The Art-of-the-Possible Comes to the Contact Center
by Mike Butts on February 10th, 2012
Business leaders make decisions based on past experiences. Even when we think we are being innovative, we are still innovating from what we know and what we’ve seen succeed.
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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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
Say No to a Siloed Architecture
by Chris O'Brien on December 22nd, 2011
Unified communications works best when it delivers on its own promise – unifying communication channels and improving collaboration between employees. Systems that are able to deliver on this promise in the most seamless, lightweight, nonintrusive, intuitive ways are those most successfully embraced by end-users, and ultimately by the organization as a whole, leading to benefits such as heightened productivity, operational efficiencies and cost savings.
The ideal UC scenario is not hard to imagine because it exemplifies a sort of business utopia in which all things work together seamlessly.
Likewise, we’re all equally familiar with the alternative: the “siloed organization.”
Unless you happen to work in an industrial refinery, you’re not likely to encounter siloes in the physical sense. But if they impede your ability to do your job efficiently, they can be all too real.
Many companies seeking a unified solution are actually looking for a way out of siloed operations. However, the fact is many well-known solution providers implement platforms that are not truly unified – meaning, rather than uniting all applications through a common reporting and administration structure, some critical applications must be accessed outside the core platform.
Ironically, although these solutions provide less functionality, they also tend to be more difficult to configure and more expensive to implement. The commitment required to support a siloed architecture can cause an unnecessary administrative burden, complicate IT management and impede the ability to respond quickly to changing market conditions.
Such an architecture can present long-term complications with regard to growth and scalability, as well as advances in technology. Some providers require a forklift upgrade in order for small/midsize businesses to expand from their “express” solution to an “enterprise” solution. Consider the time and inconvenience of a complex hardware upgrade – not to mention the cost associated with all-new components.
Another valuable feature of effective unified communications is its potential for breaking down artificial barriers to productivity. Even teams located in buildings physically separated by thousands of miles can enjoy improved collaboration and speedier issue resolution through greater access to knowledge, documents, networks and each other.
One Aspect client to realize these benefits was MedcoEnergi, Indonesia’s largest privately owned national oil and gas company. Because the company relied heavily on electronic communications, it needed a new solution that could seamlessly integrate with its existing IT infrastructure, remove siloed barriers to information, and easily scale to support rapid growth.
Read the full case study to see how Aspect’s next-generation solution helped implement improved workforce mobility and communications.
Unified Messaging Platforms
by Jamie Ryan on December 2nd, 2011
It’s been said that technology can only be as effective as the business strategy it supports. Before you can formulate an effective strategy, however, you need to understand what a particular technology can deliver. That sentiment definitely applies to unified communications. Too often, companies get caught up in the technical aspects and lose focus on how it can make the end user more productive.
So when companies evaluate unified communications, it’s important for them to define what they hope to accomplish. I’d urge people to ask three basic questions:
- How can this technology affect the way people do their daily jobs and improve customer value?
- How does it streamline processes such as collaboration, scheduling, and other activities?
- What level of IT support is necessary to provide people with this added functionality?
What’s truly transformational about unified communications is that it gives users a single interface to manage and manipulate their interactions. When Aspect was preparing to implement Lync’s predecessor, OCS, our strategy was to unify our disparate messaging platforms—that is, voice, voicemail, e-mail, instant messaging, video, online meetings and conferencing, and calendar.
Think about the how you use different communications platforms throughout the course of a workday: voice conversations are pretty easy and spontaneous; email tends to me more formal and planned; instant messaging is short and immediate; and calendars should reflect and integrate these interactions.
When people are dealing with day-to-day tasks, they tend to stay in their communications environment. The ability to manage all of these different platforms without switching screens or devices is a tremendous time saver and delivers significant benefits.
A platform that accommodates individual tastes. With unified messaging platforms individuals have the flexibility to adapt the technology to their work style—something that’s critical for user adoption. Similarly, with the intuitive interface, users can jump in without extensive training.
