Spoken Blog

Empower Your Employees to Serve Your Customers

2016-07-28T13:00:00Z

It may seem that we talk a lot about trends in our Spoken blogs, and a quick search of our blog archive would certainly confirm that, but trends are an interesting phenomenon in that they act as a teacher of sorts when it comes to learning about what’s happening in an industry, or the world for that matter. Plus, watching trends helps us to know what steps should be taken in order to “ride the wave” of the trend instead of getting “swept away” in it.

Let’s take, for example, the issue of Customer Service. In recent years, the function of customer service has trended away from a single department/cost center to a primary marketing function of an organization. What’s brought about this change? In a recent article by Tricia Morris, consumers now tend to value customer service and customer experience even more than they value a product or a good price. Consumers are much more savvy than they used to be; they have the ability to shop multiple sites to compare products and prices and once they’ve found what they want, the process of making a purchase then becomes all about how quickly and easily they are able to do this and how well they are treated should an issue arise with their order. Additionally, this article points out that 90% of consumers expect consistency and continuity from a brand across channels. That means regardless of how a customer contacts you via phone, e-mail, live chat or a social media platform, they expect the experience to be exactly the same.

These changes in customer expectations have been the driving force behind the call center’s shift from single department to a more front and center marketing function. Interestingly enough, however, not all contact centers have implemented a multi-channel integration that provides a consistent experience across platforms. Additionally, many contact centers are still lagging behind when it comes to training their agents across multiple channels or equipping them to make on-the-spot decisions that will assist the customer.

Check out this Spoken blog to learn more about how to equip your call center agents to meet the customer’s expectations.

Considering that this customer trend will not be going away anytime soon, it’s important to implement some customer service principles that will enable your organization to grow with the trend instead of getting lost in it. This requires a commitment from all levels of the company and is the process by which you make your customer service move from a “back-office” department to a front and center marketing function. Here are a few specifics:

Empower Employees: Leaders need to train their customer-facing employees to know what they are doing, what they can offer and where to go to get the information they need to assist the customer.

Insights: Leaders need to equip the customer-facing employees with access to key customer insights that will make the customer experience more personal. This should include customer profiles on the products and services they use and analytic tools to view customer history.

Mobility: Customers are mobile and customer service should be as well. Leaders who monitor trends will see the importance of a mobile customer service department that is ready to connect and engage with customers on any platform with any device.

Empowering employees to serve the customer requires leadership from the top down that embraces trends, uses multiple channels to engage your customers and training all of your employees to be customer centric. Leaders who have moved with the call center trends have reaped the benefits and built a company that is seen as a leader in customer service.

Give Your Customers More ‘Wow’ Experiences With Smarter Technology

2016-07-21T13:00:00Z

It’s no secret that customer service expectations are high and growing higher as new technologies are helping to streamline communications between brands and consumers. But due to these high expectations the probability of meeting these service ideals is low and customer let downs are commonplace following contact with today’s call centers, whether with a live agent or an IVR system. One might even say that your customers are prepared for the worst from the moment they dial into your hotline. One mix up by your auto-attendant, for example, could send the whole customer experience spiraling downward.

Since customer service is a top priority for brands, upgrading your technology to support your call center team and improve every customer service interaction is vitally important to your company’s reputation and, ultimately, its bottom line. So ask yourself: Is your current technology causing more mishaps than success stories? If the answer is yes, then now is the time to stop letting your subpar system diminish your call center’s ability to provide excellent customer support.

With the right technology, you can let the capabilities of your call center shine and never worry that your customers are growing frustrated by an IVR system that frequently transfers them to the wrong representative, for instance.

So, what does a call center model that produces “wow” results look like? Here are few features and benefits:

Full redundancy: Is there anything worse than having your phone lines go down due to a storm or power outage? Your customers expect that you’ll be available under all circumstances, so make sure you have technology that can support this supposition. Your technology provider should have redundant and geographically diverse data centers that will back up your phone lines and keep the calls flowing no matter what. For instance, in the event that one data center fails, the second data center will immediately take over the full call volume without missing a beat or disconnecting a single customer.
Smart IVR: Your IVR system should be fully customizable to your specific call center needs. That is, you need your IVR system to be intelligent enough to automatically identify and route callers with specific qualifications to particular agents. For example, an IVR system with flexible and programmable call flow capabilities enables call centers to choose exactly how they need their calls to be routed. In addition, advanced programming capabilities help call centers more accurately route callers to the representative most knowledgeable about their issues.
Usage-based pricing: Another important feature that will help you produce more internal (in addition to customer-facing) “wow” results is usage-based pricing. For example, if you employ a team of remote agents, they’ll need to use a virtual desktop solution so that they can access the same tools their colleagues in the office use. But some agents may log in at different times, or may not have the same volume of calls each day; therefore, it’s more cost-efficient to pay per minute of usage so that you can get the biggest bang for your buck. Rather than paying upfront for capacity that may not be used at all times, pay as you go and avoid shelling out more money than is truly necessary.
Advanced security: Security is a major concern for customers who share their personal information—from home address to credit card numbers—over the phone. As such, it’s important to choose a provider that can offer on-the-fly encryption that uniquely codes each customer’s phone call, making it extremely difficult for hackers to gain access to data that is shared. Rather than only having one general encryption for all of your customers, individual call encryption ensures that, even if there was a security breach, the hacker wouldn’t be able to gain access to all of your customers’ information at once.

So put an end to letting your customers down when they dial into your call center. Arm your call center with the advanced technology that can fully support your customers’ needs and deliver high-quality results.

An Inside Look at the Customer Success Manager

2016-07-19T13:00:00Z

We recently came across a fascinating article detailing the relatively young profession of the Customer Success Manager, in the recently released 2016 Customer Success Salary & State of the Profession Report. What’s a Customer Success Manager you ask? Well, to best answer that, let’s learn a bit about Customer Success Management programs.

Customer Success Management is a new term that describes a Business to Business program designed to bring success to your business customers. For example, here at Spoken, we sell products and services that are designed to support the Customer Service functions of our clients. We have a vested interest in making sure that our customers succeed because if they don’t, we don’t. Say we want to implement a program or new piece of technology that we believe will bring great success to our customers, like encouraging certain customers to move to the Avaya Cloud. In order to insure that this “push” is successful, we decide to implement an incentive program for our agents that offers some additional commissions or bonuses for every customer that they are able to successfully transition to the Avaya Cloud system. That is a Customer Success Management program. It is a program that really benefits all involved, because it will bring greater success to our customers and at the same time, reward our employees or Customer Success team for a job well done.

Below is a graph that outlines some of the possible top goals of a customer success team.

2016 Customer Success Salary Survey & State of the Profession Report

Want more? You can learn other techniques for reducing churn in our recent blog. And here’s 5 tips for customer retention.

Customer success programs are growing as are the teams that manage them. As the Customer Success teams grow, so does the need for managers. Customer Success Management is a new and fast growing profession that has seen tremendous growth within the industry over the past two to three years and is proving to be a profession with low turn-over.

2016 Customer Success Salary Survey & State of the Profession Report

Compensation

The compensation structure within the customer success program can be key when it comes to successful implementation. In addition to their salaries, agents can earn additional compensation within the Customer Success program. As we mentioned above, incentives can be offered to agents when they successfully move a customer into a new program or a new product. Additionally, other metrics, such as churn reduction, renewals, upselling, or portfolio health can be factored into the compensation structure. Bonuses can be driven by both the team performance and company performance as well.

Teams

Customer Success teams can have as few as 1-5 members or as many as 100 plus. Larger companies are likely to have a number of positions that comprise the Customer Success team, beginning with more entry level positions and continuing up to executive positions.

2016 Customer Success Salary Survey & State of the Profession Report

The Customer Success Management Program is a trend that is worth watching and one that we anticipate will continue to grow and change with our every-changing and growing industry.

Cloud Trends Unfolding: IT Assumes the Role of Innovation Broker

2016-07-14T13:00:00Z

6^th in the series

As we continue our series of Cloud Trends Unfolding in 2016, one of the more interesting trends to watch is how the cloud is impacting the IT department. One might think that the advent of the cloud would have a negative impact on IT, but as we monitor trends, what we’re seeing is how the role of IT is shifting from that of “overseer” to that of “innovator.”

The Role of Overseer

Prior to the arrival of the cloud, the CIO was the purchaser of hardware and software that was needed for the day to day operations. Once these items were purchased, the CIO along with the IT department, implemented these items and maintained them. Basically, the IT department was responsible for making sure that everything worked and that all the systems were secure. The role of overseer was clearly defined and things chugged along.

