Managing the Holiday Rush in the Contact Center
by Christine OBrien on December 19th, 2012
That time of year is well underway: when familiar jingles inhabit the radio, all your cups are red and white, and the scent of pine is ever-present. Yes, it’s the holiday season, and while you may have already been flying high on holiday spirit for quite some time, the contact center seems to bear the brunt of the magical mayhem.
With the holidays upon us, increased consumer behavior will lead to a spike in contact center activity. Thanks to the rise of mobile shopping, and the phenomenon that is Cyber Monday, the holidays now represent one of the busiest times of the year for contact centers—not only are more people shopping and consuming this time of year, and therefore finding themselves in need of the contact center, but more people are getting gifts that they may or may not want or having service issues or reasons to reach out to the contact center.
Now, while painful, these spikes in customer volume actually present companies with the opportunity to uncover weaknesses in their contact center strategy. For instance, take multichannel contact: are you able to provide your customers with top-notch service in their preferred channel? Or what about workforce optimization: do you have the flexibility to integrate remote agents or adjust your scheduling to accommodate the season’s heavy traffic?
What’s more, on top of the mere increase in volume, contact centers must deal with people who are more stressed during the holiday season (for reference, think about your own Thanksgiving or Christmas dinners). As a result, first-call resolution is an even more crucial metric than usual—because as the clock ticks down toward the holidays, people become much less forgiving of inefficient operations and repeated calls.
With these raised expectations, contact centers must ensure they are prepared for the ensuing onslaught of customers—both in terms of software and their agent pool—and capable of providing fast turnarounds and better performance during this high-stress, heavy-volume time. Customers will be calling, emailing, Tweeting, chatting, and Facebooking any and all comments, questions, or complaints that enter their minds. Only those contact centers equipped for such efficiency are going to be able to weather the impending storm with flying colors.
The holiday stress test can be a valuable proving ground for the contact center, with the lessons you learn in December informing what strategic upgrades you make in January.
What is your company doing to manage the holiday rush? Let us know in the comment section.
Chris O’Brien, Marketing Communications Writer, develops and designs content for a wide range of Aspect communications and social media applications. She continually monitors consumer trends to ensure that marketing messaging aligns with industry best practices and meets customer expectations.
Read more about managing customer expectations during the holidays:
- Kicking off Holiday Sales with Black Friday – Is Your Contact Center Ready?
- Social Shopping
- WFO: What to Do When the Back Office is the New Front Office
Lessons in Call Center Service from the Storm
by Tim Dreyer on December 12th, 2012
It was not long ago that Hurricane Sandy stormed in off the Atlantic Coast and wrecked havoc on New York City, New Jersey, and much of the rest of the Northeast. The images on television were harrowing—flooded subways, the famed Atlantic City boardwalk in tatters, and large swaths of powerless buildings that left much of the City That Never Sleeps in darkness.
And while we can never forget the lives lost due to the storm, incredibly the Northeast is now returning to some degree of normal. It’s now even possible to look back on the event as something of a landmark moment in modern communication history.
When media outlets, governmental departments, and companies were looking to disseminate information, they turned to social media. People used their smartphones to keep in touch with the world—be it through phone calls, texts, Facebook status, or the latest updates from their news apps. The Red Cross launched a relief campaign that made it easy for people to donate by text. And Twitter was abuzz with photos, videos, and breaking news—not to mention Newark Mayor Corey Booker, who used the platform to offer personal help to those affected by the storm.
Sandy demonstrated that social media has now become such a crucial and integrated channel in all of our lives that it is viewed as a trusted and viable tool in emergency settings. As 1to1 Media’s Anna Papachristos wrote in a recent story, “Not only have we seen the power communication has when keeping us connected, but these avenues―social media, text messaging, and mobile devices―have the power to bolster our strength as a nation and bring us together when hardship hits… Despite our focus on social media and mobile devices as sources for customer insight, these channels have become an integral part of our society and will only become more prominent and vital as time progresses.”
So now that we’ve seen how the evolving world of communications helped shape the response to Sandy, what can organizations learn to help prepare crucial customer service support in the face of a crisis?
Well, for starters, companies should be prepared to tap pools of remote agents to fill in for those agents stuck in areas affected by natural disasters. They should also be certain to implement workforce optimization tools that grant contact center managers more flexibility in adjusting to changes in the work environment—say, a real-time ramp-up of agents and on-the-fly schedule changes in light of a crisis.
Being proactive in your preparation can help save you time and maximize your resources—not to mention leave your customers satisfied at a time when they may need you the most.
