Contact Center Efficiency Doubles Agent Sales Per Hour for Chinese Financial Services Company
by Tim Dreyer on March 1st, 2012
Ping An Insurance (Group) Company of China is an integrated financial services conglomerate with insurance, banking and investment businesses at its core. Their vision is to become an internationally leading integrated financial services group by leveraging its insurance, banking and investment businesses to achieve long-term, stable and healthy growth. 
To accomplish this, Ping An recognized that telesales would be the ideal channel to reach these potential customers, offering greater flexibility and efficiency versus relying heavily on branch offices and agents.
Because the company believes that their success depends heavily on the dynamic customer contacts in their telemarketing campaigns, Ping An determined that it needed an advanced solution that could help it improve outbound call campaign accuracy by effectively detecting answering machines, fax machines, or busy signals.
In addition to maximizing agent productivity, the company was also interested in advanced call blending capabilities so that sales agents would be able to manage inbound inquiries when there is an influx of customer service calls. They also wanted to reduce the costs and the complexity of integrating disparate point solutions.
Spoiler Alert: They selected a solution from Aspect.
Through the company’s five contact centers and 10,000 agents managing inbound customer service calls and outbound sales and telemarketing calls, Ping An is seeing a significant improvement in telesales productivity. With answering machine detection (AMD) accuracy of up to 95 percent, the Aspect® Unified IP® solution allows agents to reach customers and prospects more effectively. As a result, agents are more adequately prepared to sell because they know when a call is connected that they will be talking to a person and not a machine.
The agents’ sales pitches particularly are more productive with the assistance of predictive dialing capabilities. By implementing this feature, Ping An’s agents increased their everyday customer contacts by more than 100 percent. Both the customer contact volume and overall revenue have had dramatic growth.
Agent productivity is top-of-mind for companies looking to realize a return on their contact center investment. Ping An has experienced:
- Improved outbound call accuracy by almost 40 percent
- Enhanced agent productivity
- Increased sales per hour by up to 100 percent for individual agents
- Minimize the management effort by centralizing all systems
The deployment of Aspect Unified provides Ping An with the great potential to deliver on the next generation of customer contact with Aspect.
Golfbreaks.com Selects a Joint Solution from the New Aspect-Dell Relationship
by Tim Dreyer on February 23rd, 2012
We are excited today to announce a new strategic relationship with Dell Services aimed at enabling customers worldwide to acquire end-to-end next-generation unified communications solutions incorporating hardware, software, services and support from a single vendor. Centered on Microsoft® collaborative technologies, the relationship also gives customers the flexibility and scalability to tailor their private branch exchange (PBX) and contact center solution to best fit their needs. 
Many large organizations are viewing contact centers as a primary customer engagement point and increasingly as a revenue generation engine. However outdated telephony infrastructures or poorly connected contact centers can result in missed or dropped calls and negatively impact customer service. This can result in missed sales opportunities and potential damage to a company’s brand.
Golfbreaks.com, Europe’s leading golf tour operator, is one of the first joint customers of the Aspect-Dell relationship. Golfbreaks.com experienced the downside of an aging telephony platform that could no longer keep up with the service demands of their customers so the company sought out a contact center solution built upon an open, capable and affordable software platform. They are implementing a Microsoft-based unified communications solution including a full multimedia contact center infrastructure to replace its older PBX platform.
Due to increasing volume, which let’s face it, is a great problem to have, Golfbreaks.com required a way to meet the increased customer demand without increasing headcount and to basically do more with less. The lack of channel integration was putting a strain on their agents and systems, increasing administration time. With new support for SMS and email, as well as tight integration with their CRM system, Golfbreaks.com’s customer should find booking with them easier and quicker than ever.
So the point of the post, aside from announcing the adorable offspring of our new relationship, is this: your platform might be good enough for you, but is it good enough for your customers?
