Marketing and IT converge in the contact center
by Nancy Dobrozdravic on August 4th, 2011
.jpg "nancy")
In a recent post, Forrester’s Luca Paderni noted that many organizations are starting to recognize the need for marketing and IT to work more closely together. This issue is no doubt part of a larger trend among companies: the use of data and analytics to personalize every customer interaction and the rise of social communications have moved IT from a support function to a key component in business strategy.
Marketing faces some different challenges, however: an expanding number of channels to interact with customers, new devices, and rising customer expectations regarding service levels. The company-customer relationship has changed from an infrequent, one-way conversation to a continuing dialogue; surveys to gauge customer satisfaction have been augmented by an explosion of online feedback, social media reviews and forums, and contact center data.
As I mentioned in a previous post, companies have collected this information for some time but with varying success in translating it into more effective customer strategies. Part of the challenge is that multiple departments—marketing, communications, sales, customer service—interact with the consumer. They then use a variety of metrics to gauge the effectiveness of their programs and the organization’s overall performance.
So now, as Paderni notes, “Data ownership is not just an operational issue but is being elevated to senior management.” Successful companies understand that the insights these departments collect are vital to making informed strategic decisions and identifying new opportunities. To encourage collaboration, executives should seek to tear down traditional barriers to interaction and reorganize the company around business goals rather than functions and departments.
The contact center, especially with the benefit of a unified communications platform, is well placed to serve as a primary information engine and help drive the evolution of the organization. As a key customer-facing function, the contact center already has a range of interactions with consumers and collects data and feedback―and, in turn, is the focal point for employing that data to enhance customer relationships and move closer to true “1 to 1″ marketing. And since the contact center integrates capabilities to communicate through social media channels and monitor online conversations, the contact center is uniquely positioned to collaborate with marketing and communications to develop new efforts that reach and engage consumers.
As important, the contact center can act as the catalyst to engage the enterprise and draw on its collective knowledge and business intelligence to serve the customer. Moreover, tools such as rich presence enable service agents to tap expertise within the organization and forge stronger company-customer relationships. Indeed, using the industrial strength routing and workflow capabilities, customers can automatically be matched up with the agent or even non–contact center employee that can best serve them based upon known customer information
I’m not pretending that this kind of evolution happens easily or quickly. It will take a sustained and concerted effort by executives to get marketing and IT to work more effectively together, as well as to implement an organizational structure more focused on business goals than functions. But companies would do well to draw on the successes of the contact center—both its processes and its ability to extend throughout the enterprise and to customers—to help drive these efforts.
Corsidian acquisition closes with a strong team in place and emphasis on strategic growth in Latin America
by Mike Sheridan on July 25th, 2011
I first started with Aspect Software in 2004, when what was then Concerto acquired Rockwell FirstPoint Contact. Since then, I have been the beneficiary of being exposed to many new products and great new people as Aspect Software acquired even more companies. Even though the exact path was not set in stone, all of this was part of a plan to systematically assemble the knowledge and expertise to bring the most comprehensive suite of contact center products and services to market.
And now one more. Our acquisition of Corsidian, which was announced on April 4 of this year and closed on Friday, July 22, is the latest installment. Any company pursuing growth through M&A can attest that integrating new businesses while never wavering on company execution is a difficult proposition. However, Aspect’s success rate with acquisitions is a testament to our fourfold strategy for growth:
1) Bring a unified contact center proposition to the market. Our goal is to continue to do better than the market growth rates in segments we already operate in—such as workforce optimization and inbound call center—while augmenting these offerings with new products and capabilities.
2) Expand into new product markets. With Aspect Contact, for instance, we’ve developed a robust offering for contact centers with fewer than 100 seats, which represent 50 percent of the market.
3) Develop Microsoft UC&C services and products. Aspect will drive the coming convergence of the enterprise and contact center with offerings that build on Microsoft’s strong UC foundation and integrate key customer service features. Our acquisition of Quilogy in 2010 certainly exemplifies our commitment here.
