New World of Customer Expectations

Transcription

1 New World of Customer Expectations The Agile Enterprise

2 The Agile Enterprise Jerry Gregoire, the CIO of Dell Computers, said it best Customer Service is the next competitive battleground. We have entered the era of the customer. Today, providing customers with outstanding customer service is essential to building loyal customers and a long lasting brand. Social media, and other cutting edge communications, have a place in any company s customer strategy, but the front-line of every company s service organization remains the telephone, and the customer service agent. It also remains one of the largest operational cost areas. In this new battleground, companies need to provide customer service that surpasses the competition. They need to realign their culture and technology in order to drive the maximum value out of their investments (making employees more productive, and extending current capital expenditures to capture the highest value). In this paper we discuss: The business benefits of migrating and integrating your telephony and CRM solutions in the cloud How cloud technologies have enabled the seamless integration between telephony and CRM Highlight key considerations when moving your service operations to the cloud Provide real-world examples of customers achieving results telephony & crm: a cloud-based match More revenue, higher quality, greater speed all are watchwords in today s customer-facing contact center industry, along with tougher service level agreements and steadily increasing customer expectations. Contact centers and other customer-facing organizations are seeking answers to these challenges from technology. Customer Relationship Management (CRM) solutions are providing more insight into customer behavior and guidance for specific interactions. Telephony solutions are allowing more sophisticated routing and control of customer interactions. The old world of on-premise legacy technologies CRM, call distributors, autodialers, Computer Telephony Integration (CTI), Interactive Voice Response (IVR) systems and more have grown far too complex and unmanageable, making it impossible to achieve the level of transparency and responsiveness demanded by today s customers. Organizations, of every size and across every industry, are reducing their dependence on premise-based solutions such as Siebel s CRM and SFA solutions and shifting in huge numbers to cloud-based counterparts such as salesforce.com. They are also moving their telephony functions out of premise-based, licensed software solutions and costly private data centers into SaaS solutions designed for and living in the cloud. Increased Importance in the Social Era Customers today are expanding their use of social networks as a means of communication, and self-service is emerging as a primary mode for resolving issues. This trend has only strengthened the importance of a strong and central CRM. The wide use of online knowledge repositories and customer portals have enabled customers to resolve many low level customer interactions themselves. This means that the support interactions managed through telephony are now the most complex since customers have exhausted efforts at resolving their issue themselves. 2

3 The advantages? Lower costs, improved agility, greater reliability, and flexibility or the ability to scale rapidly. Each of these are critical in an industry where shifting markets and opportunities demand rapid change. why the dependency between telephony and crm The internal discussion happening in leading organizations today is changing - from measuring the costs to cover customers, to a new discussion around the cost of servicing customers. Improving customer satisfaction and the quality of every interaction is seen as a critical driver for growth. Cloudbased technologies offer advantages and opportunities toward developing more sophisticated and responsive business processes aimed at improving revenue and customer satisfaction. But critical to the success of these initiatives is the tight integration between telephony and CRM. CRM systems such as Salesforce are providing a great deal of information and guidance to make every customer interaction successful. But this information is not fully realized, if the person leveraging the information is not capable of applying this guidance to the customer interaction. IVR, VRU, and CTI capabilities ensure that the customer is routed to the correct queue or person to manage the interaction. The right business process along with telephony and CRM integration, ensures the right employee, at the right time, equipped with the right information, can make each customer interaction a success. the cloud difference: distinct business advantages The financial and operational benefits of moving to the cloud are extensive. Hardware and software investments are minimal if needed at all. No up-front capital investment is required for servers or other equipment (telecom switches, handsets) and ongoing monthly expenses are much easier to forecast. Flexibility is built in. It s much easier to add or subtract seat licenses rather than change the capacity of premise-based hardware and software, so costs can be kept to a minimum as business needs fluctuate. Speed of innovation. By eliminating the delays associated with internally managed systems, contact centers can cost-effectively add functionality, boost capacity, change processes, and tap new or changed data sources precisely when they need to. Speed of deployment. Cloud-based CTI lets a business deploy agents or even establish new contact centers with unprecedented speed. Flexible agents, located anywhere. VOIP technology means agents can be located anywhere in the world domestically, offshore, or even in their homes creating an on-demand workforce. 3