Measurable Results from a Customer-Centric Strategy
by Chris O'Brien on February 8th, 2012
The decision to refocus or restructure an organization in favor of a more customer-centric model is a bold move, but it’s one that is becoming more common as customers consistently demonstrate how much of the power they now wield in today’s social marketplace.
This was the goal of India’s largest paint company, Asian Paints. With customers
in more than 65 countries and a 25,000+ dealer network, most of Asian Paints’ direct interactions took place with its dealers. Therefore, the company not only needed to respond to evolving consumer demands and expectations for better service, responsiveness, consistency and knowledgeable consultancy, it needed to provide exceptional, convenient phone service to its dealers.
The only way to realistically achieve these goals was to focus on becoming a truly customer-centric organization. To do that, Asian Paints needed a next-generation customer contact platform capable of managing both customer and dealer communications, and optimizing agent productivity and responsiveness.
When selecting a solution provider, Asian Paints did its research. Mr. Deepak Bhosale, Chief Manager, Systems, explained the company’s decision:
While we were researching different vendors and getting references, the best remarks and kudos were given from customers using Aspect to organize its customer interactions. Since we wanted a cost-effective way to have several solutions in our contact center, Aspect was the right choice for us. We needed a little bit of everything, improved quality interactions, dealer interaction and high operational efficiency.
Working with Aspect to implement a next-generation customer response and dealer management system, Asian Paints made it easy and convenient for both dealers and customers to do business with the company – from placing quick and convenient orders, to consulting with an expert on paint color choices.
As a result, Asian Paints achieved measurable successes:
- 80% increase in dealer satisfaction, as well as improved customer satisfaction
- 40% drop in average call handle time, due to increased visibility into caller’s information and history
- Improved contact center agent productivity
- Reduced wait time resulting from access issues
- Increased service availability window, leading to an effective 40% reduction in workforce
By improving customer interactions and organizational productivity, Asian Paints hopes to reinstate customer confidence and build customer loyalty, particularly among customers who had moved to competing brands during periods of poor customer service.
Read the full Asian Paints case study.
Companies can no longer afford to think customer service doesn’t matter. In many markets, the customer experience is the competitive differentiator.
Have you found this to be the case in your industry? Tell us about it in the comments.
“Inbound, Outbound, Successbound”
by Chris O'Brien on January 23rd, 2012
In a tug of war between resources and customer service, nobody wins. Organizations experiencing this uneasy push-pull may be struggling through periods of rapid growth, budget constraints, rapid turnover, or a change in roles brought on by a new strategic direction. Whatever your challenges, today’s consumers are unrelenting in their expectations of a consistently superior customer experience.
Businesses that continually put the customer first are those that manage to successfully
command consumer attention in the crowded marketplace, and are rewarded with long-term customer loyalty.
One such organization is Germany-based contact center outsourcer, 020-EPOS. Urged by its high-profile clients to proactively engage with customers in a more targeted and personalized manner, 020-EPOS needed a solution that would help it maximize outbound and lifecycle management strategies, while taking advantage of optimal choice and flexibility.
020-EPOS conducted an exhaustive review of all potential solution providers before selecting Aspect to develop its integrated call center solution.
One of 020-EPOS’ key requirements was the ability to reliably support, integrate and route multichannel contacts. At the same time, the solution needed to offer comprehensive, state-of-the-art dialing, callback and call blending capabilities, in order to ensure a smooth transition between inbound and outbound operations.
Another key consideration was 020-EPOS’ desire to route callbacks and returned emails to the same account teams that had initiated those contacts. As Georg Jansen, Managing Director at 020-EPOS explained:
“Outbound campaigns generate inbound contacts and inbound calls gather information for outbound. In order to be successful, both have to be managed professionally, that is why we act upon the maxim Inbound, Outbound, Successbound.”
020-EPOS was able to articulate its forward-thinking vision for customer experience through Aspect’s next-generation customer contact solution. This led to achievement of a number of specific benefits:
- Improved agent utilization due to soft blending capabilities and Workforce Optimization, which enables managers to adjust outbound/proactive activities when inbound call volume is high.
