High Availability Helps the Contact Center Meet Consumer Expectations
by Chris O'Brien on February 22nd, 2012
There’s an old saying (or curse), “May you live in interesting times.” This is particularly apt for the world of customer experience. The pace of change virtually guarantees that things will be interesting for the foreseeable future.
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.
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
Measurable Results from a Customer-Centric Strategy
by Chris O'Brien on February 8th, 2012
The decision to refocus or restructure an organization in favor of a more customer-centric model is a bold move, but it’s one that is becoming more common as customers consistently demonstrate how much of the power they now wield in today’s social marketplace.
This was the goal of India’s largest paint company, Asian Paints. With customers
in more than 65 countries and a 25,000+ dealer network, most of Asian Paints’ direct interactions took place with its dealers. Therefore, the company not only needed to respond to evolving consumer demands and expectations for better service, responsiveness, consistency and knowledgeable consultancy, it needed to provide exceptional, convenient phone service to its dealers.
The only way to realistically achieve these goals was to focus on becoming a truly customer-centric organization. To do that, Asian Paints needed a next-generation customer contact platform capable of managing both customer and dealer communications, and optimizing agent productivity and responsiveness.
When selecting a solution provider, Asian Paints did its research. Mr. Deepak Bhosale, Chief Manager, Systems, explained the company’s decision:
While we were researching different vendors and getting references, the best remarks and kudos were given from customers using Aspect to organize its customer interactions. Since we wanted a cost-effective way to have several solutions in our contact center, Aspect was the right choice for us. We needed a little bit of everything, improved quality interactions, dealer interaction and high operational efficiency.
Working with Aspect to implement a next-generation customer response and dealer management system, Asian Paints made it easy and convenient for both dealers and customers to do business with the company – from placing quick and convenient orders, to consulting with an expert on paint color choices.
As a result, Asian Paints achieved measurable successes:
- 80% increase in dealer satisfaction, as well as improved customer satisfaction
- 40% drop in average call handle time, due to increased visibility into caller’s information and history
- Improved contact center agent productivity
- Reduced wait time resulting from access issues
- Increased service availability window, leading to an effective 40% reduction in workforce
By improving customer interactions and organizational productivity, Asian Paints hopes to reinstate customer confidence and build customer loyalty, particularly among customers who had moved to competing brands during periods of poor customer service.
Read the full Asian Paints case study.
Companies can no longer afford to think customer service doesn’t matter. In many markets, the customer experience is the competitive differentiator.
Have you found this to be the case in your industry? Tell us about it in the comments.
Big Data and the Contact Center
by Michael Ely on February 1st, 2012
Watch any new phone advertisement, and you’ll see the focus has shifted from connectivity and call quality to data, lots and lots of data―from connectivity to your favorite sites to watching the game live and video connections. Data has become so consuming that a report from the University of California, San Diego entitled “How Much Information?” reveals in 2008 the average American consumed 34 gigabytes per day―before 4G was even available to the average customer.
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?
Planning for SIP Trunking: Considerations to Take into Account
by Mike Sheridan on January 27th, 2012
This article originally appeared in the Nov. 2011 issue of INTERNET TELEPHONY.
No matter where I travel in the world, telecom managers’ eyes gleam when the topic of SIP trunking arises. So it wasn’t much of a surprise to me as I looked at a SIP Trunking Snapshot to see that the viewpoint on adoption is still, for the most part, looked at from a futuristic standpoint, but that more and more people are expressing excitement about it. Alright, so we know that there is the potential for immediate and significant cost savings in the business. But what does it mean for those highly regulated outbound contact centers?
From the two-second rule to call abandonment to mandatory caller ID, there are many regulations that organizations understand they need to plan for in regards to their outbound customer contacts. It doesn’t just stop there, though. For other operations, like answering machine detection, it’s important to realize that this transformation requires even further planning to make sure that the experience is equivalent in a SIP environment to a time division multiplexing environment.
And it’s complicated. AMD for outbound SIP connections is typically done by requesting early media where the caller asks the receiver to send audio, even before the call is officially established, allowing processing of the received audio as soon as it’s available. To send the audio, the receiving SIP phone collects the speaker’s voice, taking tiny slices of the audio stream and sending it over the IP network as a data packet. In many cases, the audio is compressed so it takes less network bandwidth, but that also may reduce the audio quality depending on the encoding strategy. The latency of transmission with the packets going through a switched network adds to the delay in reaching the caller. There is also a jitter buffer on the receiver used to reassemble the packets into a continuous audio stream before playing them out so the playback isn’t broken up as there is no assurance that the next packet will arrive exactly when needed.
