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.

When companies are able to balance both priorities, the results can be truly impressive. Aspect client HarborOne, the largest state-chartered community credit union in New England and one of the top 100 in the country, offers a blueprint for how it can be done. On top of achieving substantial costs savings and improved performance, the company is gaining recognition for its vision: Ventana Research, a business and IT research and advisory services firm, awarded HarborOne its 2011 Business Collaboration Leadership Award.

The accomplishments are the culmination of efforts that began several years ago. At the time, HarborOne’s executives evaluated their operations and identified the contact center as a priority for strengthening customer relationships and increasing revenues. The team developed a multiyear vision for how it could transform the company to deliver better customer service and support business growth.

As Wayne F. Dunn, senior vice president and chief technology officer of HarborOne, noted, “We knew we needed a future-proof platform that could take us there.” As a foundation, the company selected Microsoft Lync and SharePoint to enable collaboration. HarborOne then added solutions from Aspect to unify elemental contact center functions, give agents greater access to information and experts, and track interactions through enhanced transparency, metrics, and reporting.

HarborOne’s success offers four lessons for other companies seeking to achieve improved contact center performance.

Develop a long-term vision. Technological advances will only accelerate going forward, so companies must ensure that their investments in the contact center support flexibility and customization. Considering how the iPad has transformed the business environment in just two years, being able to adapt to changing conditions is imperative.

Take advantage of existing IT investments. Providing the contact center doesn’t have to mean starting from scratch. In addition, companies that have already implemented in Microsoft unified communications solutions are already well positioned to tap products that can integrate seamlessly with their existing platforms.

Understand what customers expect. HarborOne recognized that its consumers were looking for a higher level of engagement across a number of channels, such as IM, social, and potentially video. Across industries, companies are recognizing that customer service can be not only a competitive advantage but also a revenue generator.

Empower management to optimize the workforce. Contact center managers and supervisors need the information and ability to respond to spikes in volume and emerging issues in real time. Enhanced metrics and reporting deliver the latest information, while the best solutions enable quick and easy alterations to business rules.

Most companies can achieve improvements by adding the right functionality to their contact center operations. But as HarborOne demonstrates, the benefits of a comprehensive strategy for customer service are substantial.

Leaders with the right creativity and vision will immediately seize upon the inspiration that no matter what systems exist within an organization, the opportunity is always there to restart and rebuild as long as there is a better, more effective way to approach it.

 This was the climate of innovation we encountered when we began consulting with Newport City Homes in 2009.

 Now recognized as the UK’s leading not-for-profit Registered Social Landlord, Newport City Homes approached Aspect as a newly established government agency that was facing the difficult task of migrating existing systems and developing an entirely new technology infrastructure. Its Board, executives and staff were determined to introduce a culture of excellent resident services and to develop a solution that would conform to its organization’s FIRST values: “Fair, Innovative, Respectful, Sincere and Trustworthy.”

 Microsoft® Infrastructure

At a network level, Newport City Homes adopted a 100MB meshed network to link its three main sites, with broadband serving smaller offices and other sites; while in the front and back office, it invested in a range of Microsoft solutions including Microsoft Office®, Service Manager, Microsoft SharePoint® 2010 and Windows 7 on the desktop. In order to improve the quality of customer interactions, it also developed a sophisticated Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system based on the Microsoft Dynamics® 4.0 platform. Microsoft OCS (Office Communication System) system, now known as Microsoft® Lync™, provided its high-quality VOIP telephony solution.

By December of 2010, with its contact center handling an increasing volume of customer calls, Newport City Homes began seeking a specialized contact center solution that could integrate with and complement its Lync and Microsoft Dynamics platforms. According to Nigel Ward, Newport City Homes’ Information Services Developer, Aspect Unified IP was the right choice:

“We looked at many different solutions, but Aspect was the only one that gave us confidence to integrate with our existing Microsoft infrastructure and enable us to fully execute our unified communications strategy. We anticipate the platform will play an important role in improving our contact center efficiency and effectiveness.”

