For those who may be unaware, 65% of the contact centers in the world have less than 50 agents, meaning that [...]]]> As I reflect on last week and my time spent at Enterprise Connect, I can’t help but think about all of the conversations I participated in about the unmet needs of small contact centers. The #1 question asked at the show was around how a small contact center can possibly compete with the “big guys,” meeting the same expected service levels that they do with limited resources. Many were wondering if the cloud can help them meet this challenge.

For those who may be unaware, 65% of the contact centers in the world have less than 50 agents, meaning that over half of the world’s contact centers have been unable to deliver the same exceptional customer experience as their larger counterparts. However, if you manage a small contact center, you are familiar with this struggle. Here are some questions that small contact center managers can answer to help determine if they would benefit from a cloud-based solution.

1. Do you find it difficult to offer the same level of service as large contact centers do?
2. Is providing exceptional customer service a priority, and would it differentiate your business?
3. Has hiring the “right” agents and emphasizing agent training gone as far as it can go?
4. Would you like to be able to deploy new technology and capabilities more rapidly?
5. Must you often say no to the business because of a lack of resources or expertise?
6. Is it hard to find fully functional, market leading solutions that fit your small center’s budget?
7. Do you need to be up and running quickly?

If you are looking for ways to level the playing field between you and “the big guys,” I encourage you to read this informative whitepaper, “A Practical Guide to Understanding if the Cloud is Right for Your Small Contact Center,” to see if the cloud can help you do it. Take a few minutes to take the survey contained in the paper and see how you score.

My guess is that you’ll find the cloud to be an effective way to exploit the unique and inherent strengths that small contact centers have – speed and agility, entrepreneurial spirit and ability to develop meaningful personal relationships – to gain the customer service advantage.

A big fan of the underdog,

Jason Alley

There are several problems that companies face when using email as a way to manage workflow in the back office, including:

As an IT Manager at a utility, your objectives are many. In addition to improving the customer experience, you are also being tasked with building and maintaining theses mobile apps in a way that allows [...]]]> How important is mobility to your utility customers? Today, customers expect convenience, customization and self-service – wherever and whenever! Expectations have been set by other industries that this ease of access translates to mobile access. This will continue to be a market force in the utility industry that will challenge those without apps to deploy them – and those with apps to keep improving them.

As an IT Manager at a utility, your objectives are many. In addition to improving the customer experience, you are also being tasked with building and maintaining theses mobile apps in a way that allows for rapid creation, and modification as the mobile landscape continues to evolve.

Trying to get all the functionality you want in a mobile application can seem a bit daunting. How best to tackle it? A little at a time. Here are nine best practices to help guide you through the development process:

1. Create an internal group responsible for making decisions about the app that have diverse knowledge such as IT, customer service, web manager, operations, collections and IVR manager. Have a project manager dedicated to the mission.
2. Determine what processes you would like to have apps for and determine priority of implementation – start by looking at what transactions are the highest in your call center, IVR or web apps. Most of the time a pay-your-bill option is a great place to start.
3. Identify and use a technology that allows you to successfully create and maintain apps easily across all platforms.
4. Look for ways to proactively reach out to your customers. Two-way outage information is another hot topic for mobile devices. Allowing customers to report outages, including outage maps, and sending push notifications to customers about when they can expect restoration of services, can all increase customer satisfaction.
5. Develop a mobile app that allows for tight integration to the contact center. This is a must to deliver an exceptional mobile service experience. Consider a click-to-call option as a feature.
6. Thoroughly test the app before deployment. Test the apps with a users’ group – make sure it is simple, no more than a few clicks and user friendly.
7. Launch your app internally first. Ensure that you have tested any app download to ensure it works right the first time for your customers.
8. Prepare to launch the app to your customers. Think about ways to reach your customers, advertise the app in paper billing, via text messaging, outbound call promotion, direct mail, and through company managed social media sites. Communications is a must! Tell them once, twice, three times and hopefully the third time it will stick is the old adage.
9. Once the app goes live, track any reported issues and bugs. You may see an increase in calls or a diversion of calls – keep track!