4 MEASURABLE BENEFITS: Cloud migration results in direct benefits, customer satisfaction and cost of support. ABERDEEN INSIGHTS: TECHNOLOGY ROI on Cloud Migration The following figure shows that cloud migration eventually results in better performance across the broader (and more significant) business metrics: customer satisfaction and cost of support. Enhancements and upgrades occur seamlessly. New software releases are simply pushed to the cloud-based production environment with no business disruption whatsoever and usually no involvement from an enterprise s own IT unit. The result? Maximum agent productivity, lower costs, and greater ability to seize market opportunities. integrating cti with your crm system Another distinct advantage is the ease of integrating cloud-based CTI and CRM solutions. Links between the two platforms are provided out of the gate (i.e. Salesforce) or can usually be quickly and easily customized and configured, strengthening both solutions. With customer, call and contact information flowing freely both directions, calls are more easily routed to the right agent, while agents can provide better-informed service with more customer information at hand. Agility as a key for success. The benefits of making this move to the cloud are compelling, but the target platform must be selected with an eye toward ongoing agility. Even the move itself must be done in lockstep with changes in the business. This requires an agile implementation approach designed to leverage technology implementation best practices and solve your business problems incrementally. The result? Tangible results with minimal project risk. By addressing business challenges at the outcome of the project, cloud transition teams can minimize time-to-value. 4

5 Graphical User Interface for Building IVR and ACD Scripts Speed of deployment is driven by the Five9 platform s configuration interfaces. The Five9 visual call routing designer enables call center administrators to design their call flows via an intuitive configuration tool. In addition, out-of-the-box integrations to CRM platforms such as Salesforce accelerate the deployment process. Other Sales IF ELSE IF ELSE Other Sales Service Support Collect s No Match Service Support Collect s No Match success story: national health insurance company Rapid Deployment With Salesforce Integration Fuels Successful Launch Of New B2C Telesales Team The Challenge When a large, nationwide health insurance firm began preparing to launch a new product line one in which health insurance would be marketed directly to consumers it planned a new telesales team to reach out to prospects. Agents would: Help consumers complete a lengthy healthcare application via phone a process that could take as long as two hours Capture and retrieve detailed healthcare information while also tracking information about the call itself Field support calls from healthcare plan applicants (included Inbound agents blended agents, and eventually off-hours agents handed off to outsourced contact center service providers) Data security is a key issue in the healthcare space due to HIPAA and other regulatory requirements. All solution components would need to be configurable to manage data access on a role and individual basis. The Solution Early on, the team identified Salesforce as a key technology component, for managing both lead and collected healthcare information. Given the need for customized integration among contact center technology, Salesforce, and three other back-end applications, the team engaged with Bluewolf to help select and assemble all the components. Their marching orders: move quickly. The solution needed to combine call data from IVR and other telephony applications with lead information for Salesforce to create customized prompting screens (known as screen pops). These screens would guide agents through the long, complex calls. All the information collected would need to feed back into Salesforce. For the contact center functionality, the team chose to implement the cloud-based, virtual contact center solution from Five9, for a number of reasons: Cost of Ownership: Total cost of ownership, including hardware, software, support and 5

6 other factors would be lower than with premise-based solutions. Time to Market: Five9 s built-in, easily configured SFDC integration would limit complexity, enabling the solution to be in place much sooner than premisebased technology. Ease of Integration: Other integrations could be readily achieved with Five9 s open, standards-based APIs. Flexibility: Later, when outsourced providers took on after-hours and overload blended support, Five9 s agent-anywhere capability and easily configured security smoothed the way. The combined Five9 and Bluewolf team also identified an additional component deemed ideal for generating and maintaining the long, complex scripts needed by the agents: a graphical scripting solution called Informavores (since acquired by salesforce.com). This tool would integrate with the contact center technology. The Results As a result of the deployment, the insurance firm was able to roll out its solution very quickly, and establish a consistent, scalable solution, thanks to dedicated integration work by Bluewolf, and easy-to-implement Five9 contact center software. Starting with a small telesales team, the solution quickly ramped to more than 260 agents, with an additional agents at outsourced service providers. Lead generation and conversion rate both improved boosting the return on investment and helping the new product line enjoy dramatic success. Productivity & ease of use: The new solution reduced the number of agent applications from nine different systems down to a single application and desktop. And finally, this organization had been routing any overflow calls during the day to their outsourcers. Because of the increased agent productivity, the company was able to manage all call volumes during work hours, resulting in significant monthly savings. Choosing a Cloud-based CTI Solution: Key Considerations Cloud-based CTI solutions can deliver on their promise of lower costs and increased agility when they offer certain attributes. When deliberating solutions consider the importance of some of these factors into your decision process: Comprehensive Functionality/Flexibility: Consider the need for components that manage both inbound and outbound calling. Blending agent workload and the ability to quickly scale a team can be a key component. Extensibility and APIs/Integration: Speed and ease of integration with a strong central CRM is critical, but there are also many other applications that may benefit from integration. Consider the overall platform, and the ability to extend and customize through open APIs. Reporting and Visibility: Reporting and analytics are also critical. A solid platform will sport a full library of pre-configured reports. Consider the ability to facilitate bringing CTI data into external reporting or analysis applications, and the ability for your organization to optimize performance through improved visibility. 6