All of these added times could affect the ability to meet certain regulations that may be in place on how fast an agent or IVR must be connected to the person that answers an automated call. These rules often mandate a response within two seconds, making even a 5 percent increase in receiving audio a potential issue. So while AMD over SIP is absolutely viable, it’s something that needs to be carefully planned for to eliminate any extra delays that could potentially put an organization out of compliance.
What are some things that you’ve encountered when moving to a SIP environment? What about while applying AMD in your outbound SIP connections?
Role Reversal: Microsoft’s Skype Acquisition Will Transform the Contact Center
by Mike Butts on January 25th, 2012
About this time last year, I wrote a blog titled “Will video transform the contact center? Don’t believe the hype.” I was very skeptical that video is everything and stated emphatically that it would not replace voice in the contact center. While video may not replace voice in the contact center, my thoughts were radically changed last May.
Little did I know at the time that Microsoft was in the midst of making an $8.5 billion investment acquisition of Skype. No company makes that kind of an investment unless they are playing to win and win big.
(Skype’s revenue was only $860 million at the end of 2010.) This acquisition brings Microsoft 700 million consumers that use Skype technology for their voice and video calls. As we know Microsoft has not officially released details on how it plans to integrate Skype into its product stack, but we do know that Skype will play a key role in Microsoft Lync, Office including Outlook, Windows Phone, and Xbox.
Once Microsoft integrates Skype video technology into its product and hardware (phones and Xbox) stack, it will bring consumers even closer to companies. Forward-thinking organizations will have new opportunities to seize customer loyalty and wallet share. In the near future, consumers will use Skype via the Web, Windows Phone, or Xbox to communicate with businesses. As a result, companies that deploy a Microsoft Lync unified communications infrastructure will have the right tools to collaborate with customers across the same Skype video stream.
All B2C companies have a short window of opportunity to prepare their organizations to use video as a service differentiator, productivity booster, and revenue generator. Companies need to act now to gain a leadership position in customer service before their competitors leap onto this emerging communications channel. Doing so will allow your company to take customer service, communication, and collaboration to the next level because people who use Skype (850 million and growing fast) will want to communicate via video.
Microsoft Lync will provide the perfect integrated platform to allow your contact center (and the rest of the enterprise) to collaborate using Skype video and the rest of the UC capabilities such as presence, instant messaging, screen sharing, remote desktop access and more. These 850 million consumers are opening a new frontier for your organization.
Here are a few thoughts for how video can be used in the contact center:
Create a personal relationship with your agents and company. I don’t know about you, but I always feel like my challenges are going to be resolved faster if I can see and make a personal connection with someone who is taking my order or assisting me in some other way. Video allows this to happen without traveling from location to location.
Increase collections. I wonder how much collections would increase if you can look a debtor in the eye when he makes a payment promise? I have to think that collections would increase significantly because of this direct, more personal interaction. This goes back to creating a more intimate relationship.
Enable opportunities to up-sell. Have a new product or campaign? Use an on-hold video to inform customers about additional products and services. Get really creative by pushing a relevant video based on a caller’s purchase history. The potential here to drive revenue is unlimited. Your marketing department is going to love this.
Facilitate troubleshooting. Push a video to a caller that instructs them how solve their current challenge. Video can also help reduce call volume by allowing your contact center to push visual installation or assembly instructions to callers.
Support learning and agent development. Record and capture videos in your contact center to educate current and new agents on best practices and supervisor to agent training.
So how do companies prepare? At a recent conference, Microsoft proclaimed that “60 percent of enterprises are going to make a unified communications decision in 2012.” I encourage all CIOs and customer experience decision makers to investigate and deploy the Microsoft Lync platform now. Get your contact center and enterprise personnel comfortable using the vast array of unified communications capabilities now so video becomes a natural extension once Skype is incorporated. Implementing Lync in your organization is not that difficult, and in many cases you can recover your investment within six months. And last but not least, your employees will absolutely love the new capabilities.
Till next time.
Mike
“Inbound, Outbound, Successbound”
by Chris O'Brien on January 23rd, 2012
In a tug of war between resources and customer service, nobody wins. Organizations experiencing this uneasy push-pull may be struggling through periods of rapid growth, budget constraints, rapid turnover, or a change in roles brought on by a new strategic direction. Whatever your challenges, today’s consumers are unrelenting in their expectations of a consistently superior customer experience.
Businesses that continually put the customer first are those that manage to successfully
command consumer attention in the crowded marketplace, and are rewarded with long-term customer loyalty.
