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 >
Assessing the hard and soft ROI of unified communications
by Jamie Ryan on March 2nd, 2011
For companies that are thinking of adopting a unified communications (UC) platform, one of the lingering questions is verifying the return on investment (ROI). Even though the economy is recovering and IT spending is predicted to rise more than 5 percent this year, any major technology investment must be rigorously analyzed and justified before committing resources.
In a previous post, I highlighted the bottom-line benefits that Aspect has captured in implementing Microsoft Lync (and its predecessor, OCS) in our offices around the world. A little background: two years ago, Aspect made a commitment to implement a UC platform for our entire global workforce—1,900 employees in more than 20 offices. We achieved substantial cost savings—$2 million of annualized spending in the first 12 months.
Our experience at Aspect is consistent with a Forrester Consulting study on the total economic impact of Microsoft Lync on a composite organization. Forrester estimated a 337 percent risk-adjusted ROI, with a payback period of 12 months. We actually achieved an ROI within nine months of adoption.
As we moved from OCS to Lync, we saw additional savings via an 80 percent reduction in our server footprint. …Read more >
Huge cost savings and rapid ROI with Lync
by Jamie Ryan on January 31st, 2011
When Aspect replaced Microsoft OCS with Lync, it had an immediate impact on our entire organization. A few facts tell the story:
- Deployed to 1,900 employees in 22 countries just 5 weeks after Lync’s general availability (GA)
- No training required to move from OCS to Lync
- Reduced server footprint by 80 percent
- Achieved ROI in just 9 months
For more details, check out this video:
Two heads are better than one – but at what cost?
by Michael Ely on January 13th, 2011
In a recent post, Gartner’s Michael Maoz recounted conducting an experiment on collective intelligence as part of a presentation. He asked an individual for the Hubble Constant,* and when that person didn’t know, he then put the question to the audience of 300 to find someone who did. I like the experiment, though I think it left out a key parameter – the time (and therefore cost) spent to get the right answer to the question.
Asking the first person, who didn’t have the answer, probably took 10 seconds, costing little even if this individual was highly paid. Now multiply that times the 300 people asked (who had to take time to think about it even if they didn’t respond), then times 100 contact center agents handling 10 calls an hour for 12 hours each weekday – that’s 10,000 hours of time used each day. Extend the example to the contact center and you can understand why it’s vital to access collective intelligence in a smart way.
Admittedly, I’m exaggerating for effect: every customer will not have a question that an agent must seek outside help to answer. However, a study done in 2008 by Leo J. Shapiro and Associates indicates that more than 10 percent of customer issues require agents to find someone outside the contact center to assist in resolving them. Contact centers are about efficiently getting answers for customers, so using collective intelligence indiscriminately could cost more than you think.
This is why I believe capabilities like “Ask the Expert” are so critical. If Michael could have determined which people in the audience were most likely to know the answer and asked one of them directly, odds are he would have saved the time that the 300 people spent thinking about it.
Just as important as finding the right person is letting that person do their own job. Having the ability to schedule experts so they aren’t bombarded all day by the contact center (unless that’s their job, of course) is critical so that a business can use its highly skilled and highly paid employees in the most efficient manner while still providing outstanding customer service.
While I’m all for collaboration, the right solutions can ensure it happens with the right people at the right time to keep both your business and your contact center running at peak efficiency.
*The Hubble Constant is the rate at which the velocity of recession of the galaxies increases with distance. I had to look it up myself.
Bringing social networking into your IT strategy?
by Manish Chandak on June 28th, 2010
We are beginning to see organizations trying to provide some social networking tools within the enterprise to enhance customer-company communications. With growth in collaboration platform tools, social tools don’t need to be one-off projects; they can be an integrated approach to your customer experience strategy. The concept of bringing “social within the organization” is probably a matter of when, rather than if. We have seen this evolution with email and then with instant messaging tools. They all started in the consumer space and most organizations were skeptical of their internal value. Today email is a critical business tool and most organizations have adopted presence and instant messaging. Current communication tools and collaboration platforms are already integrating these capabilities. One good example is the integration between LinkedIn and Microsoft Outlook. Another is the pervasive use of wikis or content management within SharePoint.
Within social tools, wikis and blogs have already been well accepted; we are particularly seeing a broad usage of wikis. But this is still a very structured use that is easy for most organizations to envision. The bigger change is with unstructured social tools – activity feeds, employee profiles, walls and statuses. These are being leveraged in some organizations to create a bond between formal groups and special interest groups. Informal groups are being formed based on subscriptions and interests.
I am interested in seeing how well these tools get adopted by our clients. So when do you think your organization will introduce these tools and if you have already adopted them, how have they changed the way employees interact?
Join us at 9:00 EDT May 19th — Learn About the Role of Unified Communications and Collaboration in the 2.0 Enterprise
by Chris O'Brien on May 18th, 2010
We have an excellent line-up of presenters and topics, ranging from Facebook Cofounder, Chris Hughes speaking on social media, to Aspect CEO, Jim Foy discussing the future of business communications and an array of end users and experts in between. Don’t miss the roundtable discussion where some early adopters will offer their perspective on how their companies have benefited from Microsoft communications and collaboration technologies. This offers a great opportunity for you to get your questions answered by people that are using and supporting the technology every day.
The Collaboration in the 2.0 Enterprise online symposium provides a unique occasion for everyone who is interested in learning more about communications-enabled business processes, foundational technologies to support those processes and the applications that will deliver measureable value. Bring a pen and pad and have your Twitter account open—there will be lots of valuable information to record and share!
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.