- Higher closing rates, resulting from inbound calls being routed back to the same teams that initiated the contact.
- Higher productivity through the use of skill-based teams rather than channel teams.
- Comprehensive, measurable quality assurance by applying defined quality criteria to all sequences of the customer dialogue.
Read the full 020-EPOS case study.
Aspect helps great organizations do what they do well, even better. What are the obstacles to your achievements right now? Are you in the middle of a tug of war between resources and customer experience? Tell us about it in the comments below.
Recommended Reading: Be Our Guest (The Disney Customer Experience)
by Chris O'Brien on December 28th, 2011
Interestingly, when you overlap three black circles in just the right way, a large percentage of the global population will associate this symbol with a mouse-eared icon by the name of Mickey. The Disney brand is among the best at connecting with its target market on a significant, emotional level. And that market is not just children. Adults also answer Disney’s seeming siren-song of dreamy Princess magic and animation-themed escapism, routinely setting their sights on Disney’s highly rated hotels and parks as vacation destinations.
Those in the customer service industry would argue that Disney’s long-term success and enthusiastic customer base – who interact online in every way from fan blogs, to podcasts, to planning sites – is no mere accident of product popularity. Based on Walt Disney’s firmly held tenets of customer experience, the company has effectively institutionalized processes for creating “magical” experiences.
This, in fact, is the case Ted Kinni of Disney Institute presents in his new
book “Be Our Guest: Perfecting the Art of Customer Service.”
Relatively simple keys to success are often overlooked by businesses in their rush to market. Develop the best product you can. Train your staff well to deliver exceptional service. Learn from your experiences, and celebrate your successes. This is by no means a magic formula, but it does set up a framework that begins to feel a little bit like magic when executed effectively.
Much has been written about Disney and customer experience with an eye toward capturing and replicating the secret sauce that Disney liberally applies in its management and business best practices. “Be Our Guest” provides a valuable, insider’s look at the business processes Disney Institute teaches, which for me was reason enough to pick up this book.
As Disney has demonstrated, customer experience can be a key competitive differentiator in a marketplace that must continually lobby for consumers’ attention. Creating magical, memorable experiences at every point of service effectively edges Disney ahead of the competition in terms of customer loyalty.
We saw this principle succeed with one of our clients, Asian Paints. Asian Paints had identified substandard customer service as a potential factor behind lagging customer loyalty, with customer experience being a key differentiator among its competitors. In response to increasing demands for better service from both its customers and dealers, Asian Paints implemented a next-generation customer contact solution through Aspect that enabled the organization to focus on becoming truly customer-centric.
Asian Paints’ results speak for themselves, including a remarkable 80% increase in dealer/customer satisfaction. You can read more in the full case study.
If there is a secret sauce in the Disney way, it lies in the magic that happens when organizations are inspired to elevate the customer experience. As the man behind the mouse said, “Do what you do so well that they will want to see it again and bring their friends.”
Using the contact center to strengthen your market position
by Mike Sheridan on November 15th, 2011
Many people think of good customer service as a fairly simple equation: the consumer has a question or issue, and the contact center agent is there to provide information or resolve the problem. Over the past decade, customer interactions have grown increasingly complex and now involve multiple channels, inbound and outbound calling, and more informed, engaged customers.
Even when interactions occur directly between the agent and customer, companies still face the constant, formidable task of pleasing customers. Now add in an extra layer between the agent and the customer, such as a dispersed network of retailers. That means you would have to provide information to not just customers but also the people that serve them on the front line. Asian Paints, based in India, faced this daunting challenge.
The challenge: Meeting heightened consumer expectations
Asian Paints serves customers in 62 countries through a network of 25,000 dealers. Many dealers call the company on a daily basis, so ensuring that these interactions are efficient is critical. In addition, Asian Paints has 80 sales offices and a total sales force of 500 people that work directly with retailers. For product launches and other consumer efforts, it must coordinate a number of entities to be successful.
