User guides- Contact Centres

Knowing how to recommend appropriate technology

s part of a strategy of continuous improvement, contact centers are always looking at cool new technologies that may provide improvements in their business practices. Okay — maybe they’re not all that “cool,” but they definitely make things work better!

Driving Improvement with Technology

Your contact center’s analyst is primarily responsible for identifying opportunities for improvement, but everyone contributes ideas and recommendations. The manager of technology, for example, is likely to read trade journals and visit with vendors to keep abreast of new developments. He or she may come across something that may have a net improvement, and so should generally have an answer when someone asks if there’s a technological solution to affect a driver in a particular way.

In this part you find some examples of technological enhancements.

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IP contact centers

VoIP is the transmission of voice conversations over an IP-based data network. It represents a fundamental shift in the way that voice messages are handled when compared to traditional circuit-switched phone systems. IP Telephony is the collective set of software-based voice applications that transport voice via VoIP.

For several years, businesses large and small have been saving significant amounts of money by converting traditional voice systems to VoIP solutions. The majority of savings is realized through a simpler network infrastructure (a converged voice and data network) and avoiding costly toll calls by carrying the majority of traffic on that network. Savings are also realized through significantly simpler maintenance — moves, adds, and changes are done in minutes instead of hours or days.

Some contact centers — perhaps yours — have already made the switch to VoIP and are just beginning to realize the benefits available through such a conversion. An IP contact center leverages IP technologies to flatten and consolidate contact center infrastructure, removing expensive network charges and running many locations from one centralized set of applications (or maybe two for redundancy).

It is this “many locations” benefit that can give contact centers a competitive advantage that was never before possible. Home agents, satellite locations, outsourced resources, and resident experts are easily added as extensions to the same contact center, all while maintaining centralized management and reporting. Contact center agents at branch offices can now have affordable access to the rich suite of contact center applications because these applications no longer have to reside on site.

SIP, or Session Initiated Protocol, is making its way into the contact center. Using the concept of presence, agents can instantly see who is logged on and what work state each expert is currently in. This facilitates an agent being able to quickly invoke the help of another agent, a supervisor, or other expert to help with an answer for the tough questions — leading to fewer transfers and faster call resolution.

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For contact centers, the real value of IP is realized by implementing a number of solutions made possible by the IP infrastructure. These solutions include:

Server and application consolidation. Contact centers can radically reduce application and infrastructure complexity. The consolidation means it is not uncommon to reduce capital expenditures by 30 percent or more and ongoing maintenance and support by 15 percent. The reduction in complexity makes your center more flexible when responding to market changes.

Virtual site consolidation. Assuming your company has contact center resources in differing locations, an IP infrastructure increases staffing efficiencies in the range of 3 percent to 8 percent by pooling agent resources across the locations.

Resource optimization. Because you can utilize staffing wherever it is located (on site or off), IP contact centers typically reduce staffing costs by 3 percent to 9 percent and help grow revenue. It is not uncommon to also increase customer loyalty by more easily connecting the right agent to the right caller at the right time.

Globalization. If you’ve thought of expanding your contact center to include off-shore resources to provide a 24-hour follow-the-sun contact center, an IP infrastructure makes such expansion possible. Contact centers can reduce operating costs by approximately 30 percent by staffing the center with high quality, low turnover, college-educated agents from developing economies.

All of these solutions can easily cost justify themselves in standalone implementations, but they become most attractive when you understand that such solutions are much easier to implement in an IP contact center than in a traditional contact center.

Since IP technology represents a fundamental change in a contact center’s technological infrastructure, a conversion is not something to be done lightly. Fortunately, leading IP partners, such as Avaya, know that you don’t need to change everything at once. You can plan for an evolutionary change, over time, that enables you to realize immediate benefits without scrapping your current systems and grow into longer-term changes that poise your company for continued growth.

Agent performance monitoring

Most contact centers do a great deal of quality monitoring. In many cases, they do this by randomly listening to and grading agent contacts, often recording them using a cassette recorder. Occasionally, the supervisor (or a member of a quality team) sits beside the agent and reviews the call immediately upon its conclusion.

Other times, the supervisor may record the call remotely and review it with the agent at a later date. This method can be effective, but it has its drawbacks. Most significant is that it is very time consuming for the supervisor. Idle time between calls and the administration of storing, recording, and grading calls makes the process very inefficient. Some supervisors have claimed that they can do about one call per hour when they included feedback.

Because the process is so labor intensive, it’s difficult and impractical to target specific agent needs — such as high call length, low customer opinion, poor sales, or high returns.

For most contact centers it’s beneficial to purchase an automated quality monitoring system and integrate it into your infrastructure. Doing this can dramatically increase your supervisors’ productivity and enable them to provide to the agents a greater volume of feedback with more specific detail.

The system automatically captures complete agent phone calls — recording both the voice conversation and a video picture of the agents’ navigation of the systems. When supervisors are ready to review agent calls, they simply log in to the system from their workstation, retrieve sample calls from the agent or service they wish to review, and begin scoring.

