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.
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?
It’s Time for Your Company to Address Data Governance
by David Harper on January 11th, 2012
So I do most of my writing while I travel – specifically, while I am in flight. One topic that I have yet to talk about is data governance, specifically as it relates to business intelligence. Data governance is still somewhat of a new topic. It has existed for websites, and in Microsoft terms, for SharePoint for years now―but why not for data?
In my years of consulting, data ownership is somewhat a game of musical chairs―IT passes it to the business to own, the business passes it right back to IT to regulate, IT passes it back to the business to define, and the business passes it back to IT to standardize. Then the music stops and we see who is left holding the bag….
To be effective, data governance requires a coordinated approach among business and IT leaders. The IT goal should be to have a clear ownership chain and definition set for any piece of structured or unstructured data. The business goal should be to have ownership of the meaning and usage of this data.
With users demanding more self-service BI applications, the ownership of the source can sometimes become diluted. Thankfully, the technology is really picking up the pace to support this process.
The combination of SharePoint 2010 and SQL Server 2008 R2 make data governance a fairly streamlined process. Excel Services is a perfect example of how technology can help support data governance.
- The business defines the system of record and creates the definition of the data elements.
- IT creates the Office Data Connection (ODC) file and places it in a secured folder inside of SharePoint.
- Users point their Excel 2010/2007 client to the SharePoint document library to connect to the ODC.
- Users create pivots and charts and upload into SharePoint.
- Users connect to SharePoint to see the end result.
What is so simple and straightforward here is how data are being managed and governed. No more rogue reports that you have to go to Bill in Accounting and pay him in Skittles to unlock the power of data! Strong data governance protects everyone from everyone.
So my questions to you: does your organization have a data governance team? If so, who sits on it and how does it operate? If not – what’s stopping you?!
Achieving True Performance Management in the Contact Center
by Doug Whitaker on January 6th, 2012
In recent posts, I have discussed the Workforce Optimization process in the contact center—specifically, how companies can create a cycle of continuous improvement in business processes—and the value it can generate for the entire organization. An essential component of this process is performance management software because it delivers the “action” for continuous improvement. This process is both guided (by suggesting best practices and corrective action) and automated (with applications triggering a process).
Before we discuss how companies should pursue performance management in the contact center, I’d like to clear up a common misperception. Too often, the term “performance management” is associated with either reports or dashboards generated by individual applications. In reality, these tools are just forms of performance reporting, not performance management. Reporting may provide a snapshot of progress against a goal, but users must take action based on this information to make any real progress. Unfortunately, once individual action is introduced, the overall process suffers because such efforts can vary widely from person to person and group to group.
Foundational elements of performance management
A comprehensive performance management solution helps remove this variability from the process in several ways.
1) Information from multiple sources is unified to create “one version of the truth,” removing the potential for different interpretations of the data.
2) Companies can measure performance, aggregate it across siloed groups, and then correlate with other metrics.
3) Contact centers can understand the impact that transactional measurements (such as handle time) has on customer-specific metrics (such as sales and satisfaction).
Communication and transparency are key
To support performance management efforts, companies must be able to share data with various stakeholders. This can be done in an automated fashion with alerts, forms, and e-mails rather than relying on the individual to look at the information and recognize the problem.
However, key performance indicators will vary based upon the stakeholder: an executive will want to see data on the contact center’s progress against corporate goals―such as profitability, cost structure, or forecast accuracy. Meanwhile, a lower-level supervisor will be more interested in team performance, handle times and individual adherence. Therefore, any solution must align to the needs of the individual role.
Translating data into action
The next step is to derive future improvement from the information. To achieve this goal, performance management must embrace business processes that are connected to results. This can be automated or guided.
For example, if a contact center agent has low customer satisfaction scores, an automated process can be launched that provides training to the employee on customer empathy. A guided approach may initiate a coaching session with a supervisor in which the supervisor is provided suggestions for remediation. The goal is to establish a standardized process to coach employees toward improvement, thus generating improved organizational effectiveness.
While successful performance management requires a coordinated effort at all levels of the organization, the results can be tremendous. Performance management helps companies identify best practices, which can result in a wide range of organizational benefits: increased productivity, higher revenues, and reduced costs.
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.
Using Gartner’s findings to give every interaction an edge
by Jane Hendricks on November 11th, 2011
Gartner recently released two reports, Magic Quadrant for Contact Center Infrastructure (worldwide) and Business Benefits Drive the Alignment Between Contact Center Infrastructure and Workforce Optimization. For organizations looking to their customer contact center to master customer engagement, this research contains good insight into the technology landscape.
Gartner highlights a number of benefits, including “incremental workflow benefits” that organizations can capture by taking a single-vendor approach to their Contact Center Infrastructure (CCI) and Workforce Optimization (WFO). The second report offers the following example:
“Several CCI vendors are adding unique workflow to their CCI-WFO solutions to enhance the value proposition. For example, if an agent gets a poor score linked to product knowledge from his or her supervisor following the playback and assessment of a call recording, then the automatic call distribution system will start rerouting calls accordingly.”
This incremental workflow benefit, with a bit of analytics and a dose of creativity thrown in, can help an organization predispose every interaction to be better than it would have been with a non-integrated solution. As the following examples illustrate, the impact can be striking.
1. A customer needs help with a product. She engages through some inbound channel (voice, IM, chat…doesn’t matter). A routing engine that is divorced from WFO looks at the problem, has some basic idea of agent skill based on information uploaded to the system a week ago, and makes a determination on who gets to serve that customer.