Voice commands across messaging platforms. With Lync, people can use Outlook voice activation to respond to both e-mail and voicemail by phone. For example, say I’m in the car running 15 minutes late to a meeting. To notify people, I can simply click on the meeting invite and say that I’m running 15 minutes late. Lync automatically sends a message to all attendees and adjusts the meeting time on everyone’s schedule. While some smartphones are now adopting this same idea, we have been using it for the past three years on a global basis.
A unified view of messages. Lync also features such as voice-to-text translation, which allows individuals to prioritize voicemail and e-mail messages at the same time by using preview screens in e-mail. You can get an idea very quickly of what people want. In separate environments, you can’t do that.
The right messaging platform every time. With rich presence, your colleagues quickly understand the best communications channel to use based on your availability. If someone sees that I’m not available, they aren’t going to leave me a long voicemail. I’ve found that people intuitively understand how to select from their messaging options to get the best response. It’s why I’ve received just a handful of internal voicemails since we implemented unified messaging.
Recognizing what unified communications can deliver to your organization is the first step. Next, companies need to devise an implementation strategy to achieve these benefits. In my next blog, I’ll share a basic framework that can enable every organization to begin to integrate unified communications into their daily operations.
The social customer contact center
by Jane Hendricks on September 27th, 2011
It seems that every presentation, webcast, conference, or podcast I have recently watched, attended or listened to isn’t complete without a “social” mention. Typically, the approach advocates using social media to better understand and engage the customer. Given the importance that executives place on customer loyalty and the customer experience in the “Age of the Customer,” this should come as no surprise. However, social is more than a tweet or a review.
A recent article in CMS Wire got me thinking about how “social” applies within the walls of the organization itself. This article identifies the three pillars of the social business as people, processes, and platform. It goes on to describe the 15 indicators of social business transformation. Here, I want to focus on just a few of the indicators and discuss them into the context of the customer contact center.
People:
Global/functional teams sharing best practices frequently; organizational silos become nonexistent
When we consider the kind of information a typical agent needs, it can be overwhelming. They are often looking to multiple sources to understand who the customer is, what the nature of the request is, and the best way to meet the request. This progression takes place in a silo isolated by technology and communication barriers. With unified communication, a context-sensitive knowledge base, and visibility into enterprise experts (and their availability), the contact center can break down that silo and ensure that every customer interaction can take advantage of the enterprise’s collective customer experience knowledge.
Social behavior becomes engrained in the everyday fabric of employees’ workflow and process
For the contact center, this objective is no more and no less than the ability to share who you are and what insight you can add to the collective customer experience body of knowledge . With the right environment, the people behind the customer experience and their customer know-how become more visible to one another, to their management, and potentially to the enterprise itself.
Process:
Workflows created that collect external customer feedback and filtered back to the product organizations
Aspect’s technologies can gather customer feedback at multiple stages and in multiple ways: survey feedback is collected that measures satisfaction with the interaction; the interaction is recorded as a conversation as well as a process (through screen capture); and our IVR channel also collects data. The hard part is the “filtered-back” portion of the equation.
Organizations need to communicate this information to a range of employees:
- The agent who needs it to understand whether they are meeting customer need consistently
- The supervisor who needs to understand how their team is performing
- The enterprise itself
Here, the collaborative framework can play a central role to provide visibility and heighten the focus on customer engagement. Organizations must think beyond visibility to understand how to integrate the insight into their operations. To truly make use of this rich asset, insight must be turned into action―for instance, by automating the right decision.
Platform:
Internal communities and collaboration systems deployed and being used across functional business units—sales, marketing, customer support, supply chain management
This is the framework that can pull together the data, the people, and the knowledge needed to create the next-generation customer contact environment that we talk about. Microsoft’s SharePoint, with it’s endless integration possibilities, is particularly well suited here.
Collaboration is happening more within internal communities than in email
In “Information Overload: We Have Met the Enemy and He is Us,” Basex analysts Jonathan B. Spira and David M. Goldes claim that interruptions from phone calls, emails, and instant messages eat up 28 percent of a knowledge worker’s work day, resulting in 28 billion hours of lost productivity a year. It’s about time that cycle is broken.
