Home-Based Agents Don't Degrade Quality

Contact centers are not quite as "central" as they used to be. The old cliche of a big room full of representatives handling phone calls is starting to come apart, thanks to technological developments and to the critical need for new sources of labor. Remote agents and virtual centers are a small but growing component of the industry, especially in the more mature markets.

The fundamental platforms in contact centers have turned so quickly to IP that the availability of remote agents has grown faster than the actual adoption of that staffing model. One reason for the delay is the cultural hesitation among contact center managers about assuring the quality of customer interactions, and the ability to actively manage the staff from afar. In practice, it turns out that these fears are largely unfounded: managers see into each transaction and each agent's performance just as well as they could in a traditional brick-and-mortar center. There is not as much tension between adopting a remote staffing model and maintaining quality as many thought there would be.

To a large degree, remote agents depend on the presence of an IP-ACD infrastructure to connect them to the mother organization. A recent research study pegged the portion of IP-enabled seats in contact centers at just short of 50%, and expected to cross that important threshold in the next few years. The research has found at the same time, multi-sourcing, that is creating a mixed environment including multiple outsourcers or a mix of outsourced and in-house agents, will rise as IP adoption makes contact center virtualization easier to accomplish. Such virtualization will lead the growth of remote agents within enterprises, picking up significantly by the end of the year . The population of remote agents - agents who are part of a call center's infrastructure but don't work inside the walls of the center – is currently between 100 and 150 thousand people.

There are three compelling business cases for setting some part of the agent pool off-site, either in small virtual centers or fully remote.

First and foremost is cost control. Evidence shows that agents stay longer in their jobs, and have higher satisfaction levels, when there is flexibility in how they are deployed. In some very large companies, they have built their entire customer contact workforces out of remote agents because agents who work from home are clearly more vested in maintaining their jobs and their employment status. And as you reduce turnover, you can retain your most able and motivated staff and your costs for new-hire training and recruitment go down.

The second business case is continuity. Remote agents aren't affected when your physical center becomes unavailable; this is a benefit that's often discovered after the fact, rather than factored into the initial decision to decentralize the agent pool.

A third benefit, often neglected is the acquired quality improvement from using a single queue irrespective of the many separate call handling locations. Contact center managers can basically administer the setup from any location with a virtual model. Customers have a much more constant interaction than they do on centers are operating semi-independently under different metrics and management.

Multi-Channel Customer Service

Multi-channel customer service means service consistency across channels. A high-value customer with a high service-level effectiveness, who received top priority in the phone call center (for example, a hold time of less than one minute), would receive the same high priority in email processing (for example, a response within thirty minutes). Furthermore, service agents, regardless of channels and sourcing model (in-house or outsourced), would have access to the same customer profile, the same knowledge content, and the same, unified history of communications across those channels. This approach would guarantee that customers get the same answers to the same questions across channels, agents, and even service modes (self-service or assisted service), and get the right service levels across channels.

Are you finding that a multi-channel approach in the contact center industry is better meeting your customer's various needs? As technology progresses, will the phone be but one of many mediums used?

Yes, this is mandatory but the technology should be very easy to use and comparable with traditional e-mail accounts or have better features other than detailed statistics. A multi-tiered highly targeted approach allows for personalization that increases resolution rates, encourages loyalty and leads to additional up sells and cross sells. Most definitely as our customers and competitors alike are moving forward so quickly that we feel offering a multi channel approach gives us the edge. Our customers’ requests for handling multiple channels is growing every day and we feel that with our ever increasing pool of talented, specialized staff we are now able to utilise their skills to the optimum levels. Innovation is crucial in our business and we find that by providing this service offering that we are always striving to be the best.

It’s better for a small group of customers. However, the bulk of customers prefer the phone. To make this a full success the customer needs support, education and encouragement to use different channels of support. One sales example: there was a mix-up in customer communication when a sales agent tried responding to a call at the same time as a chat request. The phone call log was affected worse than the chat, though both issues were addressed.

Communications channels are changing people, which they are no longer using the phone to achieve resolution to customer service issues. We have seen a steep rise in other 'channel' communication and expect these to rise further. In today's fast paced society, individuals want access to information quickly and they want access to this information using the medium of their choice. The storm multi-channel contact center allows customers to do just that, providing a better customer experience. We have different folks from different demographics that include rural, urban, older and younger generations. They all tend to do things differently and we are here to meet them and their needs.

Choosing the Best CRM Business Solution

Today, companies are seeking ways to ensure that they will realize a valuable return on investment from their CRM system. To achieve this, companies must have a clear understanding of what information they want to gather and how the CRM system will be used to capture and analyze data to make further improvements in customer service.

