Tag: Contact Center

High Definition Voice, a Boon to the Contact Center – Really?

by , posted in Communicate
Ken Landoline
Ken Landoline

Summary Bullets:

  • As VoIP and SIP become commonplace in the contact center environment, high definition voice is a potentially appealing enhancement to improve agent/customer communications, which some believe would result in shortened call times and therefore reduced phone bills.
  • However, with complaints about customer service escalating, there seem to be more pressing customer service issues to tackle that cannot be solved by simply broadening the bandwidth of the voice connection in order to improve audio quality.

Recently I have been reading and hearing a great deal about how high definition (HD) voice is, or soon will be, changing the world of voice services. The major cellular carriers are planning to introduce HD voice on their mobile phone connections in the coming year, the new Apple iPhone 5 has HD voice capabilities, audio and videoconferencing providers are already offering HD voice as an enhancement to their teleconferencing portfolios, and several landline carriers (at least those outside the U.S.) are providing HD capabilities on their public phone networks. However, for HD voice to really make a difference the connection must be HD quality (between 50 Hz on the low end and 7 kHz or higher on the high end) from end-to-end, as opposed to standard voice lines that transmit between 300 Hz and 3.4 kHz. Therefore, it is not likely that customers calling into a contact center today can be connected via an end-to-end HD voice connection and that HD voice will improve the quality of the conversation between customers and agents. Continue reading “High Definition Voice, a Boon to the Contact Center – Really?” →

Contact Center Investments Make Good Cents

by Jeremiah Caron, posted in IT Leader
Jerry Caron
Jerry Caron

Summary Bullets:                

  • Customer service in general and contact centers in particular play a crucial role in the health and image of virtually any business
  • The contact center market is stepping up with innovations to meet growing demands, and IT departments and business leaders should carefully examine their level of investment given the importance

The annual global spend on advertising, or customer acquisition, is roughly $500 billion. The customer relationship management (CRM), or cross-selling, market stands at approximately $50 billion. The contact center slice of the pie is $9 billion. These figures were trotted out at last week’s Genesys G-Force conference in Barcelona by the company’s top sales executive in an effort to make the case that perhaps enterprises need to adjust their priorities a bit. That Genesys—one of the contact center market leaders—would make that argument is hardly surprising, but given the irrefutable influence that customer service in general and contact center activities in particular have on brands, the fundamental point sits on a solid foundation despite the self-serving platform upon which is was delivered. Continue reading “Contact Center Investments Make Good Cents” →

Harnessing Big Data in the Contact Center: A Slow but Worthwhile Struggle

by , posted in Communicate
K. Landoline
K. Landoline

Summary Bullets:

  • Contact centers have been dealing with the ‘big data’ issue for years as they strive to develop the elusive 360-degree view of the customer across an assortment of structured and unstructured data collected from billions of customer interactions each year.
  • Despite a long history of dealing with big data, there has been little progress in utilizing the information to optimize operations in most contact centers, and thanks to a lack of centralized management capabilities, data silos continue to be a major hindrance to the development of the ‘intelligent enterprise.’

Managers dealing with contact centers on a daily basis are perplexed with the industry’s sudden fixation with big data since they have been obsessed with the issue for more than thirty years in their voice call centers.  Now, the shift to the multichannel contact center, through which recorded phone calls, e-mails, faxes, Web chats, social media, and survey feedback data flow, makes the challenge even more complex and unwieldy.  How to deal with the volume, velocity, and variety of data moving through the multichannel contact center today and use the information to improve enterprise operations is a discussion worth having if we ever hope to reach the dream of the much-discussed ‘intelligent enterprise.’ Continue reading “Harnessing Big Data in the Contact Center: A Slow but Worthwhile Struggle” →

Is It Time to Abandon Your Interactive Voice Response System?

by , posted in Communicate

K. Landoline
K. Landoline

Summary Bullets:

  • Customer complaints regarding the IVR interface with customer service are so plentiful that many customers and companies wonder if they may not be achieving the purposes for which they were designed: to speed up service, reduce company costs, and improve customer satisfaction and longevity.
  • More intelligent IVRs and the expanding use of smartphones/tablets by consumers have the potential to alleviate today’s major IVR frustrations.  They can eliminate unnecessary interactions and enable visual IVR functionality allowing customers to navigate more easily through menu choices. 

