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1 Welcome to This Month's Insights In this issue: Featured Articles: "Removing Language Barriers...Improving the Customer Experience", "Selecting the Right Phone Append Process","Leveraging Big Data to Improve Contact Center Performance" Click here to visit EPIC's updated website featuring our three services: Outsourcing, Consulting and Managed Services > EPIC Connections.com EPIC Insights/News In this month's issue of EPIC Insights we cover: Removing Language Barriers... Improving the Customer Experience Selecting the Right Phone Append Process Leveraging Big Data to Improve Contact Center Performance Removing Language Barriers: With new technology solutions introduced every day, it is often easy to overlook the obvious: a customer's language Bill Pieper and dialect. How is it possible for you to remove the language barrier from the equation? You may not have to. Language Interpretation Service Bureaus may be the right solution. Phone Append: Another critical success factor in our business is related to getting the right phone number for the right person. Phone Append, like most other processes, has morphed into a multi layered solution involving picking the right databases to use, asking questions and getting answers that define a good phone number and understanding contact compliance. We have included an overview of the types of phone number data are available and what you need to ask in order to get the optimal results. Big Data: Our final article is related to "Big Data." Contact centers have become the hub for information as it relates to your customers. While most of the focus continues to highlight contact center efficiencies and customer experience, with the use of data gathering, data analysis and visualization tools, a clearer picture of your customer is available. Learning how to use this data can be the difference between growing your customer relationship versus just maintaining it. I hope you find this content meaningful and useful as we strive to keep you "in the know" as it relates to the varied and numerous segment of our industry. Please be sure to visit our updated website and provide your feedback. Thank you. Removing Language Barriers...

2 Improving the Customer Experience Contact center agents have difficult jobs and they are even more challenging when there are language barriers with the customers they are interacting with. That's when language interpretation services can become useful. Language interpreting can be performed quickly and also improve the overall customer experience. The Language Challenge Many "types" of problem resolutions are complex by nature. With more technology related problems, regulatory compliance issues, and privacy concerns talking a secondary language customer through an issue can be very upsetting for the customer and the agent. Most contact center outsourcers provide limited alternative language options other than Spanish in the United States and French in Canada. Speakers of less prevalent languages are out of luck and have to stumble through calls with agents who only speak the dominant languages. There is an Effective Alternative A language interpretation service has access to a large pool of linguistic professionals, each with their own language specialization. Contact centers don't need to provide these linguists with benefits, incentives or management oversight. The headaches related to recruiting, training and maintaining linguistic staffs become someone else's problem. When faced with an unfamiliar language, a contact center agent can transfer the call to an interpretation, and get referred to a linguistic professional who speaks the right language. With todays technology this transfer can be performed seamlessly within a matter of seconds. An Agent's Friend Contact center agents are constantly having their performance measured. Call times are the primary driver between an agent being highly productive or poorly performing. Proper use of a language interpretation service can significantly improve an agents overall performance and their stress level. All parties involved in the transaction win. The customer experience is enhanced and the agent benefits from the reduced call time. The contact center benefits from more efficient workflow. Implementing Language Interpretation Language interpreters are meant to be as unobtrusive as possible. By using a language interpretation service bureau for example, contact center agents can connect in seconds and request an interpreter who knows the customer's language. If the agent can't tell what language is being spoken, the language interpretation coordinator can determine it. Upon recognizing the language, it's just a simple matter of a three way conference call. If increased customer satisfaction and better contact center metrics aren't enough of an incentive, companies will find that language service agencies offer a wide variety of additional services such as on site interpreting and translation, which can be used to complement or even expand other areas of your business. Most interpretation services work 24/7 365 days per year. Companies are always looking for ways to improve their operations while saving money. Language Interpretation Services allows them to do both.

3 Selecting the Right Phone Append Process Many contact centers use a service provider to add, flag and update phone numbers on a call list. In many cases, they are allowing someone else to decide which phone numbers are the best. Fortunately, there are many different ways to reach your unreachables, increase your contact ratio and improve your conversion rate. Contact centers just need to know what to ask for. Following is a breakdown of the options available to ensure the best possible results, as well as an examination on how phone append processes can vary so widely. Different Types of Source Files Phone Book Compiled: This phone number information is drawn from scanned data on phone books. These numbers were accurate and verified by the phone company, but there's no guarantee that the phone number is still active (updated once a year). This white page data can be used for marketing as long as the phone numbers are scrubbed against the do not call lists and cell phone suppressions. This type of data must also meet all the necessary regulatory requirements. Directory Assistance (DA): Can be thought of as an up to date phone book "what's in the phone book if it was published today". DA data are typically updated every 24 to 48 hours so it is very current and contains newly connected phone numbers. It also contains some records which are not published in the phone book. Important pieces of information relating to addresses may be missing if the resident requested that information not be shown. Public Utility Files: Contain phone numbers from either a phone company or other public utility. These are generally very good in quality and completeness, but they generally are very fragmented, only covering specific market areas. This information is hard to compile and has limited possibilities when it comes to calling. Typically marketing use is not allowed, but there may be exceptions for particular call sponsors (political campaigns, fundraising/non profits, government, etc.) or for specific call purposes like market research surveys, political polling, health or emergency notification, etc. Proprietary Compiled: Is assembled from non typical, generally non utility sources of phone numbers. This data can be useful in filling in some gaps in phone company original datasets, but the recency of this information is pretty unstable. These proprietary databases are "pulled/extracted" from registrations, warranty cards, volunteered information. Since some of these data sources is "self reported," there is no guarantee to its accuracy. Special Use Files: Compilations of records with specifically allowed uses. They are often similar in restrictions to utility based information, but they are not built primarily from utility information. There is a wide variety of special purpose data in the marketplace, including those that provide limited cell phone information and those built primarily from voter registration records, which is generally limited only for use in political campaigns. Most of the phone numbers available from these special purpose files come with some kind of restriction. In fact, if someone tries to sell a special purpose file that has no restrictions proceed with caution. What Constitutes "Good" Phone Number Data? Once there is an understanding on what "type" of data is available there are many more factors that need to be considered before processing your files.