Given this groundswell of engagement, now’s the time to turn our collective attention to the practical side of social technologies—using them to create better, more productive working environments. Instead of just watching for the tweets and status updates, businesspeople should really consider how social technologies can shape how we interact with one another as colleagues.
Social technologies enable connections―bringing people together electronically, providing them with relevant information, and creating a venue for collaborating with one another. When we think of “Enterprise 2.0,” this is exactly the environment we imagine: one where information is centralized and organized, collaboration isn’t a scheduled event, and knowledge is timely, relevant, and easily accessible.
It seems that within the Enterprise 2.0 environment, social business would be the norm everywhere you looked. And there is no function more social than the contact center.
Enterprise 2.0: Not quite the social butterfly?
by Chris O'Brien on September 1st, 2011
He’s one of the top decision-makers in the company. He’s well-educated and highly compensated. And he probably values social tools LESS than other collaboration tools available in his Enterprise 2.0 workplace.
These are the latest findings revealed by Forrester’s analysis of survey data taken of content and collaboration professionals, discussed in TJ Keitt’s blog: Is Social Software Relevant to Information Workers?
The answer to Keitt’s question actually seems to depend on what Enterprise 2.0 expects and needs from its social technology, both now and in its evolution alongside the consumer.
Doing Business in a Social Marketplace
As described by thought leaders and analysts, Enterprise 2.0 is the path forward that enables market-savvy businesses to engage today’s sophisticated, socially networked consumers.
Forrester’s data indicate a substantial number of businesses are following this trend, leaving behind the antiquated “hanging shingle” model of doing business and adopting a customer-facing approach driven by relationships, long-term loyalty, and referrals.
This approach? Just like the customers it targets, it’s extremely social.
So, has a social marketplace and a social business strategy translated into widespread adoption of social tools in the workplace?
Surprisingly, no.
When surveyed, the heaviest users of social tools within an organization – like the executive we met earlier in this blog – felt that social tools actually had less value to their organization than other workforce collaboration tools.
“Liking” the Metrics
The big question is, why? It may depend largely on the industry.
For the knowledge worker, collaboration within the organization is a two-way dialogue – an exchange of information that is often the key to workplace effectiveness. In contrast, there is a point of diminishing returns for this type of collaboration in terms of productivity in other areas of the organization, such as the contact center. There, efficient collaboration is a matter of streamlining the information exchange into an agent’s workflow – providing real-time access to information throughout the entire organization.
In the contact center, the value of social customer contact is directly relevant to how each interaction can be channeled, captured, parsed, routed, and queued for follow-up by an agent. Tools that fail to do these things are of limited value, and executives with any understanding of Consumer 2.0 will quickly come to that conclusion.
A new offering from Aspect announced last week suggests new possibilities that may deliver the true business value that has long been absent from social media tools.
Aspect Social Media Channel Integration is a business workflow solution that complements and enhances virtually any social media monitoring tool an enterprise already uses.
This application is, in fact, truer to the vision of Enterprise 2.0 and enables the company to be more responsive to customers on a much larger scale. In addition to monitoring and responding to individual social interactions, an enterprise will now have the capability to determine the relative social influence of a customer providing feedback – and automatically assign a follow-up task to an agent’s queue through Aspect Unified IP. Recorded outcomes, agent interactions, and performance benchmarks for the enterprise’s social strategy all become part of the trackable, reportable data.
If perceived value is tied to metrics, this may be the turning point Enterprise 2.0 needs to come out of its cocoon.
The Age of the Customer elevates the importance of the contact center
by Nancy Dobrozdravic on August 16th, 2011
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At Aspect, we’ve talked for some time about the potential of the contact center to tap the collective intelligence of the organization to serve the customer. Through this level of engagement, progressive companies have built a competitive advantage by being customer service champions. Others seem to be coming around to that notion as well.