4) Establish a strong presence in geographic growth areas. With 23 offices across 13 countries, Aspect has built a strong global customer base.
The acquisition of Corsidian fits perfectly into this strategy. Latin America is an important emerging market for Aspect: overall economic growth in Latin America is projected to remain strong, and the market research firm Ovum forecasts that the region’s contact center market will grow at a rate of 9 to 10 percent from 2010 to 2015. These are growth rates that mature markets can only dream about.
What is especially attractive about this acquisition is how our current Latin America partners can have even greater success with Aspect. We can now provide them with direct service and support to collectively address the needs of our Latin American customers. Two ingredients made Corsidian a natural choice to bring into the fold: the company has been a valued channel partner for ten years, and it has about 100 people focused on delivering Aspect solutions to customers.
Warren Buffett once remarked, “You can’t make a good deal with a bad person.” With Corsidian, we know we’re bringing the right team on board. Our regular meetings with Corsidian’s leadership have reinforced that they possess not only in-depth knowledge of the market and expertise on products, services, and customer relationships but also a common passion for growing the business by serving better serving our customers. By integrating their perspectives into our Latin America team, Aspect is poised to continue making substantial inroads in this market.
With the official close of the acquisition, we’ve hit the ground running as a unified team. I’m optimistic about the possibilities and will keep you posted on future developments.
Using social media to bring you all the good stuff
by Chris O'Brien on July 12th, 2011
As any reader of Aspect’s blogs knows, our experts devote a lot of time to talking about the value of a multichannel approach in the contact center. Social media has become a ubiquitous component of the business conversation, so companies that aren’t communicating through these channels run the risk of falling off the customer’s radar.
Being engaged is one thing; offering value can be a totally different proposition. Our philosophy has always been that using Twitter or Facebook purely as a means to promote upcoming events or showcase the latest piece of company content misses the larger opportunity to provide an overview of industry trends and topics. As fast as technology is evolving and the landscape of the customer contact is changing, no single entity controls the conversation.
For that reason, we use Facebook and Twitter as ways to aggregate the latest news, industry developments, and insight and share it with our fans and followers. While our main focus is driving the conversation around customer contact, we fully recognize that for many other companies it’s just one growing part of an increasingly complex business equation.
Since we try to have our finger on the pulse of all things customer contact, including research, interviews with industry leaders, and interesting statistics, we figure the least we can do is make sure you don’t miss key insight that could help your organization. We have a lot of compelling information to share on how companies communicate with and serve their customers, how operations can be improved to benefit the customer, and the effect of the changing IT and consumer environment on the company-customer relationship.
Our blog will remain the primary channel for Aspect’s leaders to share their stories from the front lines of customer contact. Be sure to check out Aspect’s Twitter and Facebook for the full range of perspectives from outside sources—along with some news about conferences, symposiums, and upcoming webinars and events.
As always, be sure to send us any questions and we’ll make sure our experts respond to you with their thoughts.
A new measure to justify investment in customer centricity: return on customer service (ROCS)
by Mike Sheridan on July 6th, 2011
To track performance and health, companies measure all kinds of things: ROI, ROIC, ROCE, and EBITDA, to name just a few. Noticeably absent is any calculation of the value of customer service to an organization.
Despite decades of claims by marketers and contact center companies that the contact center should be seen as a profit generator (not a cost center), companies have lacked an empirical tool to measure the impact of the contact center on the bottom line. This gap reflects the reality that many companies have improved their call center operations, but relatively few have gotten the entire organization to embrace a customer-centric mind-set.
Customer service champions that have built their brand around delivering an excellent customer experience serve as a general endorsement of emphasizing customer relationships. The problem for most companies is that the gap between best in class and their current position is so wide that this level of engagement seems completely unattainable.