Enter the Cloud

Then Cloud technology came along and everything changed. Everything began to move faster. Money that had initially been spent on maintenance now needed to be shifted to new things. Additionally, various departments within organizations were jumping over to the cloud on their own, separate from the rest of the company. In many cases, no one was consulting with IT, which at the time, gave the false impression that IT would be side-lined or marginalized into a minimal role. However, as cloud technology began to grow and departments migrated their resources to the cloud, it became obvious that the IT department’s role would become much more front and center.

The Role of Innovator

The cloud offers much flexibility and scalability to businesses. This makes it an attractive option when it comes to data storage. In addition, most cloud vendors offer a pay-as-you-go model bringing data storage costs down considerably. Every CIO wants to insure that they are getting the full cost-benefit that the cloud offers and they tend to rely on their IT managers to research and monitor the best strategies offered. This has required IT managers to gain an insider’s knowledge of each cloud vendor and the specifics of their services enabling them to “pick and choose” which services best suit their company’s IT needs. For example, which aspects of their business need to be on a private cloud and which are suitable for a public cloud. It’s been through this process, of sifting through the options of cloud technology, that the role of IT has changed. Additionally, as cloud technology advances, many cloud vendors are seeing the need to offer more specialized services, breaking away from the more one-size-fits-all model we saw in the early cloud days. With so many options becoming available, it only makes sense that the IT manager would move from the role of overseer/project manager to innovator and cloud-service broker.

IT managers of call centers have, perhaps, been some of the most innovative. As cloud technology has grown and adapted to market needs, it has proven to be an effective means of streamlining the call center. Since cloud technology allows agents to work remotely, rather than on-premise, call centers can temporarily add agent seats when needed to support peak seasons and then scale back down during the slower times. This type of scalability has proven to be revolutionary to the call center. Here at Spoken, our Spoken Cloud ACD options are equally revolutionary and efficient allowing customers to gradually transition some or all operations to the cloud. IT managers have praised this aspect of the Spoken ACD.

To learn even more about how the cloud can benefit call center revenues, check out our Spoken blog here.

When it comes to transitioning your organization to the cloud, who better to sort through the latest technology than the team that has been at the helm of your organization’s technology all along? Thanks to IT innovations, call centers, and all organizations, can reap all the benefits of cloud computing. With the cloud technology continuing to move forward, it would appear that IT managers will have plenty to keep them busy and innovating for a long time to come.

Best Practices for Using Native Cloud

2016-07-12T13:00:00Z

In today’s highly-technological age, there are many new terms that have become very mainstream that a decade ago, we had never heard. One such term is “native cloud.” What exactly does this term mean? Native cloud refers to a type of computer software that uses, or is “native” to the cloud. To be a little more specific, native cloud utilizes services and infrastructure provided by cloud computing providers such as Amazon EC2 or Force.com.

OK, that tells us WHAT native cloud is, but let’s break this down a little more and take a look at some of the best practices for using native cloud. In an article posted earlier this year by THE NEW STACK, we found a clear guide to the best practices for using native cloud.

Be Micro- the best way to go about this is to breakdown the application into microservices where each service does one thing really well. This makes it much easier to do updates when needed which is a key for today’s cloud-native application. Sometimes the architecture of these microservices can add complications….. mainly the many containers to track. In 2014, Google introduced the Kubernetes project, which basically makes their container management system “opened source” making the management of microservices a bit easier. The Cloud Native Computing Foundation, a group that has formed in answer to this issue, will take the Kubernetes Project as a starting point to develop this open-sourced system.

Be Explicit- when developing cloud-native applications, it is important to have consistent libraries and systems that are used for development, testing and production. Be specific about your code dependencies and your relationship with backend services.

Be Stateless-Hmmmm, what does this mean? This means that configuration variables such as hostname and password should be specific to the cloud environment and not the repository. Basically, let the cloud work for you.

Be Temporal- this is another way of saying, “be flexible.” Within the cloud, your application should be able to gracefully shutdown or start-up. If your application is Stateless, as explained above, you can do this without any loss of data.

In April of 2016, Spoken announced the release of the new 2.4 version of the Spoken Cloud ACD. This is a flexible, native cloud ACD of the future that has implemented the best practices mentioned above.

A key point to remember is that combining good design with coding best practices will make it easier to develop cloud-native applications.

What is the real driver of cloud growth in 2016

2016-07-07T13:00:00Z

2016 Cloud Trends Unfolding Series

So far, as we’ve been moving through our series on Cloud Trends Unfolding in 2016, we’ve talked about cloud providers optimizing big data in the cloud followed by how cloud analytics helps IT and the emerging security standards we can expect to see. Let’s take a closer look at another cloud trend for 2016: how contact centers are approaching cloud adoptions.

However, before we dive into this, let’s take a quick overview of the cloud and how it works. First, it’s important to remember that the cloud is not a single thing but a network of services, storage, applications and servers that both perform tasks and store data. Some of those servers provide services, while others provide storage. An example of the services the cloud provides would be something like SalesForce or Adobe Photoshop. We used to access this creative service by buying the boxed software, now Adobe Photoshop, along with other creative services, has been moved to the cloud and is accessed through a subscription in order to use the service. Microsoft has moved to a subscription model for its popular Office suite as well, now charging for a yearly subscription rather than for a one-time download and outright ownership.

And anyone who has uploaded photos to iPhoto or Instagram or who has shared documents using Google Drive or SharePoint knows about cloud storage.

The real driver of cloud growth in 2016

Given that consumers use the cloud every day without realizing, what is the value to the enterprise of cloud in 2016? According to Dustin Smith, Sr. Product Marketing Manager at Tableau Software, it's ease of use. Moving data to the cloud will become as easy as a simple copy/paste move. Smith predicts:

"With self-service cloud analytics and data prep now a reality, the chance of letting an individual move data into a cloud ecosystem quickly and easily (and without a technical background) is on the horizon," he says. "Simple solutions that largely decouple the complexity of data integration, staging, and transformation and focus solely on letting business users drop data into preferred cloud databases and warehouses are on their way."

Smith states a simple truth: the ability to easily back up, access, share and store data in the cloud without even thinking about it is the real value here. Ten years ago, data backup procedures required hardware, manual action and strict protocols. Today, even a non-techie can backup, store or share data in the cloud without even thinking about it. What is driving cloud growth is that it is so easy to use that we can now spend our energies focusing on our core tasks rather than on manual ways of storing and sharing data.

More cloud predictions and other cloud technology posts

Perhaps one of the greatest lessons we’re learning as we watch these trends unfold is simply that cloud technology is easily accessible to the average user with minimal barriers to entry. In the early days, changes in technology had to go through the IT department. But the accessibility of cloud computing meant that departments could bypass IT entirely: a sales team could easily implement SalesForce, a marketing team could implement HubSpot and a development team could share documents on Google Drive or DropBox without going through a lengthy IT vetting and installation process.

The contact center cloud in 2016

A recent report by research firm Frost and Sullivan on contact center modernization predicted that the cloud contact center market will grow to over $3 billion by 2017. This represents the combined spend across ACD, IVR, outbound contact, chat, quality monitoring, workforce management, and analytics applications.

Furthermore, Frost and Sullivan has reported that the adoption of hosted or cloud solutions is not concentrated to any one industry or few industry sectors; rather, it is fairly distributed across industry verticals. They believe its high adoption in industries such as financial services and healthcare validate the robustness and maturity of the model.

According to the Cloud Contact Center Market Trends Report by Frost and Sullivan, the key considerations for moving to a cloud-based contact center include:

Reduced systems maintenance and management costs
Reduced IT budgets to buy and manage infrastructure in-house
Rapid time to deployment
Flexible scalability and business agility
Ease of provisioning and managing multi-site operations
To support remote / at home agents

It only makes sense that contact centers are flocking to the cloud with the abundance of benefits and the increasing simplicity. Will the cloud contact center market reach $3 billion by 2017? Only time will tell. But based on the growth we are seeing at Spoken and the immense benefits our clients are receiving, we certainly think so.

Keeping workplace productivity high is as easy as 1-2-3

2016-07-05T13:00:00Z

How do you keep productivity high?” Well, we did a bit of research on this topic, and honestly, you find a lot of the “same old advice” like, “be a good employer”, “make people feel valued”, “create a productive atmosphere,” “be positive and encouraging.” Now, none of this is bad advice; in fact it’s all good advice, but it is rather vague and subjective and a bit outdated for today’s workplace. We wanted to find some information that offers more targeted tips for the specific demands of today’s worker.

