An Oracle Best Practice Guide April Best Practices for Designing Contact Center Experiences with Oracle RightNow CX Cloud Service

Transcription

1 An Oracle Best Practice Guide April 2012 Best Practices for Designing Contact Center Experiences with Oracle RightNow CX Cloud Service

2 Introduction... 1 Understanding the Problem... 2 Addressing the Problem Through Best Practices... 2 Oracle RightNow Contact Center Experience... 3 Choosing the Right Tool for the Job... 4 Putting It All Together... 8 Incorporating External Systems Conclusion... 14

3 Introduction This guide contains best practices for using the design tools in Oracle RightNow Contact Center Experience. In most situations, a cross-functional team including operations managers, analysts, and IT professionals tackles experience design. IT and operations practitioners can apply the best practices in this guide as they approach both strategic and incremental customer experience improvement initiatives. This guide provides best practices for applying Oracle RightNow Contact Center Experience to agent operations. With this guide, you re equipped to apply the most-effective design tools for each situation facing agents. The guide ends with straightforward instructions to help you get started with each tool. 1

4 Understanding the Problem Guiding agents to deliver satisfying customer experiences is a cornerstone objective of nearly every contact center. Traditional approaches range from agent training and skills development programs to call scripting. Newer approaches include the use of agent-facing knowledge and contextual guidance. But how do you know which approach to take? There is a wide range of experience design tools that you can use to guide agents as part of Oracle RightNow Dynamic Agent Desktop Cloud Service, a product in the Oracle RightNow CX Cloud Service family. Each of these tools is designed to optimize the agent experience in a specific type of situation. Oracle RightNow Contact Center Experience gives you the power to combine these tools for your agents. With so many options, the task of choosing which tool to apply in each situation can be challenging, especially in cases where multiple tools can be used to provide agents with the guidance they need. This guide contains detailed information on the range of tools in Oracle RightNow Dynamic Agent Desktop Cloud Service, along with best practices for when and how to apply each tool. Addressing the Problem Through Best Practices Have you ever been talking with an agent who is mechanical in his responses, offering choices that make no sense for your situation? Or how about an agent who fumbles over the process of handling your request, asking for the same information twice and missing key steps? These are a few of the consequences of applying the wrong agent tools to a situation. We d all like to think that these poor experiences don t happen in our contact center. But even if you don t believe the customer satisfaction statistics a few quick phone calls to companies you do business with will convince you: these problems crop up far too often in contact centers. For decades, the standard approach to solving these customer experience problems has been a twofold strategy: Train agents to handle specific situations very well. Segment and route calls to agents who are skilled in handling the situation at hand. In the current economic climate, more and more contact centers have been searching for a way to provide the same quality of experience they achieved using this approach, but with minimal agent training costs. Other contact centers are looking for a way to build on the skills/routing approach and uplift their customer satisfaction (CSAT) using advanced techniques. Oracle RightNow CX Cloud Service provides a series of design tools that are purpose-built to help contact centers meet these goals. These tools comprise Oracle RightNow Contact Center Experience. 2

