Seamless Customer Conversations

Transcription

1 Seamless Customer Conversations Driving Intelligent Interactions in the Contact Center executive brief

2 TABLE OF CONTENTS: PAGE Effective Contact Center Operations: A Strategic Imperative...3 Challenges in the Contact Center...4 Integration and Intelligence: Keys to Seamless Conversations...6 Pick What s Critical for Success...8 Find the Right Solution: Infor Service for the Contact Center...9 Conclusion...12

3 effective contact center operations: a strategic imperative Many customer-oriented companies today are struggling to keep up with basic customer relationship management (CRM) processes necessary to ensure continued growth and profitability processes such as managing the sales cycle, providing quality customer service, and marketing intelligently to new purchasers. Even when they improve productivity in one or more of those areas, they may create a disjointed experience for their customers because their processes lack true integration. This situation is often further exacerbated for companies that have experienced frequent mergers and acquisitions and/or new product line launches. In the past, it is likely that each unit within such organizations operated as an independent business with its own processes and its own IT applications and systems. While this might work well for smaller companies or individual business units, it can cause havoc for larger companies seeking to create a consistent customer experience and strong brand loyalty. For many organizations, the focal point of building strong relationships with customers is the contact center. In many cases, it is the primary interaction point for the customer, and the contact center agent may be a company s only opportunity to make a positive impact on that customer. Given the potential magnitude of this interaction, companies have the opportunity to differentiate themselves from their competitors by making these customer interactions more personalized and intelligent. Indeed, in today s world of increased global competition, taking full advantage of each customer interaction has become a strategic imperative. And customer-oriented companies in a wide range of industries must focus on developing a contact center that drives effective, consistent customer interactions and builds long-term customer loyalty. Infor Service for the Contact Center is a leading solution designed to help customer-oriented companies transform their contact centers into a strategic component of their overall business strategy thus paving the way to better customer relationships, increased efficiency, and improved profitability.

4 challenges in the contact center Inefficient Processes, Escalating Costs Many companies lack the technology to optimize their contact centers, and it often takes multiple interactions to get simple things done. Basic functions like customer service requests can trigger a chain reaction of repetitive, redundant activities that involve numerous employees. Such inefficiency can escalate the cost of serving customers, particularly when it is multiplied across a global customer base. Even when efforts are made to improve efficiency, many activities still take longer than they should, and customer information is often dispersed throughout the enterprise in fragmented applications, data, and processes. This means customer-facing employees are forced to overcome the limitations of their technologies often toggling back and forth between different applications when they should be spending this time handling customer requests. Contact centers with inefficient processes experience an ever-expanding base of unmet customer needs. And although money is spent on equipment and personnel to keep up with demand, the level of customer service rarely improves. Decreased Customer and Employee Loyalty Poorly integrated, poorly directed systems make it impossible to resolve customer problems in a timely manner. A simple call that should be resolved in minutes can turn into a drawn out activity as the contact center agent struggles to find the information needed to perform the requested task. In the end, customer dissatisfaction and customer churn become not just a possible outcome, but the most likely one. It is common knowledge that good customer service has a huge impact on developing customer loyalty, while poor customer service has the opposite effect. In addition, there are cost factors to be considered. Experts say that it costs considerably more to acquire a new customer than to keep an existing one. And Infor s own research has shown that even a 1% increase in the level of performance against each of a core group of seven operational measures can result in an incredible 76% improvement in return on capital employed RoCE. * Once customers are gone, it can be difficult, if not impossible, to get them back. So, it is in a company s best interest to retain existing customers. However, many of today s systems do not and cannot provide the insight about customer behavior and buying patterns needed to address this issue, leaving organizations fighting an uphill customer retention battle. In addition to customer churn, problems in the contact center also lead to agent turnover. Job satisfaction often plummets when agents are not given the tools necessary to satisfy customers. And when a company loses trained agents, all of the experience and knowledge of those agents are lost to the organization. As the long, expensive cycle of training new people begins, the remaining agents are burdened with the bulk of customer requests, further impacting customer service. *1% Solution: How Demand Drives Financial Performance, an Infor white paper, January, 2006