Perhaps one of the biggest changes and demands in the workplace today is the ability to work remotely. For newer companies, you know, companies that have come on the scene in that last 5-10 years, this is a common practice. However, for older, more established companies who have been around so long they can remember using fax machines, and phone messages had to be taken by an actual receptionist, the idea of allowing employees to work remotely from home can be a down-right frightening concept. To think of allowing an employee to work from home would equate to an employee who really isn’t working at all. That is simply not the case and this leads us to our first tip:

Pay your employees what they are worth. Nothing is worse than working hard and not being well compensated. One way people will feel valued in the workplace is if they are paid well for what they do. It’s pretty simple really. When people feel their employer is generous, that can be very motivating to work hard in order to feel that generosity is warranted. Life is expensive, and people need to feel that what they devote the majority of their life to, is worth it for them. Pay well, offer bonuses when it’s possible and make sure your benefits package is a competitive one. People tend to not walk away from good situations.
Cut down on useless meetings! We’ve said this before right here, but we’ll say it again! Meetings are USELESS! Consider this, the amount of time you spend in meetings is time your employees are NOT working at their jobs and being productive. Yes, sometimes meetings are necessary BUT, they should be short and to the point. Always have an agenda when heading into a meeting and make sure the meeting does not go over 30 minutes.
Offer Flexibility and trust by allowing your employees to work remotely from home 1-2 times per week. Today, it is very common for households to have two working parents and also for said households to live quite a long distance from their work-place. Allowing workers to flex their hours so that they aren’t spending half the day in the car will go a very long way in increasing productivity overall. By not having to drive in 1 or 2 times per week, allows employees to get a head start on their work day and in the long run, offers them a better work-life balance. Additionally, allowing employees some flexibility with their schedules can be very helpful when it comes to managing their work and family duties. In doing these, employers communicate to their staff that they understand the need for balance with work and family priorities. Employees see flexibility as a major plus and are careful to honor that in order to keep it.

These three tips are, what we see, as the BIG ones; meaning if these three are in place and prioritized by employers, then workplace productivity can flow. Now, let’s focus a little more on the flexibility tip above. Flexibility is a HUGE plus for today’s employee for the reasons we discussed above. Since it is so popular, it’s hard to imagine that there’s a down side to it, but there is…… or at least there can be.

As we were researching our points for this article, we came across a great read from August of 2015 by Stephanie Vozza about productivity tricks she learned while at Google. The first one caught our eye:

Use technology to keep remote employees close. Very good point. While flexibility and working remotely has numerous advantages, the major disadvantage is a feeling of disconnectedness that can tend to settle in. This is particularly true of organizations that have several satellite offices and a large percentage of employees working remotely. There are many tools available today that can keep employees connected from video chat, to conferencing tools, however, our personal favorite is the secure cloud connection. The Cloud allows employees to quickly and easily connect with your network regardless of where they are in the world and maintain a high level of productivity. Here at Spoken, our cloud integration is a great tool for maintaining a connection to your remote employees and keeping productivity high.

Cloud Security: What are the emerging standards?

2016-06-30T13:00:00Z

2016 Cloud Trends Unfolding Series

As we continue through our series of call center cloud trends unfolding in 2016, one of the biggest areas of concern is that of security.

Security is one of life’s greatest needs and is something that every human being craves. We crave security in relationships, in our jobs and in our finances. In today’s world, we also need security in our online activities. Few things can promote a greater sense of fear, in both organizations as well as consumers, as a security breach of personal information.

The internet and the Internet of Things (IoT) have created an even greater need for security as people have shared their information with various businesses and connected devices. Global connectivity paired with the myriad of internet-enabled devices glued to our hands have made us all the more vulnerable to security hacks.

Add to this the increase in cloud technology adoption rates, especially in the call center, and vulnerability concerns increase.

Get the skinny on Spoken’s cloud security features

Cloud security is at the forefront

One of the primary cloud predictions for 2016 was that cloud security would be one of the key emerging concerns, and this is proving to be true. In a recent article in CIO, it was reported that the global cloud market is expected to hit $240 billion in 2016. Security concerns will grow right along with this. According to John Kinsella from CSO, the key challenges that cause these security concerns include the fact that 1) Internal clouds are not inherently secure 2) Companies lack security visibility and risk awareness 3) Sensitive information needs safer storage 4) Apps aren't secure 5) Authentication and authorization must be more robust.

According to Neil MacDonald, a Gartner analyst for 20 years, “Through 2020, 80% of cloud breaches will be due to customer misconfiguration, mismanaged credentials or insider theft, not cloud provider vulnerabilities.”

With these concerns, the Cloud Access Security Broker market will become the hottest new thing.

Cloud Access Security Brokers

A Cloud Access Security Broker is on-premise or cloud-hosted software that acts as a control point to support continuous visibility, compliance, threat protection and security for cloud services. Basically, a CASB is like a security guard for cloud data storage. There are a number of CASB providers to choose from, including:

Netskope: Netskope helps organizations understand and secure all cloud apps
BlueCoat: One of the leaders in web security, they have extended their security to include cloud services
Skyhigh: Skyhigh offers security for many different applications on one platform

The primary objective is to find a security system that will meet the particular needs of your organization. This market will only get hotter and it is likely that there will be even more CASB options to choose from as time goes on.

Check out this definitive guide to Cloud Access Security Brokers.

Why is security such a big deal for contact centers?

Contact centers handle some of the most secure and personal data in the world. From credit card information and bank account numbers to social security numbers and medical records, companies (and their customers) cannot afford for this data to get into the wrong hands. And with the contact center cloud market predicted to grow to $3 billion by 2017 (Frost and Sullivan), companies are putting a spotlight on security and how to ensure secure operations.

Get the skinny on Spoken’s cloud security features

Top five customer service trends of 2016

2016-06-28T13:30:00Z

Even though we are a technology company, pretty much everything we do here focuses on one thing: improving customer service and the customer experience. The products and services Spoken creates enable the customer service departments, in a wide variety of industries, to do their jobs and provide a high level of customer satisfaction to their clients. Needless to say, (but we’ll say it anyway) we tend to watch the trends that impact this industry VERY CAREFULLY!

A recent article detailing customer service trends caught our eye. Not only does this article offer some interesting insights into today’s customer, but it also details some very specific trends that will impact the customer service industry going forward.

First, let’s talk a little about today’s customer and how they have a major role in shaping how customer service is done. Customers today tend to be very savvy and well informed. With a simple “click” on a tablet or smartphone, a customer literally has a wealth of information about the product itself as well as access to dozens or hundreds of customer reviews.

Online customer reviews have been the key factor in upending the business to customer relationship. Why? Because they’re right there for all to see! By reading online reviews, customers can see how problems are handled and whether or not the business truly does value their customers by seeing to it that they’re satisfied especially if there has been a problem. Online reviews as well as social media platforms have forced a transparency in the business world that didn’t exist even ten years ago, and this has had a HUGE impact on customer service. Basically, if a business is not tracking brand mentions online and engaging in conversations via social media--well, as we used to say in the days of The Cluetrain Manifesto, "the conversation is happening out there, with or without you."

Customer service trends in 2016

But aside from understanding that markets are conversations, 2016 has brought a plethora of new trends to the customer service space.

Quicker responses: Customers who complain on Twitter expect a response within 60 minutes. A recent study showed that customer expectations of email response time has sped from four hours in 2014 to just one hour in 2015. It's no longer acceptable to deliver a response in 24 or 48 hours. And what about on weekends? It may be time to review and refresh your response rate policies.
Video chat: This is a new and innovative technology that is beginning to emerge and can be seen on popular tablets. Amazon’s Kindle Fire HDX, for example, feature the Mayday button, which allows a customer to connect with an agent within 10 seconds via a one-way video chat. And medical video chats are becoming all the rage; even insurance companies are covering these effective, low-cost service calls. Other companies are beginning to hop on the band wagon with their own versions of this; expect this technology to become much more common in the future.
Making self-service easier: Zendesk reported that 91% of customers said they would happily self-serve using an FAQ database rather than contacting customer service directly. Making your FAQ section more robust and easy to navigate will become increasingly more important moving forward. Businesses can beef up this section simply by mining the interactions between the customer and the agents.
Connecting with customers on every channel: In the 2015 Call Center Report, one key conclusion we discovered is that customers each have a preferred channel, and it's fruitless to try to drive them to another channel that isn't their preference. Customers want a variety of options when it comes to communicating with a business, so be sure you have phone, e-mail, live chat, text and social media covered.
Rewarding success: Building a company culture of care and going the extra mile will foster a customer service department that is committed to customer satisfaction. Happy employees make the best customer service agents, so invest in team building and employee appreciation events to ensure the best team possible.

The 2015 Call Center Report: Telephone wins and IVR loses

What trends do you see as we move through 2016 and into 2017?

Cloud Analytics helps IT, but how?

