Saluting the employees in May Day, we are going to discuss how we improve the call center performance with the help of them and right KPIs.

Fusion and Their Employees Setting the Right KPI

Fusion has a list of services under their banner and customer service is the most essential among them. We do follow certain steps to make our customer service practice outperform others. Today with the use of multiple channels, we are able to give quality leads and have a higher utilization rate.

Routing of calls to the right agents and generation of instant feedback, allowing seamless channel to pop up on the unified desktops, and greatly contributes to better performance.

As Fusion has turned into a strategic organization in these nine long years so, incorporating the best practices are important for us. Today these practices are the face of your organization. So we tend to give the best possible customer service and that too cost-effectively.

Well, the question that is going to arise in this situation is – How Fusion agents achieves the goal of 99.9% customer satisfaction?

According to the Whitepapers shared on the website of CIO Summit by the Empirix Inc shows that six different KPIs contribute much to the overall performance of the call centers. These include:

• First Call Resolution (FCR)
• Customer Satisfaction
• Higher Utilization Rate
• Cost per Contact
• Call Abandonment Rate
• Call Quality Score

These leading practices help to find the KPIs to quantify the impact. These leading practices have helped Fusion to measure the performance in a relative way. The difference in performance in BPO leaders and BPO laggards summarized below in this table looks:

From the above statistics, you can infer that maintenance of the following 6 KPIs will help to meet a balanced scorecard for customer satisfaction.

At Fusion, we are having access to high-level of support just at the touch of a button. We also add ways to transfer and escalate the calls that make sure that your customers get higher satisfaction scores and FCR.

What are those innovations that help our agent to deliver positive results to the customers?

• Installation of ACD (automatic call distribution) system, routes calls to the right agent. This is an important aspect of the FCR.
• Preparations of call transfer rules that are handy, give access to multiple agents, and give instant support to all customer queries.
• Better utilization with innovative tools helps to keep the operation cost lower and workforce motivated.

Further study by Benchmark Portal affirms that the use of low-cost communication channels like Web, email, self-service helps the agents to solve problems faster and in an easier way. More use of at-home agents to lower cost and improve contact center convenience.

The result of analysis shows that the daily operations not only lowers the operational cost but also improves the customer experience. Moreover, these results in building organized and relevant leading practices.

Employees give their best at every call; and with the assistance of intelligent tools boost the productivity and result ins improved customer satisfaction rate. We thus salute the hard work of our employees!

Travel and tourism is the trendiest industry and people all over the world like to invest upon it. In this travel and tourism industry, there has been a current trend of Timeshare realties, which has become popular by late 90’s.

Timeshare is a competitive package for the holidaymakers. Here, they are going to have an access to an impressive line of hotel brands for the customers to enjoy their holidays. If you are an average holidaymaker, then you have ample of choice to select from the Timeshare.

The timeshare companies thus run through intense competition and more effort to engage and retain the existing customers.

For this, the timeshare companies often have to face these four challenges:

• How to recognize marketing strategies that improves customer engagement?
• How to diagnose the customer behavior and thus target the marketing campaigns?
• How to improve sales?
• How to develop a retention program?

At Fusion, we have helped our clients to attain the perfection by solving their four queries as mentioned above. For that we have, prospectable timeshare campaigns to further help our clients.

Improving The Customer Engagement

According to the current level of engagement, we divide customers into a number of bases. This segmentation done under the following categories:

• Most Valuable Customers
• Growing Customers
• Marginal Customers
• Loss-Making Customers

After this segmentation, it becomes easy for our client to design the loyalty programs for their valuable and growing customers. Whereas, the loss-making customers helps to reduce the cost of servicing them. This helps to engage the customers at a higher level and generate profitable timeshare leads.

Marketing Campaigns

Members were actually segmented according to the frequency and the volume of the transactions made. At Fusion, we use the data to understand the behavior of the customer. Our client thus forecast whether a member is going to make a booking or not. With this insight it help us to optimize the communication programs and retain the target prospects. Actually, these savings generated from the customers who wanted to book it, boosts the sales conversion rate.

Improvement In The Sales Graph

The data collected in the timeshare campaigns at Fusion is generally transient in nature and is more of permanent nature, and let our client get the tangible benefits. To understand the attitudinal trends of the customers, so that you can communicate effectively and thus improve the sales.