Traditionally, the contact center was seen as the cost of doing business—a compulsory function that sought to resolve issues but wasn’t a source of competitive advantage. The evolution of industry, technology, and consumer behavior is changing how we collectively think about the relationship of business and the customer. The confluence of technologies such as unified communications and the more collaborative nature of today’s consumers are highlighting the contact center’s vital role in strengthening customer relationships.
A recent Forrester blog noted that we have entered the Age of the Customer. As analyst William Band puts it:
“The successful companies will be customer-obsessed, like Best Buy, IBM, and Amazon.com. Executives in customer-obsessed companies must pull budget dollars from areas that traditionally created dominance—brand advertising, distribution lockup, mergers for scale, and supplier relationships—and invest in four priority areas: 1) real-time customer intelligence; 2) customer experience and customer service; 3) sales channels that deliver customer intelligence; and 4) useful content and interactive marketing.”
Fundamentally, Band is saying that if companies don’t have strong customer relationships, efficient operations and savvy marketing won’t matter. That’s a bold statement: in effect, the focus on operational excellence should take a backseat to customer experience. So while I’m happy that executives want to join the customer experience party, I don’t believe companies should view it as an either-or proposition. Let me explain.
Many companies are already reassessing the traditional organizational functions and how they interact. I’ve written previously that the entire organization, led by the contact center, must work together to serve the customer. Greater collaboration and more effective information sharing are critical to support this evolution. Fortunately, unified communications provides the tools and capabilities to enable employees to reach across departments.
The contact center is emerging as the natural hub of interaction between the organization and the consumer. How critical is the contact center in the Age of the Customer? Let’s take a look at the four priority areas noted above:
Real-time customer intelligence. In the course of operations, contact center technologies can extract and analyze data from not just social media but also customer service conversations, providing companies invaluable customer insights
Customer experience and customer service. The next-generation contact center has the ability to engage with consumers on their terms—multiple channels in real time. Traditional metrics such as average call times have given way to a more holistic view of interaction and customer experience.
Sales channels that deliver customer intelligence. By integrating outbound dialing, text messaging, and social media, the contact center has become one of the most valuable sales channels. The contact center has the ability to capture insight from customer conversations and translate it into business intelligence that can then inform future customer encounters.
Useful content and interactive marketing. The contact center now has the ability to tap experts and offer content to enrich the customer interaction. FAQs, online self service, and content such as blogs and white papers are other powerful tools in the contact center arsenal.
Companies can reorient their customer service efforts so that every part of the organization—from executives and experts to frontline personnel—is supporting the same strategy. And by giving the contact center a more prominent role, executives will still be able to devote the necessary resources to operations.
Your contact center is sitting on a treasure chest
by Mike Butts on August 10th, 2011
How many of your colleagues still look at your contact center as an overhead expense line item during the annual budgeting process? Granted, your colleagues may concede that the contact center has a definite effect, both positive and negative, on customer attainment, retention, and satisfaction, but at the end of the day it’s still viewed as a cost of doing business. Go ahead and raise your hands. It’s okay, because you now have the opportunity to transform the contact center into a strategic asset that offers supreme value to every department within your enterprise.
How so, you ask? At our recently completed Customer Contact in a Consumer 2.0 World online symposium, Bruce Temkin, managing partner of the Temkin Group and former Forrester analyst, shared as one of his four pieces of advice for contact centers to avoid extinction that they need to be “providing customer insight to the business.”
More customer interactions and transactions flow through your contact center than any other part of the business. Just imagine the power you can harness for the enterprise if you can find a way to organize and report on customer insight that matters to your colleagues. I’m willing to bet that every department—from engineering, sales, marketing, manufacturing, finance, and others—would treasure data that help them make quicker and more accurate business decisions.
Business intelligence (BI), the science of improving business decisions by providing insights to the business, has been around for many years. The convergence of the exploding growth of social media chatter coupled with your contact center’s daily customer interactions make this the ideal time to deploy a contact center BI solution that your product management, sales, marketing, and boardroom desire.
Think about the possibilities. Imagine capturing and synthesizing customer comments about product features, pricing, warranties, or billing problems that contribute to customer lifetime value. Or capturing the reason(s) why they are selecting a competitive product or service. If a contact center BI solution is designed and deployed right, you can save your company thousands of dollars and resources on studies devoted to competitive intelligence, customer satisfaction, brand awareness, voice of the customer, and product road map validations.