5 Missed Revenue Opportunities Large organizations also spend a great deal of time and effort on outbound marketing to sell new products and services. Unfortunately, most customers are bombarded with these offers, and it is increasingly hard to be heard over the crowd. In comparison, having a customer in direct contact with a company agent, as occurs through the contact center, introduces an ideal opportunity for organizations to offer new products and services that are desirable to the customer. But without integration of guided marketing and sales processes into customer service operations, contact center agents are unable to identify and present appropriate up-sell and cross-sell offers in real time. Pinpointing what a customer is interested in not only helps agents to meet that customer s immediate needs, but also presents a valuable opportunity to learn about what drives customer decisions and what might be useful to that customer in the future. However, if a company s systems do not provide the means to capture and react to customer interest, it will never be able to benefit fully from this critical information, and revenue opportunities will be lost.

6 integration and intelligence: keys to seamless conversations Integrated Processes In today s global environment, business processes must be integrated seamlessly across divisions so that contact center agents can handle calls more quickly and resolve issues in a single interaction. To do this successfully, they need visibility into all of the data and processes associated with their clients. When customers call to check on the status of service requests, policy updates, credit approvals, or other transactions, agents in the contact center must be empowered to view and amend customer account activities on the spot. While current technology can enable faster and more frequent contacts via the phone, , or web self-service it is also important that each customer interaction be personalized and consistent, picking up where the last one left off, without customers needing to repeat themselves. The push should be to unify the experience across interactions and across touch points. This results in increased customer loyalty and faster issue resolution, which in turn affects the bottom line. Intelligence-driven Interactions To maximize profitability and retain customers, companies must be able to respond quickly and appropriately when customers initiate contact with them. They must focus on increasing average sales and improving retention rates across the more profitable members of their customer base. This means contact center agents must have systems that allow them to make every customer interaction intelligent. Customer preferences and analytics such as affinity for early product adoption and lifetime value must be available to determine the appropriate action the contact center agent should take. Intelligence-driven interactions can also help agents quickly identify an answer to a specific customer question or problem. In addition to reducing call time and improving customer satisfaction, customer intelligence available during an interaction can also aid in identifying new sales and marketing opportunities. By blending the processes of customer service with both sales and marketing, agents can increase share of wallet (the proportion of a customer s disposable income allotted to a single company) within the existing client base. It is becoming increasingly clear that share of wallet is as, or more important than, share of market, making it vital to reach out to customers during their contact center interactions. By intelligently routing requests to the appropriate agents, enabling them to be more effective with guided interactions, and determining the best match of programs to individual customers contact center interactions can become a primary source for generating new orders.

7 Real-Time and Event-Driven Capabilities Finally, to maximize revenue opportunities in the contact center, it is necessary to have both real-time and event-driven marketing capabilities. Real-time marketing capabilities involve presenting offers to customers while they are on the phone or visiting the web site. This requires the ability to uniquely identify the customer, their preferences and history, isolate appropriate offers and present them to the customer in real time. At the same time, contact center agents supported by a guided system can capture customer reactions to marketing programs and unique offers as they occur. Event-driven marketing is a new, effective form of marketing triggered by events that occur during customer contact. For instance, if a customer makes a payment, this may trigger a followup offer to be sent to the customer through direct mail, , or a call from an appropriate agent. When suitable systems are in place, marketers can identify significant events and assign actions to take place when they occur, and event-driven marketing can be enacted without requiring any additional work or training for the agents.