Generation Of Appropriate Retention Campaigns

Use of the timeshare campaigns in a logistics way helps the client to identify the target prospects and give them appropriate retention campaigns. This data used by timeshare companies in separate retention programs to recognize the target prospects and thus save large on the direct marketing costs and reduce attrition.

Additional Services Given at Fusion

Timeshare campaigns have increased the effectiveness of the timeshare companies and they are able to cater better customer service. At Fusion, we have added some extra benefits that include:

• To understand the customers and their buying trend
• Slashing the customer retention
• Increased market efficiency

Well, the figure is around 7 lakh approximately and it is not a simple figure. Overall employment in the IT and BPO sector of India has seen almost half of the increase in 2012, than the preceding years. It has been since July 2009 that India witnesses employment demand to rise despite the economic downturn.

Call Center Job: The Hot Trend

According to the Economic Survey for the year 2012-13 tabled in the Lok Sabha (Parliament of India) shows that the steady development in the employment structure contributes a lot to the human development. This is of great economic significance to BPO sectors in India provided that the measures taken to seize the “demographic dividend”.

As we know that the younger generation infest the BPO sectors more than any other age groups, so the working – age population, between 15 and 59 years are likely to grow by 64% in the year 2021. Moreover, new entrants around 63.5 million had an influx in the call center industry this year.

The booming population of India, perennially scouting for jobs, has found that call centers are the most dependable source. It has given financial opportunities to the number of youth. At Fusion, after doing some  researches we have found that people hired by contact centers of India expected to grow 50% annually.

Battling The Attrition Rates

One of the annoying problems that dog the outsourcing industry is the work ethic. People hired in the contact center industry is volatile. They are moving with the trend ‘here today, gone tomorrow’. The constant shifting of jobs pull down the operational qualities like – discipline, endurance, loyalty and respect for the management.

Though the employment has scope increased in the last year by 7 lakh, attrition rates shoot up 50% every year. Human resource manager finds it tough to battle out the tough problem of attrition. Being the leader in contact centers Fusion too faces the similar problems of attrition.

However, attrition was previously a major concern, but with the increase in the employment scope, attrition rates have started to decline. What is the cause? – Well, the cause is changes in macroeconomic element of the industry according to the Macroeconomic Framework Statement by Union Budget 2013-2014. Macroeconomic conditions are having a great impact on the attrition rates. This allows the outsourcing companies to let their employee enjoy long-term career growth and security.

Factors Contributing Towards the Growth of BPO Career

• Low operational costs and tax benefits
• Favorable government policies
• Technically sound employees present in the country itself
• Adoption of advanced IT technologies
• Growth in export demand from various new verticals
• Use of innovative technologies like cloud computing
• Set up of more SEZ in Tier II cities

Above 7 factors largely contributes to the growth of Indian BPO industry to have a strong competitive position and a market share. NASSCOM survey report says that rural areas are going to boost ten times by 2013-2014, compared to the year 2009-2010. Booz and Co have conducted a survey poll and has found that India is the ideal destination for offshoring that encourages foreign companies to offshore their products to Indian ITeS companies.

With all these elements and considering the macroeconomic situation of India, 2013 is surely going to enjoy en employment boos, 99.9% customer and employee satisfaction as well.

• Do we feel that age-old generation gap?  
• Are we too old to accept the Gen Y people?
• Does Gen Y overpower Gen X?

Gosh! We have so many questions to answer. Gen Y employees are those born between 1980 and 2000. A common perception about them is that they are less involved, more self-absorbed, and of course lazier than Gen X.

Many webinars have unfolded the queries on the Gen Y recently. The webinars revealed that Gen Y workforce is different and their working pattern is an inspiration for the present business processes. Gen Y involved with contact centers do involve past moving perceptions and embraces the generation’s role to bring out effective changes.

A study on Gen Y Employee Engagement by BusinessWire shows how positive, enthusiastic and motivating are the Gen Y employees. Well, they have a lot of why’s in their life.

• Why we are handling the process in this way?
• Why we are not approaching it in an efficient manner?