One such organization is Germany-based contact center outsourcer, 020-EPOS. Urged by its high-profile clients to proactively engage with customers in a more targeted and personalized manner, 020-EPOS needed a solution that would help it maximize outbound and lifecycle management strategies, while taking advantage of optimal choice and flexibility.
020-EPOS conducted an exhaustive review of all potential solution providers before selecting Aspect to develop its integrated call center solution.
One of 020-EPOS’ key requirements was the ability to reliably support, integrate and route multichannel contacts. At the same time, the solution needed to offer comprehensive, state-of-the-art dialing, callback and call blending capabilities, in order to ensure a smooth transition between inbound and outbound operations.
Another key consideration was 020-EPOS’ desire to route callbacks and returned emails to the same account teams that had initiated those contacts. As Georg Jansen, Managing Director at 020-EPOS explained:
“Outbound campaigns generate inbound contacts and inbound calls gather information for outbound. In order to be successful, both have to be managed professionally, that is why we act upon the maxim Inbound, Outbound, Successbound.”
020-EPOS was able to articulate its forward-thinking vision for customer experience through Aspect’s next-generation customer contact solution. This led to achievement of a number of specific benefits:
- Improved agent utilization due to soft blending capabilities and Workforce Optimization, which enables managers to adjust outbound/proactive activities when inbound call volume is high.
- Higher closing rates, resulting from inbound calls being routed back to the same teams that initiated the contact.
- Higher productivity through the use of skill-based teams rather than channel teams.
- Comprehensive, measurable quality assurance by applying defined quality criteria to all sequences of the customer dialogue.
Read the full 020-EPOS case study.
Aspect helps great organizations do what they do well, even better. What are the obstacles to your achievements right now? Are you in the middle of a tug of war between resources and customer experience? Tell us about it in the comments below.
The Right Tools for Next-Generation Customer Interaction
by Jane Hendricks on January 17th, 2012
Certain jobs require specific tools. For instance, if you see the cable guy coming and he doesn’t have his special bag of wire cutters, cable splitters, and signal testers, you’re probably not going to be watching your stories in HD tonight.
In the business world those tools are changing all the time. As new tools enter the consumer domain―for example, mobile devices and social media―the tools used by the business follow suit. This consumerization of IT is seen in the rapid adoption of the mobile devices, web-based communities, and even instant messaging within the walls of the enterprise.
The force that drives consumer adoption of new technology is a thirst for instant, real-time information and engagement. This anytime, anywhere access to information and people defines Consumer 2.0. As the tools that we use to connect to one another get smarter, our tolerance for slow, ineffective customer service, while already low, drops even further. As a consumer, I expect that if I am able to access competitive pricing and relevant suggestions for complimentary products while standing in line at a store, I will receive the same level of sophistication and intelligence when I have a question or issue.
The contact center has become the option that consumers tap only after all others have been exhausted—the last best hope for issue resolution. So after an individual has spent time on product pages, consumer forums, and the FAQ page of the company website, she is banking on the contact center to provide her with some information that she didn’t turn up on her exhaustive search and to be cognizant of what she has already reviewed.
This environment raises the bar for service agents and what they need to deliver to keep customers satisfied. That’s why some recent figures caught my eye.
Forrester released research findings on the adoption of customer service technologies in the contact center. According to analyst Kate Leggett:
“Our data shows that 55% of companies surveyed use knowledge management; 35% use real-time decisioning and another 40% are actively considering this technology; and, 34% use unified agent workspaces.”
While these numbers are moving in the right direction, they show that a large number of companies are sending their agents into the customer engagement space without the necessary tools. Some thoughts:
- Without knowledge management tools, agents don’t have the benefit of information generated by customer engagements. In practice, the result is multiple agents searching for the same answers to recurring questions—or worse, inconsistent answers to recurring questions—not exactly the model of productivity.
- Nearly two-thirds of companies aren’t using technology to route calls to the best agent based on expertise, performance, and other factors. When agent skills and customer needs are misaligned, you are gambling, and customer experience is the currency. In today’s environment, one negative interaction can irreparably damage the company-customer relationship, so why not lower those odds?
- Last, the majority of companies don’t give agents the benefit of a unified workspace or access to the same kind of tools they enjoy as consumers. Having to switch between screens, rely on phone calls and notes to pass information within their team, and use clunky interfaces not only increases handle times but severely reduces the likelihood of first-call resolution.
Over the past year, we’ve seen a growing number of companies awaken to the realization that effective customer engagement can deliver long-term benefits—happier consumers who spend more money on products and make recommendations to friends.