Awards and Recognition

Without a doubt, the Newport City Homes implementation team had a clear vision for exceptional customer experience that helped Aspect develop and build their successful, next-generation solution.

Newport City Homes has since been recognized for its success in creating a world-class computing and communications infrastructure. At the 2010 UK IT Industry Awards, it was named “Small IT Department of the Year.” It also won the “Delivering Customer Driven Services” and “People’s Choice” awards at the 2010 Welsh Housing Awards.

Read the full case study.

Are there opportunities for rebuilding within your organization? What stands in your way? Were you successful in integrating new technology with legacy systems, applications or processes? We’d love to hear your story.

Once he exhausts his ability to provide the right answer, his fallback is to ask, “Why don’t you just tell me the name of the movie you want to see?”

Many companies that are struggling with customer service are desperate for someone to just tell them how they can make their interactions with consumers more effective. It’s not hard to understand why. As fast as the customer experience landscape is evolving, it’s difficult for even the best organizations to keep pace. However, the information and answers to enable better customer service are often closer than you think.

At Aspect, we’re big advocates of harnessing the information that customers are already providing to improve their experience. On this blog, we’ve shared a number of approaches for optimizing customer experience.

Data analytics. As we’ve noted previously, companies are sitting on a wealth of insight in the form of data they capture through customer interactions in the contact center. So the key is to implement the capabilities and processes to extract the value from these data

Social media monitoring. As consumers have adopted social media channels to express their feelings about companies and products, business leaders are struggling to understand how to track and address issues from these sources. It’s clear, however, that social media and what it can tell companies are too valuable to ignore.

Expert voices. One of the most difficult challenges with customer experience is to take a step back and understand the larger trends shaping the industry. With the benefit of these perspectives, companies can gain a comprehensive understanding of how to react to rising customer expectations in a strategic and sustainable way.

In an effort to practice what we preach, we’re holding the Aspect Customer Experience (ACE), on June 19-22. Over the past few years, we’ve found that part of what makes this event so valuable—to our executives as well as attendees—is that the agenda is developed in part based on feedback and surveys from our customers. So if you allow me to channel my inner Kramer, why don’t you tell us what you’d like to see?

With this information, we’re looking forward to a stimulating program that directly addresses some of the issues and challenges our customers face in delivering excellent customer service and improving the performance and effectiveness of their contact centers.

I’ll be sure to share the customer insights that emerge from ACE in a future blog.

Here’s who we’re feeling particularly amorous toward right now:

Tim Dreyer hearts ZDNet:

“Paul Greenberg had an excellent post recently, Social Media Companies Make Moves, which talks about four social media companies making an impact in the customer-facing and employee focused technology marketplace.”

Chris O’Brien hearts lifehacker:

“Lifehacker is, quite simply, a treasure trove of brilliant ideas. I love finding out that there are simple solutions to problems I never even realized I had. If life were a product or service… Lifehacker would be the answer to a better customer experience.”

 Jane Hendricks hearts Forrester’s Kate Leggett:

“I personally love Kate Leggett’s blogs – all of them. I’d have a hard time picking just one but her recent one on Data Quality is a beauty. Not only is she visionary, she is very well grounded in the practicalities of the customer experience and what the contact center can deliver and how they can do it better.”

Who do you love? What are your favorite blogs and must-reads? Let us know!

 To illustrate this point, CIOs have jumped on the opportunity to increase organizational productivity by deploying one-stop SharePoint portals. SharePoint portals have migrated from simple document repositories to internal communications sites and external corporate web sites. Some businesses, such as mine – a former Microsoft consulting agency – ran its entire operation using SharePoint. Research shows that businesses that once viewed SharePoint as the “go to” place for content are extending its role into “the place where business gets done”. SharePoint makes it easy to envision the art-of-the-possible and perhaps even remove the word “impossible” from our vocabulary.

