Why getting the results you need depends on the right platform choices
Today's tighter economic conditions mean that businesses are having to place an increased focus on key areas such as customer retention and brand differentiation, and a greater reliance on the overall customer experience offered by the business. Whatever your strategy, it's essential to make sure that your business has the right customer contact solutions in place to help you boost customer loyalty by providing a better customer service and experience. And - given current market realities - it's likely that you're going to have to do this within a framework of tighter budgets and shorter project payback windows.
Fortunately it's not an impossible challenge. Delivering cost-effective customer service with increased limitations of course means you're going to have to make the most of your existing applications and technologies. You'll also have to make sure that you're in a position to take advantage of those applications and solutions that have been shown to deliver a compelling, short-term ROI and play an important role in helping to achieve your current business goals. Key areas to examine here should include:
- Reducing costs and increasing service accessibility through sophisticated self-service and assisted self-service options
- Increasing efficiency and making more effective use of your most expensive contact centre asset - your agents - through key workforce optimisation techniques
- Improving customer retention by having the right outbound strategy and infrastructure in place
- Successfully reducing headcount or combining multiple contact centres with effective virtualisation
- Ensuring business continuity and avoiding lost business by making sure you've successfully replaced key platforms - such as ACDs - that are either end-of-life or don't support your business strategy
Identifying the high value contact centre applications
In its recent UK Contact Centre Market review, Datamonitor focused its attentions on those applications and technologies that are more likely to support the strategic business goals of UK contact centre directors, with the most important including cost reduction, customer retention and up-selling/cross-selling, improving business intelligence and analytics, and supporting new customer acquisition.
While key innovations such as video, speech analytics, on-demand CRM applications and social networking are all seen as delivering significant potential benefit in the longer term, it's clear from Datamonitor's perspective that the 2009 technology imperatives for the UK contact centre market have an understandable emphasis on efficiencies and costs. For Datamonitor, the investments that can make a real business contribution in today's tighter market are:
- Infrastructure optimisation through Virtualisation
- The development of Outbound solutions
- Increased automation using innovative
- Self-service applications
- More effective reporting, monitoring and enterprise performance management
- Agent efficiency technologies and Workforce Optimisation
Optimising existing resources with virtualisation
Virtualisation is proving a key approach for any organisation looking to optimise their existing resources, whether it's IT, telecoms, office space or staff. Contact centres are no different, and many businesses have found that evolving their multiple contact centre infrastructures and PBX/ACD equipment into a single, location-independent site can prove extremely cost and resource-efficient. However, virtualisation isn't just about rationalising equipment: the focus needs to be on optimising physical, technical and human resources and ensuring that the organisation not only replicates functionality from its new virtualised capability, but also has the flexibility and performance needed to meet future challenges.
Putting Outbound to work
Given that agent costs are estimated to account for between 60 to 70 percent of contact centre costs, it makes sense to make the most of your expensive agent resource. So it's surprising that so few organisations really put Outbound to work for their business effectively, if at all - particularly as part of a blended programme that can automatically switch inbound activities to outbound when it is most resource efficient.
By combining the ability to deliver enhanced customer service and upsell opportunities with increased agent efficiency, organisations can help optimise their business resources - and potentially reduce overall call volumes if some of the outbound initiatives are delivered by self-serve IVR applications. So, whether it's utility disconnect warnings, flight cancellation notices, booking confirmations, overdraft notifications or hospital appointment reminders, there are significant opportunities for organisations to streamline their business processes, contain costs and improve the overall customer experience using outbound in their business.
Enabling higher levels of automation
Speech-enabled solutions are now playing an important role in removing barriers to service. User centric-designed speech applications make processes much easier for the customer, and are playing a key role in handling the routine transactional calls - such as Customer Identification and Verification and Account Balance enquiries - that take up so much live agent time.
A key development here is the shift from speech recognition, which determines what's being said, to voice verification that can actually identify who is speaking. One major bank that has worked with Sabio now uses speech recognition to verify over 75 percent of its calls within the self-service application - saving almost 50 seconds a call. It's results like this that are driving self-service take-up and consistently delivering clear sub-12 month ROIs.
More effective monitoring and enterprise reporting
All across the enterprise IT space we're also seeing a renewed focus on operational reporting, but we're now seeing an increasing effort on integrating contact centre and customer-facing activities into the enterprise mix through increasingly sophisticated Contact Centre and Agent Analytics. By integrating data from different sources such as ACDs, IT systems, CRM, WFM, data from diallers, and reporting from quality monitoring, organisations can turn activity information into more meaningful business performance results - which can then be fed back to drive performance improvement at both an individual and team level. A key part of this process - and the driver for extremely accurate statistical reporting - is the need to closely align contact centre KPIs to high-level business objectives. For the contact centre agent, this can mean the opportunity to focus their individual activity on what the broader business really needs them to do in order to drive overall business performance and have their pay linked to these objectives.
Unlocking agent efficiencies
With their ability to reduce agent overstaffing and improve attrition, approaches such as Workforce Optimisation - and specifically Workforce Management (WFM) - are ideally placed to help organisations do much more with less, and are set to provide a critical differentiator for firms that are looking to optimise the performance of their most expensive asset - their people. Optimisation techniques that can help to improve productivity and lower costs. Immediate benefits here can include removing much of the non value-added administrative activities that tend to monopolise so much contact centre management time, including sorting out holidays, handling shift swaps and agent sickness, as well as reporting and exception management.
Ensuring that your business is ready to take advantage of these higher value applications
Clearly there are significant opportunities for contact centre operators to adopt these types of high value applications - but what if your business doesn't have the right contact centre infrastructure in place to help you deploy such solutions. How can you make sure that your organisation isn't going to be held back?
Examples of potential barriers could be that your current telephony platform is 'end-of-life', your evolving business needs aren't supported by your existing telephony system, you're not getting the flexibility your business needs from your ACD platform, or you're still trying to run a contact centre using an old telephony platform.
However, with the right systems at the heart of your customer contact strategy, you could get access to next generation applications that deliver short term ROI, such as automation using speech technology, proactive contact and enterprise reporting, to name a few. Investing in your infrastructure now will give you the platform you need for access to customer contact applications that could make the difference for your business in these tough times.
If you're serious about increasing efficiency and reducing costs within your contact centre environment, then you need to be implementing the applications that will both deliver the fastest returns in the short term, and also leave you in the best position to accelerate into the inevitable recovery.
Sabio has produced a new White Paper: "Customer Service Solutions for Tough Times", that expands on the topics being covered and provides contact centre operators with valuable practical advice about making the right platform choices. This can be downloaded here