While the adoption of necessary functionality is lagging behind consumer expectations, the right technology can transform contact center operations. But there’s no time to waste.
Achieving True Performance Management in the Contact Center
by Doug Whitaker on January 6th, 2012
In recent posts, I have discussed the Workforce Optimization process in the contact center—specifically, how companies can create a cycle of continuous improvement in business processes—and the value it can generate for the entire organization. An essential component of this process is performance management software because it delivers the “action” for continuous improvement. This process is both guided (by suggesting best practices and corrective action) and automated (with applications triggering a process).
Before we discuss how companies should pursue performance management in the contact center, I’d like to clear up a common misperception. Too often, the term “performance management” is associated with either reports or dashboards generated by individual applications. In reality, these tools are just forms of performance reporting, not performance management. Reporting may provide a snapshot of progress against a goal, but users must take action based on this information to make any real progress. Unfortunately, once individual action is introduced, the overall process suffers because such efforts can vary widely from person to person and group to group.
Foundational elements of performance management
A comprehensive performance management solution helps remove this variability from the process in several ways.
1) Information from multiple sources is unified to create “one version of the truth,” removing the potential for different interpretations of the data.
2) Companies can measure performance, aggregate it across siloed groups, and then correlate with other metrics.
3) Contact centers can understand the impact that transactional measurements (such as handle time) has on customer-specific metrics (such as sales and satisfaction).
Communication and transparency are key
To support performance management efforts, companies must be able to share data with various stakeholders. This can be done in an automated fashion with alerts, forms, and e-mails rather than relying on the individual to look at the information and recognize the problem.
However, key performance indicators will vary based upon the stakeholder: an executive will want to see data on the contact center’s progress against corporate goals―such as profitability, cost structure, or forecast accuracy. Meanwhile, a lower-level supervisor will be more interested in team performance, handle times and individual adherence. Therefore, any solution must align to the needs of the individual role.
Translating data into action
The next step is to derive future improvement from the information. To achieve this goal, performance management must embrace business processes that are connected to results. This can be automated or guided.
For example, if a contact center agent has low customer satisfaction scores, an automated process can be launched that provides training to the employee on customer empathy. A guided approach may initiate a coaching session with a supervisor in which the supervisor is provided suggestions for remediation. The goal is to establish a standardized process to coach employees toward improvement, thus generating improved organizational effectiveness.
While successful performance management requires a coordinated effort at all levels of the organization, the results can be tremendous. Performance management helps companies identify best practices, which can result in a wide range of organizational benefits: increased productivity, higher revenues, and reduced costs.
Key 2011 Contact Center Trends—and What They Mean for 2012 and Beyond
by Tim Dreyer on December 29th, 2011
Over the past year, several trends emerged that will shape the customer engagement landscape for the foreseeable future. A number of factors, fueled by technology, have elevated the importance of the contact center, making it the hub of customer engagement efforts. Aspect’s executives and thought leaders weighed in on the new challenges facing companies as well as the steps they should take to position their contact center to serve today’s consumer.
The growing importance of the contact center
As consumer expectations continued to increase, progressive organizations came to the realization that the entire organization needed to be engaged in supporting customer engagement. This is easier said than done, as most companies have organizational structures that support 20th century business operations. Nancy Dobrozdravic weighed in on the strategy, tools, and organizational realignment that must occur to strengthen customer relationships:
- The Age of the Customer Elevates the Importance of the Contact Center
- If the Whole Organization Is Responsible for Marketing, What Role Should the Contact Center play?
- Marketing and IT Converge in the Contact Center
- Empowering the Entire Organization to Serve the Customer
Compliance with shifting contact center regulations
Technological advances are presenting new opportunities for contact centers, but existing laws on outbound calling and collections have created ambiguity and potential risk. Mike Sheridan and Lynne Levy shared their insight on how companies could make sense of the current regulatory environment and maintain the flexibility to adapt to changes:
- Ensuring Compliance in Contact Center Operations
- What contact centers need to know to stay compliant
- Features that every contact center should have in place to aid compliance
- How Companies Can Use Social Media in the Contact Center
Workforce optimization
Companies looked to the contact center not just to improve customer interactions and experience; they were also interested in achieving greater transparency and accountability to boost efficiency. In a series of posts, Doug Whitaker laid out the tools and functionality contact centers need to get more out of their workforce:
- How a High-Performing Contact Center Directly Supports Business Strategy
- Empowering the Contact Center with Vital Workforce Optimization Tools
- Four Critical Components of a Next-Generation Contact Solution
Be sure to check back to this blog throughout the year to get more insight on these and other topics. All the best for 2012.
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.