These why’s of Gen Y are actually changing the workplace. This is not self-absorption, but a broader statement of a generation that cares much passionately about how they are going to live their life.

Yes, the perceived boredom in the workplace has given rise to the cultural shifts that has occurred over a past few decades – outsourcing, massive layoffs etc. Yet, they are turning out to be the most promising employees of the contact centers.

Therefore, the contact center must welcome this generation of employees and reduce the 5 common misperceptions to create a better call center environment. What are those misperceptions?

Let us reveal, so that the contact centers can earn some potential benefits from Gen Y’ers-

• Do They Really Lack Work Ethics?

Check out the top outsourcing companies, you will come to know that they dispel this myth (Gen Y does not have work ethics). Gen Y workers are a little different from Gen X. They crave for satisfaction and appreciation for their work. You have to inspire them, by explaining the work pattern and the working part they love the most.

• Gen Y Workers Are Not Focused

Contact center managers must understand that the outlook of Gen Y changes drastically. They are actually multi-taskers, and they can operate between different systems to solve problems of the customers easily. Wow! What an excellent advantage the customers can get from Gen Y. So, use it!

• Do They Respect Management?

Constant questioning by Gen Y people is no more perceived as disrespect. It is rather a huge benefit for the contact centers as it brings changes in the work process. Moreover, it is necessary for the outsourcing companies to ask how much respect to give out to their Gen Y workers and ask what they can do to foster a greater culture of respect.

• Do They Stay Engaged at the Workplace?

If you want to create a sense of community around the workplace, then it is going to create a long way for engaging both workers and other employees. Programs such as social outgoings or the softball leagues, helps the company to start building a healthy community with Gen Y employees.

• Can They Handle Criticism?

Another misconception which we generally have against the Gen Y employees is that they cannot handle criticism. Gen Y workers do not avoid criticism, rather they actively look for feedback and challenges to some common perceptions. As the criticism at times is aggressive, it does not give feedback to employees, but Gen Y is not counted among them.

Fusion encourages Gen Y employees at their call center premise, as their positive outlook towards life helps them to provide better customer service. Gen Y employees move with the evolving technology, to give fast and effective solutions, that not only generates better ROI for business, but also a good repute for the call center they work with.

Various contact centers conducted surveys, which shows, 28% call centers do not have a formal Quality Assurance Program. However, we think that this very program has enabled Fusion to get the extra advantage over call centers and earn the fame.

Fusion has installed the performance dashboards to provide real-time views of quality that include elements like average call handling time, ratings on customer satisfaction, FCR (first-call resolution), call schedule adherence, etc.

Fusion is working on the QA Program for a long time and has met up with many certifications. The chart below that shows percentage of performance that Fusion attained through various quality monitoring tools:

Here, we are going to share 5 basic strategies on Quality Assurance, which we have set besides implementing the quality monitoring tools:

1. Quality Improvement Practices Is Must: Research shows that service level goals, call-handling goals, call control processes all must evolve within the context of quality improvement practices.

   Why? Since, it might backfire, leading to customer dissatisfaction and costs will rise over.

2. Handling Service Level Intelligently: One needs to set the service level intelligently to make sure that they do not become obstructions to quality problems. This does not imply that you have to sacrifice the service level, but it should have the perspective that leads to quality. Since, agents motivated by the call handling rush to end a call without information. It might increase the cost of calling back or contacting the contact center via different communication channel.
3. Need of Systematic Approach: Some of the call center metrics meet the service levels, but they alone cannot give the right picture of customer satisfaction. There are organizations that capture the voice of the customer in an ad-hoc fashion over different communication channels. Thus, without a systematic approach, organizations could be unaware of the events occurring in the markets.
4. Customer Preference: One needs to set the standard for the contact center development by changing their insight according to the customer preference. At Fusion, customer preference is highly valuable.
5. Call Center Agents A Part Of Self-Evaluation: The performance metrics are clearly defined at Fusion, and we ask our employees to take up self-assessment exam from time to time. As this is the most powerful building blocks to quality improvement.

Contact centers often ignore the need for quality management. Thus, they often find themselves spending on costly quality monitoring tools, experiencing disappointment in terms of little or no benefit.

