3 Crucial Tools for the Next-Generation Contact Center JED HEWSON Director: 1Stream BRUCE VON MALTITZ Director: 1Stream
3 CRUCIAL TOOLS FOR THE NEXT-GENERATION CONTACT CENTER EXECUTIVE SUMMARY In a world with more demanding customers and rapidly changing technology, call centers need to be more agile and adaptable than ever before. The sudden uptake of the cloud surprised even the most astute analysts last year, with DMG Consulting reporting that cloud-based infrastructure is by far the fastest growing area for the call center industry, and expected to double between 2013 and 2015. Whilst cost continues to be a driver, it is no longer the most significant driver to the cloud fast deployment and flexibility is. Call center technology providers have to enable their clients to respond to customer needs faster, and across a wider range of media, than ever before. Social media has already imposed the need for multi-channel integration and responses on companies, who are finding their customers both complimenting and complaining about various aspects of their businesses on platforms such as Facebook and Twitter. Forward-thinking call center managers are already pondering their response to the next wave of disruptive behavioural trends. Below are three tools that modern call centers have to examine in order to remain competitive in the very near future. 1. CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE MANAGEMENT TOOLS When Ovum completed a survey among customer service managers, asking them what the most important call center metric is, over 60% answered: customer satisfaction. The market has become increasingly competitive and customer-centric social media has made it easier for customers to voice their concerns (and disdain) and wide-spread connectivity makes it much easier to swop between suppliers. In addition, research has shown that totally satisfied customers contribute 17 times as much revenue to a company as a somewhat dissatisfied customer, and a totally dissatisfied customer decreases revenue at a rate equal to 18 times what a totally satisfied customer contributes to a company. It is therefore imperative that every single customer touch point remains committed to keeping customers happy and for most companies, the call centre is the primary touch point. Which begs the question: how effective are call centers when it comes to monitoring, researching and reacting to customer s feedback about their experience with the company in question? The industry needs to adopt new quality measurement tools and benchmarks that can change across shifting parameters and different means of communication with the purpose of using the information gathered to improve the customer experience. Effective means of measuring customer satisfaction, loyalty and service levels have puzzled the industry for years. A decade ago, Fred Reichheld launched the Net Promoter Score (NPS) as a primary customer satisfaction measurement tool in many organisations and many companies lauded its introduction as the answer to their prayers. A NPS is developed by asking a customer what is often referred to as The Ultimate Question typically along the lines of How likely will you recommend our company to a friend. Based on the response, a customer is placed into 3 groups: Promoters (9-10), Passives (7-8) or Detractors (0-6). The Detractors are then subtracted from the promoters to determine the organisation s score.
KEY TRENDS AFFECTING THE SOUTH AFRICAN CONTACT CENTER Reichheld s principles are still held in esteem today. NPS advocates see NPS as the only quality measure required and many call centers still use The Ultimate Question (with a few supplementary questions) as a measurement of call quality. It s a valuable tool, but extremely limited. Even a simple question ( Are you happy with our service? ) is open to interpretation should the caller make a recommendation based on the agent s interaction, or the company as a whole? Not to mention that posing standard questions to a client who has phoned to cancel a service or has just opened an account is unlikely to reveal information that can be used. And while it does draw attention to customer satisfaction, it simply doesn t give insight into why customers feel the way they do. Scores and quantitative answers may reveal that the customer is happy with the agent s performance, but they could be unhappy with the poorly constructed IVR. Ultimately nothing is learnt that can be improved upon. The only real way to monitor how a customer feels is through open-ended questions: How do you feel about our company?, Please take a minute to tell our CEO about your experience with our call center. These answers can not only assist with agent coaching and provide insight into why customers rated the service the way they did, but also with process and service improvement that can ultimate lead to action. However, receiving and analysing those answers can be extremely difficult. If companies are serious about customer satisfaction, they will have to find a way to automate the process of capturing, analysing and using open-ended responses at a call center level. Some companies have resorted to focus groups whereby researcher draw a small pool of respondents from a selection, and lead them in a discussion about the company, its products and services. The results are then interpreted, coded and presented after a set amount the time. Of course, the drawback of that methodology