It’s often not possible to isolate and replicate the individual elements that contribute to customer service—company culture, efficient processes, technology platforms, workforce management. That leaves contact centers focusing on metrics such as average call times that often undermine the company-customer relationship
Many executives have traditionally approached customer service as a necessary evil, not as a function that can support their overall strategic goals. Since achieving a competitive advantage in customer contact is an all-or-nothing, long-term endeavor, these efforts have been all too easy to push aside in favor of other initiatives.
However, contact centers have become more and more advanced with tools to measure performance and ensure alignment with the CEO’s high-level objectives. Companies now have the ability to quantify the impact of excellent customer service—call it return on customer service (ROCS).
I define ROCS as the combination of two metrics: percentage of return customers and the difference in revenue generated from return customers vs. first-time customers. I believe these are the two clearest indicators of the connection between customer service and the bottom line.
So the formula would look something like this:
% of return customers X incremental profits generated from return customers = ROCS
If you have a low percentage of return customers, your customer engagement may leave a lot to be desired. It’s no secret that it costs more to attract customers than to retain them, so the lower the percentage of return customers, the harder your sales and marketing departments have to work to maintain volume.
The second metric—incremental profit from return customers vs. first-time customers—is the payoff from nurturing customer relationships. If it costs less to keep customers and they consistently purchase more, then the higher profit per customer suggests a direct link between customer service and profitability.
A real-world example bears this out: the customer service champion Zappos has been tracking these numbers for years. Here’s how they perform:
On any day, 75 percent of customers are repeat customers
Average order size: first-time customers―$123. 86; return customers―$156.27.
That added revenue—nearly $33 per return customer—represents the fruits of Zappos’s commitment to customer service and gives the company an ROCS of 24.75.
Establishing a link between customer service and revenues is one thing; getting the entire organization to commit to a customer-centric approach can be far more difficult. That’s where the next-generation contact center comes in.
A multichannel contact center built on an enterprise-wide unified communications platform can tap the entire organization to serve the customer. The challenge of using the best resource in the company to address a customer’s sales, service, or even debt payment questions can benefit from technologies pioneered in the contact center.
Everyone in the company has a vested interest in better serving customers. According to a study by Leo J. Shapiro and Associates, more than 10 percent of customer issues require contact center agents to find someone outside of the contact center to assist them in resolving an inquiry. In addition, many conversations are also happening in online forums and social media. Smart companies are looking to bring these worlds together, using the measurement and structure found in contact centers to ensure that best practices are scaled to the greatest good of their customer base.
By taking this approach, the challenge is no longer how to make the contact center a profit generator; instead, it’s about drawing on the organization’s collective intelligence to serve the customer, strengthen relationships, and increase ROCS.
How to add the right social media channels to customer contact
by Jamie Ryan on June 17th, 2011
As a CIO, I deal on a daily basis with new and emerging technologies: assessing their capabilities, figuring out which ones fit with business strategy, and devising implementation strategies for those with the most value for our organization. So I can relate to the challenge many companies are facing regarding customer experience and which social media channels to integrate into customer contact.
There’s no one-size-fits-all answer, and most companies don’t have the resources to be all things to all people. Instead, they must choose the path that meets the majority of their customer needs.
One of the key factors in selecting social media channels to pursue is a company’s ability to support a large and engaged following. It’s the classic “be careful what you wish for”: if you actively promote Facebook to increase your number of fans, for instance, you’re sending the signal that it’s now a preferred channel for customer engagement, so you better have someone monitoring the traffic.
Given this added commitment, companies should make an objective assessment of their current approach to social media to help select the highest value channels.
- How would you rate your customer contact and level of service?
- How many channels are you currently operating in?
- How integrated are your internal functions?
The answers will help companies determine the maturity of their customer engagement as well as their ability to integrate new channels easily. Armed with this knowledge, companies then must determine which channels are most effective for customer contact. A few things to keep in mind:
Different channels move at a different pace. Think about the varying customer expectations for response times based on the contact channel: voice (real time), SMS text message (within 15 minutes), messages posted to Facebook (by day’s end). Contact centers need to establish realistic guidelines so that they can provide the same value and level of service regardless of channel.