2016-06-23T13:30:00Z

2016 Cloud Trends Unfolding Series

As we continue through our series of Cloud Trends that we are seeing unfold in 2016 ,

How does cloud analytics help in the overall scope of Information Technology? That’s a great question. As the cloud continues to gain traction in the business and technology world as a new option for data storage, questions like these and others arise. However, before we delve into the question of how cloud analytics helps IT, let’s take a few minutes to define cloud analytics.

Cloud analytics is a service model in which elements of the data analytics process are provided through a public or private cloud. Typically, cloud analytics applications and services are offered under a subscription-based or pay-per-use model.

There are six key elements of analytics:

1. Data Sources

2. Data Models

3. Processing applications

4. Computing Power

5. Analytic Models

6. Sharing or storage of results

If one or more of these elements is implemented in the cloud, that qualifies as Cloud Analytics.

Tell me something I don't know: four insights your call center analytics SHOULD reveal

So, how do these help IT? Well, if we look at cloud computing in general, we can start to see how the analytics aspect can have a positive impact on IT.

In the article How Cloud Computing Works, we gain some insight into this. One of the major benefits of cloud computing in general is that it is a web-based service that hosts all the programs a user would need for his or her job. This includes all the elements of analytics. Rather than investing in separate programs for each function, the cloud offers one place for all to be hosted. Not only is this a more streamlined model, but with the option of subscription based services, a business can opt for the pay-per-use model insuring that they are not paying for more than what is needed. So instead of investing in software for the function of processing analytics and then investing in additional software for the storing or sharing of results, the cloud offers each of these analytic functions in one location.

These more flexible and streamlined models offered by the cloud have had a significant impact on the call center and the IT professionals who manage call center data. Prior to the cloud, all call center applications had separate software that was required to run the specific application. This could be a huge headache for IT professionals managing, upgrading and expanding when needed. The cloud simplifies all of these functions by offering a single platform for every aspect of call center services. When a specific application needs to be upgraded, that process is easily managed on the cloud platform, while before, an upgrade required the implementation of new software which lead to down time to convert, training to get agents up to speed and the process of trouble-shooting. The simplicity and flexibility of the cloud has eased the demands on IT departments.

Dustin Smith, Sr. Product Marketing Manager for Tableau Software, predicts that “……Cloud analytics solutions that allow for digging into both usage and billing data will give IT leaders the power to quickly spot potentially costly services and prevent budget overruns. And they’ll be able to do it from mobile devices, in the middle of meetings.

As more services are moved to the cloud, including analytics, the less burden is placed on IT. Essentially, IT becomes more of an operational factor than a major capital expenditure.

Check out Spoken’s blog, on the benefits of moving IT infrastructure from CAPEX to OPEX.

Interested in learning more about Spoken Engage Advanced Cloud Reporting and Analytics platform? Get the release notes on the latest version.

Three business intelligence trends impacting your contact center in 2016

2016-06-22T14:00:00Z

Business Intelligence, often abbreviated BI, is the set of techniques and tools for the transformation of raw data into meaningful and useful information for business analysis purposes. You probably already know that there are tools available today that businesses can use to gather information that will help them make informed business decisions.

And most businesses use some form of BI, but there are several factors that affect whether businesses are actually using their BI tools to full advantage. After all, if the intelligence isn't comprehensible or actionable, how intelligent is it, really?

Tableau recently released a report citing 10 trends that are impacting Business Intelligence in 2016. I found that three of them ring especially true for the call center.

1. Data integration

Many companies today want to have agile analytics. In other words, analytics or business data that allows them to see the big picture instead of just the pieces. Think of it like a puzzle: you’ve got hundreds of pieces that need to be put together before you are need to see the full image to figure out what to do next. Data integration is a bit like the finished puzzle: it allows a company to see the whole picture by integrating data from various departments and putting it all together. The call center is one particular business that benefits greatly from data integration. With analytics and data coming off the Automated Call Distributor (ACD), the Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tool, the Interactive Voice Response (IVR), speech analytics and customer satisfaction surveys, it's essential to be able to get the full picture of the complete customer experience data.

For example, if the ACD data indicates a long hold time, the CRM indicates the third call this month, the IVR indicates a high-value customer and speech analytics show dissatifaction keywords, a 360-degree view of that data in one place could lead a supervisor to save a lost customer in real time.

Four insights your call center analytics SHOULD reveal

2. Cloud data and cloud analytics

As enterprises have continued to embrace the cloud, they’ve learned that it offers the analytics agility they need. The cloud has been proving over and over again that it is safe, reliable and adaptable to a business’ specific needs.

Six cloud predictions for 2016

3. New technologies

New technologies are constantly emerging to adapt to customer expectations in the contact center space, and call center technologists are inevitably scrambling to catch up. In 2016, we are seeing increasing demand for multichannel contact center support as well as speech analytics, real-time reporting and cloud transition support. This is where BI comes in: new technologies mean new data information sources, which contribute to a more complete picture. For example, when customers implement the Spoken Smart IVR, there is a wealth of new data about the automated interactions newly available: every single customer utterance as well as any Guide corrections are compiled in a database, which makes it easy to visualize the information and spot areas for improvement.

For example, one customer noticed that callers were giving a 10-digit number when asked for their street address. Aha! That is probably a phone number. So we worked with them to automatically run any response to the "What is your street address" IVR prompt as a phone number. The results? A 10% jump in caller identification rates!

Spoken Smart IVR case study for Guthy|Renker

2016 Cloud Trends Unfolding: insights from the end of Q2

2016-06-20T13:00:00Z

The first in the Cloud Trends Unfolding Series 2016

As you look at the title of this blog, you may be thinking, “What? Trends? But it’s June.” True, typically we do tend to write about trends as we are saying goodbye to an old year and ringing in a new one. However, we thought now would be a great time to see how our predictions back at the end of 2015 are unfolding, now that we're wrapping up the second quarter of 2016.

Six Cloud Predictions for 2016

The overall prediction for 2016 we made in our November 2015 post (linked to above) was basically that we would see growth; more companies would move more functionalities to the cloud. We would see a greater migration of more data to the cloud, and the demand for cloud security would increase as well.

In a recent article in CIO, industry insiders share some insight on cloud trends they believe will dominate the rest of 2016. While this article details a number of trends, we’d like to take a closer look at each one and offer our two cents as well.

Trend #1: the data land grab

According to Dustin Smith, Sr. Product Marketing Manager of Tableau Software, big cloud providers will be pursuing companies everywhere to move their data into their cloud ecosystems. Any and all cloud providers will be looking to try and move all of a company’s data to their cloud platform.

In other words, be prepared to see cloud providers make a big push for all of your data to be moved to their cloud platform. This will be especially true for large companies with large amounts of data to be moved. Basically, now that the cloud has proven itself when it comes to efficiency, cost and ease of use, cloud companies are saying “hey, enough with the bit by bit transitions, we want you to fully commit to letting us handle all of your data storage needs on our cloud system.”

Of course, cloud companies want all of your data, but Spoken firmly believes that dipping your toe in the cloud and using a gradual transition plan works best for most cloud contact center migrations.

Trend #2: big companies go cloud in a big way

According to Smith, “the tipping point is upon us.” The cloud is no longer seen as something that only startups do but has definitely become more mainstream, and CIOs are realizing the cost effectiveness of the cloud as they look five and ten years down the road.

In fact, according to DMG Consulting LLC's 2015-2016 Contact Center Infrastructure Market Report, cloud-based contact center infrastructure has hit its stride on a global basis. The past 12 months have been the best in the history of this sector, with the number of cloud-based contact center infrastructure seats rising 49.9% over the last year, from 1,302,788 to 1,953,249. The report also found that a majority of customers are satisfied with their cloud-based solutions with 90.8% of customers satisfied, highly satisfied, or completely satisfied with their cloud-based contact center infrastructure solution. This year saw great improvement is system availability and reliability, demonstrating that the leading competitors have learned how to deliver compelling and reliable solutions.

Trend #3: hybrid cloud strategies get easier

"One foot in the cloud and one foot on the ground? When it comes to a technology roadmap, this largely lost the "playing safe" stigma and is now openly accepted as the right path for some organizations," Smith says. "As a result, solutions and services built to support this model will bloom like never before.”

We've noticed this trend as well. Many of our customers ask about not just our shared cloud platform but also the possibility of a private or dedicated cloud (of course, the answer to all three is "yes"). And we created an animated video to showcase the flexible options available.