is not just the expense, but the amount of time it takes to complete the process. If companies are serious about customer satisfaction, they will have to find a way to automate the process of capturing, analysing and using open-ended responses at a call center level. This will not only enable them to determine exactly what customers think of them, but also to spot trends as they emerge. If, for instance, hundreds of customers are mentioning price as an issue or if there are recurring technical difficulties with a product, the company can react to that. Whilst it s relatively easy to measure how quickly a customer can reach an agent, how quickly calls are resolved and hold long they wait in a queue, quality monitoring is mostly done by people, rather than software. Which means that the process is not only subject to human error, but in large 500-seat call centers, it s a daunting task for a single manager or administrator to do. It is simply not practical to rely on the ability of someone scanning, listening to and scoring each recording. Spot-checking phone conversations or recorded surveys is unlikely to reveal important patterns in the data. The industry needs to adopt new quality measurement tools and benchmarks that can change across shifting parameters and different means of communication with the purpose of using the information gathered to improve the customer experience. 82% of customers interviewed in a recent Liveperson survey said that getting their issue resolved quickly is the deciding factor to determine a great customer experience. We shouldn t merely be measuring agent performances but also overall shortfalls in service delivery. We should observe trends, common complaints
and customer sentiment that isn t just based on agent interaction, but the general experience the customer has had with the company. 2. THE SMART OUTBOUND DIALLER South Africa has a mobile penetration of roughly 118% - which means that fifty million people are wielding close to 59 million cell phones. And despite the implementation of RICA, mobile churn (where users buy and discard SIM cards) is still increasing. Customers easily switch between phones, numbers and service providers who are offering attractive incentives for them to switch between networks. The impact might be quite detrimental for the telecommunications industry, but even more so for debt collectors who have a hard time pinning debtors down. South African household debt is at 75% of disposable income, and unsecured personal loans have grown by 53% in the last year which means that many debt collectors are upping their efforts to ensure debtors honour their repayments. However, that process is not as easy it may was back in the day when people were locked in by their landlines. Any debt collector worth his salt would tell you that starting a dialogue with a debtor is the first step in resolving the issue. The churn of cellular phones, the decrease in land line adoption and the ability to screen calls have all made it more difficult to track a debtor down and garner the outstanding amount. This leads many call centers down the slippery slope of repeatedly attempting to reach customers via phone, and failing time and time again, wasting time and incurring additional expenses over and above the (potential) bad debt. Needless to say, the days of merely dialling as many numbers as quickly as possible are gone and call centers have be more strategic than ever before. The Smart Dialler is the most essential tool any call center with a debt collection component should have particularly when it comes to maximising payments. Most debt collectors will tell you that the longer a debt has been outstanding, and the more uncommunicative a debtor is, the less likely your chances of receiving payment are. Unlike a basic dialler, a smart dialler keeps track of what numbers to dial (e.g. home numbers before 8am and after 5 pm, work numbers after 8 and before 5pm and mobile numbers at other times) and make sure that once you have connected to a client you do not then call the other numbers on this record. The dialler will also know how many times a number has been called and stop calling if it clearly doesn't connect after a given number of attempts, reducing the time wasted on futile attempts. Smart diallers are equipped with different modes, including predictive dialling. This prevents calls go through to blocked numbers or voicemails from going to the agent, essentially allowing more calls to be placed because they don t have to field constant dead ends. Power and preview modes can respectively display the script and dial the call, or display the script without dialling to allow the agent in question to prepare. Both have been found to improve productivity. The smart dialler can issue tasks based on the exact interaction needed. If a company has not received payment on a debt and the payment is only overdue by a few days, there is no need to use your most expensive resource your agents to chase that payment up with a phone call when an agentless message serving as a reminder to the customer will do. Thereafter, if the reminder was not successful, calls can be scheduled accordingly. Smart diallers, then, can be one of the quickest means of eradicating inefficiencies in a call center environment. The technology, as part of a hosted solution, can be deployed in a matter of days. And as call dodgers become smarter, so should call centers.
