting with customers through the right channels at the right times, companies have the potential to develop long-term, loyalty-based relationships with their customers.
Of course, achieving a Consumer 2.0-enabled contact center is not without its own set of challenges, and this is where Aspect can help.
“Did you know,” I said recently, to one of my traveling coworkers who was preparing her PowerPoint presentations, “that you refer to Aspect as the go-to source for information on integrating these new developments into the contact center?”
“That’s right,” she said.
“Go-to source! How very 1.0! You’re actually bringing this information across state lines! Maybe we should call ourselves the come-to-me source! Ha ha!”
I have this bad habit of laughing out loud at my own jokes, which is probably why I was told to stay here in the office and write blogs.
NOTE: Seats are still available for select dates and venues at the Next Generation of Customer Contact series. Reserve yours now. (You can have mine.)
A glimpse into the future of the contact center
by Aspect on July 15th, 2011
As I sat on an airplane this week traveling to team meetings, I spent some time thinking about what would the contact center look like two years from now. Imagine a time when….
- A company anticipated your needs with a product you had purchased before you even knew what those needs were. And then proactively told you about how to address it through either video, email, SMS, IM, etc.
- A company knew your presence―for instance, are you on your mobile phone, landline, on facebook―and then used that information to determine how to contact you.
- You had access to everything you needed to know about your purchased product/service, from any device, at any time. And you could access this information quickly and efficiently.
- You wouldn’t need to talk to an agent when obtaining service. In fact, it’s more efficient to not use an agent.
- An IVR was “natural” so you don’t need to talk in “segments” but rather can talk to an IVR like you would talk to an agent. And that IVR had intelligent access to content within the enterprise and gave you the right information to service your issue.
- Customer service was actually a pleasant experience.
Here’s the reality check: we don’t have to wait for a couple of years for these developments. They are happening right now. In fact, I believe Consumer 2.0 is not a next-generation consumer; they are the current consumer. This is what the Consumer 2.0 requires today. It’s what I expect when I purchase a product or service. It’s what my teenagers expect. And believe it or not, it’s what my parents expect when they purchase a product or service.
That presents companies with a daunting challenge. The moment I cannot troubleshoot issues with a product, my customer satisfaction declines. The moment I have an issue and the company I purchased it from did not anticipate the problem and tell me, my customer satisfaction declines.
Enterprises cannot wait to build their strategy around the next-generation consumer. They’re here today, and you need to have a strategy to support them in the short term. Otherwise, your competitors will take them away. The reality is, within the next two years, we’ll be talking Consumer 3.0 and their needs.
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.
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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.