customer care solutions

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1 Your BANK Account balance: $2,345 Next payment due: 1/30/09 customer care solutions from Nuance Is it Time to Transform Your Contact Center? Migrate your Legacy IVR to Drive Your Bottom Line executive summary Outdated technology may be hindering your ability to deliver a world-class customer care experience that increasingly savvy consumers expect. Your company may even have customer care platforms nearing end-of-life. View this as an opportunity to strategically migrate your end-of-life technologies into updated care solutions that deliver a great customer care experience and boost your company s bottom line. Using innovative approaches to customer care with higher value interactions, you can contain costs while simultaneously improving customer satisfaction and creating new revenue streams. This whitepaper pulls together strategic ideas to consider when creating a roadmap to migrate to updated customer care systems. These ideas leverage standards-based interactive voice response systems integrated with CTI, CRM, analytics, and inbound/outbound/handset and multi-channel solutions.

2 NUANCE :: customer care solutions time to upgrade your customer care platform? Your customers live in an increasingly connected, convenient and mobile world. Can your current customer care systems support your customer base both today and tomorrow? If not, you run the risk of lost opportunities to provide more self-service and new revenue streams, and may ultimately erode your competitive edge because of decreasing loyalty to your brand. Customer service greatly impacts the perception of your company. How influential is customer service on your perception of a company? 80% respondents say quality of service is extremely or very influential. Harris Interactive June, 2007 Holding on to your legacy IVR customer care platform will eventually become more costly than migrating. But is it time for you to migrate? Consider your current customer care system. Does it: Limit your ability to impress your callers with an excellent customer experience? Limit your ability to drive cost containment with more self-service? Limit your ability to create new revenue streams from your various customer touch points? Deliver measurable analytics that drive continuous improvement in your customer care? what does a new customer care platform offer? Investing in new technologies and services may offer several benefits above and beyond your legacy platform. A planned, strategic migration to an improved or entirely new customer care platform can offer: Improved customer experience by impressing clients with smoother, shorter calls and valuable services including personalization, proactive outbound notifications, seamless biometric security, and convenient inthe-handset phone applications Lower operational costs by increasing self-service in the IVR utilizing voice driven applications where appropriate Lower operational costs by streamlining calls based on a tight integration of CTI with the IVR and agent desktop, as well as reducing agent wrap-up time by using automated dictation Lower operational costs by increasing self-service with in-the-handset phone applications, deflecting calls from ever even reaching the IVR New revenue opportunities from the integration of CTI/CRM with the IVR, agent desktops, and intelligent offer engines 2

3 develop a strategic roadmap to migrate your platforms Strategic planning identifies a series of technology and services investments to align your customer care systems with your key corporate goals. The focus of your strategic planning should therefore be to develop a Strategic Roadmap, a set of concrete actionable recommendations to create a customer care system that optimizes your return on investment to deliver your business goals. There are several key issues to consider when developing a Strategic Roadmap. Customer Care Customers are changing, are you keeping up? Improving how easily your customers can interact with your company is vital to driving customer satisfaction, customer loyalty and future business revenue. Today s demanding customers value mobility, convenience and personalization. They want to be impressed. Web 24x7 access Company controls information Search Consumers empowered, get information on their own terms Consumers have power to compare information sources Social Media Communication at an all time high through peer networks and increasing media interest INFLUENCE Mobility Personal mobile devices increasingly common Timely and portable information access ACCESS EXPECTATIONS Increasing consumer expectations of access to information INDEPENDENCE Increasing consumer independence to get informaiton Increasing influence of consumers on public opinion Increasing consumer expectations for convenience and information access Late 1990 s Mid 2000 s Your roadmap should assess various customer contact points you already have or should consider developing. These include agent handled calls, inbound and outbound self-service interactions, segmentation/routing and agent CTI desktop applications to provide seamless calls. In addition, consider new approaches to boost your customer care and drive customer loyalty in your changing customer base: 3

4 NUANCE :: customer care solutions Consider personalizing the interaction with your callers by customizing IVR prompts. Use the caller s name. Allow callers to define custom parameters in the IVR to always pay the balance from a particular account, or always send an outbound notification text message when a balance falls below a user-specified threshold. Allow callers to select using regular prompts or shorter expert-user prompts. Allow callers to choose from several personas; the person they d like to speak to when they reach your IVR. Your BANK Account balance: $2,345 Next payment due: 1/30/09 Consider handset applications to offer new levels of convenience for your smart phone customers. Your smart phone customers can download handset applications that intercept and deflect calls away from your IVR by conveniently providing balance, account status, or any other information you can push to the graphics on the smart phone handset. These applications not only reduce calls to your call center, but impress customers with speed and convenience. Consider speech biometrics to streamline your caller authentication, improve security and allow hands free access to your IVR. Continuous Improvement How can you leverage Analytics to measurably improve your customer care systems? Analytics tools offer great potential for visibility into what is happening in your IVR and what is happening when your callers are speaking with your agents. Broadly speaking, analytics tool vendors focus on one of the following three areas: IVR front-end (callers interacting with your IVR) Agent back-end (callers speaking with your agents) IVR & Agent end-to-end (callers interacting with IVR and agents) Each of these analytics tool approaches offer pros and cons to be carefully considered when creating a Continuous Improvement program. The desired goals of such a program are identifying Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) and developing the corresponding reports, dashboards, analytics tools and a corporate governance process needed to formally drive the continuous improvement. Your roadmap should identify the appropriate analytics tool, the appropriate analytics services required for success, and very importantly define the continuous improvement program to ensure your Analytics investments provide measurable and ongoing business benefits. Analytics tools can be powerful but need a focused, concerted effort to deliver ongoing benefits. 4