Spreading Contact Center Values Across the Organization
by Christine OBrien on November 26th, 2012
When people think of the contact center and its role within an organization, they most likely think of it as a last line of defense. In a sense, this is true—the contact center is the place where a company can both salvage and improve its relationship with its customers—but it’s also so much more.
When a contact center is functioning optimally, it connects the whole enterprise.
In fact, the contact center just may cover more ground than any other part of an organization. As a result, its values can extend to other areas of the business as well:
1. The contact center is a model in how to manage chaos. A high-functioning contact center can tackle just about any situation, its workers capable of putting customers in touch with the right people to solve any problem at any given time. As Jeff Shearer put it in a recent article for Contact Center Pipeline, the contact center specializes in “…the art of pulling together all the moving parts to bring order to what otherwise would be a very chaotic business.”
2. In order to do his or her job well, a contact center staffer must understand the customer and the business. This provides direct insights into the company that can pay off down the road. “(T)o do their job effectively, he says, “…contact center analysts have to stay on top of a variety of communications to be ready for questions that arise when there are changes to systems that they support.”
3. The contact center’s ultimate role is to add value for the customer and the business, not just address the needs of the customer. In this regard, it involves the customer and the business in equal roles that are unprecedented in other areas of the organization. “They know their customers’ busy seasons, the applications they use, and the interdependencies of those applications,” Shearer says. “They also develop a keen sense of ‘who’s who’ within the firm, how decisions are made, which teams execute upon those decisions, and what the impact is on other parts of the firm.” Can you imagine how valuable these skills and knowledge would be if they were shared across the company? It may be why Shearer argues that contact center staffers make for such reliable employees at various posts throughout their careers.
This may also have something to do with the recent shift among leading companies toward instilling customer service values across the enterprise, as well as the increasing involvement of subject matter experts in issue resolution. The benefits of such a shift are readily apparent: not only do customers get better service (which makes for increased satisfaction), but employees from across the organization gain those same firsthand insights from customers that are typically gathered by contact center agents.
Of course, a contact center is only as good as its staffers, and an effective contact center enables those employees to do their job as quickly and as easily as possible, with peak functionality and adaptability.
Are you a contact center worker who has gone on to work in other parts of an organization? Feel free to share your stories below.
Chris O’Brien, Marketing Communications Writer, develops and designs content for a wide range of Aspect communications and social media applications. She continually monitors consumer trends to ensure that marketing messaging aligns with industry best practices and meets customer expectations.
Read more about optimizing your contact center:
- How to Build a Customer-Centric Culture in Your Contact Center
- Building a Next-Generation Contact Center with SharePoint
- Collaboration in the Contact Center Delivers Improved Performance
Kicking off Holiday Sales with Black Friday – Is Your Contact Center Ready?
by Christine OBrien on November 21st, 2012
While most of us in the U.S. are baking pies and looking forward to hours of family and football on Thanksgiving tomorrow, contact center supervisors will likely be lining up the predicted spike in workforce that coincides with the annual shopping event dubbed Black Friday.
And so begins the careful holiday balancing act – ensuring adequate customer service coverage while accommodating agents’ time off requests.
As every manager knows, workforce scheduling around this time of year can be a challenge. Employee morale often hinges on allowing adequate time off for celebrations with family and friends, whereas customer expectations are also a critical consideration. Overseeing and approving scheduling requests like these can easily take up a large part of a manager’s day. This was one of the driving factors toward the improvements we made recently in our latest release of Aspect Workforce Management, which features improved scheduling control and flexibility. Our goal was to create an easy-to-use, self-service environment for both premise and virtual agents that would relieve managers of the administrative burden by – among other features and improvements – enabling employees to submit time off requests and validate their existing schedules.
Self-service scheduling frees administrative time for a greater focus on agent productivity and customer service activities, empowering your staff with the ability to:
- Directly view and select available trial schedules
- Log in and make scheduling selections during assigned windows of time
- Easily select preferred schedules and quickly release unwanted time back into the agent pool
Another perk for managers is the ability to provide “priority access” to the self-service scheduling pool based on performance, enabling managers to offer this as an incentive to top performers. Preferred scheduling can be a significant performance motivator, especially around the holidays.
Adopting a centralized and comprehensive approach to staffing is key to planning and budgeting for the right number of agents, back office staff and experts with the right skills at the right time. Just this week, we held a webinar with Alaska Airlines on how to make best use of workforce management applications like Aspect Workforce Management 7.5 to simplify and enhance this process with advanced forecasting and scheduling tools. If you missed the webinar, you can view the replay online.