 Given SharePoint’s ubiquitous presence in  corporate IT environments, and the drive for customer intimacy, it’s time to bring the art-of-the-possible to the contact center and tackle  productivity and efficiency in an entirely new way.

 All too often, contact center productivity is  hampered by departmental silos, lack of enterprise knowledge, little to no access to subject matter experts, no real-time metrics, untracked manual processes, limited training and much more.  Let’s envision a day where your contact center agents and management teams have a single, “one-stop” interface they use to begin and end their work day, that easily manages all of the different technologies they tap into throughout the day.  SharePoint is that key enabling platform that allows everyone within the contact center to stay focused on the task at hand:  delivering business value to customers and the enterprise.

 Let’s explore some of the possibilities.

1. Agent and Supervisor Communication and Collaboration – Create a My Workspace page where agents can access what they need from the corporate CRM database, access their Outlook email messages and assigned tasks, and readily see who’s available for IM chats, voice calls, screen shares and more using Microsoft Lync unified communications capabilities without ever needing to switch screens or open all of those applications individually.  Now, consider getting more creative with this My Workspace page – integrate real-time agent metrics, company announcements, team statistics, employee and team recognition, work and vacation schedules, contact center and project schedules, and so much more. The beauty of SharePoint is that it can consolidate all of the information and process needed, and expose the right piece and the right bits of information to the right user. No longer are you hindered by  disconnects between agents and supervisors – every player sees what they need when they need it.

 

2. Knowledgebase – How many times are agents and supervisors looking through stacks of notes or hunting around shared drives and desktops for that one document they need? With a centralized knowledgebase, you can turn all this information – including documents, videos, and the notes that pass between the people within the contact center – into a centralized source for both information and collaboration. SharePoint’s powerful search engine allows employees to search information using visual search clues such as meta-driven navigation, thumb nails, previews and click-through relevancy to quickly find and refine search results. And the beauty of SharePoint is that the capabilities you use in-house can quickly be turned on for external consumption. Imagine the same powerful search and collaboration driving a customer self-help portal.  

 

3. Analytics – Without knowing where you are, it is difficult – if not impossible – to know where you need to go next. Putting analytics front and center – and putting them into the hands of those who make changes– can transform the culture from one of guessing to one of knowing. Within SharePoint, analytics can be integrated such that they are always visible and always available. For example, display agent and team performance metrics like upsell revenue and average handle time directly on the My Workspace page to align behaviors with strategic objectives. Provide holistic interactive dashboards and scorecards to front-line supervisors and management personnel so they are equipped with the best information to make the best decisions.  

 

4. Workflow Automation – Prevent process delays (and lost revenue and customers) while reducing human latency and errors by automating mundane, manual and complex business processes.  Business processes such as opening new accounts, credit approvals, accounts receivables, policy management, etc. can involve a number of different workflows, employees with different skill sets, and several different departments. Use SharePoint’s workflow automation capabilities to move business steps through a series of logical and repeatable steps to ensure that business processes do not get bogged down or lost in the shuffle of everyday work.  Use SharePoint to push tasks to agents while supervisors use a dashboard to watch service requests move through the system. Workflow automation is great for connecting the contact center to back office operations. It can help ensure that the organization is managing the customer experience holistically – from the initial inquiry through fulfillment – with full visibility along the way.  

 

5. Training – Turnover within the contact center remains a pain point even in this challenging economic environment. As new agents come on-board, few can afford the productivity delays that are common. In-person training and reinforcement is hard to manage and sending out document after document is impractical for both the trainer as well as the trainee. With SharePoint, you can reduce the time it takes to onboard new agents and increase effectiveness of existing staff by assigning short training videos to watch and you can easily test understanding with integrated testing. This entire process can be done through SharePoint. Videos can educate staff on new products, offers, campaigns, contact center etiquette, best practices and more. Create a personalized list of recommended videos to supplement training efforts. Make these training videos part of employee performance records and review cycles. 