OR
2. A customer needs help with a product. She engages through that same channel used in the example above. But now our routing engine sees the aggregated customer score from recent satisfaction surveys on similar interactions performed by that agent vs. the same score of other agents, compares the empathy need of this customer with the empathy score of the agent, looks at the churn propensity of the customer, and evaluates it against the high-touch index of the agent. In a split second, the routing engine determines the optimal agent (the agent most likely to get to a positive outcome) for this interaction. At the same time, this agent sees within his portal that Bob (who is in product management, not in the contact center) is a product expert and is available to help the agent resolve the customer’s issues. Not only is the optimal match between customer and agent made, but the agent has the right enterprise backup.
In the first example, success rests in the hands of a single agent assigned solely on availability, geography, language, and assignment. If that agent is intelligent, the interaction will go well.
The chance of the second interaction delighting the customer is significantly higher, since it reflects a team approach. It’s not just the agent, it’s the enterprise as a whole considering the total need of the consumer and lining up the right resources―analytically driven workflows, interaction context, and enterprise expertise―to ensure success.
A blog by Dr. Sian Beilock in Psychology Today examines what drives a group’s ability to perform. Much of the article doesn’t easily translate to customer engagement strategies, but there are some interesting (and relevant) findings. Dr. Beilock found that individuals working together were predisposed to success if they had “c”―“it wasn’t the average or maximum intelligence of individual group members that predicted performance, but a collective measure of intelligence or ‘c’ of the group itself.”
For customer engagement strategy, cooperation between the two sides of the technology divide―interaction management through CCI and workforce quality and performance through WFO―can open novel possibilities to innovate, differentiate, and succeed.
As you review these reports, it’s important to keep these kinds of possibilities in mind. Because Aspect is the only CCI leader that builds its own feature-rich workforce optimization (WFO) technology. When we develop and deploy our software, these are exactly the kind of possibilities that we translate into reality.
Features that every contact center should have in place to aid compliance
by Aspect on November 9th, 2011
In my last blog, I noted that the regulatory landscape for contact centers is currently very dynamic. Legislation is pending to address the widespread adoption of technology among consumers, and courts are interpreting existing laws to apply requirements to cell phones and the like. In fact, the U.S. House of Representatives is currently evaluating the new Mobile Informational Call Act.
While companies wait for some of these issues to be settled, they still face the challenge of complying with existing laws—a difficult task. Depending on an enterprise’s interpretation of regulation, many contact centers are prohibited from using predictive dialers to call people on cell phones. In addition, many times, it’s not possible to tell whether a phone number is for a landline or cell phone. Both of these issues have a significant impact on the productivity of a collections contact center.
For instance, I was talking with a representative from a major U.S. financial institution, and she estimates that her company is losing $14 million a year as a result of compliance efforts. In some cases, agents are forced to use a spreadsheet to call customers manually, which can slow things down dramatically.
The wide-ranging impact of compliance
The cost of compliance can extend far beyond additional resources in the contact center:
- Lost revenue and lower profits—Since the companies can’t dial as many customers and must use more agents to reach them, the contact center isn’t able to collect as much money from delinquent accounts. This impacts the bottom line of the enterprise.
- Lower tax revenue for the government—Every dollar that can’t be collected means another dollar that can’t be taxed.
- Fewer jobs internally—$14 million could hire a lot of full-time employees, so the cost can be felt in fewer jobs and fewer staff to pursue opportunities.
The current regulatory environment isn’t loosening up or going away, so companies can’t afford to wait it out.
Critical functionality to lessen the compliance burden
Companies must adopt the functionality they need to improve contact center productivity in the short term while ensuring that any solution is flexible and extensible enough to adapt to continuing regulatory changes. Here are the tools every contact center should have in its arsenal to address these issues:
- List management. It’s critical for contact centers to be able to target the right people via the right mechanism (for example, SMS or phone call) at the right time. If a contact center can no longer dial at very high rates, managers must be able to evaluate calls lists based on business rules and determine exactly who should be dialed and at what point in time.
- Verification agents. This capability enables agents to be divided into two groups: agents that are utilized for pacing and verification agents. The pacing group identifies the party answering the phone; once the correct party is identified, the agent transfers the call to a verification agent who completes the call. If the wrong party answers, the agent terminates the call. This allows a contact center to use their less-skilled agents to handle the first part of the call and then hand off to a more highly skilled agent.
- Pacing. A contact center must be able to dial the right number of calls to maintain agent productivity and reduce abandoned calls—all while complying with regulations. Having a solution with robust pacing option is key to enable this balance.
- Answering machine detection. Your most expensive asset is your agents, so you don’t want them talking to answering machines. Having a solution with a world-class algorithm for detecting answering machines is key to ensure agents are only talking to “real people.”
- Early stage collections. This functionality helps a company collect debt early in the cycle. For instance, if a customer is just a week late, it’s more effective to send an email or SMS message instead of making a phone call. This approach not only brings in more revenue earlier in the cycle but also doesn’t require an agent to contact the debtor.
Aligning technology with business strategy
Above all, many businesses should modify their strategies to pave the way for compliance. From the top down, organizations must be aware of the regulations and work to create a culture that supports compliance. This effort often starts with agent training. Businesses must educate agents on how the regulations affect them and outline clear and concise guidelines for behavior.
Once companies have tweaked their business strategies to aid in complying with regulations, they must bring their technology strategy into alignment. Many companies mistakenly believe that technology is a silver bullet to ensure compliance with the regulations. However, one of the most important lessons of recent years is that technology is only successful when it supports a clear, coherent business strategy.
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.