5 Oracle RightNow Contact Center Experience Oracle RightNow Contact Center Experience contains tools to configure your instance of Oracle RightNow Dynamic Agent Desktop Cloud Service for an optimal experience. Oracle RightNow Contextual Workspaces Cloud Service Oracle RightNow Contextual Workspaces Cloud Service provides the screens that agents use in Oracle RightNow CX Cloud Service. Agents use Oracle RightNow Contextual Workspaces Cloud Service (commonly called workspaces) to work support cases (commonly called incidents), view customer information, log calls, respond to s, chat with customers, post social media responses, take orders, and much more. Because every company is different, workspaces are fully configurable. You choose what information and tools to show in your instance of Oracle RightNow CX Cloud Service. The contextual part of Oracle RightNow Contextual Workspaces Cloud Service refers to the ability to dynamically modify the screen while the agent is using it. Oracle RightNow CX Cloud Service includes a rule-based designer for you to specify how the workspace needs to change for each situation. Oracle RightNow Guided Assistance Cloud Service Oracle RightNow Guided Assistance Cloud Service provides agents with guides for specific situations. A guide gives an agent step-by-step instructions for handling the situation. The instructions in the guide can branch along the way, much like a decision tree. The guide can point the agent to relevant knowledge articles (commonly called answers) as well as hints and tips. Oracle RightNow CX Cloud Service clients most often use guides to help agents with troubleshooting and compliance with corporate policies, but the guides can be used to provide basic guidance to agents in nearly any situation. Oracle RightNow Agent Scripting Cloud Service Oracle RightNow Agent Scripting Cloud Service directs agents in handling sensitive conversations. A script tells the agent what to say during the conversation and gives the agent relevant information to act on. Scripts can also guide an agent to collect information in easy steps. Similar to Oracle RightNow Guided Assistance Cloud Service, scripts can branch along the way. But with Oracle RightNow Agent Scripting Cloud Service, the branching logic can be more sophisticated combining multiple criteria, incorporating external systems, supporting complex navigation, and even accommodating nonlinear paths. Oracle RightNow CX Cloud Service clients most often use scripts to direct agents in selling and fulfillment processes. Scripts are also used for intelligent agent greetings allowing the agent to confirm any information passed from an interactive voice response (IVR) system or other communication system and transition to addressing the purpose for the interaction. 3

6 Oracle RightNow Desktop Workflow Cloud Service Oracle RightNow Desktop Workflow Cloud Service helps agents switch context during interactions. With Oracle RightNow Desktop Workflow Cloud Service, you design workflows that span the full interaction from start to finish. These interaction flows can present the agent with a sequence of workspaces and scripts dynamically as the context of the interaction evolves. As your workspaces become more tailored to specialized contexts, Oracle RightNow Desktop Workflow Cloud Service becomes an essential means of switching between workspaces. Interaction workflows are also used to automate actions, saving precious time. Oracle RightNow Desktop Workflow Cloud Service lets you create business records behind the scenes, generate backoffice tasks, and store information. Oracle RightNow CX Cloud Service customers use Oracle RightNow Desktop Workflow Cloud Service to orchestrate communication with business processes. Choosing the Right Tool for the Job With so many tools in Oracle RightNow Contact Center Experience, it can be challenging to choose the best tool for the job at hand. This section provides several approaches for deciding which tools to apply in each situation. Choosing Tools Based on Your Goals What goals have you set for improving contact center operations? You may have goals based on a continuous improvement program, competitive pressure, or budgetary constraints, or you may face acute operational challenges. Alternatively, if you are an Oracle RightNow CX Cloud Service customer, you may have received a customer experience assessment or contact center assessment, which provides an ROI-based foundation for goal setting. Here is a sample assessment with goals you might have for agent operations: Figure 1. A customer experience assessment can help you set contact center goals. Once you ve determined your goals, you can evaluate which tools might provide the best leverage for you. Figure 2 helps you to see which tools are well suited to your goals. 4

7 Figure 2. Choose Oracle RightNow CX Cloud Service design tools that are aligned to your primary contact center goals. The design of each tool determines its optimal application. For example, the ability of Oracle RightNow Guided Assistance Cloud Service to help agents with troubleshooting makes it excel in improving effectiveness and first-call resolution, but not with selling. Conversely, the ability of Oracle RightNow Agent Scripting Cloud Service to step agents through prescribed procedures with rich content and instructions makes it ideal for consultative selling and enforcing corporate policies, but only marginally with customer satisfaction and handle time. Choosing Tools Based on Agent Processes Another way to evaluate which are the right tools for the job is to look at the agent processes involved. The tools in Oracle RightNow Contact Center Experience are purpose-built to be applied to a specific set of agent processes. For example, Oracle RightNow Agent Scripting Cloud Service is purpose-built for troubleshooting customer problems and guiding agents to comply with corporate policies. Conversely, Oracle RightNow Guided Assistance Cloud Service is best suited for guiding agents in sensitive situations like saving customer cancellations, selling, and greeting customers in context. Figure 3 helps to identify the tools that are best suited to support your agent processes. 5

