Top Call Center Challenges

Transcription

1 Top Call Center Challenges Stop idle agents, dialer delays, capacity mismatches, phone-phobic customers, and other issues from killing your Call Center performance A SoundBite Communications White Paper

2 SoundBite Communications White Paper 2 The handwriting is on the wall for call centers. Pressure to perform has never been greater. Executive Summary Outbound Call Centers face the same difficult equation constantly: how to increase efficiency and results in the face of all those tough facts of Call Center life: Adding agents means higher costs due to training and turnover. Penetrating lists deeper means more agent time spent on dead ends. Raising call volumes shoves more time-consuming Right Party identifications at agents due to the physics of dialers. More agents making more calls exaggerates the unevenness in skill levels, and provokes variable results from agent to agent (even from call to call). Stuffing more campaigns into a narrow best time to call window creates capacity planning nightmares and invites poor performance. Dialers can t reduce the rate of dropped calls during the 2-second Dialer Delay, or avoid leaving dialer-damaged answering machine messages that decrease callback rates. The handwriting is on the wall for call centers. Pressure to perform better has become coupled with downward pressure on profit margins. The solution is easy to state but hard to achieve: outbound campaigns are successful when agents spend the bulk of their time connected with live, qualified customers performing relevant tasks, and when redundant tasks are handled with agent-like proficiency, but without agent involvement. Point technology enhancements and even further outsourcing can t bring the equation back into balance. A dramatic platform shift is required, and that platform had better reduce, not increase, the capital equipment investment. There is a solution that Call Centers both large and small have begun to adopt with great enthusiasm. Many are augmenting their traditional workhorse systems and realizing a multi-tiered return on investment, consisting of Higher agent productivity (focusing agent time on complex transactions that truly require human attention, such as skip tracing) Lower cost per right party contact, higher overall call success rates More IVR transactions and agentless workflows More answering-machine-driven callbacks This cumulative improvement that turns marginal campaigns into highly profitable ones is due simply to capitalizing on the latest intelligent Voice Messaging technologies technologies that are as close by as the nearest Web browser.

3 SoundBite Communications White Paper 3 These successsappers can be dramatically reduced or eliminated by incorporating IVM into your call center toolset. The Top 5 Call Center Killers Interactive Voice Messaging technology is tailor-made to reduce or eliminate some of the worst issues facing call center operators today. Although there are many advantages to incorporating voice messaging into the call center toolkit, we can start with five obvious results killers: Agent idle time. Agent costs are by far the largest factor in call center success. Agent productivity must be protected and improved wherever possible. Every moment that sees an agent either waiting for a call or conducting some repetitive, low-payback activity is a dollar dragged from the bottom line. Dialer delay. Predictive dialers attempt to pace outbound calling to match the capacity of the number of available agents. But experts estimate that up to 60% of live customers drop dialer-initiated calls during that 2-second pause between picking up the phone and connecting to a live agent. Dialer Delay loses customers before they can find out that this call is important to them. Contact-phobic customers. Nothing embarrasses people like talking to a stranger about an unpleasant subject. Customers in sensitive situations react much better if they feel a sense of control. Studies show that people in today s selfservice society largely prefer an automated interaction over a human one. Answer machine misfires. Every campaign produces a large number of answer machine messaging opportunities. In fact, answer machine pick-ups average over half of all connects, depending on time of day. When a human agent leaves a message, the result can be rushed, incomplete, and very inconsistent from one message to the next. In any case, the goal is to keep agents working on highvalue interactions, not repetitive tasks. Predictive dialers, which attempt to transfer each connected call to an agent within two seconds, often do a poor job of leaving a clean recorded message messages are often clipped, vastly reducing the chance of a callback. Pilot error Any team of agents will contain both top performers and that ineffective bottom-third group. Each agent is only as good as his training and experience. Anytime anyone other than your very best agent is on the phone, there s a chance that something less-than-optimal will happen. And even the best agents get fatigued after a day of performing repetitive, low-value tasks. Your people must be your advantage Getting the most out of your best High agent productivity results from spending maximum time with live customers, handling high-value or complex transactions. Any factors that detract from this goal must be addressed. Call centers solely dependent on predictive dialers contain many culprits that reduce agent efficiency: Agent idle time waiting for calls to be transferred from the dialer system Time wasted handling customers who immediately disconnect Time spent finding the right party Time wasted on calls where the right party is not available Opportunities lost when a customer answers but no agent is available Time spent leaving voice mail messages on answering machines Time spent helping customers choose from a pre-defined set of responses