 Chances are, your company already has a SharePoint deployment and the possibilities we have outlined have you thinking about the art-of-the-possible for your contact center and maybe even your organization. Possibly the greatest benefit of SharePoint  is that you can design and deploy a strategy at a pace that works for you.

 I would love to hear your ideas on how SharePoint is being used or could be used in your contact center. Drop me a note.

 Till next time.

 Mike

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.

Eye on the Horizon: Key Trends Will Reshape ARM Industry in 2012

2012 ushers in many changes for the accounts receivable industry on every front. Since the start of the recession, economic, regulatory and market conditions have played a role in creating a new playing field for grantors, service providers and vendors. 

Key trends reshaping the ARM industry include:

1. Economic turbulence continues to impact liquidation results – Some reporters are stating that this must be a booming time for debt collectors as placement volumes increase and collectability rebounds.  Not so fast.  Yes, recovery rates have improved across most market segments over recent quarters as more consumers have paid down debts at increased rates.  However, the collection industry is not out of the woods yet and executives should continue to operate prudently as the economy recovers.   

 

2. The landscape of credit card/bank card agencies is changing. – Loan origination reductions have severely impacted placement volumes, resulting in bank card/credit card collection agency vendor networks being downsized as much as 60% in 2010 and 2011 and collection law firm networks following suit over recent quarters.   Top performers across most asset classes have actually seen an uptick in placement volumes as a result of contractions.  As we look forward into 2012, we anticipate further placement volume reductions coupled with more compliance “asks” from credit card issuers and increased regulatory scrutiny.  Strong agencies focused on performance without sacrificing compliance will benefit significantly as banks and issuers extend credit at increased rates.  

 

3. Substantial changes are looming on the regulatory and regulatory fronts – New laws and regulations will result in significant changes to workflow, technology, compliance and day-to-day operations among debt buyers and collection agencies.  It is highly unlikely lawsuits against collection agencies and debt buyers will decline in 2012.  We examined the trends.  Establishing reasonable compliance programs, increasing the time and resources spent on collector training and using technology that is designed to prevent law violations is critical to successful navigation of the legal, legislative and regulatory environment we predict for 2012. 

 

4. Job creation, while starting to show signs of improving, remains hovering at lowest levels in 30 years.  The number of layoffs is down as we head into 2012.  Unemployment continues to rank as the most significant trend impacting collection efforts.

 

5. Collection agencies are resilient – According to a recent survey conducted by InsideARM, 60% of agencies plan to increase staff levels over the next 12 months and more than 75% are projecting increased revenue a year from now in spite of economic conditions.  Most agency executives are forward thinking and are positioning their agency to be the beneficiary of increased outsourcing and collectability across numerous market segments including healthcare, government, student lending, mortgages and other financial deficiencies. 

For every company involved in any facet of collections and accounts receivable management, new laws and regulations—even proposed versions—will involve significant changes to workflow, technology and day-to-day operational policy. Rozanne Andersen, Vice President and Chief Compliance Officer of Ontario Systems LLC and former CEO and Vice President of Government Affairs at ACA International, is a good friend of our firm and the leading authority on this front.  As Rozanne has taken stock of thousands of regulations, case law decisions and recent legislation, she successfully encapsulated the most critical trends for our industry in her full report. These trends include: 

• Lawsuits against collection industry companies 
• State attorneys general file lawsuits and take action 
• What’s happening at the Federal and state level? 
• How the new CFPB will impact ARM 
• A look forward at what to expect 

Rozanne and I agree that it is unlikely lawsuits against collection agencies and asset purchasers will abate in 2012. Negative press, high levels of consumer complaint filings, ambiguous laws and regulations and the resolve state and federal regulators have to fill the coffers with money extracted from the industry in the form of fines and penalties does not bode well for the industry. Establishing reasonable compliance programs, increasing the time and resources spent on collector training and using technology that is designed to prevent law violations is critical to any agency or asset buyer’s successful navigation of the legal, legislative and regulatory environment we predict for 2012.