But how does a customer decide which strategy will work best for their contact center? Elements such as sunk costs in existing infrastructure, end-of-life timelines and availability of resources are all factors, and there is no one right answer we can jot off in a quick blog post. In fact, we're constantly writing about this question as new information surfaces and as customers ask us more questions and provide us with new challenges. For example:

Is an Avaya hybrid cloud right for your call center

Seven things to consider before selecting a private cloud vendor

Call center TCO: why it doesn't matter

What we can tell you is that now, at the end of Q2 2016, these three trends are out in force. Yes, we are seeing more cloud adoption. Yes, we are seeing several companies going cloud in a big way. And yes, we are constantly being asked to customize hybrid cloud solutions in order to enable contact centers to take their first steps into the cloud.

Considering cloud? Find out more about how other contact centers have done it.

Avaya cloud transition resource library

Body Language 101 for Business

2016-06-16T18:57:25Z

Does our body language REALLY matter in our day to day communication? Aren’t our skills and qualifications all that we really need to be successful in our lives and chosen vocations? One would think the answer to that would be “YES, of course”, however, according to non-verbal communications experts, the answer to that question would be “NO! Body language is extremely important!” In fact, our body language could be the difference between staying stuck in the same position or advancing up the corporate ladder.

Let’s take a look at some ways that positive body language can make a significant difference in how you are perceived.

Posture: Sitting or standing with good posture, shoulders back, spine erect and head up conveys to the listener that you are confident and comfortable in your own skin.

Approach people directly: Rather than approach people from behind or from the side, it’s better to approach them head on and while conversing with them, make sure you stand face to face. This will allow you to hold their attention while you speak to them.

Eye contact: This one is SO important! Good eye contact allows you to establish trust between you and the person you’re addressing. Think about it for a minute; when you speak to someone who can’t look you in the eye, doesn’t it make you feel uncomfortable and perhaps even a little suspicious?

Voice Pitch: Did you know that breathing deeply and lowering the pitch of your voice will project a calm confidence when you speak? Try it sometime.

Use your hands: Using your hands in certain ways can also work to your advantage. It will cause you to feel more engaged in what you are saying, but you do want to ensure that you are not being aggressive or invading someone else’s space. One specific gesture is called the “steeple gesture.” Touch the tips of your fingers together while keeping your palms open. Believe it or not, this communicates sincerity.

So these are some of the positive body language habits that you want to put into practice. The following infographic details some of the more negative body language habits that can be a hindrance to your success.

Where do you fall between the two lists? Do you think body language really matters?

Know before you go: tips for maximizing your IAUG experience

2016-06-03T15:54:42Z

IAUG has a history of providing leading communications technology education and training for those who attend the annual conference and the 2016 IAUG ENGAGE Conference promises to do the same. In fact, there is so much great content offered that it can be daunting trying to determine where to focus, so we’d like to offer some tips on helping you make the most of the 2016 IAUG ENGAGE conference.

Before you go

To keep from getting overwhelmed at IAUG, here are a few pre-trip tips:

Back up. In the worst case scenario that your laptop is stolen or hacked, back up your data before you go. Seriously. Do it now. Both cloud and hard drive.
Kiss your spouse and kids. Being out of the office and absorbing huge amounts of information while making a plethora of new connections is taxing, but so is being without you! Make a point of spending a little time with your family before you go.
Tidy your desk. Want to come back to a nice, clean desk on Monday morning when your boss asks, "What did you learn at IAUG?" Do a quick declutter, and rinse out that coffee cup.
Set your out of office notification. To let prospects and colleagues know you might be slow replying to emails, set your out of office notification.

Remember to pack

In addition to standard work attire, a few packing tips:

Layers. While Orlando is warm, the conference area might be chilly. Bring a jacket or sweater.
Vitamins. Late nights drinking... er... "networking" can lead to weakened immune systems and leave you vulnerable to the "convention crud." Bring vitamins or Emergen-C to stay healthy.
Multiple shoes. With a huge amount of walking and standing required, it's wise to bring at least two pairs of shoes. When one pair becomes uncomfortable, switch to the other pair. Ladies, if you're bringing heels, remember to bring an additional pair of low heels or flats.
Snacks. Junk food and sweet treats are stock in trade at IAUG. Bring protein-rich snacks such as almonds or sunflower seeds to keep energy levels high without the sugar crash.
Business cards. With all the electronics we use today, many people forget to bring their actual business cards! Bring at least 100.
Pen. I like to scribble notes about the conversation on the back of business cards, especially if I promise a follow up. Always be the guy with the pen!
Bleach pen or wipes. There is nothing worse than walking around a cocktail party with the drink you spilled on your tie earlier tarnishing your appearance. Bring Shout wipes or a bleach pen. Even if you don't use it, you can be the hero to someone else: I once offered a detergent wipe to a company president who had just spilled spaghetti sauce on his white shirt before going on stage to address the entire company!
USB hub. Got more than one electronic device that needs overnight charging? Invest in a USB charger like this one I take on every trip. It only uses one hotel outlet and charges six devices at once.

Map your plan

It’s important to note that the content of the sessions offered is always aligned with the biggest industry trends, so choose the content that will be most relevant to your business. Before you leave, select your must-do's and your nice-to-haves. (The best way to do this is to head to the IAUG website and navigate to the For Attendees tab and click on the Agenda Search option.)

Once you know which sessions you will be attending, check out the Workshops that are being offered during the four-day event. The Workshops page offers a daily schedule of workshops offered along with a brief explanation of what will be covered in each one. Again, mapping this out prior to the conference will help you narrow down the offerings that will best suit your business needs.

The Schedule of Events page will help you plan out your day-to-day schedule while the Networking Events page will help you plan out your after-hours activities.

At IAUG

Once you arrive at the event, make sure you have plenty of water with you to stay hydrated, and become religious about hand-washing and sanitizing, if only for the three days of IAUG. You won’t get much out of the event if you’re sick and in bed in your hotel room.

Be sure to visit the Expo Hall. The best time to scope out the Expo Hall is the opening night cocktail event on Monday. Grab a drink, chat and scope out the exhibit floor. Then make a note of the top three to five booths you'd like to revisit on Tuesday for more detailed information. A few other tips:

Schwag. Decide if you want to collect schwag (fun, branded freebies given away by vendors) or if you'd rather collect digital information and save the luggage space.
Hydrate. I said this once before, but it bears repeating. The Expo Hall is notoriously dry, so hydrate more than usual--dry sinuses are vulnerable to infection.
Passport to Prizes. In your registration packet you’ll find a Passport to Prizes Partneropoly Game board that you’ll want to get stamped as you navigate the Expo Hall. Not only does it help you to visit key vendors, but you can also win some great prizes! (We're giving away an Apple Watch. I'm just sayin'.)
Hashtag. If you're a social media geek like me, you'll want to follow the event hashtags, #IAUG and #AvayaEngage, to find out about secret events, contests and the best content and information. And why not follow Spoken on Twitter while you're at it? :-)

And did I mention you should stop by the Spoken booth 117? We'll stamp your passport AND show you how to save 30% on the total cost of ownership for an Avaya cloud contact center!

Have a little fun

There’s nothing better than carving out a little time for fun, especially in a locale like Orlando, FL. Whether you enjoy golfing, amusement parks, the spa or just some time in the sun, plan to arrive a day early or stay a day late if you can! There are also plenty of networking events and dinners to attend. Vox Network Solutions is hosting a dinner on June 7^th sponsored by Spoken. Space is limited so learn more and RSVP to join us.

RSVP for the VOX cocktail event sponsored by Spoken

We look forward to seeing you at the 2016 IAUG ENGAGE Conference!

Five innovations cloud contact centers offer that on-premise doesn't

2016-05-26T23:24:53Z

Call it what you want: virtualization, cloud or distributed computing. But the cloud is one of the most innovative technological advances to hit the call center in a long time. It has literally changed the way that organizations operate, and its effect on the call center industry has been nothing short of revolutionary.

According to Frost and Sullivan, the cloud contact center market is predicted to grow to $3 billion by 2017. More and more call centers are migrating their premise-based solutions to cloud-based call centers and finding that, in addition to delivering on the standard promises of cost savings and scalability, cloud vendors are also leading the way in technological innovations for the call center.

Let’s take a look at some of the ways the cloud is innovating the call center:

Streamlined logins With many on-premise call centers combining solutions from three or more vendors, it's not unusual for the agent login process to be convoluted and end up driving unnecessary calls to technical support, thereby decreasing the agent's productivity and increasing the cost of supporting agents. Cloud vendors have leveraged the uniformity of SaaS and can often streamline the agent login process, ending calls to tech support and skyrocketing agent productivity.