4 SoundBite Communications White Paper 4 With the evolution of voice messaging technology, all of these activities have become unnecessarily expensive tasks for live agents. All can be performed easily by the automated voice messaging system at a fraction of the cost of a live agent, while at the same time dramatically raising agent productivity. Professionally recorded voice messages do a good job of capturing and holding the customer s attention: The rate of call abandonment during the first two seconds is much lower than for predictive dialers. Voice messages commence without delay and reveal the relevance and importance of the call immediately. Voice messaging systems are just as effective at Right Party Verification, but have the advantage of identifying right parties without agent involvement. After RPV, the rate of successful customer engagements is higher with voice messaging, because the right parties have opted in to the engagement. IVM delivers automated Right Party Verification, no Dialer Delay, and a friendly, helpful customer experience. With a voice messaging solution in place, agents spend the majority of their time with right parties, working on interactions that truly require human attention. Agents are freed from leaving endlessly repetitive voice messages. Agent morale is boosted when they can conduct more relevant customer interactions in a given amount of time. In addition training proceeds more quickly, new agents ramp-up faster, and overall job satisfaction increases. Voice messaging can prep agents just prior to receiving each contact. As part of Right Party verification, the system can capture information such as account number, last four social security digits, etc. and whisper this data, along with the name of the customer, to the agent while the call is being transferred. This can help the agent determine a customer s account status immediately upon receiving the call, saving time and increasing customer satisfaction with the efficiency of the process. When the phone don t talk, you ll know it s me Dialer Delay has become the most ubiquitous non-verbal signal in our electronic society. Many households receive dozens of calls each week, all characterized by the predictive dialer s signature two-second pause before transferring to a live agent. Depending on agent availability, this delay can be much longer than a couple of seconds, but even in the best of circumstances, dialers have trained the consumer population to terminate any call right at the initial point of connection, before learning its origin or purpose. The customer hangs up simply because the pause says nuisance. Voice messaging solutions initiate a scripted message immediately upon connection. The content is carefully worded and spoken in a professional, helpful manner. It is almost impossible to terminate the call before learning something about its purpose. Consumers who may reject useful or important dialer-initiated calls are more likely to choose to stay on the line when they know what the call is about. Voice messaging gives them this key information. When agents talk, do people listen? Interactive voice messaging gives the customer a real sense of control over the call. Experience has shown that many consumers find it mentally taxing to engage with an unknown party on a cold call. Attempts by the agent to guide the call and solicit information can be off-putting to the customer. Many people find a politely automated phone approach preferable to dealing with a stranger. Simply put, customers hate discussing embarrassing or unpleasant subjects with agents. Customers in sensitive situations often experience stress and sometimes react badly. Feelings of anxiety or anger are not helpful in customer interactions, and most

5 SoundBite Communications White Paper 5 customers will take right actions sooner if they are initially approached in the context of a private, non-confrontational phone session. Catering to a New Customer Mindset Are pre-recorded pitches as effective as live agents? Do people perceive voice recordings as spam? Are messages easier to hang-up on than live agents? Can voice messaging systems really verify/locate the right party as accurately as a live agent? Technically sophisticated voice messaging solutions such as SoundBite can answer all these questions with an emphatic YES. Just as importantly, the attitudes of consumers, customers, and clients have also evolved. We are now a self-service culture that expects more control over all our commercial interactions, from bank cash machines to online ticket agencies, from airline check-ins to on-demand cable movies. People are accustomed to controlling and pacing these transactions to suit their needs. Interactive voice messaging caters to this now-pervasive customer mindset. For many activities in today s hectic world, the self-service approach is much preferred while human-driven interactions are seen as intrusive. Did you get half of my message? Most predictive dialers fail to distinguish whether a call has been picked up by an answering machine or a person between 15% and 30% of the time. Each failure is a lost opportunity either the system hangs up on a live customer, or a mangled message is delivered to the answering machine. Top voice messaging systems accurately detect answering machines over 98% of the time. This is a crucial advantage over dialer performance. The voice messaging system begins playing the outgoing message immediately upon pick-up, while simultaneously listening for the tell-tale signals of an answer machine on the other end of the line. When an answering machine is detected, the original pre-recorded message stops and instead a customized voice message is played after the answering machine beeps. The dialer, on the other hand, must dispatch each call to an agent or call queue within two seconds, so dialers often fail to detect the answer machine at all or leave a clipped message on the machine (the kind of message that consumers quickly delete as junk). Given the high rate of answer machine connects, campaign results are often dependent upon callbacks generated through effective answer machine messages. Experience shows that voice messaging can generate 30% more agent connects through callbacks. Best practices during the call itself The ability to script and record a best case version of your message, voiced by professional talent, often results in higher response rates simply by getting the story right every time. The communication skills, judgment, and real-time reactions of human agents vary widely. In many situations the overall delivery quality is flawed or outright poor. Most call center staffs are plagued by uneven training, varied seniority, and a wide range of personalities and approaches to the job. Voice messaging solutions never have a bad day, never suffer from boredom, and never leave out an important point. While the value of voice messaging systems is obvious in agentless campaigns such as notifications, alerts, reminders, welcome messages, surveys and activations, they can also dramatically improve agent productivity by starting the customer off with a complete, consistent, and effective understanding of the purpose of the call. The Voice Messaging Advantage Voice Messaging solutions are a powerful and effective new tool for a wide range of Collections, Customer Care, and Marketing/Sales applications. Voice-driven contact programs play a key role alongside traditional communications methods such as and direct mail, but voice campaigns execute much faster and at significantly lower cost. Voice campaigns also have the advantage of greater capacity and flexibility. Ondemand voice messaging, wherein telephony services are hosted offsite by an application service provider, can intensify calling rates at optimal times of day or penetrate customer lists faster (SoundBite Communications, for instance, offers virtually unlimited calling capacity on demand). For the call center, voice messaging augments the capabilities of predictive-dialers and offloads right party verification from live agents. In delivering notifications and reminders, voice messaging performs as well as or better than human agents. And when used as a front end to IVR systems, voice messaging vastly increases the scope and effectiveness of agentless transactions.