Customer inquiries are fielded by a diverse workforce. In the typical organization, there’s not just one department that owns social media. Customer contact, marketing, sales, and communications can all be involved, so it’s important that everyone is operating with the same messaging and approach.
Gathering information is one thing, keeping track of engagement is another. In the old days, companies would use a CRM system to track customer contact. If 50 requests came in, a sales force member might resolve 40 and hand 10 off to contact center. Now requests are coming in through multiple channels and being sent to six different functional areas to be solved.
Choosing which social media channels to integrate can be moving target, and it’s not just about the technology. Companies should follow a three-step process to integrate social media into customer contact.
1) Expand gradually. Choose the one or two channels you feel most comfortable with and offer the greatest value to the organization, master them, and then integrate additional channels over time.
2) Take a coherent organization approach. Departments such as sales, marketing, and customer contact must begin to work more collaboratively and transparently.
3) Implement the right systems and processes. Companies need to develop a strategic approach to take action on the information these channels generate, which means developing the appropriate organizational tools.
New technologies are emerging every day, so the most successful companies will implement a social media strategy that is flexible enough to evolve and respond as the business landscape changes.
Let me know what approach your company has taken to social media and customer contact—what’s worked, what could be improved, and the response of your customers.
Which window to look through to see customer experience?
by David Herzog on June 8th, 2011
As readers of Aspect’s blogs have noticed, we spend a good bit of time discussing the needs of Consumer 2.0 and how companies can meet these increased expectations. (Check here, here, and here for wisdom from my colleagues.) Emphasizing a customer-facing approach is an important part of doing business in the current business climate. But it’s not the whole story.
Another crucial component, and one we haven’t talked about as much, is giving enterprises the right tools and capabilities to put these strategies into motion. From this vantage point, customer experience takes on a different meaning: it’s about engaging with customers to understand their specific needs and challenges and ensuring that their feedback is heard throughout the organization.
Within Aspect, I head Aspect’s Customer Experience organization, which includes some diverse functions such as Product Management, Programs Department, Global Reference Program, and Affinity (relationship management with our Enterprise accounts). The primary reason these departments roll up into Customer Experience is because of their impact on and visibility into the customer life cycle, which comprises every touch point within prospect, sales, implementation, transition, support, and referenceability.
Which brings us to my window theory. To deliver a continual improved customer experience, the view into the customer life cycle must come from three main areas.
- Product and solutions we develop
- Internal cross-functional department work flow and cooperation
- Ongoing open communication from our customers (Voice of Customer)
Each of these windows brings a unique perspective, but it’s necessary to view them together to see the entire picture.
Going forward, I plan to discuss customer experience, highlight success stories, and discuss analyst reports and industry trends. The next month will take me to Asia to work with Aspect customers in that region, and I look forward to sharing insight into the impact of different cultures on customer experience.
I’m also interested in hearing how other companies are driving an improved customer experience, so feel free to share your thoughts and insight with me. I look forward to a rich conversation.
Reinvigorating the organization from within
by Jim Foy on June 3rd, 2011
Technological advances over the past several years have created an unprecedented, dynamic business environment. The organization that stays in one place or fails to adapt its strategy to changing conditions will be overtaken by the competition, often never to catch up. Such is the climate we operate in.
Therefore, tapping into fresh perspectives is a natural—and necessary—progression. No company beyond the smallest businesses derives its vision from one individual; instead, a unique and winning vision is forged through collaboration, robust discussion, and firsthand experience with the market and customers.
Aspect has always sought to champion new ideas, whether from the acquisition and integration of partners or by providing promising leaders with a platform to help shape the company’s strategy. Management guru Peter Drucker wrote, “Promotion should not be more important than accomplishment.”
I couldn’t agree more. That’s why I was pleased to announce earlier this month the appointment of three key executives whose significant accomplishments have had great impact on Aspect’s success and whose ongoing contributions will continue to help shape and execute Aspect’s vision.