5 More Self-Service Can you empower customers and reduce costs? Your strategic roadmap should assess existing inbound and outbound IVR self-service (DTMF and speech) customer contact points to determine the best strategy and supporting business case to increase selfservice. Your team should leverage technology expertise and vertical knowledge of self-service capabilities used across your industry to determine what is possible and what the financial benefit would be. Your roadmap should financially model proposed improvements to existing and new self-service functions in your care systems. It s important to consider not only traditional inbound IVR based self-service but to also model the benefits of newer handset applications, agent productivity applications and outbound notification applications. Branding How can you project your brand into the phone, text, and agent conversations? Callers emotionally react to IVR systems and ascribe personality characteristics to the IVR voice. Your corporate brand equity is valuable and should be deliberately extended into your phone channel, and indeed all channels, to create a unified brand experience across voice, text, and even agent desktop scripting. For the phone channel specifically, your key brand attributes should be used to empirically, systematically evaluate several professional voice talents using hundreds of demographically appropriate listeners. The voice talent that scores highest best reflects your corporate What voice best reflects your brand to your customer demographic? brand and, combined with a style guide for writing brand appropriate prompts, allows you to write and record prompts that best extend your brand in the phone channel. This effort can also be extended into all your customer care channels to create a unified, positive emotional reaction to all your customer touch points. Are you a Tom, Dick or Mary? Voice attribute scoring provides you with the best chance to achieve channel and corporate branding parity. 5

6 NUANCE :: customer care solutions Technology and Services How should you choose your vendors? A typical set of technologies your roadmap will need to evaluate includes standards-based VXML IVR platforms, CTI, CRM and CRM offer engines, analytics tools, speech-to-text, text-to-speech and speech biometric security engines. Phase 1: Preparation Phase 2: Release Phase 3: Evaluation Phase 4: Decision Increasing Discovery consumer - Current State expectations - Future State of access to information - Goals & Objectives Indentify Potential Vendors Craft RFP Questions & Selection Criteria RFP Supporting Documentation Compiled Full Package Delivered to Procurement for Release to Vendors Vendor Q&A Based on Responses Response Grading Develop Short List Final Vendor Selection Technology Sourcing and Decision Support Process Your roadmap will need to systematically score which vendor services and technologies best address your business needs. Vendor scoring should be empirically calculated emphasizing the technology and services elements most relevant to your business. For each technology vendor decision, your roadmap will need to consider: Core technology functions and features Integration, telephony, OA&M (Operations, Administration & Maintenance) Professional Services expertise and industry knowledge Training and Documentation Support and Quality Assurance 6

7 moving forward get professional advice When creating your strategic roadmap, consider engaging knowledgeable outside experts to assist your team. When choosing business consulting experts to work with, consider the following vendor priorities to get the best business value from your investment: Hire Experience, Move Carefully Look for deep and broad practical experience in the consulting partner you hire. De-risk your projects by leveraging experience your consulting team has earned by deploying other companies in your industry. Leverage deployment experience your consultant should have outside your vertical this cross-pollination of ideas could allow you to leapfrog your competition. Start gradually with your vendor by working with them to produce your strategic roadmap. If the roadmap makes sound business sense, then move forward to implement your new care solutions. Hire Customer Experience Understanding Choose a consulting partner with significant real-world customer experience earned by deploying hundreds of customer care systems. Your consulting partner should be able to create and draw on best practices knowledge for designing care systems that deliver superb customer experiences. This requires expertise in requirements definition, persona design, dialog design, application development, usability testing, championchallenger testing, and application tuning. To ensure the best final result, your vendor should also be experienced in knowing when and when not to apply advanced technologies such as analytics, speech call steering, or voice biometrics. Hire Contact Center Experience Select a consulting partner with broad experience in the contact center covering CTI, CRM, and agent desktop including dictation. Additional deployment experience in continuous improvement analytics, end-to-end user interface design, and automated speech technologies will prove highly valuable to your final care systems. Think Beyond the Inbound Contact Center! Engage a consulting partner with experience that considers business opportunities beyond the traditional inbound contact center. Multi-channel customer touch points including proactive outbound notifications (interactive voice or SMS) and compelling new handset applications (deflecting calls from ever reaching your IVR) are valuable care approaches in which your consulting partner should have solid experience in order to inform your decisions. 7

8 NUANCE :: customer care solutions about Nuance Business Consulting Services Enterprises engage Nuance Business Consulting as a trusted advisor to help create actionable roadmaps for implementing contact center solutions that reduce costs, improve customer satisfaction, and drive revenue. Consultants utilize 20 years of vertical-specific, practical experience from a vendor and technology agnostic viewpoint to ensure their strategies will optimize customer care efficiency. For more information about Nuance Business Consulting, please visit Nuance. All Rights Reserved. Nuance is a registered trademark of Nuance. All other trademarks mentioned here are the property of their respective holders. WP NUCC346 NUANCE COMMUNICATIONS, INC. one wayside road burlington ma nuance.com