Scoring is also done through the system. After they’re done scoring, the supervisor can e-mail the results to the agent, with comments. The agent can also retrieve and review the call. The supervisor is relieved of the administration and wait time associated with manual quality monitoring. As a result, in some contact centers using this technology, supervisor productivity has more than tripled. Because they can retrieve calls from any agent without waiting, supervisors can target individual agents and try to understand performance deficiencies that are evident from the statistical analysis.

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CRM technology

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is a business term that refers to the process of relating to your customers to maximize the length and value of that customer relationship. It involves data collection and analysis to better understand your customers’ needs and wants. It also includes customized strategies for addressing unique customer needs. The whole point of CRM is to get new customers, to keep the customers you’ve got, and to maximize the value of the relationships you have with those customers.

The technology of CRM is diverse. However, it doesn’t have to be overly complex or uncommon — especially in the beginning. Think of CRM technology in terms of four components: data collection, data management and analysis, the creation of business rules, and customer contact applications.

Companies collect data on their customers from a variety of sources, including billing systems, contact center customer contact systems, Web-based contact information, or any other point of contact. This information is used in building the CRM database.

Managing data is an important part of any CRM system. As the system collects information about individual callers, the data are stored in a large data warehouse. This information can be analyzed and inferences made about your customers’ needs and intentions. You can make these inferences at the individual customer level, creating a service plan for each one.

Developing a CRM strategy

The core of any CRM strategy is to create a philosophy and plan on how you want to treat your customers, what you want to get from your customer relationships, and what you plan to give customers in return. All parts of the organization should coordinate in the execution of your CRM strategy — from marketing to contact center operations.

The execution of the CRM strategy includes three components: people, process, and technology. As with many contact center initiatives, it is very easy to purchase technology in the hopes that it will solve your problems and achieve your strategic goals. But careful advance planning and evaluation are necessary to ensure that the technology can actually improve your customer relationship management and your business results.

Using CRM data

Make data analysis part of your overall CRM strategy. This analysis can be as simple as preparing reports and conducting database queries, or as complex as building predictive models in an effort to forecast the future behavior of your customers.

In the contact center, the collected customer information is used to create business rules. Some rules guide agents in the handling of specific customer calls. For example, VIP customers can be identified by automatic number identification from their home phone, and their calls can be routed to your best agents. After the customer’s call is answered, agents are prompted by the CRM tools to make specific offers that analysis suggests the customer may be interested in.

CRM applications are not unlike the contact center applications on the agents’ workstation. They include ways to access customer information and deliver information to the customer. In a CRM environment they have additional functionality, such as information on the customer’s call history and preferences, suggested sales and service strategies, and even suggested scripting.

Focusing on the customer

CRM applications can help a contact center totally shift their focus to the customer in ways never before possible. Contact center applications and infrastructure act as the enabler for CRM applications to really strut their stuff. If your infrastructure and applications cannot connect agents to the right information within the right time, the customers’ experience and the entire operation is less effective.

However, if your CRM applications are meaningfully integrated within your infrastructure, then your customers’ experience is enhanced and operations effectiveness is improved. Customers are properly identified, classified, and routed to the best available resource to help them. In addition, the agents receive the right information on their desktops to best address the customers’ needs, as well as cross-sell and up-sell.

How to Recommend Technology

Okay, you’re a technology genius and you found some technology that’s going to make a big difference. So what’s next?

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How do you go about getting approval so you can start saving the company money? Why not keep it simple? Try the one-page cost-benefit analysis.

The one-page cost-benefit analysis

The most appropriate and effective way to submit a proposal for technology enhancements is with a one-page cost-benefit analysis. It’s easy, and only two specific rules apply:

The analysis must easily fit onto one letter-sized piece of paper

The argument for spending money on new technology must be communicated in one minute or less

Certainly, some proposals are going to be a lot longer than one page. The point is that the business case for new technology needs to be so clear and so focused on business objectives and drivers that it can easily be summarized in one page. And you know what? Few decision makers ever read those other pages anyway.

The easiest way to meet both of these rules is to use the business model outlined in Part II. The model says that all business activities go toward the key objectives of generating revenue, minimizing cost, or satisfying customers. To make the case for new technology, you have to define the benefit of new technology in terms of those key business objectives.

To make your business case, you have to show that the new technology can affect at least one of the performance drivers in a manner that results in a benefit to your company substantially larger than the cost of that new technology.

Considering the technology payback

Any technology recommendation needs to take into consideration payback — after all, that is the reason that any cost-benefit analysis is done. The goal of the analysis is to show that the payback of any technology investment is greater than the investment.

When considering payback, however, you must also consider intangibles. For instance, if a new system can decrease average call length by 30 seconds, that’s an easy savings to quantify. If the same system can also increase agent satisfaction, how do you quantify that? Further, how do you even determine that increased satisfaction is a potential payback until you’ve had agents try the new system?

These are questions that analysts face every day. As you are working on your recommendation, consider working with your existing analysts; they may be able to identify and quantify items that you never considered in your research. They definitely can help you identify current costs and measurements so you can compare them to the anticipated costs and measurements of the target system.

When considering any technology investment, work closely with your vendor or technology partners. Chances are good that they have experience in identifying and quantifying different ways that your investment can provide the payback you need.

Also consider payback in terms of strategic positioning — does a proposed system help position your contact center for greater growth or competitive advantage? Such intangibles are important in any business, and rightfully enter into any