Quality monitoring at Fusion focuses on compliance-related activities. We use the quality monitoring tools and implement them intelligently with strategic goals. We have found that not limiting quality monitoring to a checklist of measures analyzed without context, it is better to find a process that aligns metrics.

Are you wondering? Nothing to wonder, it is the answering service, that the medical practitioners have enabled to help people in the late hours.

The survey done by The Journal of Family Practice shows, that the doctor responds to 67% of the answering service messages almost immediately and they prove effective for both doctors and patients.

It does not matter whatever time it may be, you can always reach your doctor. Fusion BPO has modified their answering service and has taken it to the next level to offer medical answering service on behalf of their clients from healthcare industry.

Take for example, if you are sick  and need doctors’ advise, then I think answering service is the way out for your practitioners. As office of the doctor remains closed at late hours, the answering service is going to provide prompt service to patients.

Well, we here at Fusion blog is going to explain you on the working of answering services.

What happens when a customer calls at the doctor’s office who has enabled answering service?

1. It is late night you need a little doctor’s advise as your son is sick. You called up knowing about closed office.
2. You end up speaking to someone and they page the doctor for you, isn’t it awesome!
3. Who answered? Are those open lines of communication?

Do you know with whom you spoke? – You spoke with an answering service. Do you want to know to whom the phone carrier sends the call to the doctor’s office?

As the doctor’s office is closed, the phones transfer the call to the answering service via call forwarding. The phone company sends out the voice call to the answering service department along with a 10 digit ANI (like caller ID).

At Fusion, our answering service department, and the PBX identify the call. PBX follows a dial plan and sends the voice and data of the particular call to an answering service operator like us.

We have our agent at the right end of the phone who is ready to greet in a courteous manner. Then you speak with our agents relaying your message and the urgency. Our agents are there to listen to your problem that is against doctor’s protocol.

The Fusion answering service department follows a protocol to reach the doctor. Our answering service thus relays the message to the physician on call by patching through their phone. You then get to speak to your respective doctor, and he responds to the call to render great advice.

What We Need To Maintain In The Answering Service?

Fusion being the leading contact center provides effective answering service across the global destination maintains the 5 pillars of growths.

• Safety
• Efficiency for patients
• Effective message service for both patients and doctors
• Timely responses
• Patient centered services

Get through all your medical requirements with Fusion’s steadfast answering service.

Before beginning this discussion, the big question in this aspect which we have to answer is- “What is tele-prospecting or teleprospecting? ”

Teleprospecting is not selling something over the phone, but it’s function is to keep the sales department active. The B2B telemarketing company uses tele-prospecting to follow-up, and qualifies for the market responders and generates demand for the product or the service through outbound calling.

The tele-prospecting should serve as a connector between sales and marketing. For good reasons, one of the department should handle tele-prospecting to give marketing a good momentum. Before we say why marketing should own this function, let us discuss why tele-prospecting is a part of the sales activity.

How A TeleProspecting Agent Must Act?

• Teleprospecting agents should chalk out a path to grow a sales aptitude.
• You need a sales culture while running a tele-prospecting operation.
• The agents need to craft a compensation structure, based upon results.
• The agents need to align with the sales.

Fusion is going to stress in this blog the reasons to own tele-prospecting. Many of the experts are of the opinion, that in B2B marketing, tele-prospecting is not a need. But we are going to give compelling argument and will list the increasing importance of tele-prospecting campaigns in B2B marketing.

1) Setting Right Tele-Prospecting Approach to Convert the Sales Accepted Leads

It is seen that the teleprospecting team can easily set up a structured approach to nurture the accounts. They give impetus to right buying standards, cross-pollinate interest buyers and sellers , execute various tactics that can generate huge revenues and give towards the marketing campaigns. Marketing in this case must find the right balance between wringing campaign revenue and obtaining a good ROI. With responsibility for the entire function, we have to get better yields. However, there is a question – Can sales generate the same results? Yes, marketing can capitalize the upstream income.

2) Helps to Improve Upstream Demand Generation Tele-prospecting

not only converts the lead but also helps to get a precise feedback, so that marketing can tune into new media, message, and improves the upstream investment yields. Can sales alone meet it? Yes. Marketing is again such a greater aspect that makes sure that upstream campaigns work well.