I’m even more confident that your contact center can pull this project off because your agents have the necessary skills, training, processes, and tools to quickly collect and organize these customer interactions.
So where do you begin? First, align yourself with a business partner that has deep experience deploying BI solutions. Notice the emphasis on business partner; this endeavor is more of a business project than a technology project. Today’s technologies such as Microsoft SharePoint 2010 can organize and display structured and unstructured information, so your first priority is making sure your business partner understands how your business process maps to your objectives.
The second step is meeting with your colleagues (and executive team, if possible) to discover the key types of information they need to support business strategy and objectives while increasing productivity. Listen closely for their pain points to see if your contact center can contribute information that eases their struggle for accurate information.
Third, start small. Deploy a pilot project with a single department to gain confidence and a raving fan base before moving on to a larger project.
Your contact center is sitting on a treasure chest full of highly valuable customer insight. All you have to do is collaborate with your colleagues to unlock the riches.
Til next time.
The rise of Consumerized IT
by Jeff Hodson on June 28th, 2011
The continued beat down on enterprise IT organizations by their end users to become more Consumer 2.0 friendly is beginning to have an effect! The pressure appears to be loosening the vice grip of control that CIOs have enjoyed over the years and the intentional side effect of high-level separation between work and play activities. They are gradually becoming “Consumerized IT.”
In fact, according to a recent Proofpoint 2011 Consumerized IT Security Survey, “84% of organizations in the U.S. are now allowing their employees to use consumer-focused IT products and services such as iPads, iPhones, Facebook, Twitter, and instant messaging.” The survey even pushes the envelope by suggesting “organizations that prohibit consumerized IT may be increasing risk at an unquantifiable level.” This is due to the reality that employees are finding ways to use unsanctioned devices and services that leverage both work and play tasks regardless of the corporate rules. Consumerized IT is a fact of life in the workplace, business approved or not.
From the perspective of the contact center operations, a major end user of enterprise IT, the effects of Consumer 2.0 activities both within and outside the workplace is most evident. Regardless of a center’s service, sales, or marketing focus, collaboration and interfacing are occurring in ways that traditional enterprise IT shops just aren’t equipped to handle.
The need to incorporate social media information and online marketing efforts into the customer contact equation now has value. It is essential to access experts and management who are on the move via the plethora of mobile devices in order to sustain or improve contact resolution. Today’s “average” customer service representatives and peripheral expert professionals are tech savvy and spend much more time online, bringing their non-workplace approaches in house to socialize, communicate, and network while wondering why their IT-supplied workstation or phone has to be so darn difficult to use.
Of course there are reasons for this. IT security, support, and openness to the outside world are always a concern. Consumerized IT characteristics offer little to alleviate these concerns. But as a result of its “excuse me, I’m already here” presence, there are new ways being forged to help mitigate these risks including:
- Leveraging the latest virtualization technologies
- Emphasis on protecting actual data rather than the device – encryption, for example
- Moving away from a “trust only” approach to deploying a layered security and compliance strategy that includes a combination of trust, policy, and technology.
Risks aside, some of Consumerized IT’s benefits must be mentioned too:
- Greater accessibility to resources over extended periods of time – blending work and play
- Less burden and cost for the IT organization to supply the latest device or gadget as users will bring in their own – no more IE 6 browsing, yeah!
- More emphasis on application support and less on particular devices
- Collaboration and interaction that are prone to happen faster and continue in real time
Contact centers and their standby panel of UC-connected experts can greatly benefit from an IT organization that has a adaptability plan for Consumer IT. With the inevitable influx of social media content and online collaboration coming down the contact center pipe (not to mention maintaining the pace of the more traditional contact forms like voice, email, and chat), planning for and embracing the Consumer 2.0 onslaught rather than resisting it makes for a much smoother ride for the turbulent – or should I say cloud-y – times ahead. Either way Consumer IT is already in the proverbial “house” and poised to take over.