The company’s leaders identified an opportunity to strengthen their market position by providing better customer service. Research had revealed that customers were becoming more engaged in the purchasing process and expected dealers to offer expertise on projects.
It was clear that the company’s contact center operations weren’t up to the task, so executives outlined a few strategic objectives:
- Make it easier for dealers to get answers and product information from the company
- Give agents better visibility into dealer history and interactions
- Integrate the entire supply chain—from sales and customer loyalty to consulting—into the customer contact channel
A phased approach to next-generation customer contact
Asian Paints understood that there were no quick fixes for its contact center. Instead, executives developed a long-term, phased strategy to begin to integrate enhanced functionality into the call center. They understood that any solution must have the following attributes:
- Be flexible and scalable to accommodate evolving needs
- Give agents the tools to serve customers more effectively
- Integrate with existing platforms
Aspect partnered with Asian Paints to understand their unique needs and help them devise a solution that would deliver the functionality they needed to serve customers more effectively.
Delivering an immediate impact and laying a foundation for long-term growth
Asian Paints selected Aspect Unified IP and conducted a pilot to integrate it into 50 contact center seats in four locations. Next, it expanded its operations to accommodate 5,500 dealers. The implementation proceeded smoothly, and the effort yielded impressive results:
- Waiting times were substantially shorter
- The window for service availability improved significantly
- Average handle times fell by nearly 40 percent
- Dealer satisfaction increased by 80 percent
More important, the company is poised to move on to the next phase of the rollout with the necessary pieces already in place.
For more on the experience of Asian Paints, click here.
Bringing the contact center in-house to increase performance
by Mike Sheridan on October 31st, 2011
It often makes sense for companies, especially when they’re young, to outsource certain functions. When businesses experience rapid or sustained growth, they can reach a tipping point when the burden of managing the external vendor outweighs the benefits. This dynamic is particularly true of the contact center.
The decision to create an internal contact center brings with it the challenge of selecting the right platform and tools to enable service agents. In effect, the company is going from 0 to 60 in a short time frame, having to install technology in the contact center, put management in place, and hire and train staff. In these instances, any potential solution must be flexible and extensible to accommodate continued growth and changing conditions.
Establishing an in-house contact center
HomeShop18, India’s largest e-commerce company, faced this challenge. The company operates a 24-hour shopping channel with 11.5 million weekly viewers as well as a website that has increased traffic by 300 percent annually, to 2.4 million unique visitors per month.
HomeShop18 had outsourced management of the contact center, both inbound traffic and outbound calls, to an external vendor. Its leaders had recognized that customer experience was increasingly important to the business—repeat customers make up 40 percent of its base. To exert more control over contact center, HomeShop18 decided to move the contact center operation in-house.
Supporting operations with the required functionality
Empowering contact center employees with the right capabilities was a critical piece of the puzzle. Specifically, the solution needed to be able to accommodate requests from multiple streams, including e-mail and text messaging. To optimize the workforce, managers had to have the ability to monitor actions, route calls to the most qualified agents, and provide real-time coaching.
After reviewing available products, HomeShop 18’s leaders selected Aspect’s Blended InteractionTM because of its track record of delivering value at other businesses. Blended Interaction can integrate multiple point products for managing different contact channels, and its universal queue feature organizes incoming contacts across all communication channels into a single queue. It can then route them to the most appropriate agent based on wait times, incoming traffic volumes, and service levels.
Boosting performance significantly
When HomeShop18 compared its in-house call center’s performance with that of the external vendor, the results were striking: agent efficiency jumped 25 percentage points; the call-handling rate increased to 14, from 9; and sales conversions nearly doubled, to nearly 40 percent. Response times to other communications channels were even more striking: Blended Interaction helped reduce call response time for SMS messages from 12 hours to just 20 minutes
Over the past year, HomeShop18 has continued to expand its contact center. Today, more than 750 agents handle a total of 40,000 calls each day from a state-of-the-art facility, and Blended Interaction has been able to evolve and adapt with HomeShop18’s operations to handle this increased volume.