8 pick what s critical for success Rapid Deployment, Easy Integration, Flexibility Because the marketplace for attracting new customers and retaining existing ones is a constantly moving target, companies cannot afford a contact center solution that requires a lengthy implementation schedule and is out of step with their needs before it is even operational. Nor can they afford a solution that is difficult to integrate or that doesn t fit their exact requirements. Unfortunately, many pre-built, off-the-shelf contact center packages fail to meet these specifications. They are designed to dictate the business processes and data used by customer service agents and offer little or no flexibility. Since these packages are hard to integrate with existing systems and processes, contact center automation projects involving them often exceed expected timelines and budgets. Such problems can be avoided with a service-oriented technology architecture based on industry standards that expedites integration, customization, and deployment. Competitive Differentiation In addition to longer implementation schedules and higher costs, many packaged contact center solutions create a great deal of sameness. They provide similar tools for contact management, request logging, product catalogs, and new order tracking, but fail to offer personalized service through integrated processes the single most important capability that companies require to differentiate themselves from the competition. Only by using an advanced solution to engage customers as unique individuals, to better understand their needs, and offer products and services that meet those needs, can companies accelerate revenue growth and bottom line results. Most pre-built, off-the-shelf systems don t offer the integration of customer analytics and guided processes that are required to achieve this higher level of service. Ability to Tap New Revenue Sources Smart companies know the benefits of integrating the contact center with sales and marketing initiatives to enhance customer profitability. However, most packaged contact center solutions still treat marketing, sales, and service as separate functions, making true business process integration virtually impossible. As a result, contact center agents lack the basic tools to execute effective cross-sell and up-sell campaigns and unknowingly let revenue-generating opportunities slip through the cracks, while companies fail to gather important intelligence about individual customers. This can be corrected with seamless integration between CRM solutions to ensure that relevant customer information from multiple perspectives is always available.

9 find the right solution: Infor Service for the Contact Center The Right Ingredients Infor believes that most companies desire to achieve higher customer satisfaction, improved profitability, and increased efficiency, but have problems attaining those goals due to poor returns on prior system investments. To reach this new level of sales and service in the contact center takes thorough integration of customer-centric systems across the enterprise. It also requires merging, mixing, and connecting information and activities between functional departments and product lines, as well as adding intelligence to customer interactions. Infor Service for the Contact Center, a critical component of Infor Customer Relationship Management, is a robust solution designed to meet the demanding challenges of the modern blended contact center. It provides a flexible means of enabling agents to interact intelligently with customers by leveraging the integrated resources of company-specific environments. Deployed in conjunction with Infor Inbound Marketing, Infor Outbound Marketing, and Infor Sales, Infor Service for the Contact Center can power a contact center with real-time analytics, problem resolution capabilities, and marketing offers that are personalized for every customer. Rich Functionality across the Contact Center Infor Service for the Contact Center provides a flexible application base with rich functionality. Whether a transaction involves taking applications for home mortgages, upgrading a customer s communications services to the latest digital offerings, making a change to insurance coverage, or managing aftermarket service agreements, the solution can enable companies to implement optimal processes for their customers, contact center agents, and the bottom line. With Infor Service for the Contact Center, companies are not locked into a software vendor s idea of what represents a best practice. Instead, they can create and execute processes that encompass their own best practices, helping all agents work with the productivity and effectiveness of their best representatives. Seamless integration to existing systems such as credit approval systems, account clearinghouses, and service provisioning applications can provide further empowerment. Phased Implementations, Advanced Technology Because change is a fundamental reality in today s business environment, Infor Service for the Contact Center is designed as a modular set of solutions capable of providing the most critical functionality quickly through a series of phased implementations, if preferred, rather than all at once. It supports key contact center business processes with easy integration and customization capabilities, allowing for fast initial implementations and integration with existing systems that can return value to the business swiftly. It also facilitates manageable follow-on projects to ensure a unique solution capable of addressing evolving challenges that come from business change.