3) Incorporating Tele-Prospecting Into Different Forms Of Outbound Marketing Can Improve The Efficiency

Integrated marketing works for a reason and it is similar to, lead nurturing. At Fusion, we set up different groups to design messages, timing, frequency, method of contact, working on the optimization of the contacts and the information exchange strategy. This lead optimization and experimentation is compulsory for marketing. It is no doubt challenging if you can take out tele-prospecting out of the big marketing toolkit.

4) Right Kind of Skill and Customer-Centric Messaging

It is not possible for the marketing team to create customer-centric messages, but still they have abilities. While testing openers for various buyers one needs to develop assets that will make the responders sales ready. The telemarketers thus learn a lot about what motivates the customer, what are their interaction rates etc.

5) When Next CSO Is Hired Tele-Prospecting Operation Will Not Get Converted Into Quota-Carrying Sales Team

Fusion has been in the telemarketing service for a long time and thus enjoys pure inside-sales. We know that it actually occurs when fund is tight. Since, a new sales leader thinks that everyone on his team should actually sell, carry a quota and meet their earnings.

Thus, getting into depths Fusion excavate the teleprospecting aspects to make sure that the sales pipeline stays filled throughout the camping session.

How we help our clients? – We help our clients to nurture leads, generate comparative profits, and keep the sales pipeline growing throughout the campaign.

Lead nurturing is a tough process, and in our previous blogs, we have clearly shown how Fusion deals with the obstructions and dilemmas that come in the path of B2B marketing with three different strategies. However, when we deal with clients, the common question, which we face, is:

How Quick and Cheap is the Lead Nurturing at Our Call center?

Yes, our clients want a time-saving and cost-affordable lead nurturing. How do we provide them with such facilities? Well, we generally follow 5 basic ideals to meet the cost affordability and time-saving aspects.

Through this blog, we are going to share the prominent strategies that we adopt to help our client get the best potential leads.

1) Having  the nurturing database

We include all the people in our database to whom we generally sell the products. These include people whom we might have met at the trade shows, someone who might have spoken with our sales team, or the ones who might have responded through our website.

2) Reviewing the database

We check out the database from time to time to see what we know about our customers. In which industries they delve in. What are their designations? Where did we find their names?

3) To find out what services are the most relevant to customers

We often sit with our contact center agents and ask them some common question regarding our customers, like:

• What question do the customers ask most often?
• What do they care the most?
• What issues they generally face?

We check the articles, blogs, whitepapers, etc. that addresses different customer issues. We pass on this content by the sales team. We ask the agents, whether the customers value it or not. We can repurpose the content and the Whitepapers can be transformed to articles and finally the articles into blogs.

4) Email the relevant content to possible prospects, but don’t pitch

We keep the emails simple as if we are speaking to someone directly. We at Fusion, help our agents and sales team by providing them with email templates, so that they can follow-up easily and engage easily in the new conversations.

5) Adding the human touch in conversations

We establish a personal connection with each customer and take them into confidence by adding the human touch to our phone calls. A human voice gains trust of customers easily than the automated machines. We greet them with their names, do ask for feedback at the end of every call just to make the call process a complete one.

At Fusion, we have realized that lead nurturing can be done without the help of expensive automation tools. Our business clients can start-off with simple and cost-effective platforms. Since, our motto is to keep everything simple.

Since the agent has to handle huge volumes of call throughout the day, so repeating the same act 50 to 75 times irritates the agents. Many people who began their work at the contact center, probably knows that how monotonous is the job.

In eminent contact centers like Fusion, we break up the agent’s day periodically. Things like agent training and team meetings that associate with different activities all are a part of the daily schedule. However, what else the agents can do in between handling the calls, which do not occur in the specific time.

Fusion knows that happy agents can make the customers happy in return. Boosting up the agent retention is necessary, but how contact center can meet it? Here, we have some of their own ideas to share.

1) Agent Growth

You won’t be satisfied if the customers come to know more about the product and the service offered than your agent. If customer problems get resolved through multiple channels before calling the call center, then no complex issues will be left to resolve.

So make sure that the agents have the proper training to increase their communication skills and have the detailed information to entertain all the abrupt questions coming from the customers.