8 Figure 3. Determine the degree of alignment between Oracle RightNow CX Cloud Service design tools and common agent processes. As you look across your agent operations, chances are you support a number of these processes today. For this reason, the design suite gives you ways to combine the design tools into Oracle RightNow Dynamic Agent Desktop Cloud Service. (For more information, see the section Putting It All Together. ) Choosing Tools Based on Specific Capabilities If you re evaluating the design tools in Oracle RightNow Contact Center Experience for purposes that are specific to your operations or that don t fit into the guidelines above, the easiest way to choose the most appropriate tool may be to compare the specific capabilities of each one. Table 1 shows some key capabilities for each of the design tools in the suite. 6

9 TABLE 1. DESIGN TOOLS CAPABILITIES CAPABILITIES CONTEXTUAL GUIDED AGENT DESKTOP WORKSPACES ASSISTANCE SCRIPTING WORKFLOW USER INTERFACE OPTIMIZATION Display a screen for agents to use X Modify the screen agents use X X Provide controls for agent input X X X Embed external applications X X Switch screens agents use X X Display formatted content X X X AGENT GUIDANCE Provide a question/answer conversational UI X X Encapsulate corporate decisions X X X Direct agents to knowledge articles X Branch based on agent input X X Branch based on multiple factors X X Act on decisions from external systems X X AUTOMATION Set field values to store information X X X Create business records X Generate back-office tasks X Coordinate information with other systems X X X Act on decisions from other systems X X Although this is not a comprehensive list of capabilities, it should give you a general sense of what each tool can do. For a complete list of functionality with each tool, refer to the Oracle RightNow CX Cloud Service documentation available online at the RightNow Community. 7

10 Putting It All Together To handle the range of situations your contact center faces, you ll want to use all the tools in Oracle RightNow together. This section outlines straightforward guidelines for orchestrating the design tools to provide agents with an intuitive, high-performance desktop. Start with Contextual Workspaces Oracle RightNow Contextual Workspaces Cloud Service is the most commonly used of all the tools in Oracle RightNow Contact Center Experience. Start by designing a generic workspace for each of the business records agents use typically contacts, incidents, tasks, opportunities, and organizations. The workspace for each record should contain all the basic information agents need in order to handle the full range of interactions they will encounter. Each workspace should also contain controls for agents to record critical business record information and notes during interactions. At this point, you should be able to pick out groups of information and controls that apply only to some types of interactions perhaps by category or product. Group these fields and other controls into panels and/or tabs in the workspace; then add workspace rules to conditionally show each panel or tab when it is needed. This is a common first step to making your workspaces dynamic. Adding a rule looks like this: Figure 4. Use rules to make workspaces contextual. Once you ve finalized the workspaces, deploy them to the profiles your agents use in the Administration area of Oracle RightNow CX Cloud Service, as shown in Figure 5. 8

11 Figure 5. Deploy a workspace to agents via profile settings. Enhance Your Knowledgebase with Guides To start enhancing your knowledgebase using Oracle RightNow Guided Assistance Cloud Service, create guides for the most-common decisions your agents need to make. These could range from decisions based on company policies to determinations made while troubleshooting a customer issue. To create a guide, add questions that represent the decisions or determinations to be made. For each decision, list the possible outcomes with the question. Then, link the questions together in a logical flow, as shown in Figure 6. 9