6 SoundBite Communications White Paper 6 It s no wonder that voice messaging has already been widely adopted for activities such as payment reminders, primary and third-party collections, account activations, renewals, notifications and personalized reminders, credit card information updates, promotions and cross-selling, customer surveys, and many others. Voice Messaging helps to disarm a wide range of Call Center killers. Every customercontact organization should make it a key part of their strategic evolution. SoundBite provides the most Voice Messaging power, in an easyto-use interface, on a pay-as-you-go basis. The Pay-as-you-go Platform: Freedom of Speech SoundBite Communications offers state-of-the-art on-demand voice messaging services through a powerful but extraordinarily easy-to-use online solution. Some of its industry-leading features and benefits include: As complement or alternative to on-premise predictive dialers Unlimited calling capacity Thousands of inbound and outbound lines ensure fast and efficient campaigns, and allow you to penetrate your calling lists much faster Frees up on-premises telephone lines Capacity-on-demand meets your changing needs (we execute millions of call attempts daily) without buying additional hardware or software More call-backs 98% answer machine detection (AMD) is significantly higher than dialers Messages are never clipped or truncated, as happens often with dialers Professional-voice-talent messages prompt more call-backs Automated right-party-verification No agent time spent verifying right parties Keeps agents engaged with high-value customers Opt-in call participants provide better campaign results in less time Complete flexibility to mix interaction types: Connect-to-agent Agentless IVR One-way notifications/alerts/reminders Versus other available Voice Messaging solutions Superior scripting SoundBite scriptwriters use best practices to create clear, concise messages with easy-to-follow instructions Multi-option scripts can lead callers to agents, customer IVR systems, or a SoundBite IVR system, depending on each interaction Whisper feature informs agents of customer responses spoken or entered through keypad prior to connecting agent to customer Personalized, professional quality voice messages Text-to-speech capability creates fluid-sounding personalized messages

7 SoundBite Communications White Paper 7 Superior voice quality Pay-as-you-go model No annual contracts Extremely fast set-up compared to other Voice Messaging solutions Costs incurred as campaigns are conducted: as easy to use every day as it is to try it for the first time Versatile reporting Pre-formatted reports can be run even while campaign is ongoing Dispositions of every call attempt Bad number log for skip tracing or FTP reports to interested parties Powerful auto-manage controls for campaign optimization Auto-adjust calling rate in response to changing number of agents, customer hold times, and other factors Remove phone numbers without interrupting campaign execution SoundBite Outsourced IVR Inbound calls can be connected to agents or our self-service IVR system SoundBite IVR provides hosted front end for many types of agentless transactions At SoundBite we earn our customers business every day, campaign-by-campaign SOUNDBITE info@soundbite.com

8 SoundBite Communications White Paper 8 About SoundBite SoundBite Communications, Inc. is the leader in ondemand customer communications solutions. We use personalized voice, text, and messaging to Optimize call center performance Personalize one-way communications Automate agent-less IVR transactions The SoundBite voice messaging platform automatically connects with more customers in less time, at lower cost and delivers opt-in participants who produce better results. SoundBite provides unlimited calling capacity without any capital investment, and offers the most complete campaign management tools in the industry SOUNDBITE 2 Burlington Woods Drive Burlington MA info@soundbite.com SoundBite and the SoundBite logo are registered trademarks of SoundBite Communications, Inc. in the United States and other countries. Features and specifications in this document are subject to change without notice.