Learn more about HomeShop18’s journey here, and be sure to let me know if you have specific questions.
How UC in the contact center delivers real benefits
by Mike Sheridan on October 17th, 2011
Recently, when I was given a Toyota Prius by my rental car company, it got me thinking. At its introduction, prospects for mass adoption of the Prius seemed to be slim. Yet it has sold more than 1 million cars in the United States since its introduction and been the leader in transforming the auto industryfrom gas guzzlers to hybrid and electric vehicles.
Part of the challenge of any new technology is the perceived gap between what it promises and what it can actually deliver. That’s why there’s no substitute for the real-world results: the proof is in the value a product can actually deliver.
On this blog, I and my colleagues have talked extensively about the benefits of the next-generation contact center built on a unified communications and collaboration platform.
1) The ability to tap the collective intelligence of the organization using tools such as rich presence and ask an expert
2) The transparency and flexibility to optimize the contact center workforce and respond quickly to spikes in volume.
3) The analytics capabilities to monitor and improve contact center performance.
While we’re supremely confident in the capabilities of our products, I understand that people need concrete facts about the impact such technology can have on their organization.
That’s why I’m happy to share the story of HarborOne, one of the top credit unions in the country. Several years ago, its leaders began planning their organization’s transition to unified communications. At the same time, they identified the functionality their contact center needed to boost its performance and improve customer service.
HarborOne chose Aspect’s Seamless Customer Service powered by Aspect® Unified IP® for its contact center, and the results have been impressive:
Enhanced ability to monitor interactions. The contact center can now track each interaction from start to finish, and the system’s in-depth reporting capabilities help translate this data into business intelligence.
Significant cost savings. The organization has saved more than $100k annually on travel by moving to video and Web conferencing enabled by unified communications
Better service levels. The new platform has helped HarborOne’s contact center reduce missed calls by 2 to 3 percent
Improved disaster recovery. HarborOne’s new platform provides complete redundancy of contact center operations, increasing business continuity.
The value that HarborOne achieved is no anomaly. As more and more businesses adopt a unified communications platform, they will be well positioned to integrate the contact center seamlessly into their operations. A decade from now, all organizations will have these capabilities. However, those that move now to enhance their contact center will see the impact not only in better customer interactions but also on the bottom line.
For more on HarborOne’s experience, click here.
Catalyst Rx: A prescription for back-office optimization
by Chris O'Brien on August 2nd, 2011
To more than 7 million clients across the United States and Puerto Rico, Catalyst Rx is a full-service benefits management company, helping members balance pharmacy costs with quality of care.
To Aspect, it is also a success story in workforce optimization. More specifically, it’s a story about optimizing the back office.
The metrics behind the data of this particular case study show impressive results, including a 35 percent increase in overall productivity, a sharp decline in order processing time (from nearly four days to just over two days), and a 50 percent jump in the number of authorizations that were processed by hour.
But this story is also about how workforce optimization transformed the back office and empowered employees to be more productive and provide better service. Take “Joan” (not her real name), one of the supervisors who works at Catalyst Rx. Based on the challenges Catalyst Rx was having, here’s what Joan’s typical workday was like before workforce optimization.
Joan and her colleagues supervised a back-office staff of 150 employees, including remote workers, who handled tasks that were escalated from the main contact centers. Because the main contact center had no way of knowing the availability of any of these employees, their first outreach for escalation usually came to Joan or one of the other supervisors.
Joan was constantly on the phone routing calls. During busy months, supervisors were getting as many as 14,000 calls through the agent hotline due to back office issues. At the end of some shifts, she left feeling exhausted and drained, having spent the entire day on the phone solving problems but never even touching any of the tasks on her own list.