At Kaulkin Ginsberg, we have been tracking M&A market activities and macro-level trends impacting the ARM industry for 20 years.   We cover these and additional market conditions in our latest Q4 report which is available without cost on insideARM. I am happy to discuss these market conditions and how they may impact your business.

In

A lot of the industry interest in speech analytics is being driven by a heightened focus on the customer experience. In today’s hyper-competitive economy where there the meager opportunity for product differentiation and operational efficiency has been squeezed as much as possible, customer experience, driven by customer service, has emerged as a primary area of differentiation. There is a realization that a lot of learning is needed to before an organization is ready to deliver differentiated customer service. Organizations are looking at their existing data such a recording that they already have, to see if they can extrapolate more value out it and turn it into a true enterprise asset.

Customer interactions are becoming increasingly complex. With so many customers seeking self-service routes before they engage with the enterprise, agent-customer phone interactions are more complex than they used to be. Because of this, organizations are trying to figure out if they can better understand those interactions, some of which are using speech analytics to do so.

Customers have changed. They are more connected, they are more informed, and due in part to the increasing use of social media, they have a voice like they never did before. And while the customers have changed, what they want from their service provider has changed as well. Speech analytics can help an organization get a quantified view into those changes.

At the same time, technology has evolved such that the actual recordings are easier and cheaper to capture and store. Unified communication has contributed to that by reducing the reliance on hardware and shifting it to software which, due to falling storage costs, is easier to configure and maintain. And speech analytics options have also increased such as text-to-speech and even phonetic-based approaches. Plus, speech analytics solutions are increasingly more open, enabling data to be extracted and integrated easier than in the past.

In some ways, it’s a perfect conversational storm: the drive for service differentiation, the need to understand the new customer and their new needs, and technology evolution.

Tim

With this much data, not to mention the amount of information available to the consumer, when someone makes the decision to reach out to a contact center, in most cases they will have as much information as the agent they reach. This isn’t saying the days of “Did you check if it’s plugged in?” responses are gone, but the contact center needs the ability to raise its game to keep up with the volume of data available to the informed consumer.

According to Google CEO Eric Schmidt, “Every two days now we create as much information as we did from the dawn of civilization up until 2003. That’s something like five exabytes (10¹⁸ characters) of data.” While the vast majority of this information is user-generated content (pictures, tweets, IMs, posts) there is still a massive amount of data collected on each individual. Your cell phone, car, and other devices can report your location along with any time you connect to any data network.  Unified communications and other presence applications track what you’re doing and your availability nearly around the clock. Purchases get tracked by credit card, store and of course browser “cookies,” to say nothing of security cameras (a recent study found the average big-city resident walks into the view of a camera 75 times a day) and other devices designed to monitor access.

How much data does a contact center agent need? While only a small fraction of this information might be pertinent to why the consumer reached out to the contact center, access to the right information at the right time―especially to support cross-selling, collections, and even simply consumer relations―becomes even more critical. This is the foundation of “Big Data”―analyzing the huge volume of available customer information to determine what’s important to know.

Technologies such as Hadoop are considered foundational for data-intensive distributed applications such as business intelligence (BI). Microsoft SQL Server 2012 recently announced support for Hadoop integration to extend its BI functionality to the vast quantity of data available in social network and retail platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and eBay.

Imagine a consumer tweeting about an issue they had with a recent purchase. The contact center monitoring the social networks correlates the post to a recent purchase made by the consumer and sends a text message or email with a “click to talk” link. The consumer uses the link and the agent is supplied with the information on the purchase, the tweet, and a list of knowledge base search results on the issue. The agent can resolve the issue and, when alerted to the consumer’s upcoming birthday, offers a coupon for a related item. Big Data within the contact center enables this kind of proactive customer service.

Does your contact center have the functionality to take advantage of all of the customer information it collects?