12 Figure 6. Create a guide for agents using Oracle RightNow Guided Assistance Cloud Service. Once you ve created guides for the most-common decisions, publish them to the knowledgebase as answers with keywords to help agents find the guides easily. Once the guides are published in the knowledgebase, enable agents to find and use the guides by adding Oracle RightNow Guided Assistance Cloud Service to their workspaces. Script the Sensitive Situations With Oracle RightNow Contextual Workspaces Cloud Service providing a strong foundation for agents to handle a full range of interactions and guides for the most-common decisions agents make, the next step is to script the sensitive situations that require the most skill from your agents to handle well. Agents benefit most from scripting in situations where they need to deliver a difficult message, need to use controlled language, in consultative selling, or in lengthy procedures where it s easy to miss a step. Creating scripts using Oracle RightNow Agent Scripting Cloud Service is very similar to creating workspaces with a few key differences. 10

13 Scripts are a sequence of screens held together by linear or branching navigation. Instead of designing one screen packed with information as you would for a workspace, you ll design a series of screens that comprise the script. Scripts can take input that is used for branching logic. Oracle RightNow Agent Scripting Cloud Service provides controls called script questions that allow agents to make selections during the interaction that you can then use to branch the script navigation from but the data in these questions is not stored after the interaction ends. This is a significant difference from workspaces where information in every field and control is stored in the database for business record keeping. Scripts are embedded in workspaces. Oracle RightNow Contextual Workspaces Cloud Service includes the ability to display scripts built using Oracle RightNow Agent Scripting Cloud Service. Once you have built a script, you can add it to a workspace using a script object in the workspace designer. These differences make the activity of designing scripts feel quite different than designing workspaces. Figure 7 shows an example of a script being designed. Figure 7. Use Oracle RightNow Agent Scripting Cloud Service to design scripts. Help Agents Switch Context Using Workflow One of the most powerful capabilities of Oracle RightNow Dynamic Agent Desktop Cloud Service is the ability to switch context as many times as needed during an interaction. In the three steps previously discussed in this section (1. Start with Contextual Workspaces, 2. Enhance Your Knowledgebase with Guides, and 3. Script the Sensitive Situations), workspaces have served as the top-level container for the context of the interaction. So, to switch context you need to switch workspaces, using Oracle RightNow Desktop Workflow Cloud Service. 11

14 To do this, create a new workflow in the Application Appearance area of Oracle RightNow CX Cloud Service Administration. (Note: If you have Oracle RightNow Desktop Workflow Cloud Service, you can create and manage workflows alongside with workspaces in the Workspace Explorer view.) Add a mix of workspaces and scripts to the workflow; typically, you would include workspaces that are highly tuned to address specific situations. You may find as you re looking through your workspaces that a small number of them are overburdened with trying to address too many contexts. In this case, you should break these workspaces apart into separate workspaces for each context, and then add each workspace to the workflow. With the workspaces and scripts embedded in the workflow, the next step is to connect them with the logic that specifies which workspace to show in each situation, and the flow from one to the next. Use the decision elements in the workflow designer to specify the logic, and use connector elements to arrange the flow. The resulting workflow might look something like the depiction in Figure 8. Figure 8. Design a workflow using Oracle RightNow Desktop Workflow Cloud Service. Once you ve designed the workflow, you will want to test it out using the Preview function. You can test out workflows against new or existing business records in your instance of Oracle RightNow CX Cloud Service. To do advanced testing, you can deploy the workflow to a test account and ensure that all the rules, conditions, branching logic, and decision points operate properly with different profile permissions in the full range of customer contexts. To deploy the workflow to a test account, select it as the workflow in that account s profile. (See Figure 5 for an illustration of this.) Once you feel comfortable with the workflow, deploy it to the agents on the floor. You can deploy the workflow progressively as agents are prepared and trained for the switch. Once the workflow is deployed, agents will see it the next time they open Oracle RightNow CX Cloud Service. 12