With the busy holidays upon us, it’s important to remember that every interaction with a customer is an opportunity to provide great service. Agents who feel valued and empowered to make scheduling decisions are more likely to put forth the extra effort required to deliver exceptional customer support and forge a lasting customer relationship.
Wishing your business the very “Blackest” of Black Fridays and you and your family the very happiest of times this Thanksgiving holiday season!
Chris O’Brien, Marketing Communications Writer, develops and designs content for a wide range of Aspect communications and social media applications. She continually monitors consumer trends to ensure that marketing messaging aligns with industry best practices and meets customer expectations.
Read more about effectively managing your workforce:
- How to Build a Customer-Centric Culture in Your Contact Center
- Is Telecommuting a Good Idea?
- Five Steps to Better Visibility, Discipline and Control in the Contact Center
How to Build a Customer-Centric Culture in Your Contact Center
by Kathleen Schroeder on November 19th, 2012
Why would a focus on employee empowerment actually help turn your company into the customer-centric enterprise that drives results?
During our recent webinar at the Virtual Contact Center Conference, we answered just that question. Ours was only one of many fascinating presentations from industry experts and a wide range of professionals in different fields and areas of expertise. Overall, the conference was an enlightening discussion on the opportunities we all have ahead of us for optimizing every customer contact.
Our presentation, Empowerment without Compromise: Building a Working Customer-Centric Culture in the Contact Center, specifically focused on employee empowerment as a means to those optimized customer contacts. (If you weren’t able to attend live, you can watch the replay now online.) Contact centers often face the same challenges—overmanaged agents and overworked supervisors—that lead to high employee turnover and low work quality. This turnover rate can lead to significant costs for an employer, running anywhere from 25-250% of a position’s annual salary.
Instead of increasing demands, we challenge you to implement systems that empower your employees.
Workforce optimization technologies provide a foundation for agents that allow flexible work-at-home options, scheduling control, targeted learning and coaching opportunities, and a greater sense of teamwork. The technology foundation is made up of a few key components, including:
- Self-service scheduling and flexible schedule trading
- Common business rules for schedule modification and training
- Holistically charted personal and team performance statistics
An empowered workforce is one that is more engaged, motivated, and productive. A culture of empowerment can also go a long way in creating a compelling reason for your agents to stay on the team.
The truth is in the numbers. When Alaska Airlines implemented these changes, they saw a 4.9% gain in productivity.
Alaska Airlines then had the capacity to hire 12 extra full-time employees that handled an additional 9 calls a day. The company also realized a significant cost savings in decreased real estate space—50% at one location!
Do you have a success story to share about empowering your workforce? Tell us about it in the comments!
Learn more about Aspect’s performance management solutions.
Kathleen Schroeder, Product Marketing Specialist, has over 25 years’ experience representing the voice of the customer through global event presentations, webinars and integrated multi-national campaigns for numerous verticals ranging from education to transportation and tourism to telecommunications. As a member of Aspect’s Product Marketing team, Kathleen creates customer-facing programs and content to bring the value of next generation customer contact solutions to various market segments, while developing global customer initiatives, helping to launch new analytical solutions, and helping our customers deliver on the promise of excellent customer service.
Read more about optimizing your workforce:
- Is Telecommuting a Good Idea?
- Aligning Your Social CRM and Workforce Optimization Strategies
- WFO Outlook: Trends and Technologies in WFO
Are You Sabotaging Your Own Communication Efforts?
by Christine OBrien on November 5th, 2012
How many times have you asked a family member, “don’t forget” to do something? How many times did they end up forgetting to do that exact thing you reminded them about?
Communication challenges are common only at home but in the workplace as well.
It can be frustrating, but the problem may not be them. It may actually be the words you chose to use in the conversation. Pamela Jett, CSP and presenter at Aspect’s first webinar in the ASUGA Educational Series, insists that the words we choose to use and the words we choose to lose can immediately boost our communication skills. By employing negative combinations of words—which our brains can’t process as readily—we’ve effectively just told the other person exactly what to forget.
Remarkable communication is positive, inquisitive, future focused, and emotionally intelligent.
You can listen to Jett’s in-depth discussion of these four elements of effective communication by accessing the replay of this webinar, Words Matter: Effective Communication in the Contact Center. Jett’s discussion starts from the bottom up, knowing that it is only by focusing our energies on becoming more positive and proactive that we can deliver the high-class results our customers want. After we’ve reset our attitude, Jett asks us all to be more inquisitive in our conversations as this shows us as more open and approachable. By focusing on the future, conversations become productive instead of critical. However, it’s easy to forget all of this advice when you’re in the middle of an exasperating call, so Jett cautions all of us to develop our emotional intelligence.
