How To Support Anivr

Transcription

1 Technology Briefing My IVR System is End-Of-Life, Now What?

2 My IVR System is End-Of-Life, Now What? A large percentage of companies have reached this point with one or more of their IVR system components (platforms or applications) in the last few years. With the recent economic uncertainty many companies were reluctant to invest the time, financial resources and the risk associated with a major platform and software upgrade. While the call center industry as a whole has recently shown solid employment growth and spending projections are up, many call center managers are still struggling to support obsolete IVR systems. This industry briefing will focus on two key areas of interest to call center managers and IT leaders: Changes and trends in the call center market, including the huge impact of social media and other channels on IVR Technology The options available to call center leaders to maintain, support and even enhance IVR systems that are end-of-life Business trends in IVR and the call center industry As previously mentioned, there appear to be some positive business indicators for the industry as a whole. Numerous studies and surveys show that hiring is trending higher for the call center industry and is outpacing many other industries. New technology providers are emerging to challenge the big names with innovative, standards-based software offerings. The move away from proprietary software to open standards such as Voice XML is accelerating rapidly. More recently there has been an increase in the number of IVR products that are available as SaaS / Platform as a service (public cloud), on-premise software (private cloud), or hybrid clouds that combine the public-cloud and on-premise components. Perhaps most importantly, surveys show that companies are beginning to budget for new technology initiatives for their call centers. There is also a growing interest in a range of analytics tools, ranging from desktop to speech to performance analytics. The renewed interest in performance metrics might be attributable to the impact of the recession and perhaps new regulatory or security issues. Of course, the old adage that you can only manage what you can measure may be an underlying factor as well. Indeed, one trend that has stayed consistent over the years is the mandate to manage for maximum efficiency. Call centers have been traditionally viewed by management as cost centers so the quality metrics revolved around cost, not customer experience. Today, the customer experience with a call center will very often determine if that customer continues to do business with a company. A study by the American Management Association found that nearly 70% of customers will stop doing business with an organization due to poor customer service. The notion of a call center as a driver of customer loyalty and revenue has at least moved corporate thinking from do more with less to do more with the same P a g e

3 For companies with legacy IVR systems, doing more with the same is still an enormous challenge. For example, adding new features to the software to meet changing business needs is not optional, it is required. However, the old proprietary code is often undocumented and un-supported, making updates risky and testing more complex. Further compounding the challenge are changes in customer expectations. Today s consumers are demanding a better, in fact a much better customer experience when interacting with a company. A recent study by STELLAService reveals customers hoping to get a customer service question answered via Twitter may be disappointed as the top 25 retailers only answered an average of 44% of customer tweets at all. The study reveals that most retailers are paying short shrift to quality customers who are both willing to spend more than the average shopper and who place enormous importance on quality customer service. A recent American Express Global Customer Service Barometer, said people who have used social media for customer service at least once in the past year are willing to spend 21 % more with companies that provide great service. It s becoming clear that social media-savvy consumers trying alternatives to the Contact Center customer experience are an incredibly important segment of any company s customer base, both because they have higher service expectations and they have wide broadcast networks for sharing their experiences with others. By failing to take Twitter seriously as a customer service channel, companies may be inadvertently ignoring some of their best customers at their own peril. There are many factors driving higher expectations from customers. A company s own branding and marketing that emphasizes the importance of their customers, messaging that conveys trust, reliability and expertise are taken quite seriously by customers. Competitors and companies in other industries increase their service capabilities and customers quickly come to expect the same level of service from every company. According to Adam Mandelbaum, a writer and industry analyst for the International Customer Management Institute (ICMI) It s no big secret: the customer experience consumers face is a major determining factor in whether they ll continue using a company s services or turn to a competitor. And a recent poll conducted by Harris Interactive and RightNow Technologies shows that the customer experience does more than just determine who your repeat customers are. It also determines how much they spend. The results of the poll show that customers are willing to pay more if they are met with a superior customer experience. The results show that 85% of surveyed consumers in the U.S. said that they would pay more than the standard price of a good or service as long as they receive outstanding service during the transaction. 1 Some industry pundits theorized that with the advent of nearly ubiquitous web access and the emergence of social media that IVR would simply fade away. In point of fact, nothing could be further from P a g e