15 Incorporating External Systems As you think through how to apply the best practices in this guide to your operations, you may find that you want to use Oracle RightNow CX Cloud Service for end-to-end interactions but have your agents rely on one or more other systems. Typical contact centers that deploy Oracle RightNow CX Cloud Service use from 6 to more than 40 agent applications. Instead of trying to unify all your applications into one monolithic system, it s much easier to simply coordinate the applications at the desktop. You can incorporate these applications with the tools in the Oracle RightNow Contact Center Experience in a variety of ways. Web-Based Desktop Integration Oracle RightNow Contextual Workspaces Cloud Service and Oracle RightNow Agent Scripting Cloud Service include the ability to embed Web-based applications visually on the screen for agents. To embed a Web application, add a browser control to the workspace or script and specify the URL of the Web application for that control. Often you will want to direct agents to a very specific location with the Web application, likely loading information specific to the customer, case, or order at hand. To do this, specify the URL parameters accepted by the Web application with information contained in Oracle RightNow CX Cloud Service. Most information available in Oracle RightNow Contextual Workspaces Cloud Service can be passed in URL parameters to pass context seamlessly. You can add as many Web browser controls to a workspace as you want, but too many will degrade the performance of the desktop. If you have more than a few Web browsers, we strongly recommend that you use the Progressive Load option for each browser control. If you have more than six browser controls in a workspace, we recommend that you decompose that workspace into several workspaces that can be loaded dynamically with Oracle RightNow Desktop Workflow Cloud Service. Microsoft.NET Based Desktop Integration Because so many contact center applications are built to run on Microsoft Windows, Oracle RightNow Contextual Workspaces Cloud Service and Oracle RightNow Agent Scripting Cloud Service include the ability to embed native Windows applications through an add-in framework. Embedding Windows applications using the add-in framework lets agents use these applications within Oracle RightNow Dynamic Agent Desktop Cloud Service. One of the great advantages of doing this is that each application can be loaded and displayed dynamically during the interaction as needed, rather than sitting idle on the desktop taking up UI space and PC resources. Another great advantage of embedding applications in Oracle RightNow Dynamic Agent Desktop Cloud Service is that information can be exchanged and coordinated between the systems at the desktop. This is typically much less complex and expensive than integrating back-end servers. For more information on these desktop integration approaches, visit the developer community in RightNow Community. The developer community contains a wealth of information and best practices for integrating and extending Oracle RightNow CX Cloud Service. 13

16 Conclusion Oracle RightNow CX Cloud Service customers have tools that enable them to deliver contact center experiences that are consistently superior to those of their competitors, driving sustained loyalty and disproportionate top-line growth. Oracle RightNow Contact Center Experience contains tools supporting agents in a wide range of situations. But the power of these design tools challenges business analysts and operations managers to wield the tools to maximum gain. With the best practices in this guide, managers are equipped to meet this challenge and deliver superior contact center experiences. 14

17 Best Practices for Designing Contact Center Experiences with Oracle RightNow CX Cloud Service April 2012 Author: Neil Srinivasan Oracle Corporation World Headquarters 500 Oracle Parkway Redwood Shores, CA U.S.A. Worldwide Inquiries: Phone: Fax: Copyright 2012, Oracle and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. This document is provided for information purposes only and the contents hereof are subject to change without notice. This document is not warranted to be error-free, nor subject to any other warranties or conditions, whether expressed orally or implied in law, including implied warranties and conditions of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose. We specifically disclaim any liability with respect to this document and no contractual obligations are formed either directly or indirectly by this document. This document may not be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, for any purpose, without our prior written permission. Oracle and Java are registered trademarks of Oracle and/or its affiliates. Other names may be trademarks of their respective owners. Intel and Intel Xeon are trademarks or registered trademarks of Intel Corporation. All SPARC trademarks are used under license and are trademarks or registered trademarks of SPARC International, Inc. AMD, Opteron, the AMD logo, and the AMD Opteron logo are trademarks or registered trademarks of Advanced Micro Devices. UNIX is a registered trademark licensed through X/Open Company, Ltd oracle.com