Most companies understand at some level that a CRM is not really about "managing" customers but rather about putting the customer at the center of the organization. Customer loyalty increases and business benefits accrue in many tangible ways, in providing additional value to customers from increased sales to customer continuity. Companies should seek a comprehensive overview of how a CRM can benefit the corporation, including how it interrelates with other initiatives. The planning and installation processes of a CRM system are of critical importance. All customers touch points and their supporting business processes should be incorporated into the system. This involves not only linking with the call center but also integrating with other applications, such as e-business and back office applications including financials, production, shipping, logistics, and corporate databases. Merging with other applications provides the opportunity to leverage existing technology investments while promoting a true 360-degree view of customer interactions across the entire organization.

Choosing a Business Solution

In choosing a solution, taking serious consideration should be given to how quickly, easily, and seamlessly integration with other applications can be achieved. Some CRM systems provide better ways of integrating third-party back-office applications through an integration module. By using the module, integration time can be reduced by as much as 80 percent.

A module not only allow to view information from third-party or custom applications, but also the system administrator and to create and modify records from these databases directly into the CRM system. A few simple steps are required – links are created by logging on to a database, choosing the unique fields (such as account numbers) that will be the same in both systems, and selecting the fields that users will see in custom folder tabs. Data can then be viewed and manipulated in real time, avoiding the need for cumbersome import and export routines or other costly and time consuming custom solutions. By enabling the consistent linkage between applications and the CRM system, employees can click a folder tab to access information from integrated back-office applications such as order management, enterprise resource planning, supply chain management, finance, logistics, or other verticals. Also the automated data set updates to back-office applications considerably reduce unnecessary duplicate data entry and facilitate data consistency with disparate applications throughout the enterprise.

Whether your customer service and support representatives are responsive, courteous, and accurate will influence not only your customers’ decision of whether to buy from you in the future but also the feedback and recommendations they provide to their friends and business associates. Customer interaction is very important and impacts their attitudes toward your company and resulting buying decisions, so it is important to enable your employees to be knowledge-workers.

In order to be embraced by employees, the CRM system must make operational sense, fitting in with sales and customer care staff tasks and processes rather than requiring meaningless external predetermined business processes. However, CRM initiatives provide an excellent opportunity to step back and evaluate business goals, objectives, and the business processes that support them and to implement important changes to better meet your company’s changing needs.

Selecting a CRM vendor requires a clear vision and key metrics of what needs to be accomplished through a CRM initiative. Although not the only approach, an integrated CRM suite provided by one vendor will definitely help reduce the chaos of implementing multiple vendors with disparate solutions. An implementation comprised of well-integrated CRM components regardless of which type of approach is taken will achieve the promises of a customer relationship management initiative.

The Versatility of Speech Analytics

Speech analytics has become the next step for contact centers looking to supplement their quality monitoring solutions with more powerful technology. Contact centers in today's economy provide an essential differentiation point for competitive industries as customers decide between companies with similar products based on the level of customer service and the ability to resolve seemingly intractable problems in one interaction. Speech analytics helps meet customer expectations as by increasing awareness of agent interactions and resolving potential problem areas before they spread and create lasting damage. The power of speech analytics can be evaluated in two major areas: the breadth of its impact on contact center operations and the nature of its implementation.

The Scope of Speech Analytics

Speech analytics increases control and knowledge of contact center operations for larger organizations by assisting the analyzation an otherwise unmanageable number of conversations. It can address critical issues such as achievement of campaign goals, script adherence and agent skills. Management can set an indicator for key performance for agents and use speech analytics to evaluate their fulfilment.

In addition with measurement of agent output improvement, speech analytics can also evaluate customer input such as opinions of the company’s products, frequently asked questions and other reoccurring issues. Speech analytics can also help to evaluate the overall success of a campaign and help management make adjustments in a timely manner. The powerful nature of speech analytics derives from its ability to automate categorization of calls, but its overall capability varies depending on the form of speech analytics used.

Types of Speech Analytics

The system of speech analytics can be divided into the three technologies used to categorize calls. The most fundamental, keyword spotting, is dependent on the words or phrases selected by contact center managers as essential to evaluating customer interactions. These words can be used to find relevant calls for best practices training or to evaluate almost any issue spotted by certain specific phrases. Set up and configuration of keyword spotting is generally affordable for medium-sized contact centers and will quickly generate a positive return on investment. Phonetic indexing provides a more powerful form of speech analytics, but it requires more detailed processing to create a database of phonemes. It uses much more disk space, but it allows faster and more extensive searches once the translations have been compiled. Finally, speech-to-text transcription symbolizes the most sophisticated type of speech analytics. The system must be trained to recognize specific words, and it requires a high level of accuracy. This makes for an expensive set-up period, but once the technology has been implemented, it allows ongoing text mining as your needs evolve.

One day, speech analytics will include even more powerful features such as age or gender spotting. But for many organizations, it is essential today to streamline customer service and provide a competitive edge.