Arise case study: Spoken Avaya CCaaS cloud reduced internal support calls by 99%

Live call observation: Because cloud solutions don't require on-site installations, useful tools such as live call observation for remote agents can be implemented quickly and easily. Rather than relying on a supervisor walking around a brick-and-mortar call center, cloud-based live call observation allows any supervisor working at any location to listen in on any live agent call at any time and give a coaching whisper when needed.
Speech analytics Many call center cloud vendors are showing their innovation expertise by setting up internal think tanks to create technology that addresses common call center issues. For example, call transcription and speech analytics tools can provide data insights that can help drive call center quality best practices.
Agent verification With a growing portion of call center agents working from home, verifying agent logins has become even more critical. For example, Spoken has developed a voice product that compares an agent's voice print to original samples to ensure no imposters are logged into the system.
Smart IVR IVR is a critical yet often overlooked component to the customer service experience. Current research suggests that, for most tasks, a large percentage of callers prefer self-service rather than speaking to a live agent. Interactive Voice Response is the means by which a contact center offers a self-navigating solution to customer inquiries or problems, but it hasn't changed much in the last 20 years. Except for this bit of cloud innovation: Spoken's patented Smart IVR combines the speech recognizer with an online dashboard and a Silent Guide who performs near-real-time corrections to caller utterances, thereby increasing the call completion rates and dramatically decreasing misroutes and opt-outs.

Neat case study: Smart IVR increases routing accuracy and lowers costs

Call recording It's no secret that on-premise call recording is klunky, incomplete and expensive. Cloud vendors improved not only the quality but the quantity and availability of call recordings. And, as mentioned above, many cloud vendors are also implementing innovative analytics programs to suss out even more data and insights from call recordings.

What innovations would you like to see next in your cloud call center? Let us know in the comments!

Want a more in-depth look at the reality of transitioning your Avaya call center to the cloud? Register for our upcoming webinar on June 15th.

WEBINAR June 15: Transition to Cloud with Avaya: a Customer Case Study

Webinar: a customer perspective on transitioning to the Spoken Avaya CCaaS cloud

2016-05-23T20:01:15Z

A leading BPO shares the real experience of transitioning to an Avaya cloud with Spoken Communications

You’re an Avaya loyalist. You love your on-premises infrastructure. And while you understand the benefits of the call center cloud, you certainly aren’t interested in investigating a cloud transition that doesn't involve an Avaya ACD. You might even fear that transitioning to the cloud means uprooting your current call center systems, retraining employees to use new tools and, worst of all, compromising productivity that results in an optimized bottom line.

What if we told you that you could keep all of your familiar Avaya call center technology and seamlessly transition to the cloud at the same time?

It’s true; you can now abandon your fears of a nightmarish cloud transition when you use Spoken Communications to easily and seamlessly move your Avaya call center technology to the cloud. Sound too good to be true? It isn't.

On June 15, Spoken is excited to bring you a webinar that will detail the case study of Arise Virtual Solutions and how that major outsourcer transitioned from an on-premise system to the Spoken Avaya CCaaS. Arise CIO Martin Ingram will share the driving factors, the challenges and the end result of moving to an Avaya contact center cloud. Webinar attendees will learn:

The value of a highly reliable and secure Avaya cloud CCaaS and simplified utility-based pricing structure.
Common pitfalls of transitioning and how to avoid them
How to evaluate and differentiate common cloud delivery and pricing models.

Click here to register for this webinar on Wednesday, June 15, 2016.

There are a myriad of benefits to transitioning to the cloud and we can help you transition at a pace that is comfortable to you. Additionally, you can save on Avaya licenses and gain all the benefits of the cloud while sticking with your tried-and-true Avaya system. You can continue to use all the same tools in the cloud, so throw your worries of productivity loss and retraining employees to the wind. When you use Spoken to transition to the cloud, you can take it step by step, or, perhaps more appropriately, app by app.

Have we piqued your interest? You can also learn more about this exciting opportunity to leverage Avaya in the cloud by registering to attend the International Avaya Users Group conference in Orlando, Florida June 5-9, 2016. Spoken will be there--come visit us at booth 117! We hope to see you there.

Seven things to consider before selecting a private cloud vendor

2016-05-17T12:30:00Z

Is an Avaya private cloud right for you?

The cloud is probably the most cost-saving innovation in call center infrastructure since the invention of the IVR. Many vendors will offer private cloud options, especially to owners of Avaya infrastructure who want to stay in the Avaya system. With a dizzying array of options ranging from homegrown public clouds to Avaya public clouds to Avaya private clouds to hybrid offerings, it can be difficult to know which cloud configuration will deliver the most benefits to your organization.

Curious about an Avaya private cloud? Stop by Spoken booth 117 at IAUG.

Benefits of a private cloud

A private cloud, also known as the “internal” or “corporate” cloud, differs from a public cloud in that the physical servers reside within the company's environment or colocation. Unlike a public cloud, which may house tenants from multiple companies, access to a private cloud is restricted exclusively to the company employees or business partners. There are five key attributes the private cloud offers:

Offering resources (infrastructure & applications) as a service
Flexibility and scale that meet client demands
Resource sharing among large number of users
Measurement and payment according to use of the service
Use of Internet protocols and technologies to access cloud resources

Drawbacks of a private cloud

Wherever there are benefits, there are drawbacks. Depending on the vendor selected, a private cloud solution can carry with it some of the drawbacks of a premise-based solution, including a lack of redundancy and a lack of security. While these can be implemented, the cost might increase in order to accommodate the additional servers required for full redundancy or to become PCI level one compliant. Additionally, some of the anticipated cloud cost benefits can be lost, since a large capital expenditure is still required.

How to select a private cloud vendor

When selecting a vendor to provide a private cloud solution, consider the following:

Do you have a name brand system of preference, such as Avaya or Cisco?
Is the vendor partnered with those brands?
If the cloud is homegrown, what references can the vendor provide?
If reliability is a concern, is geographic redundancy included in the private cloud offering?
If security is a concern, will the data centers be certified PCI Level One compliant?
How does the vendor guarantee a smooth cloud transition?
What Service Level Agreements (SLA's) does the vendor provide in terms of maintenance and upgrades?Can the vendor integrate with any existing systems (CRM, IVR, etc.) seamlessly, or will those need to be replaced?

Case study: from on premise to a Spoken Avaya CCaaS private cloud

What about a hybrid cloud?

As you can see, a private cloud can offer great advantages for those who are more comfortable with servers being hosted on site as opposed to publicly. And just to throw a wrench in the debate, there is yet another option: a hybrid cloud.

As with hybrid gas/electric cars, a hybrid cloud can offer the best of both worlds. Companies can keep the systems at highest risk of hacking, such as CRM systems hosting private customer data, on site, while leveraging a cloud-based ACD, call recording and reporting capabilities.

Is an Avaya hybrid cloud right for your call center?

Ultimately, the decision of public, private or hybrid cloud is up to the business requirements and objectives of the organization; one size does not fit all. To find out more about the details of a real-life private Avaya cloud implementation, join us for our upcoming webinar on June 15 at 1:00 PM Eastern.

Webinar: Transition to Cloud with Avaya: a customer case study, June 15, 2016 1:00pm EST, 10:00am PST

Six barriers to entry to the Avaya cloud call center (and how to overcome them)

2016-05-13T13:00:00Z

Smashing down the most common barriers to an Avaya cloud transition

As we approach the season for the annual International Avaya User Group (IAUG) conference, one thing is becoming clear: change is difficult. Change is scary. So why in the world should you consider transitioning your Avaya contact center to a cloud-based solution? After all, a cloud transition can often mean taking three steps backward for every one step forward. It can mean retraining your employees and incurring costs associated with downtime and lost productivity, leaving both your customers and your team dissatisfied.

Stop by the Spoken booth 117 at IAUG to see our new video and to get a live demo!

And let's face it: many cloud vendors promise a low-cost, no-stress utopia, while the end experience ends up being more post-apocalyptic.

What’s more, most Avaya users love their on-premise Avaya contact center solution. Even if competitors are transitioning to an Avaya cloud, there are real objections to taking that step within your organization. All cloud platforms are not made equal, and selecting the wrong Avaya cloud could lead to a world of regret.

Three steps to taming the complex cloud integration

I hear that. So let's talk about the main objections I hear about Avaya cloud transitions. My goal here is not to convince you of one solution or another but rather to bust some of the myths circulating about what a cloud transition is really like.

Barriers to entry for an Avaya-based cloud contact center

Over the years, I've heard quite a few objections from Avaya users about transitioning to a cloud platform of any kind and to the Spoken cloud platform in particular. And I always take it as a sign that we're doing something right, that the cloud is a wise decision for these companies, provided that these issues can be addressed.

Do any of these sound familiar?