I recently saw the results of a study done by New York University that said 49% of the people surveyed believed that use of interactive voice response (IVR) systems in customer service environments benefits neither the customer nor the company.  Only 15% of respondents felt that, as customers, they received any benefit from this common self-service tool being used by enterprises of all sizes today.  With this negative perception of IVRs being so widespread, you may wonder what is driving the growing use of the technology.  Well, to be honest, there are a few benefits to both customers and companies that originally brought IVRs to prominence in customer care circles.  First of all, IVRs enable companies to extend service hours without having to staff expensive live contact centers on a 24×7 basis.  Secondly, they do reduce queue times, because it has been shown that approximately two-thirds of calls coming into contact centers are fairly simple requests that effective IVRs can handle very well, freeing up live agents to take more complex calls requiring human interaction.  Finally, IVRs provide a sense of privacy or anonymity to consumers who may be calling to verify they are overdrawn on their checking account or late on a payment – facts they may not want to discuss with a live person.  So, don’t throw away your IVR just yet. Continue reading “Is It Time to Abandon Your Interactive Voice Response System?” →

The Smartphone and the Tablet: Catalysts of Change in Mobile Customer Care

by , posted in Mobilize

K. Landoline
K. Landoline

Summary Bullets:

  • Today, there are more mobile phones in service in the U.S. than there are people.  It is estimated that 40% of these phones are smartphones, and this percentage will likely double in the next four to five years.
  • Smartphones and tablets offer a broad range of functionality that will improve the mobile customer service offerings of enterprise contact centers.  To date, contact center application providers have only scratched the surface of the many possibilities.

In my December 22, 2011 blog entry, “Step Two in Mobilizing Your Contact Center: Create a Continuous and Seamless Customer Experience,” I discussed the importance of providing a smooth transition from self-service to live agent assistance on the mobile phone.  Since that blog was published, no fewer than four contact center software providers (Genesys, Interactive Intelligence, NICE Systems, and Virtual Hold Technology) have announced or introduced such functionality to take advantage of the advanced capabilities available on increasingly ubiquitous smartphones and tablets.  While this is very encouraging, I see it only as an initial step in capitalizing on the capabilities of these devices. Continue reading “The Smartphone and the Tablet: Catalysts of Change in Mobile Customer Care” →

The Perfect Customer Interaction: You Will Know It When You Experience It

by , posted in Communicate

K. Landoline
K. Landoline

Summary Bullets:         

  • Most customers would probably not be able to describe the perfect customer interaction until they experience it.  So, asking customers to describe their expectations will probably be an unsuccessful effort on your part.
  • ‘Personalization,’ ‘up-selling,’ and ‘cross-selling’ are often perceived as negative terms in customer service efforts.  However, experience tells me that, if used appropriately, they can enrich customer interactions and often lead to customer elation.

Most savvy customer service executives would tell you their goal is to use personal information to cross-sell and up-sell every customer that contacts their enterprise.  It’s just good business, right?  However, the terms ‘personalization,’ ‘up-sell,’ and ‘cross-sell’ have negative connotations with many customers who are worried about protecting their privacy and being forced to buy something they do not need.  Allow me to relay an experience I had with my financial institution that, I am certain, will open your mind to the benefits of personalization, up-selling and cross-selling. Continue reading “The Perfect Customer Interaction: You Will Know It When You Experience It” →

Customer Surveys: Balancing Information Needs with Customer Survey Fatigue

by , posted in Communicate
K. Landoline
K. Landoline

Summary Bullets:         

  • Collecting customer opinions regarding your company’s service is crucial to monitoring company performance and improving levels of customer satisfaction and longevity.
  • The excessive use of surveys today is breeding customer fatigue and scorn for the companies that impose them on their customers at a rapidly increasing rate.