4 the truth. While IVR may be a mature platform, it is most certainly not going away. A recent study from Global Industry Analysts, Inc. projects that the speech technology market, which includes IVR, is expected to reach $20.9 billion by The fact of the matter is that IVR, when designed correctly, can deliver a great customer experience and significantly reduce costs. And therein lies the problem for companies struggling with an end of life IVR system. Many legacy IVR systems were never designed (or tested) to optimize the customer experience. They were designed primarily to reduce cost. To paraphrase numerous industry pundits People don t hate IVR, they hate bad IVR. Poorly designed IVR systems cause immense customer frustration. The sheer magnitude of this customer frustration should be a wake-up call for contact center managers and IT leaders. Witness the popularity of the website GetHuman.com which provides detailed instructions on how to break out of a company s IVR system and reach a live agent. The design flaws at the root of this frustration are almost too numerous to mention. Presenting information that is not relevant to the customer, presenting too many options at once, forcing a customer to re-enter information are just a few of the complaints voiced by customers. Lest anyone doubt that the customer experience is truly important and has a very real impact on business, look no further than Net Promoter. A joint venture of Satmetrix, the prestigious management consulting firm Bain & Company and Fred Reichheld, a Bain Fellow who has been described as the The "high priest" of loyalty, according to The Economist, and the man who "put loyalty economics on the map," according to The New York Times. Mr. Reichheld s research shows that NPS (Net Promoter Score) leaders outgrow their competitors in most industries by an average of 2.5 times. The company s mission statement says in part Members are united by our common conviction that delivering a great customer experience is the most profitable (and most ethical) way to grow. Armed with rigorous measurement of Net Promoter Scores, we aim to unlock the door to good profits and true growth. Given the dramatic business implications of delivering a poor or even frustrating customer experience, what could make the challenge even more daunting? Social Media, , Chat, Blogs, Website Support Pages, Text Messaging and More Many people are familiar with the public relations firestorm that recently engulfed Spirit Airlines. Customer service denied a cancer stricken U.S. Marine a refund on his plane ticket when his doctors told him he was too sick to fly. Within hours, thousands of Twitter and Facebook users took to their social media accounts and spread the word. A Facebook page called Boycott Spirit Airlines appeared overnight. Within a few days it had 17,000 likes and quickly grew to over 40,000. A similar phenomenon happened with Twitter. As a result of the social media fury, the mainstream media picked up the story and it became a public relations nightmare for Spirit. This is not an isolated 4 P a g e

5 incident. Other companies have endured social media-driven public relations fiascos. Generally the bad publicity has occurred as a direct result of poor customer service combined with their lack of ability to respond to the social media channel. Facebook and Twitter have a combined user base of well over one billion people. However, they are only two channels through which customers may choose to communicate with a company. A comprehensive communications strategy includes , chat, blogs, website support pages, text messaging and even review websites. Not only does each of these channels need to be optimized, they also need to be linked and integrated. Without highly coordinated insight into every step in the customer interaction process, a poor customer experience can represent a real danger to a company s brand. Conversely, corrective action, based on deep analytical and semantic testing can also lead to actionable insights that represent upsell or cross-sell revenue opportunities. As these technologically driven cultural shifts alter the call center landscape, a company s IVR system must be able to adapt to changing business requirements. Unfortunately, modifying and updating a legacy IVR system is often exceptionally difficult. Worse still, the danger of a complete system failure is very real. Major platform vendors and re-sellers will provide some support. However, they have a vested interest in selling their customers upgrades so their support will be half hearted at best. That s not a terribly comforting thought if you are responsible for maintaining, supporting and modifying an end of life IVR system. The ideal solution would be to have a team of IVR technology experts with deep industry expertise in every major IVR system and the proven ability to support all of them. That team would have a suite of highly specialized software tools. One of those tools would be purpose built to proactively monitor every aspect of a legacy IVR system. More importantly, they would have the industry experience and technical expertise to support, maintain, optimize and modify legacy IVR systems to meet changing business requirements. That team is PSS Help, Inc. PSS understands what can and can t be automated. They understand where speech can add value and where it is an unnecessary and costly complication. Their focus is on driving long term business value. PSS can initially assess the performance of an existing call center IVR solution then create a strategic plan and technology roadmap that leads to dramatically improving the customer experience while also maximizing the return on investment for the applications and technologies. As highly specialized systems integrators and IVR solutions experts, PSS can design and deliver fully integrated communication solutions. Those solutions help contact centers become true multi-media centers to meet the rapidly accelerating customer demand for a superior customer experience, across all channels. PSS can also optimize and support both platform and applications until the time comes to move to next gen solutions. 5 P a g e