Use practical strategies to immediately recognize, understand, and manage your emotions in positive and constructive ways.
- Learn which words to use and which words to lose. Some words to put on your “Stop Using” list include the word “should,” because it can so easily trigger defensiveness in others. “You don’t understand” is another phrase that can turn a positive conversation into an argument.
- Instead, start using more positive modes of speech, such as using powerful phrases like “I would recommend” instead of “should.”
- Finally, ask others to “Please remember…” rather than asking them not to forget.
Register today for the next session in the ASUGA Educational Webinar series, Great Goal Setting Strategies, presented by Karla Brandau on November 8th at 12:00 PM EST.
Chris O’Brien, Marketing Communications Writer, develops content for a wide range of Aspect communications and social media applications. She continually monitors consumer trends to ensure that marketing messaging aligns with industry best practices and meets customer expectations.
Read more on workforce innovation:
- Five Steps to Better Visibility, Discipline and Control in the Contact Center
- Building a Next-Generation Contact Center with SharePoint
- Agent 2.0: Why Contact Centers Should Embrace, Not Fear, Enterprise Collaboration
The Link Between Customer Experience and Stock Price
by Christine OBrien on October 31st, 2012
A recent study by CFI group finds that customer satisfaction is a strong indicator of stock performance. Investments in American companies with high customer satisfaction ratings yielded gains of an astounding 390 percent, versus a 7 percent loss by the S&P 500 over the same time 12-year period.
What this seems to indicate is the lines that once distinguished customer experience data from hard, business-world metrics are becoming blurred, if not irrelevant.
Over the years, brand perception and customer loyalty have become increasingly valuable metrics in the business world. While those on the front lines have long understood the impact of improving customer loyalty, it took some time for executives to accept that improvements in these areas deliver a tangible (and favorable) economic return. Sure, everyone seemed to be in favor of increasing customer loyalty, but when it came to allocating resources, other priorities often won out.
These days, the new hot metric is customer satisfaction. For much of the past decade, the role of customer experience in reinforcing brand perception and consumer loyalty has become much more clear. In fact, in a 2012 IBM survey, CMOs identified customer service as a top priority. But even when organizations knew the value of a positive customer experience, efforts to make an enterprise-wide commitment—and seeing a concrete return on investment—often seemed too formidable an obstacle to overcome. Of course, there were those extreme examples of customer service champions such as Zappos or Apple. But more often than not, these companies were viewed as outliers rather than trendsetters.
Claes Fornell, founder of the American Customer Satisfaction Index and a professor at the University of Michigan, says it’s no coincidence that customer satisfaction and stock prices are linked. “Companies with highly satisfied customers generate superior returns because customer satisfaction is critical for repeat business, and that type of business is usually very profitable,” Fornell said in a statement. “That is, loyal customers tend to be highly profitable as long as their loyalty comes from their satisfaction and not because prices are low.”
Acknowledging the existence of a problem is the first step toward developing a solution. As we’ve been discussing on this blog, a successful customer engagement strategy is reliant upon enhanced technology platforms and functionality. So with customer expectations constantly increasing, and new communications channels and devices emerging every day, companies can’t afford to wait to enhance their contact center capabilities.
Has your organization made any efforts to improve the customer experience? Feel free to share in the comments below—we’d love to hear from you.
A Two-Step Process for Evaluating On-Demand Considerations
by Wayne Lockhart on October 15th, 2012
As contact centers evolved from call centers, the need to manage an increasing number of contact channels has driven the creation of a highly complex operating environment. In fact, it is this complexity that is now making cloud-based solutions a viable option for many businesses.
Now, with contact centers striving to remain agile and responsive to changing customer demands, an on-demand approach is seen as offering a focused, skilled operating environment.
Because complex contact center technology is the core competency of on-demand offerings, businesses can take advantage of these lower-cost, lower-risk alternatives as a way to implement new solutions. In addition, businesses operating at higher volumes and with more sophisticated needs are also turning to the cloud to expand the infrastructure capacity of their existing on-premise solutions.
Up-front planning always results in greater payoff. Hosted solutions are no exception.
Before developing an on-demand roadmap, businesses need to identify potential challenges and specific objectives such as the appropriate mix of premise-based and cloud-based solutions, the timeframe for transitioning and any concerns of department stakeholders that exist outside of the contact center, including IT and financial personnel.