We all know that communicating with our customers is a critical part of good customer service.  In my last blog, I discussed the importance of social media for capturing customers’ perceptions.  Today, I will discuss proactive customer surveys as a means of measuring customer satisfaction.  The use of post-interaction surveys has grown dramatically over the past few years.  Surveys have become so important that two large contact center optimization software companies, NICE Systems and Verint Systems, have made acquisitions in the past year (Fizzback and Vovici, respectively) to boost their customer survey offering capabilities. Continue reading “Customer Surveys: Balancing Information Needs with Customer Survey Fatigue” →

Is Your Contact Center Ready to Jump on the Social Media Bandwagon?

by , posted in Communicate
K. Landoline
K. Landoline

Summary Bullets:

  • Social media as a potential source of strategic information in the contact center has been a serious consideration for the past two years as social media Web sites have become a channel for individuals venting and/or boasting regarding their customer service and business interactions.
  • Many businesses have jumped to quick conclusions regarding the value of social media and what should be done with its information relative to other data currently available to agents. It is becoming apparent that more thought, time and effort is required before the marketplace settles on strategies that will optimize this potentially valuable flow of information.

Over the last decade many call centers have made the transition from a single channel, voice-only solution to multichannel contact centers. In addition to customer self-service channel access, which includes Web browser and interactive voice response (IVR) interfaces, end users now expect to have additional agent-assisted channels such as e-mail, fax and chat accessible to handle their corporate interactions available at their discretion. Over the past two years yet another very tempting channel of access has become available to customers seeking to get their customer service issues resolved – social media sites such as Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and others. Some contact center managers have been investigating social media data as the nirvana of customer care solutions. And many contact center vendors, including Alcatel-Lucent, Avaya, Cisco, Interactive Intelligence and Siemens now incorporate interfaces to popular social media sites into their contact center application functionality. This enables corporations to monitor social media site feeds for both negative and positive mentions of their company by customers and prospects and actually put relevant social media interactions into to contact center queues along with voice calls, chats and e-mails for agent consideration, handling and resolution. Continue reading “Is Your Contact Center Ready to Jump on the Social Media Bandwagon?” →

Step Two in Mobilizing Your Contact Center: Create a Continuous and Seamless Customer Experience

by , posted in Mobilize
K. Landoline
K. Landoline

Summary Bullets:

  •  The enterprise’s motivation in driving customers to do more via the mobile channel should be to provide a highly differentiated customer experience, enhance the overall lifetime value of the customer to the enterprise, and reduce operational costs.
  • Due to the growing popularity of mobile phones as a channel of access to customer service centers and the customer’s natural aversion to an IVR interface, it will be essential to allow customers to shift from a mobile, self-service mode to live agent assistance as simply as possible.

In my October 13th blog posting, “Step One in Mobilizing Your Contact Center: Send Your Agents Home,” I suggested that an initial step in mobilizing a contact center might be to implement an at-home agent strategy.  In this posting, I would like to broach the issue of planning and preparing for interactions with clients who will be using mobile phones more often in the future.  Preparing for increased mobile traffic will be essential to maintaining and/or improving current customer satisfaction and preparing for the younger generation of customers who will demand easy remote access to your customer service communications infrastructure. Continue reading “Step Two in Mobilizing Your Contact Center: Create a Continuous and Seamless Customer Experience” →

Examining the Cloudy Economics of the Hosted Contact Center

by , posted in Cloud Enable
K. Landoline
K. Landoline

Summary Bullets:

  • A total cost of ownership (TCO) analysis of a hosted contact center solution versus an on-premise offering can show cost reductions of 40% or more over the first three years of its lifecycle.
  • A closer look at additional critical factors may show the trade-off between the two solutions as a toss-up for your company’s customer care environment.  Continue reading “Examining the Cloudy Economics of the Hosted Contact Center” →