10 The technology foundation for Infor Service for the Contact Center is Infor Open Architecture Open Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA), a robust and scalable service-oriented architecture that has been proven in many high-intensity, high-volume situations. Infor Open Architecture SOA can enable companies to implement CRM the way their businesses need it, including full integration with existing systems and processes and the ability to leverage existing investments. Built on Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE ) technology and based on XML and Web service standards, Infor Open Architecture SOA incorporates a flexible, virtual data model that makes it possible to weave together information from a multitude of sources into a unified application. It allows Infor Service for the Contact Center to integrate easily with existing software systems at both the data and process level without the need to rip and replace existing architectures and systems. It can seamlessly integrate agents, managers, reporting and analytics, and customer information to deliver a single view of the customer regardless of the communication channel used Web, , phone, fax, or wireless. Web Customers Reporting & Analysis Phone Managers Agent Monitoring Manage Tasks/Queues Workflow Tools Knowledge Base Escalations Infor Open Architecture Single View Of Customer Routing Fax Wireless Screen Pops Layer Integration Agents Existing Systems Agent Scripting Call Control Real-Time Offers Templates 10

11 Adding Intelligence to the Customer Relationship Critical to the quality of profitable customer relationships is understanding not only what a customer has done, but also what they will do and why they will do it. Within Infor Service for the Contact Center, intelligence is driven by a view into the entire history of a customer s relationship with the company and is supplemented by analytics that evaluate an individual s likely behaviors and calculate the influence of enterprise-wide trends in sales and service operations. This sophisticated, personalized perspective cuts across multiple departments and can enable contact center agents to be more effective. Marketing offers and promotions can be introduced at the right time, for the right reasons and in the right way maximizing the opportunity for success and helping to increase the value of every interaction. Seamless Customer Conversations The ease of integration between Infor Service for the Contact Center and other operational systems helps to make access to the functions needed for seamless customer-centric interactions a reality. In addition, the solution allows the processes used by the best performers to be leveraged by all contact center agents. The result is likely to be a flexible environment in which to model winning customer-focused processes and then use them to enhance productivity and ensure consistency across the organization. Infor Service for the Contact Center can make every customer interaction part of a seamless conversation. By providing integrated service processes that blend in marketing and sales, it can enable service representatives to deliver or reinforce marketing offers and capture customer interest, even generating new orders if appropriate. By providing an integrated view of customer history, it helps agents to leverage past knowledge and helps guide them to the most appropriate actions for each customer situation. Through integrated processes and customer information, Infor Service for the Contact Center can be instrumental in turning every customer interaction into a piece of a seamless customer conversation that cuts across product divisions and business units, unifying service with sales and marketing. INFOR SERVICE FOR THE CONTACT CENTER CORE PROCESSES (SAMPLE LIST) Initial call Change of address Track order status Respond to request from template Capture lead Info Convert lead to opportunity Define and deliver quote Accept and place order Register warranty Process warranty claim Issue replacement and spare parts Troubleshooting Log defect Dispatch field service technician Upgrade service level agreement Issue recall Choose or upgrade service plan Infor Service for the Contact Center helps companies conduct seamless customer conversations by facilitating a number of core contact center processes. 11

12 conclusion The competitive forces impacting customer-oriented organizations today are setting the bar higher for contact centers. For businesses to survive and thrive in the current aggressive environment, even higher service levels must be established as customer expectations continue to rise. This means that interactions with existing customers must be more intelligent and proactive, because the cost of new customer acquisition towers over the cost of retaining and cross-selling/up-selling to existing clients. Smart companies are realizing that to retain valued customers and boost bottom-line growth, they must empower the contact center, where customer-facing agents have the best opportunity to build stronger relationships with existing customers, capture higher revenue, and reduce churn. Unifying the touch points between the client and the company and creating seamless customer conversations has become a pathway to developing and growing the long-term, profitable relationships companies are striving to create. To achieve this level of customer service, it is recommended that companies turn to a superior customer-centric solution provider who can add customer intelligence into the enterprise s existing systems and accelerate returns, helping to drive profitable growth now and into the future. Infor Service for the Contact Center can hold the key to unlocking this potential. About Infor Infor delivers fully integrated enterprise solutions for a wide range of industries, as well as best-in-class, stand-alone products that address the essential challenges its customers face in areas such as enterprise resource planning, supply chain planning and execution, customer and supplier relationship management, asset management, product lifecycle management, financial and performance management as well as business intelligence solutions. With 8,100 employees, Infor provides enterprise solutions to more than 70,000 customers and has offices in over 100 countries. For additional information, visit 12

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