Michael Regan, who previously served as Aspect’s vice president of development, has joined our team as senior vice president of engineering and technology.
Mike Ely builds on his decade-long career with Aspect, most recently serving as director of systems architecture, to become vice president of technology.
And Serge Hyppolite has become vice president of product management after nine years with Aspect, the last several as director of product management.
I’m very happy to recognize their accomplishments by giving each of these valued professionals a stronger leadership role within Aspect, and their knowledge and insight will be instrumental as we move forward with a unified vision for the next-generation contact center.
Meeting the evolving standards of multichannel customer contact
by Jamie Ryan on May 20th, 2011
How would you like to be on hold for days? That might seem like an exaggeration, but bear with me.
I was replacing the kitchen cabinets in my home, and that meant that I also had to replace the cabinet face on a built-in dishwasher. The issue: I couldn’t figure out how to change the cabinet face. I put a call in to the manufacture, and the service rep said he would e-mail me instructions. Case closed, right? Not so fast.
I waited but didn’t receive the promised e-mail. It eventually took three separate calls to get the contact center to e-mail the instructions. What should have been an instantaneous fix took several days, made all the more frustrating because the customer service reps raised my expectations by assuring me that the instructions were on the way. I couldn’t help thinking, “How long does it take to send an e-mail?”
The lesson here is that if a company decides to engage in a new channel, its representatives have to be prepared to respond according to that channel’s standards. The increase in instant communication channels such as text messages and chat has conditioned people to expect immediate attention and resolution of issues.
Back in the old days, customers had one channel in to the company—the phone—but the company controlled the conversation and the information they made available. Now consumers have been freed from the handcuffs of communicating through only voice channels, but they haven’t lost their expectations for great service. In fact, the expectations have increased.
The number of channels—online forums, Facebook, Twitter, and others—continues to grow, and these are beyond the contact center’s control. Companies have recognized for some time that to be really effective, they need to have multiple paths to communicate with customers. Here’s the challenge: how do you ensure they’re providing a consistent level of service and information, and meeting expectations across all of them?
Contact center managers have established levels of service for traditional channels, but now they need to do the same with nontraditional channels. Oracle, for instance, has supported robust online, customer-driven forums that allow programmers to trade ideas and information. The company has come up with a strategy to manage this channel in a way that enables consumers to resolve issues without ever having to engage with a customer representative.
The contact center must have the systems and processes in place for each channel to respond in a consistent and acceptable time frame. That means if you open up your contact center to tweets, you need to determine the appropriate response time. Getting back to someone’s tweet a day or two later just isn’t acceptable.
Without a coordinated, consistent approach, companies run the risk of waiting too long to respond—in effect, putting the customer on hold for days. These kinds of interactions have the potential to do lasting damage to customer relationships.
In my next post, I’ll talk about how companies can make strategic decisions about which channels to engage in.
Integrating the cloud in your contact center
by Mike Sheridan on May 10th, 2011
When I first started in the contact center industry almost 15 years ago, I sold to telcos who fancied themselves as Application Service Providers for contact centers. Today, we would call it cloud. In fact, over the past two years, cloud computing has emerged as one of the hottest and most misunderstood offerings. Some things haven’t changed, though. As business leaders are struggling to figure out how to integrate the cloud into their contact center—and the enterprise as a whole—they should keep three things in mind:
The cloud isn’t a new concept
While the cloud has taken some business leaders by surprise, its development has actually been much more gradual. A clear definition of cloud computing can shed a little light on its lineage.
I define the cloud as any hosted service that users can access remotely. In the 1990s, for example, telcos began offering virtual private networks (VPNs) to allow individuals to log in to their accounts (think the early days of remote access for your company e-mail). Software as a service and information as a service are really just cloud products, although no one began calling them that until recently.
