5 Critical Requirements for a Future-Ready Contact Center ebook

5 Critical Requirements for a Future-Ready Contact Center ebook

IS YOUR CONTACT CENTER FUTURE-READY? How to Deliver an Effortless Customer Experience (CX) Across Multiple Channels It may not be a comfortable question, but nevertheless necessary to ask yourself: does your contact center infrastructure have the flexibility to readily support new paths of customer communication? Are you easily able to add new channels, or do you break into a sweat just thinking about it? At the core of the issue, your infrastructure may be based on technology that is dated from back in the day when customer contact was synonymous with a phone call. Today, your customers expect so much more. They want the agent who answers their call to know they ve already sent an email and engaged in web chat. You may be struggling to link all these customer touch points at the same time you re asked to reduce costs and improve resource utilization. Let s take a look at how you can get started!

5 CRITICAL REQUIREMENTS TO BUILDING A FUTURE-READY CONTACT CENTER 1 Step 2 Distribute 3 Virtualize 4 Manage 5 Optimize Beyond Multichannel Work From a Single Point Your Resources Off-line Work Your Workforce

1. STEP BEYOND MULTI-CHANNEL Your Customers Expect Omni-channel If your contact center began as a voice-only call center, you may have added email, web chat, and other channels as needed. Perhaps your infrastructure didn t readily allow you to add these new channels, and they were implemented as independent, siloed solutions. You re certainly not alone in this scenario! But, to distinguish your company from its competitors requires a new way of serving customers. Instead of merely enabling customers to send an email or an SMS, exceptional and differentiated customer service requires knowledge of previous interactions. You need not just multi-channel, but omnichannel. Simply put, omni-channel means true continuity of the customer s experience. By giving agents immediate access to previous interactions, you deliver that continuity. You create the perfect setting for highly satisfied customers. Companies that connect all their customer service channels report 89% customer retention, compared to 33% for those that haven t. Aberdeen Group 1 1. Destination CRM article: http://www.destinationcrm.com/articles/editorial/magazine-features/the-4-key-customer-service-omnichannel-considerations-97686.aspx Aberdeen report Ominchannel Customer Care

2. DISTRIBUTE WORK FROM A SINGLE POINT Build Routing Rules to Optimally Serve Your Entire Business Managing all conflicting needs in your contact center is a never-ending balancing act. Do you ever feel like a juggler, barely able to keep all the balls in the air? You need a single decision engine to manage all customer interactions. Then you can create business rules that best serve your business as a whole. With every new contact, customer needs are matched with the very best available resource. Where are we in danger of missing service levels? How can I handle more work if I can t add more agents? What is the best way to handle emails without impacting wait time for callers? Who is the best agent to help this particular customer? Are there agents doing email who could help me deal with this unexpected call spike?

3. VIRTUALIZE YOUR RESOURCES The Magic Formula for Doing More With Less Many companies today are spread across multiple sites - locations that grew organically or were added via mergers and acquisitions. Each may have its own contact center. You may have branch offices where employees are busy at times but idle during off-peak periods. Envision being able to pull available resources from all these locations as needed. Now that s a great way to meet service levels! What do you gain by virtualizing your contact center? Economies of Scale Meet service levels across the business by dynamically expanding your agent pool to include agents in other locations. Business Continuity If natural or man-made disasters occur, your contact center doesn t miss a beat. Add work-at-home agents Find talented, educated agents across the country or the globe. Increase agent retention while lowering hiring and training costs.

4. MANAGE OFF-LINE WORK It s a Critical Part of Your Customer s Experience The bottom line is this: a customer or prospect s perception of your company doesn t depend solely on their phone call, web chat, or email response. You may have linked the customer journey through all touch points, ensuring the agent who answers the call has knowledge of all previous interactions. But is the offline work delivered in a timely manner? Your agent performance could be flawless, yet the overall customer experience negative if back office follow-through isn t up to par. Unfortunately it s least common denominator. One weak link can damage the customer relationship or send the customer or prospect into the arms of your competitor. By integrating customer contacts with back office fulfillment, you ensure complete followthrough and drive a positive business outcome.

5. OPTIMIZE YOUR WORKFORCE Looking Beyond Agent Scheduling and Adherence If you have more than a handful of agents, chances are you re using a Workforce Management solution for agent scheduling and adherence. But WFM is just one tool in your toolbox to optimize agents and the customer experience. Your Workforce Optimization solution needs to: Deliver best-in-class customer experience Ensure the optimal number of agents are staffed for each channel. Improve operational efficiency Contain costs by rightstaffing: meet service levels across all channels without overstaffing Ensure agent happiness Give them a variety of work, time off, and schedule bidding and swapping Comply with regulations Use speech and text analytics to ensure regulatory compliance, agent adherence to scripts, and to ferret out problems and opportunities.

ADDRESSING THESE 5 CRITICAL REQUIREMENTS How Do We Get There? Perhaps it s time to ask whether your current contact center solution is flexible enough to deliver the superior customer journey your customers demand. Do you ever feel like you re dealing with a tangle of point solutions, bolted together with duct tape and chicken wire? Force-fitting more channels into an aging infrastructure is likely not the optimal answer. A modern customer service organization should be built on modern technology instead of old-fashioned monolithic hardware. Using an open, standards-based SIP contact center solution, you can drastically reduce architectural complexity and establish a foundation for innovation. Any one channel that degrades the customer experience will negatively impact all others. Yankee Group 1 1. Drive More Valuable Customer Experience with Proactive Engagement Across the Life Cycle Sheryl Kingstone, Yankee Group, June 2014

BUILDING YOUR FUTURE-READY CONTACT CENTER Genesys can help ensure your contact center is ready to meet your customers demands, today and tomorrow. Based on averages of actual benefits realized by Genesys customers, you can expect to see significant improvements in metrics such as transfers, as well as costs and downtime. On average, our customers are seeing: 32% 15% 25% 51% Reduction in intra-site transfers Reduction in inter-site transfers Reduction in infrastructure costs Reduction in downtime

Website: Contact Us: 1-888-GENESYS Genesys is the market leader in multi-channel customer experience (CX) and contact center solutions in the cloud and on-premises. We help brands of all sizes make great CX great business. The Genesys Customer Experience Platform powers optimal customer journeys consistently across all touchpoints, channels and interactions to turn customers into brand advocates. Genesys is trusted by over 4,500 customers in 80 countries to orchestrate more than 100 million digital and voice interactions each day. Copyright 2014 Genesys. 2001 Junipero Serra Blvd., Daly City, CA 94014 All Rights reserved. Genesys and the Genesys logo are registered trademarks of Genesys. All other company names and logos may be registered trademarks or trademarks of their respective companies.