7 success story: media Virtual Contact Center And Record-Breaking Blizzard Trigger At-Home Agent Model For News Industry Help Desk The Challenge A centralized, inbound help desk team was charged with assisting thousands of individuals in the creation and use of key news assets. They were struggling with their current system due to key limitations, including: Agents were unable to take advantage of at-home agent coverage, due to limitations of the premise-based call center platform. The team wanted to boost customer service by enhancing self-service (IVR) functionality and enabling agents to retrieve relevant information more quickly and completely. Though key information was managed by and stored within Salesforce, linking the premisebased call center technology with Salesforce promised to be a long, difficult, and expensive proposition. The company selected Bluewolf to help them engage and transition to a new platform. The Solution Bluewolf identified the cloud-based, virtual contact center platform from Five9 as an answer to both company challenges. Five9 s powerful, pre-built, and highly configurable integration with Salesforce meant dramatically improved control over Salesforceheld information, and much faster, more costeffective integration between Salesforce and the cloud-based IVR solution. Now, when a client calls the help desk, the IVR-Salesforce integration quickly and easily customized by Bluewolf establishes or identifies a case, retrieves relevant case information from the system, and presents the agent with combined call and case information. The Results Thanks to easy, less costly integration of the Five9 and salesforce.com platforms together with Bluewolf s expertise in working with and customizing Salesforce-based solutions the help desk delivers faster, more effective service. Another key benefit the ability for agents to work remotely- surfaced just two days after the solution was implemented when a significant snowstorm shut down the help desk s home city. Agents could not get to the call center, but because they had implemented the cloud-based contact center software, they could use the complete new solution from their homes. Lower costs: Costly premise-based contact center software and the resources to support it were both eliminated. Flexibility: Ability for agents to work anytime, anywhere. Since launch, the customer has transitioned to a more effective and less costly at-home staffing model for off-hours work. Most importantly, the organization has gained all the advantages of cloud-based contact center software lower costs, regular, effortless upgrades, and easier integration while still enjoying the benefits of customized software where needed. 7

8 choosing the right partner Companies looking to leverage cloud based solutions to reap the benefits discussed in this paper should understand that success rests upon not only selecting the right technology, but also right partner to help transform your organization. Business process expertise and technical competence play a important role, but of equal importance is the cultural fit with an organization. When selecting a consulting partner be sure that partner has a proven process to help you establish your implementation requirements, time-lines, and cost upfront. Also, look for a proactive approach that identifies behavioral and organizational factors that may impact adoption. In the end, a true partner will listen carefully and have the expertise to build a solution that maps to your unique organizational challenges and that employees will actually use. Only then will your organization have the foundation to provide the level of customer service needed to compete, and win, in this new customer driven era. about five9 Five9 is the leading global provider of cloudbased call center software for Sales, Marketing and Support. The award-winning Five9 Virtual Call Center and Predictive Dialer serve customers of all sizes on five continents. Customers profit from Five9 s reliable, robust functionality that provides the best technology, improves agent productivity, and delivers business flexibility. about bluewolf We make enterprises agile, and unite IT and the business under one mission - Innovation. As a global agile consultancy, Bluewolf provides services across the customer life cycle, IT resourcing, managed services and training. Trusted by businesses across diverse industries, Bluewolf is translating today s unique business environment into opportunities for growth. With Bluewolf, businesses are able to deliver results that benefit the customer, the workforce, and the bottom line. 8