The app is not a stagnant item, it will continue to evolve and change. Keep improving your processes and delight your customers. With these best practices in mind, I encourage you to read the whitepaper, “Excelling at Mobile Customer Service,” to further prepare you for your venture into mobile service.

I challenge you to think of other features that your mobile app could have to exceed your customers’ expectations. If you have deployed an app, inspire others by sharing some of your lessons learned here for our readers.

Until next time, make a difference,
Mechele

The article focused on a large media company and how years of bad service has cost the company many of its subscribers. Today, the company is undergoing a $50 million ad campaign in an attempt win back old customers and gain new ones, while trying to [...]]]> Each morning, I visit a few of my favorite business sites online to see what’s taking shape in the world. While going through my rounds the other day, I came across an article about the impact of bad customer service and how it can end up costing you in the long-run. Novel concept I know!

The article focused on a large media company and how years of bad service has cost the company many of its subscribers. Today, the company is undergoing a $50 million ad campaign in an attempt win back old customers and gain new ones, while trying to overcome its negative reputation. The main reason for its loss of subscribers and revenue is that it did not have a Voice of the Customer (VOC) plan in place. As a result, the company’s customer service model was not in alignment with customer expectations.

If you are working on a VOC plan of your own, here are five items to add to your checklist to make sure you don’t end up spending millions trying to win back old customers:

• Develop a customer service program that has the buy-in from the entire enterprise
• Engage employees and customers to collect feedback
• Integrate social media monitoring into your existing service strategy
• Establish a process to address customer issues – be proactive, not reactive
• Use an automated post-call survey tool as part of a closed‐loop feedback process to listen to the voice of the customer and respond quickly

As you begin to kick-start your VOC program or are looking for ways to improve your existing customer strategy, I recommend reading the following whitepaper Improving Your Customer Strategy with Workforce Optimization for additional tips and best practices.

Regardless of how good your product is, the success of your business begins and ends with its ability to provide quality service. And with increasing competition, it is imperative that you have a  solution that is capable of tracking the entire customer interaction, and is able to integrate your findings with your contact center metrics. The feedback captured will undoubtedly help you better understand your customers’ concerns – and address them.

Has your company implemented a VOC strategy? I’d like to hear about it.

Thanks for listening and best of luck!

Brandon Rowe

While it’s a bit of a reach to think your contact center agents and customers will jump out of their seats and excitedly chant, “Noooo-body!,” perhaps it’s a worthwhile [...]]]> If you were to ask your contact center this question, “Who’s got it better than us?!,” how would they respond? How about your customers? Would they enthusiastically shout, “Noooo-body!” like the San Francisco 49ers (American) football team that just played in the Super Bowl? I know, they got beat and you’re probably thinking, “The Baltimore Ravens have it better than the 49ers…” but did we really have to go there? Ha!

While it’s a bit of a reach to think your contact center agents and customers will jump out of their seats and excitedly chant, “Noooo-body!,” perhaps it’s a worthwhile goal under the guise of continual improvement? You may have heard that taking your contact center to the cloud can help alleviate a lot of the common problems in a contact center operation. But can it?

As the owner of the contact center or technology that runs it, here’s a five step exercise you can run through with your team to uncover opportunities to see if the cloud can help.

1. Paint a picture of tomorrow’s exceptional customer experience – set up internal brainstorming sessions and consider engaging an analyst or consultant to moderate the session and to infuse knowledge, ideas and objectivity. Get creative and have fun with it!
2. Identify today’s unmet demands – conduct discovery sessions with customers, agents, supervisors and management to identify unmet needs such as new channels of communication, greater agility, better coaching, further differentiated service.
3. Detail constraints – have a working session to discuss what is preventing the team from meeting current and future demands. This may include shrinking budgets, scarce resources, limited knowledge and experience, inadequate support tools, existing systems that must fully depreciate before being replaced.
4. Search for complexity – challenge your technical team pinpoint bottlenecks in technology and/or processes. Examples include multiple aging legacy applications difficult to change or integrate, platform and application upgrade dependencies, ensuring security and compliance needs are met, planning for and testing failover and disaster recover mechanisms, keeping up with the pace of change.
5. Evaluate the impact of cloud alternatives – take the results of the first four activities and understand how moving applications and infrastructure to the cloud can help your contact center. This is another area where engaging an analyst or consultant might be helpful.