I don't want to switch off Avaya in order to get a cloud It's true that only one vendor currently offers a public cloud platform with an Avaya ACD and access to Avaya EMC multichannel solution. (And yes, you guessed it: it's Spoken!)
Cloud transitions are always disruptive. While no one can predict the success of every element of a cloud transition, choose a vendor that allows you to transition to the cloud when you want. A tried-and-true method is to start with a small call volume--maybe 5% of total call volume--and test the system. Find the misalignments and bugs. Fix, re-test, repeat. Gradually increase the call volume over as long as 18 months with no disruption. It's not magic; it's method.
I'm worried about sunk costs. The investment in not only Avaya infrastructure but also in the third-party integrations required for call recording, CRM and other systems as well as training to use them is not insubstantial. Here's a recommended approach: keep your sunk investment by retaining all your existing systems. Start with a single application, such as cloud call recording or transitioning a single telephone number to the Spoken Avaya Cloud ACD while leaving the bulk of call volume on the legacy systems. As the systems age out, transition the rest of the volume and applications to the cloud.
I have a complex legacy infrastructure that will be hard to upgrade. Don't we all? Select a vendor that can work with your legacy infrastructure rather than doing a rip-and-replace.
I'm worried that a new cloud solution won't be able to scale with my call volume. The beauty of an Avaya public cloud is that it's designed to house a minimum of 10,000 agent seats. Homegrown cloud vendors can't compete with that volume and provide the scalability your business needs. When you select an Avaya cloud vendor, be sure to ask about maximum call volume: in your wildest dreams of success, how much volume could the cloud vendor take? If you scale to 5,000 peak concurrent calls, will you have to switch cloud vendors to accommodate the additional volume? Or will you have to pay more, if you're considering a private cloud model?
I haven’t heard of Spoken Communications As the head of marketing, that's my fault. We made the decision to put our money into developing the only public Avaya cloud call center platform available today rather than buying advertising to shout about it. But if you've read this far, allow me to introduce us further: Spoken is a technology innovator that provides a cost-effective, secure and high availability call center cloud platform that is the platform of choice for over half of the world's major outsourcers.

And I want to hear your additional objections: what else is keeping you from transitioning to an Avaya cloud? Let me know in the comments!

Is an Avaya hybrid cloud right for your call center?

2016-05-04T17:51:38Z

Choosing the right Avaya cloud for your organization

If you’ve been keeping up with technology trends, you are well acquainted with the cloud and the advantages that it can offer for your contact center, including business agility, scalability and cost savings. However, one of the challenges we run across is that very few contact centers are green field implementations: almost every contact center already has some type of existing legacy infrastructure, very often an Avaya system. And with that comes the question: how can I transition to the cloud without losing the benefits of the sunk costs in my legacy infrastructure?

As part of our series of cloud trends unfolding in 2016, it's time to finally address the concept of a hybrid cloud for Avaya users and why, when and where a hybrid cloud strategy is best applied.

Upcoming webinar June 15, 2016: Transition to cloud with Avaya: a customer case study

The promise of the hybrid cloud

"Hybrid" is used to refer to a cloud solution that is something other than 100% public, multitenant cloud. As we know, a cloud solution is one that is hosted on remote servers. Hybrid refers to a cloud environment that uses some type of mix of premise-based infrastructure, private cloud or third-party, public cloud services with some type of connection among the platforms. Organizations opt to implement hybrid clouds for a number of reasons, including data security and optimization of legacy infrastructure.

Premise-based infrastructure is purchased outright by the organization and housed on the organization's preferred colocation. Many of Spoken's customers, for example, have existing Avaya on-premise equipment and are interested in transitioning it to the Spoken Avaya cloud platform. Premise-based infrastructure has the advantage of being private; however, it is costly to purchase, expensive to maintain over time and difficult to scale when more volume is needed.

Public cloud refers to cloud services that house multiple tenants, referred to as "multi-tenant." Gmail, DropBox and Amazon Web Services are examples of public clouds. They generally offer high levels of security, scalability and cost-efficiency, since the vendor develops a large host of servers and provides cloud services to a variety of tenants on them. It's simple to scale up or down if your call volume increases or decreases, and there is no large capital outlay to a cloud contract, since you're paying for services only.

Private cloud refers to a single-tenant cloud platform that is implemented for a single organization. A private cloud offers the key benefits of cloud with the added benefit (and drawbacks) of outright ownership. However, it also offers the key disadvantages of premise-based infrastructure, since it must be built and customized for a single company. This model is sometimes called "managed services," since the company purchases the infrastructure for its private site, while the cloud vendor maintains the equipment providing the service.

Three helpful steps for your cloud transition

Step 1: Take inventory

The first step in determining which type of platform will work best for your situation is to take inventory of your current infrastructure. The contact center is a complex web of integrated systems: the ACD, CRM, call recording, IVR and reporting structures must be kept up and running through any transition process.

For example, if you have existing Avaya licenses and infrastructure, you probably want to retain that legacy system and select a vendor that can do a cloud or hybrid cloud implementation as a wrapper over your existing system.

Which critical systems must be retained? Why?
Which systems have contracts expiring soon?
Which systems would most benefit from a cloud transition?
Which systems would cause the least disruption with a cloud transition?
What will your business look like in three months, six months, a year? Do you need room to grow?

Step 2: Define your goals

If you don't know where you're going, any road will get you there. What are the primary goals of your cloud transition? If your goal is cost savings and ease of transition, an Avaya public cloud is probably the best option for you. If you want access to innovations such as live call observation from anywhere or 100% call recording, either pure cloud or a hybrid cloud might fit the bill. If, on the other hand, data ownership and security are more important than cost savings or ease of use, a hybrid solution might be the best option.

Step 3: Choose your Avaya cloud

While a multi-tenant or public Avaya cloud works well for most organizations, your goals or inventory may reveal the need for a hybrid cloud solution, with one foot still firmly planted on premise. For example:

Data privacy if your client data must stay on site, you might consider an Avaya public cloud ACD that will integrate with your CRM database, which could remain on your private colocation.
Business disruption If a key goal is lack of business disruption, you might consider a hybrid model wherein your existing Avaya infrastructure remains in place, and a cloud "wrapper" is implemented on top of it. Access to 100% end-to-end cloud recording would decrease liability, and you would still be able to keep your existing Avaya ACD. Once the current ACD ages out, a transition to an Avaya public cloud ACD could be implemented.

For example, major outsourcer Arise Virtual Solutions had a customer requirement for Avaya but the need to be able to scale for thousands of new agents in a matter of weeks. Since the Spoken Avaya Contact Center as a Service public cloud offered more security than the premise-based solution, Arise opted to leverage the cost-efficient Spoken Avaya public cloud rather than a hybrid model. However, to prevent business disruption, a gradual transition plan was developed. Eighteen months later, 24 customers had been transitioned to the secure public cloud with no rollbacks.

Read the case study: Arise Virtual Solutions transitions to the Spoken Avaya Cloud

Ultimately, the cloud decision for Avaya users is up to you: public, private or hybrid, the key is to meet your business goals with minimal disruption.

Want to find out what it's really like to transition your on-premise contact center to the Spoken Avaya Cloud? Grab a seat at our webinar on Wednesday, June 15, 2016:

Do’s and Don’ts of CRM

2016-04-28T13:30:00Z

If there’s one thing we know, it’s that the customer service industry is truly the king of the 3-letter acronyms. Today’s acronym is "CRM," or customer relationship management.

What is CRM?

CRM stands for Customer Relationship Management and covers all aspects of the customer journey, from the first clickthrough to customer satisfaction surveys to the customer loss analysis. A more complete definition of CRM:

Customer relationship management (CRM) is a term that refers to practices, strategies and technologies that companies use to manage and analyze customer interactions and data throughout the customer lifecycle, with the goal of improving business relationships with customers, assisting in customer retention and driving sales growth. CRM systems are designed to compile information on customers across different channels -- or points of contact between the customer and the company -- which could include the company's website, telephone, live chat, direct mail, marketing materials and social media. CRM systems can also give customer-facing staff detailed information on customers' personal information, purchase history, buying preferences and concerns.

In the call center context, CRM usually refers to software involving the prospect and customer database, including interaction and loyalty data. Popular CRM brands include Salesforce, Zoho, SAP and Insightly. CRM software consolidates all the customer information into a single database so that businesses can easily access, manage and analyze it. Common features of CRM software include: marketing automation, sales enablement automation, contact center automation and location-based services.