2) Use Of Social Media

We ask our agents to support the customers through the social media platforms on behalf of the company. This helps to liven up their agent’s day and takes the customer service to the target markets.

Social media is the recent craze among the customers and people like to engage themselves through this platform as it is an instant way to communicate. In the beginning of the day, a little of social networking can really escalate the agent’s mood as well as engage in customer satisfaction.

3) Mingling With The Customer Community

It is better to ask the agents to mingle with various customer communities via an assigned task. It will not only reduce boredom, but could end up turning idle time into a call evading solution. And it really helps agent to know the customer traits in a better manner. So if they have to handle an irate customer, there would be less chance of getting frustrated.

4) Back Office Experience

Customer experience is the biggest concern to start the sales process within a call center. It also helps to ease the back office backlog, improve the customer experience and offer various back-office tasks like – application processing, fax communications, and processing returns.

5) The Opportunity To Welcome A Call Effectively

Your agent must get the opportunity to take the customer call without any interruption and begin warm customer relationships. For that, we train them with creative ideas to greet the customers, so that even irate customers feel keen to carry on with the conversation.

At Fusion, we try to make our call center a better place to work for our agents. As the time is tight, we have to stick to the service rules. High attrition rate and the low agent engagement is not the norm. One has options to challenge the accepted methods during the intraday management.

In spite of all the tactics, we follow, it is generally seen that staffing and call volume don’t quite match up. 85% tenancy equates to 17 hours of idle time a month. Therefore, in such cases we have seen that automating intraday management helps to re-purpose the time so that our agents can take a break from calls to improve customer experience, contact center productivity and agent retention.

In the beginning of our marketing campaigns even after attending 900 calls, we hardly used to gain 10 to 15 leads. Agents do feel disappointed, and our marketing team went about finding the flaws in the process.

So, what we did to correct our lead generation process? We made our agent receive both formal and informal training. We organized three basic rules for handling the telemarketing calls effectively. Believe us we saw an 839% improvement in our leads, as our agents started to meet 8 leads after 550 calls.

What were the three tactics that brought Fusion such a vast change in their telemarketing approach?

1. Being Human
2. Building A Relationship
3. Be Knowledgeable

Yes, the three blanket statements, which were once hard to apply, are now our strength. We have learned in the due course that translation must start with the person who makes the call, because warming up of leads start with one-on-one telephonic conversation.

Being Human

Customers like to buy thing from people and not from the companies. When our agents began selling product and service for a company, the agent’s convincing power takes the customer into confidence.

An agent helps to make the customer rely on the products. For that, they make sure that they concentrate on each call, focus on the decision makers, etc. We know that telemarketing is a highly stressful process, but we can prevent the errors just assigning proper energy to each call.

Along with the focus, one needs to start fresh with every call. Agents should sound as if they are attending the call for the first time. The flaw and the mistakes of the previous call need to be left behind and one must start afresh to qualify the next sales lead.

To optimize the approach of the call, at Fusion we follow some rules:

• We take notes on the call and call style
• Assess the call quality and get feedback from the mentors and the managers
• Accelerates constructive criticism

Building a Relationship

According to Marketing Powers, the conversation is between two humans in a telemarketing process, we have to focus on the universal lead definition. One of the most important aspects of universal lead definition is to ask open-ended questions. This initiates less questioning and better flow during the conversation. Even a decision maker gets a chance to provide complete information about the company’s issues and solutions.

We come across another aspect called the 80/20 rule, which helps us to listen 80% and talk 20% in a particular call. This not only gives our agents the time to configure notes but also provides them with adequate information.

Be Knowledgeable

Good habits help to make the call better. This includes abilities like building a good relationship with our customers, starting every call fresh, never get out of focus from the goal of the call. We avoid using those practices that are crutch like – scheduling the call back time or sending an email or keeping the customers on hold for a longer time.

Another way we make our agents knowledgeable is making them familiar with the product and service. Fusion makes their agent aware of the company’s value proposition to show the benefits, which a customer can gain.

Whatever tactics you might be using in the call center to make the telemarketing campaigns 100% successful, you cannot ignore the most essential aspect – you have to keep the process simple. Since, clarity always trumps persuasion.