After running through the exercise, I highly recommend you review these two whitepapers to help validate your results: Comfort and Security in the Cloud and How Cloud-based Contact Centers Expand Interaction.

Regardless of how the cloud plays into your future strategy, going through these five steps will undoubtedly reveal significant opportunities for improvement. What do you think? Do you have a step you’d like to share with our readers?

Here’s to aggressively pursuing that sweet, yet ever allusive cry, “Noooo-body!”

Pitchers and catchers report in two days. Hum baby!

Jason Alley

At each service level goal, there is an implied cost. And lowering cost is another of those goals. So our two goals are: lower costs and provide service. But those are not the only two goals! We also don’t want to burn out our agents with too high an occupancy, we want to provide training and professional growth for our employees, we want to sell product (for sales or collections centers), and so on…

A simple trade-off sensitivity curve, cost [...]]]> Seems like a pretty straight forward question, right? It would be, if service were free. But service is not free.

At each service level goal, there is an implied cost. And lowering cost is another of those goals. So our two goals are: lower costs and provide service. But those are not the only two goals! We also don’t want to burn out our agents with too high an occupancy, we want to provide training and professional growth for our employees, we want to sell product (for sales or collections centers), and so on…

A simple trade-off sensitivity curve, cost versus service level is below.

How we answer questions with competing objectives can be tricky, but what is certain is that the analyses required to make such trade-offs explicit is a longer term model of the contact enter network.The analyst needs to be able to determine cost, service, occupancy, training, overtime, and a bunch of other important metrics associated with any planning scenario. If you know the value of these metrics for a scenario, you can determine the trade-offs associated with competing scenarios.

By using your strategic planning system, you can find the answers to your multi-objective operation.

Ric Kosiba

One example that comes to mind is the human resources (HR) department. Most HR departments have defined, repeatable processes, such as employee onboarding, employee separation, and employee moves. These are ideal for automation and can lead to [...]]]> When most companies think about business process automation (BPA), they think about customer-facing or “production” processes. Most companies that I’ve worked with are concerned with improved cycle times, cost reductions for operational areas, improved efficiencies for contact centers, and reduction of manual processes for transactional areas. However there are many other opportunities that your organization can benefit from by looking at internal processes.

One example that comes to mind is the human resources (HR) department. Most HR departments have defined, repeatable processes, such as employee onboarding, employee separation, and employee moves. These are ideal for automation and can lead to significant improvements of cycle times for employee recruiting and onboarding.

Another area of opportunity is any type of approval process. Many internal departments have approval processes that pass around a paper folder or route emails to get approvals for contracts, content changes to documents, and even expenses. By automating these types of internal processes, companies can increase visibility and improve tracking, which in turn can reduce the amount of time needed to receive an approval.

Here are some other internal processes that can benefit from BPA:

• Facilities – Service requests for office moves
• IT/Telephony – Moves, Add/Change requests for telephone or IT services
• Legal – Contract revisions and approvals
• Marketing – Collaboration processes for marketing materials
• Coaching – QA processes for transactional or contact center areas
• Complaints – Managing the tracking and follow-up of complaint processes
• Project Management – Tracking and follow-up of project tasks

I would be very interested to hear what others have done with internal processes in their own organizations. If you need help evaluating which processes may be candidates for automation, here’s a great educational paper to get you started: “A Practical Guide to Automating Key Business Processes.”

I look forward to hearing your ideas!

Patrick Patton

This technology, which falls generally under the category of “capacity planning and analysis solutions,” helps contact centers more accurately project required staff and resources – anywhere from one week out, to eighteen months out. This is [...]]]> Hi Folks! Before we get going on this — my first post here, by the way — I wanted to introduce myself. I am the founder of Bay Bridge Decision Technologies, recently acquired by Interactive Intelligence. My specialty is helping contact centers most effectively use forecasting, capacity planning, staff planning, and budgeting technology to reduce costs, increase operational efficiency, and ensure consistent customer service.