4 When shopping for phone appending services ask your provider how many different sources they use and the approximate number of contact records to which they have access. In general, bigger is better. Search effectiveness, is where the art of phone appending comes into play. Just having access to phone numbers doesn't mean your provider is going to find them. Ask them how "tight" their matches are. There should be different Confidence Levels for your review. If you or your client only want to speak to a specific individual, tell your provider you don't want "household" or "address" level matches. Reputable data service companies only want you to have the data that best meet your business' need. Recency of Data: How quickly updates from the phone companies are integrated into the data Percent Populated: How frequently do each name and address fields contain a value (especially the first name and street address which are often intermittent) Geographic Coverage: How many phone numbers a process has access to as a percentage of the total phone numbers available in a particular geographic area. Types of Coverage: Does the service provide: Landline and/or Cell Phones, Business and/or Residential Phones Published and/or Non Published Phones Permissible Purpose: For what purposes can the phone numbers be called common purposes include marketing, non profit, survey, funds/donation solicitation, political, collections and employment verification. Another very important and related issue is whether or not the phone numbers are on one of the state or national Do No Call lists. What is the Purpose of Your Call? All phone calls are not treated equally. It is well known that making a call to tell a potential customer about a great new product is treated very differently legally from a call made to notify a customer or patient of an upcoming scheduled appointment. Specific Calls to a candidate's campaign are differentiated from those for a statewide ballot measure; political survey use is now being differentiated from fundraising solicitation calls. Nonprofit Calling Campaigns are all treated differently. A good example of this type of oversight is that of previous relationship. Are the individuals to whom a call is being made customers of the calling organization? If so, there must be additional information about the calling record that is not available if the individuals are not members? This isn't really a matter of whether or not a person is on the Do Not Call (DNC) list. All companies making outbound calls need to pay very close attention to following the FTC's DNC regulations. Identification of customers and call purpose is about having the most targeted information available prior to calling. With all of these possibilities at your disposal make sure you tell your phone append service provider exactly what your specific needs are and work with them to get you the proper counts and most reliable phone numbers possible. Leveraging Big Data to Improve Contact Center Performance The customer experience. As business leaders, we are obsessed with it. It is, after all, the ultimate differentiator in our successes and our failures. But in today's customer care multichannel blend, driving customer value and returns requires a far more strategic and holistic approach. Corporate decision makers are increasingly recognizing data driven contact centers as a strategic business asset. They are in a prime position to capture, analyze and act on information. Vitally important to managing the customer journey, is ensuring the contact center's operational practices align with the company's brand management activities. Enter big data.

5 By effectively integrating technologies, contact centers can access channels, interactions and touch points to profile the individual customer including their preferences and customer service needs. Utilizing established KPI's (key performance indicators) such as contact resolution rates, customer satisfaction, agent productivity and handle times, top performing contact centers can identify correlations and trends between the channel's customers. Business intelligence technology such as the industry's leading visual analytics software providers such as Tableau, empowers contact centers to blend the collected data and visually explore insights without compromising flexibility or speed. Personalized dashboards enable agents to interact with data in real time delivering a better customer experience. So what might a contact center measure through the use of leveraging big data and visual analytics software? Performance Metrics Centers can routinely access critical intelligence, such as average speed of answer, call handling time, first call resolution, hold times and transfers and adjust activities to improve performance. Contact Center Management can also monitor call traffic to verify network capacity and apply necessary updates. Workforce Metrics Management Can effectively monitor turnover, attendance and occupancy rates to determine smarter workforce planning. Customer sentiment and satisfaction trends, by channel, can be blended to determine the required skill level for agents. Agent Metrics Agents can access comprehensive data sources in one view, allowing them to access present and historical customer information to quickly respond to inquiries, eliminate redundancies and proactively resolve issues. Management and agents in real time, can screen agent interactions and performance to easily target additional training and support. Business Metrics Agents can access personalized customer data to determine prime customer interactions to upsell or cross sell products and services. Bottom line, contact centers leveraging big data and real time self service visual analytics provide a far more holistic approach to managing the customer journey. Decision makers at every level, including corporate, management, agents and customers are empowered to create an engaging and successful customer experience. They need only to visualize the data. For more information on how big data and visual analytics can help your organization, contact Jim Grace at jgrace@epicconnections.com EPIC in the News

6 EPIC is continuously striving to keep our clients/partners up to date with leading edge tools to help streamline their contact center operations. Below are two examples of how EPIC is staying in touch with leading providers in the areas of: Workforce Management Business Process Management As a full service outsourcing, consulting and managed services firm, we assist our clients in developing solutions that solve their most critical customer interaction challenges. With decades of industry experience and functional expertise, EPIC goes beyond the norm to develop new insights, drive results and help grow your business. Learn More Sincerely, Bill Pieper Ext. 201 Connect With EPIC > epicconnections.com Forward this This was sent to jgrace@epicconnections.com by bpieper@epicconnections.com Rapid removal with SafeUnsubscribe Privacy Policy. EPIC Connections Birch Dr Ste (402) Omaha NE 68164