To add to her frustration, the productivity of back-office staff was about half of what was expected. Her 150 employee team was only producing the work of about 75, and she had no way of tracking or auditing the work of individuals.
Catalyst Rx needed better visibility into the activity of the back office, and it needed to improve productivity and cut down on the number of calls to the agent hotline.
Aspect recommended integrating rich presence into Catalyst Rx’s Workforce Management reporting to give supervisors like Joan an at-a-glance view of back office staff’s availability. The system could detect the activity of remote workers in real time, from mouse movements and keystrokes to phone calls, and feed this information into Joan’s workforce productivity report through Aspect Workforce Management.
Agents in the main contact centers could easily see whether a back-office employee was available, so they had no need to involve a supervisor. In addition, some questions could be answered quickly via instant message in a fraction of the time it would have taken to pick up the phone.
Communication between the front office agents and the back office employees increased. Productivity in the back office increased. And Joan began to see a steady decrease in the number of calls to the agent hotline as the staff relied on each other for answers more and more.
I love the example of workforce optimization that Catalyst Rx offers, because I know there had to be employees like Joan with their own frustrations at every level in the company. Just by working with Aspect to introduce an element of visibility into each other’s processes, they were able to eliminate so much of that frustration.
Winning over the entire organization in an IT implementation
by Jamie Ryan on April 25th, 2011
Obtaining executive support and buy-in for IT initiatives is crucial. But that’s just one piece of the puzzle. A completely different challenge is to ensure that the rest of the organization understands the benefits of any new technology so that they fully embrace it.
As soon as employees don’t buy in to the new system, you’re sunk. People will find every reason the new solution can’t work instead of helping find ways to make it work. When that happens, the time and resources you’ve devoted to the new system have been wasted, and you are spending time reselling the idea vs. celebrating a successful deployment.
For Aspect’s OCS implementation, we had a couple other obstacles. Our workforce is distributed in 23 offices around the globe. Each location had become accustomed to and comfortable with its own platforms and systems. Getting employees to embrace a new technology is always tricky; when you throw in different languages, cultural norms, time zones, and geographies, the potential for resistance increases significantly. So we had our work cut out for us.
Companies getting ready to embark on a similar path should be sure to address three areas:
Understand your constituencies. CIOs need to be aware that each part of the company cares passionately about having specific types of functionality. While the executive team is much more focused on the financial and strategic implications of an IT effort, the rest of the organization will need to find ways to be productive with the solution. So CIOs ignore the administrative assistants, department managers, and functional employees at their own peril. Lots of companies have botched implementations by ignoring key parts of the organization.
Clearly communicate the value. Most people are averse to change unless there’s a well-defined benefit. For an IT implementation, CIOs must be timely and transparent so that employees understand what you’re doing, why you’re doing it, and how it affects them (the “what’s in it for me?” factor). With an enterprise-wide implementation such as OCS, you can imagine what the reaction would have been if the only thing that people understood was “we are losing our phones” instead of “our phones are being replaced by a fully integrated UC solution.” We were very diligent about sharing timelines and rationale to ensure that people were fully aware of all changes and how they would be affected.
Get people involved. Prior to rolling out OCS to the entire organization, we conducted pilots—not just to test the technology, but also to create champions for the new system. In my experience, getting people from various groups involved early in the process is critical. By including representatives from multiple functional groups, we were able to convert doubters into our biggest boosters. There’s no more effective way to drive adoption than for employees to hear from their coworkers about a cool new technology and how it’s improving their productivity.
I should note that the ease of adoption for OCS and later Lync greatly facilitated all of these efforts. Employees were able to get up to speed quickly, the interface was intuitive, and the benefits were immediately tangible. Our migration from OCS to Lync 2010 took just under five weeks. During that time, we upgraded 100 percent of our employees, across 23 sites, in 13 countries. A deployment of that size and scope only happens when people across the enterprise believe it’s a winning proposition.
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.