This technology, which falls generally under the category of “capacity planning and analysis solutions,” helps contact centers more accurately project required staff and resources – anywhere from one week out, to eighteen months out. This is critically important when you consider that contact centers frequently deal with seasonal peaks and valleys in call volume. They also need to account for agent sick time, agent attrition, call handle times, etc. Given these many dynamic factors, it’s clear that manual methods for planning often result in wasted money due to over staffing, or poor service due to under staffing.

So, as an introduction to the world of capacity planning and analysis, I’d like to offer three tips that will ensure you get started on the right foot:

Tip #1: Make sure your long-term plan is long enough.  If your contact center has a planning horizon of only a few months out, it’s tough to identify seasonal peaks and valleys in call volume. When staffing is viewed over the long-term, however, these trends can be identified and then addressed more economically by overtime staff or outsourcers. Keep in mind though that long-term capacity planning isn’t easily accomplished using the common (and cumbersome)

Erlang C-based spreadsheets, which leads me to Tip #2…

Tip #2: Validate your planning process to make sure it’s accurate. To effectively perform long-term capacity planning, contact centers need to move from Erlang C-based spreadsheets, to simulation-based systems. These factor in your last week’s actual performance data to prove that the performance predicted mimics the performance you achieved. This helps create confidence in your plans and any what-if analyses you develop.

Tip #3: Use a forecasting technique to plan for shrinkage and assume your shrink is seasonal. A common mistake contact center planners make is to assume that agent shrink — time away from the phone from illness, training, or vacation — is consistent week over week. By recognizing that shrink is typically seasonal with peaks and valleys, and using your planning process to account for this, you will end up with much more accurate resource projections.

To learn more about contact center capacity planning and analysis, check out the following educational white paper authored by Interactive Intelligence: “A Contact Center Crystal Ball – Marrying the Analyses of Service, Cost, Revenue, and Now, Customer Experience.”

Of course, I always like to hear from folks directly so feel free to contact me with your questions and suggestions for improving contact center planning and analysis!

-Ric

With a growing body of evidence suggesting that storms will worsen – and in light of the recent devastation caused by hurricane Sandy – the time is ripe to re-evaluate your outage communications plan.

And if you’re still in doubt, one only needs to point to the fall-out from Sandy when utility companies such as Long Island Power Authority were not prepared. So don’t be left in the dark or worse [...]]]> For those of you responsible for utility outage communications, I ask you this: how confident are you in your ability to communicate with customers should such a crisis occur?

With a growing body of evidence suggesting that storms will worsen – and in light of the recent devastation caused by hurricane Sandy – the time is ripe to re-evaluate your outage communications plan.

And if you’re still in doubt, one only needs to point to the fall-out from Sandy when utility companies such as Long Island Power Authority were not prepared. So don’t be left in the dark or worse yet, subpoenaed or lose your job by not having a good emergency plan.

The good news today is that communications technology is rapidly advancing, which gives you new options for communicating with customers quickly and effectively in the event of a disaster.

According to JD Powers, customers prefer to be proactively contacted during outages with updates and information as they become available.  Sharing these updates by a just in time method, such as social media, has been shown to increase customer satisfaction by as much as 89 points.

The following are a few strategies for mitigating risk and keeping your customers happy should an outage occur:

• Customers who were communicated with during an outage via social media expressed a higher satisfaction with their utility company.  For more details check out this whitepaper  “Let’s Get Social: Best Practices in Utility Outage Communications.”
• Automate the processes to ensure all actions, steps and follow-up are timely and measurable.  Hold all the business units accountable.
• Integrate self-serve options on your IVR, initiate callbacks, use mobile smart devices to include callback, Web chat, self-service, SMS text and include other tools such as Twitter, Facebook, etc.  Pictures are worth a thousand words and make sure they are powerful statements.
• Provide the best estimate you can of when power will be restored – honesty is always the best policy.  Including outage maps is a plus!
• Have a good solid plan in place identifying goals and strategies – make sure the plan has been tested with all key departments.

Times are changing and the expectations of utility customers are on the rise. So don’t delay. Take a look at the many new communications technologies at your disposal today that could very well avert disaster tomorrow.

Until next time, make a difference,

Mechele