KEY TRENDS AFFECTING THE SOUTH AFRICAN CONTACT CENTER 3.MULTIMEDIA INTEGRATION As e-commerce and social media has grown in popularity, so has the need to consolidate customer interactions in a call center. Companies have to interact with their customers in the method they prefer, including alternative contact channels such as e-mail, web chat and social media. Whilst traditional voice won t go away, businesses have to respond across almost all channels. Moreover, companies will have to respond to customers via voice mail, fax, email and web chat with the same urgency as they do via voice. Training is particularly important with interactions such as email, as email is a non-realtime communication demand. 80% of customers prefer that organisations always offer multiple channels to communicate and serve their needs. Business Insider Supervisors have to prepare agents for the new role, coach them, and keep them motivated. Even the most prolific Facebook users will need to be trained and managed intensively during the process. Agents need to know the difference between a situation that can resolved with social media, and those that can t. They should also be able to move effortlessly from social media onto a different platform, such as chat or voice. Providing proper guidelines and training is crucial in this regard. More importantly, monitoring tools need to be in place so that customer interactions can still be captured and played back. A social media connector for your contact centre management software should give you the ability to monitor conversations across a variety of platforms, alert the appropriate people and enable them to respond quickly and easily from within their main application. Supervisors still need to be able to intrude on interactions and monitor them in real-time so that agents can be coached and quality maintained. Managers still need the ability to mine and capture data for reporting purposes. Social media, in other words, has to be treated exactly the same as voice and other traditional channels. To truly turn a channels such as social media a successful customer communication channel, operators need to focus on people and not on technology. The simplest way to do this is by making use of a hosted service provider who can manage issues like integration, maintenance, backups and licensing. Once operators shift their focus to training and not technology, the headaches experienced during the transitional period is lessened. It s not to say that technology is not important it s crucial. But it needs to be handled by companies for whom call centre technology is their core business. One of the biggest mistakes contact centres make is to silo their centre by media: having one function dealing with email, another deals with web chat, another deals with enquiries, and so forth. It s the equivalent of tacking mismatched rooms onto an existing house: there is an extent of functionality, but ultimately a customer is faced with a disjointed and inefficient experience. Single vendor solutions created through acquisition often have the same operational integration issues seeming attractive on paper but failing to perform. It s important that call center agents that agents are able to manage all contacts the same way you manage voice interactions, all through a universal queue if required. This cannot be done without effective integration simply bolting-on new technology to an existing call center is not enough.
By using a single agent desktop interface for managing and reporting all customer interactions, call centers will not only reduce call volume and improve efficiency, but also consistently deliver a unified and highly personalised customer experience. Any social media post, for example, is automatically delivered to the contact center and agents receive all notifications directly, whilst this compliant with set call center criteria (such as distribution rules). The ability to not only put a name, but a face, to a call centre agent handling a query is extremely powerful and goes a long way to make a customer feel both heard and valued. Centres are now able to create personalised profiles with bios and photos of their social media agents and create platforms where customers can interact, share information and demonstrate solutions. It has also proven to be a useful research tool: companies can test how customers feel about new services, products and changes within the contact centre before launching them. The rule of thumb for customer service is ultimately to speak to your customers where they are: if they are making queries on Facebook or Twitter, that is where they should be met and addressed. IN CONCLUSION It is not surprising that the tools becoming most crucial in call centers are geared towards improving customer interactions how to reach customers, when to reach them and how to ensure that there is solid two-way communication at all times. Speak to your technology provider about your unique technology needs and ensure that they will help you implement the tools and channels you and your customer require. ABOUT THE AUTHORS Bruce has over 20 years experience in the service industry focussing specifically on contact centers for the last 10. He has a detailed understanding of how to design, build and operate contact centers having worked in the industry in SA, Africa and abroad. He holds a Bachelor of Social Science Degree, a Masters in Business Administration and a Project Management qualification all from the University of Cape Town. Jed studied at York University and has spent the last 15 years in the IT industry. Working as a Technology Director, Jed helped pioneer the voicemail and Unified Messaging industry in South Africa, including delivering SA s first Contact Center using VOIP over ATM. Jed s experience in the contact center industry includes multimedia contact centers, multi-country managed services and assisting with the first Hosted Call Center platform in SA. ABOUT 1STREAM 1Stream are providers of hosted telephony for contact centers. The hosted or software as a service model offers affordable, pay-per-use access to world-class technology including a complete range of multi-media applications to route, record and report on any contact center activity. 1Stream also offers on-going support and consulting services which has proven to help clients extract maximum value from their technology services.
www.1stream.co.za KEY TRENDS AFFECTING THE SOUTH AFRICAN CONTACT CENTER