6 The PSS Help Legacy Support Solutions: ProPSS & Managed Service ProPSS legacy maintenance and support programs offer a single point of problem resolution across IVR, CTI and PBX infrastructure. Expert IVR Support for old or new platforms and applications, providing IVR support that sustains, extends and enhances the life of legacy platforms. PSS is unique in being able to expertly provide IVR support: IVR Platforms Regardless of the manufacturer IVR Applications Irrespective of who wrote them End of Life does not equal End of Operational Value. It s not necessary to rip out the entire systems because they are outdated or seem too complex or too big to remedy. ProPSS will optimize a system as it constantly monitors and records the performance of over time, building an accurate profile of the operating parameters. Heartbeat monitoring across racks, applications, servers and gateways will detect any changes in the patterns of performance and quickly alerts the user to any potential effect. It identifies not only the component the issue is with, but what the actual problem with it is. This provides the ability to implement any of the possible resolutions before it impacts on customer service. IVR Support Uptime - With the aim of the contact center being to resolve the customer issue in one call - quickly. Any downtime means customers are unable to talk to an agent which drives them to see red! Contact center solutions with voice recognition are complex as they are made up of multiple applications and connections which all rely on each other to work. PSS provide freedom from the frustration of being locked in to multi-vendor long term support contracts that can be expensive and often deliver limited and poor service. The PSS legacy support team will work to strategically review data collected from your existing IVR system and develop a set of options for changes to the system to meet your business requirements, an optimization strategy and if needed, a complete technology roadmap. Lastly, PSS will design, test and implement the changes and then provide 24x7x365 support. Managed Service Option PSS helps enterprises who today are looking for ways to ensure their customer interaction solutions are highly used and at the same time always available. ProPSS Managed Services give enterprises the ability to outsource the proactive and reactive operational support, as well as the continual optimization of their customer interaction solutions without going through the challenge of moving everything to a hosted environment. This provides the benefits of hosting without all of the disruption, as well as a more intimate relationship with a company more familiar with the enterprise s business systems or processes. 6 P a g e

7 PSS understands the need for contact centers to have customer service solutions that are not only always available from an operational perspective, but they must also improve customer service, increase income or reduce cost: - Increase customer retention - Realize cost efficiencies - Increase the quality of delivery - Maintain system uptime targets - Drive measurable productivity increases - Increase revenue per customer - Manage production system health through continuous monitoring and improvement - Build subject matter expertise with skilled resources for the execution of scope activities - Drive better outcomes through monitoring and measuring performance and the enforcement of SLAs PSS can also become a true part of a team - meeting regularly to review and optimize customer interaction solutions through the ProPSS 5 Stage Management Review Process Statistics Gathering - Collating information from system monitoring tools, populating it in to reports Report Analytics - Strategically investigating data to provide system status summary management Option Advice - potential amends, optimise performance and changes to match business needs ROI Modelling - Present a cost benefit analysis to determine level and speed of payback Recommendation/Consultancy - Designing, testing, implementing and supporting required solutions. About PSS Help As highly specialized systems integrators and IVR solutions experts, PSS can design and deliver fully integrated communication solutions. Those solutions help contact centers become true multi-media centers to meet the rapidly accelerating customer demand for a superior customer experience, across all channels. PSS can also optimize and support both platform and applications until the time comes to move to next gen solutions. PSS is the choice of some of the world s most admired enterprises. PSS works with 150 corporations, across 5 continents, in 19 countries. We solve problems that matter to our customers, keep our promises and make it easy to renew service contracts. Our customer repeat business rate is 99%. Corporate Headquarters 7172 Regional Street #431, Dublin, CA T: or Fax: UK Headquarters The Old Saw Mill, Harvest Hill Lane, Coventry, CV5 9DD 7 P a g e

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