At its core, the on-demand planning phase can be broken down into two fundamental steps.
Step One: Identify the key factors driving the business need
Understanding the triggers for the infrastructure or application refresh will help determine the scope of the new hosted deployment. For example, is it motivated by an existing product lifecycle event? Is it being prompted by the launch of new products or services? Is it part of a process optimization initiative?
In addition, consider asking yourself these five questions to determine whether a hosted solution is the right fit for your business.
Step Two: Explore the dependencies between contact center systems
As mentioned earlier, systems in the contact center environment are complex and frequently share complicated relationships and interdependencies. Once these have been mapped, perform a cost-benefit analysis of various applications that are candidates for cloud delivery. The applications with the strongest business case should be your first choice for cloud deployment.
If you’re interested in knowing more, please join us Tuesday, October 30 for the free webinar Strategic Considerations for On-Demand Contact Centers with special guest Brendan Read of Frost & Sullivan. Register now, and make plans to attend!
WFO Outlook: Trends and Opportunities in WFO
by Jane Hendricks on September 25th, 2012
In its early days, WFO was traditionally a means of managing labor costs which mind you, is still a very important and a major benefit of WFO to the contact center. However, the market is moving away from treating the contact center as purely cost center. As organizations strive to differentiate from their competitors based on the customer experience they deliver, WFO’s value shifts from being a way of controlling the number of people needed, to being a solution that can help an organization grow customer value and build loyalty with every customer interaction.
As the nature of interaction gets more complex, there is an increasing reliance on experts that within the enterprise – those human resources that have the knowledge to fulfill a customer request or address a question that the customer was not able to answer through the many self-service channels already available (web, social, discussion boards, etc.) This means that the discipline of WFO – ensuring that the right person is there and can meet customer needs – will need to expand beyond the contact center.
At the same time, the traditional call center is transforming into a true contact center where interactions are not bound by voice alone but may span multiple channels and multiple work types. WFO technologies need to adapt to better address these more flexible work streams and processes. So as the contact center becomes more integrated into the overall strategy of the enterprise, managers and supervisors are called on to do more high value, strategic tasks and cannot afford to be mired in traditional, manual administration minutia.
To accommodate this growth, employee self-service tools become increasingly important to provide employees with the empowerment over their own work without compromising service delivery. These tools also free supervisors and managers from mundane, manual administrative tasks. They are also more and more valuable as home-based agents/remote-agents become a go-to resource which helps create a better, more empowering environment for all agents. The amount of turnover within the contact center remains significant – even within this economy – and creating a more empowering environment can help an organization retain its agents and avoid the costs of turnover.
With the expansion of the contact center, data management becomes an even greater challenge. Advanced analytics is one way organizations can synthesize the amount of data that is captured from interactions and link it to business results. Revenue generation and customer retention are just a couple of functional areas looking to their contact center as a strategic asset for their customer service strategy. Analytics are moving from siloed environments and disciplines – i.e. performance separated from quality, and both separated from speech and text – to an analytical approach that can cut across the siloes and present a single, actionable view into customers and the resources who serve them.
The principles and technologies of WFO are increasingly adopted outside the contact center – specifically in back office functions that are adjacent to the contact center and where customer requests are fulfilled. As interactions become more complex and there is an increased drive for making sure that customer need is met right – the first time – organizations are looking to harness the discipline and customer-centric approach of the contact center across all resources that are part of the customer service delivery.
In part two of the WFO Outlook, I’ll talk about the Do’s and Don’ts of WFO Optimization.
Building a Next-Generation Contact Center with SharePoint
by Christine OBrien on August 23rd, 2012
UPDATE: To access the report, please click to http://www.aspect.com/aberdeen and fill in the brief registration. Feel free to let me know in the comments if you have any trouble, and I’ll be happy to help.
According to research conducted by Aberdeen Group, there is a notable tendency among best-in-class businesses to use Microsoft SharePoint as a component in their contact center strategy. Interestingly, among the businesses that Aberdeen surveyed, SharePoint users are 50% more likely than other businesses to employ a collaboration strategy that leverages a “single source of truth” to provide diverse business groups, departments and locations with a definitive view of customer data. This single source of truth then becomes a critical factor in business decision making processes.
The figure below illustrates some of the key benefits the report reveals. Click here to register and download a full copy of the complete report, The 2012 Guide to Building a Next Generation Contact Center through Microsoft SharePoint.