In fact, the origin of the term “cloud computing” reaches back to 1997, when Ramnath Chellappa introduced the concept at a lecture at the University of Texas. However, as you can see by this Google Trends search, it would be another decade before cloud computing really began to register in people’s consciousness.
So what changed? For one, Eric Schmidt of Google began talking about the cloud, while companies such as Amazon also began to recognize a huge market for the additional server capacity they had accumulated. By 2009, the cloud was beginning to permeate the conversations of every executive searching for ways to make their organization more nimble and cost effective.
And that’s the real benefit that cloud computing can bring—giving companies a way to pay only for what they use and avoid the significant capital expenditures of in-house servers and infrastructure. For small and midsize businesses, that means a smaller server footprint and lower costs for additional computing capacity, allowing business leaders to focus their resources on innovation and growth.
Organizational challenges to capturing the benefits of the cloud
Any transformational technology can’t achieve that potential without the proper organizational structure and processes. For instance, unified communications can facilitate collaboration in myriad ways while reducing costs significantly. But if a company has a culture that permits individual functions to operate as separate entities rather than as parts of a well-coordinated operation, all the communications tools in world won’t get people to adopt a cross-functional mind-set.
Similarly, cloud solutions can sometimes undermine collaboration among departments. Imagine a company that has made it a goal to integrate its sales, marketing, and contact center functions. Management has implemented a unified communications platform to encourage information sharing—for instance, so sales and marketing can benefit from the customer feedback and insight aggregated by the contact center.
However, if the sales team unilaterally purchases a Salesforce.com CRM application (a cloud offering), it could effectively put up a wall between itself and sales and the contact center. Why? Because depending on the systems involved, it can take months to years to integrate.
Opportunities to integrate the cloud in the contact center
That’s not to say that the cloud doesn’t have a place in the contact center. In fact, fluctuations in volume and demand present many companies a natural opportunity to integrate cloud computing.
The typical investment model for contact centers is to buy for the peak—that is, invest in enough capacity to accommodate periodic spikes. Many contact centers are seasonal, so they staff up for that period of time and then return to more normal levels for the rest of the year. The obvious downside of this approach is that companies have capital expenses that are being wasted the majority of the time.
That’s where the cloud comes in. By lining up additional capacity on a pay-as-you-go model, companies can significantly decrease their capital expenses. This can be especially useful for applications such as recording that use huge amounts of server and storage capacity.
Other factors should also be considered. Security, compliance, and continuity are all important variables that can significantly increase the organizational risk of the cloud. As the recent Amazon EC2 failure demonstrated, for instance, the cloud is far from failsafe. Therefore, companies ultimately have to weigh the cost upside against the integration and security challenges and then make an informed decision.
While the cloud holds tremendous potential, executives need to avoid being taken in by the hype. By taking a more deliberate and strategic approach, executives can increase the flexibility of the contact center while reducing costs.
A forum to champion new ideas in support of our vision
by Jim Foy on May 5th, 2011
Welcome to the new Aspect blog hub. Many of you are here to read about new ideas for enhancing the customer experience. Some of you may want to get more detail on Aspect solutions, the Aspect product and industry vision, or to discover more about growing trends and how they will impact your organization. You’ll hear from key members of our executive team, as well as from leaders within our R&D, sales, product management, support organization and sales and marketing teams to get a 360 degree view of what’s important in customer-company communications.
With a rich cache of industry expertise, Aspect’s leadership team is helping to shape the next generation of customer contact. We’ll use this forum to share our thoughts, insights and experiences with industry-leading customer-centric organizations across the globe to help you and your organization create winning strategies for delivering a distinctive customer experience.
Check back often to find out what our experts are saying about the driving force of Consumer 2.0, the power of Enterprise 2.0 in meeting consumer demands, and the business process impact of real-time communications, Web 2.0 and collaboration technologies. We encourage you to comment and to share your thoughts and experiences as well. We look forward to an engaging dialogue.
Sincerely,
Jim Foy
President and CEO, Aspect
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.