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 at www.sabio.co.uk/FREE-white-paper.html