For more information on Consumer IT and how you can prepare for it, here are some excellent sources:
- Proofpoint 2011 Consumerized IT Security Survey
- 5 Reasons Why CIOs Can’t ignore Consumerization of IT
- Ready Or Not, They’re Already In Your Enterprise
- Security Concerns Aside, Consumer IT Takes Over Enterprises
So, I wonder, where does your enterprise IT organization stand as it relates to the Consumer 2.0 challenges? What is your IT shop doing to become Consumerized IT?
Let me know your feedback!
The time is now to advance your contact center career
by Mike Butts on June 21st, 2011
The stars, planets, and the contact center solar system are all aligning to help advance careers. Well, maybe not the stars and the planets, but the emergence of Consumer 2.0 and the Microsoft unified communications platform, Microsoft Lync, has the potential to build executive careers for savvy contact center leaders.
At last month’s Customer Contact in a Consumer 2.0 World online symposium, Bruce Temkin, managing partner of the Temkin Group and former Forrester analyst, shared four pieces of advice for progressive contact centers and enterprises that want to reap the full benefits of Consumer 2.0.
1) Measure and respond to customer feedback. Contact centers need to determine the impact of their service on the business.
2) Provide customer insight to the business. More customer interactions and transactions flow through the contact center than any other part of the business, so contact center leaders need to figure out how to provide value-added intelligence in a way that allows the enterprise to act on the data.
3) Prepare to respond via social media channels. The contact center is the best location in the enterprise to monitor and respond to customers in social media conversations because contact centers, unlike most marketing departments, have the training, experience, and tools to engage customers in product and service discussions.
4) Lead cross-channel integration. Customers want to communicate with the enterprises they do business with on their terms, whether its voice, Web chat, IM, Web portal, or mobile device.
Most enterprises are not in the position to effectively tackle all four pieces of advice at one time, so which one should we focus on to drive best results? If it were me, I’d pick leading cross-channel integration.
Why cross-channel integration? Consumer 2.0 is here and real, so we might as well embrace them. If we’re not leading the charge now, we’re falling further behind, with the likelihood that our competitors will be outpacing the customer experience we currently provide.
Most important, consumers get frustrated when they cannot engage using their preferred method of communication (voice, Web chats, IM, Web portal, or mobile applications). Consumers also have higher service expectations when it comes to solving their inquiries or challenges on the very first interaction. Callbacks are no longer acceptable. Contact centers need access to subject matter experts across the enterprise to answer challenging questions.
Savvy contact center leaders have recognized that Microsoft Lync has emerged as the preferred unified communications platform that enables cross channel integration while connecting the contact center with the enterprise to enhance customer experience. The Microsoft Lync platform also makes it easy for contact center agents to search, find, and tap the collective knowledge of the enterprise to increase first-call resolutions and raise customer satisfaction through functionality such as presence, instant messaging, multimedia conferencing, remote desktop access and screen sharing. Further, Lync can provide the needed infrastructure to tackle Bruce Temkin’s first three pieces of advice.
I’m going to leave you with a prediction. Over the next 12 to 24 months, contact center leaders will emerge and build executive careers by deploying a Microsoft unified communications strategy that delivers a differentiated next-generation customer contact experience that engages your entire enterprise. So are you ready for that new sports car or beach home?
Til next time.
Modeling company-customer collaboration
by Serge Hyppolite on March 18th, 2011
In garages, basements, and makeshift workshops, a legion of amateur Edisons have been quietly improving existing products or combining components to create new ones. A recent New York Times story profiled Eric von Hippel, a professor at MIT, who conducted a study of British consumers and found that 2.9 million individuals had pursued innovation in the previous three years.
For the longest time, this activity occurred totally under the radar. More recently, however, global companies have begun to recognize the value in tapping into these networks of engaged consumers to integrate their ideas into product offerings. As in many other areas of the business, the emergence of social media technologies that facilitate real-time dialogue and collaboration has been crucial in bringing these ideas into online spaces. …Read more >
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.