Making the most of your CRM

When selecting a CRM system to implement, as with any enterprise software decision, many organizations fall victim to common pitfalls. Below is an infographic detailing some do’s and don’ts when it comes to making the most of your CRM system. We would add the following do's for your consideration:

Do engage the end users in the decision-making process. Having excitement and buy-in from the end users will make training and transition a breeze.
Do engage both technical and operations users in the requirements-building process. IT will have technical requirements, and Operations will be able to lay out the types of reporting required to improve business processes. You might also involve the Sales and Marketing departments as well.
Do consider types of access. Will the users only access from desktops? Or will they be using mobile devices? If so, which devices and how often? If mobile access is key, make sure that your CRM candidates meet your end user needs.
Do make a choice based on functionality rather than price. The cheapest solution isn't always the best for your organization; neither is the most expensive. Make the decision based on realistic requirements and growth possibilities rather than exclusively on price.

How to build your corporate culture

2016-04-26T15:27:22Z

How do you define company culture?

"Company culture": we hear this term so often, but what exactly IS company culture? My good friend and specialist in internal communications Shel Holtz has the best definition of company culture I've heard to date: "the way we do things around here." Easy to understand and undeniably true.

Some might say that company culture is a company’s personality. Is it relaxed, buttoned up or work-hard-play-hard? Others would say company culture is how people inside the organization get things done, while still others would consider it to be how the employees and management interact with those outside of the organization. If you go with "the way we do things around here," one could argue that all of those elements contribute to the company's culture.

Who owns the creation of culture?

Ah, therein lies the rub. In a recent study cited by the aforementioned Shel Holtz, HR professionals, business managers and front line employees each believed that they were the primary source of the company's culture:

As Holtz goes on to remark:

The consequences of this disconnect are potentially massive. For example, acting on the belief that employees value the company’s focus on customers leaves front-line staff wondering why so little attention is paid to work-life balance. HR thinks they’re doing a great job with superior employee benefits and can’t figure out why engagement surveys scores are so low, while employees roll their eyes at pay disparities. We have long known that employee commitment begins with the belief that they’re being treated fairly—in compensation and opportunities to advance, for example. It’s nearly impossible to build a culture when employees believe they’re not being treated fairly.

At the root of culture is the health of internal communications. Are managers willing to give feedback to both the C-suite and to their direct reports? Is the CEO willing to show vulnerability? Are front-line employees rewarded for direct and honest communications with both managers and with the C-suite? Communications must flow freely, including top-down, bottom-up and peer-to-peer. And we must understand that everyone in the company defines the culture.

How to develop your corporate culture

John Tabis recently wrote in Fast Company about his three basic steps for developing an authentic company culture:

Make it personal Too often a brand voice is flat or developed by management and doesn't reflect the voice of the people who work for the company, day in and day out. What is your vision for changing the world? At Spoken, we recently engaged in a similar activity in our all-company meeting, where everyone from the receptionist to the CEO wrote down their grand vision for Spoken in a dream world. Everyone was engaged and everyone was excited about what Spoken's great vision could be!
Communicate that vision Now comes the hard part--how is that vision communicated? If you have a visionary like Steve Jobs at the helm, it's easy. But what if your organization takes a more collaborative approach, like Zappos? Zappos has ten core values that its entire team is encouraged to live and breathe every day, and it hosts a "powered by service" library that every employee reads. Maybe you meet monthly or yearly to collaborate and engage everyone to brainstorm in how better to live your corporate vision.
Put people first The best organization do this: they value their people over their vision. They believe that the vision won't happen without their people, so their people come first. "We need to start treating people like human beings, not like cogs in a productivity machine, writes Tabis. "Look at the individual first and their role second and relate to employees on a more human level. When employees feel cared about as people, I’ve found they do their best work."

If you don't take the time to develop your culture and vision, it will happen on its own. And that culture might end up being "this company uses people and throws them away" or "this company values competition over quality." Your culture is being developed as we speak: what do your employees have a voice in the creation of your culture?

Five reasons not to put off your customer satisfaction surveys

2016-04-15T16:02:12Z

How do you measure customer satisfaction?

Customer Satisfaction is commonly defined as "the extent to which a brand's goods or services meet or exceed customer expectations." The most common method of measuring customer satisfaction is the CSat survey, which usually takes the form of a series of questions about the aspects of the customer experience, including the ordering process, the demeanor of the sales or service representative, the helpfulness of follow-up communications and the customer's overall satisfaction. These questions might be delivered over the phone with a live agent, using an IVR, through email or online.

While organizations are aware of the importance of measuring customer satisfaction, it can often be a low priority because it's not perceived as delivering immediate cost value. However, I would beg to differ, since we recently did an analysis of the research comparing the cost of acquiring a new customer in comparison to the cost of retaining an existing one.

Customer retention vs customer acquisition: the real cost difference

Additionally, while we may agree on what a positive customer experience looks like, it's worth taking the time to define what comprises a bad customer experience.

Five reasons not to put off your CSat surveys

If the thought of having to spend three to 10 times more to acquire a new customer doesn't send you rushing to dust off your customer satisfaction surveys, here are a few more motivators for you:

Increase customer loyalty A recent survey shows that 71% of customers who ended a business relationship did so because of a poor customer service experience. By taking the time to listen to your customers, you communicate to them that their business is important to you. Customers are likely to remain loyal when they see a business taking the time and effort to keep them happy and satisfied.
Increase referrals Referral customers are the cheapest and easiest sales around. A customer who is well taken care of by a business is very likely to refer friends and family to your business or service when there is a need.
Leverage your competitive advantage One of the reason Amazon became the most popular online retailer is its legendary approach to providing hassle-free, wowing customer service. With speedy response time and a liberal refund policy, Amazon has become synonymous with a smooth customer experience--and their market position reflects that.
Broaden your sales reach While the saying is that an unhappy customer will tell 10 people while a happy one will only tell one, that one brand promoter can extend your sales reach into hitherto untouched markets.
Continued improvement Perhaps one of the greatest benefits of conducting customer satisfaction surveys is the opportunity they provide the customer service team to make changes that will improve how they do their jobs. Knowing what you do well is great; however, gaining insight into what you can do better will only serve to solidify the above-mentioned benefits. Plus, a team focused on improvement is a highly engaged team that is less likely to turn over.

In house or outsourced?

So we're all convinced of the value of conducting CSat surveys now, yes? So the next question is: do we conduct them in house, or do we farm the work out so we can ensure the results are unbiased? Granted, I have a bit of bias, since Spoken and HyperQuality conduct CSat surveys on behalf of clients, but there is a method to my madness.

Objectivity A third party will take an unbiased view of your customer service needs and develop a clear, concise survey that will not only be cost-effective, but customer-effective as well.
Expertise By contracting out to a third party, you will benefit from their expertise. There are numerous companies that are solely focused on improving customer satisfaction and administering CSAT surveys. This expertise will likely save you time and money by following their proven processes.
Cost-effective A third party will know exactly how to design and streamline a survey based on your needs. You will be able to focus on just what you need and eliminate what you don’t. Not only does this save money initially, but by having a very streamlined and focus survey, you will be in a better position to implement the necessary changes to improve your customer service.

Benefits of outsourcing CSAT surveys

Still hungry for more? We've got you covered. The case study below details how emailed CSat surveys improved one brand's customer service in the following ways:

19% increase in CSat scores
29% increase in First Call Resolution
18% increase in Total Problem Resolution
52% increase in Net Promoter Score/Likely to Recommend

Email surveys improve customer service across metrics

How to script an awesome IVR customer satisfaction survey

2016-04-12T13:00:00Z

One of the most useful tools we have for measuring customer satisfaction is the post-call customer satisfaction or "CSAT" survey. And with the widespread adoption of IVR technology in the 90s and early 2000's, IVR call flow design shifted away from engineers and into the hands of lay people. However, those people didn't always know exactly how to design a customer-friendly call flow.

There is a bit of an art form to creating a CSAT survey that callers will enjoy participating in. One of the cost-cutting and customer-delighting tips we discussed on last month's IVR webinar was how to design a call flow that would get the organization the results it requires while pleasing (or at least not annoying) the caller.

If you missed it, view the full webinar recording here.

We often write or suggest improvements to call flow scripts. Take, for example, this perfectly simple call flow script for an information-gathering customer service survey:

Please let us know why you canceled your service. Press 1 if you canceled because the service was too expensive. Press 2 if you canceled because you never used the service. Press 3 if you canceled because you do need the service, but it didn't have the features you wanted. Press 4 if you canceled because you had a bad customer service experience. Press 5 if you canceled because you switched to a competing service.

Tip #1: Brief the caller on the menu length

If you must give a long menu of choices, begin by telling the caller how many options they will be choosing from. For example, with the above script, you would begin with Please select your reason for canceling from the following five options.

Confusing IVR menus can frustrate callers, so setting expectations for menu length is the first step in creating a positive customer experience.

Tip #2: Reason --> action

Listing the action before the reason is a classic IVR misstep that can be costly and drive both opt-outs and negative customer experiences. Especially when it's necessary to enumerate a long list of items ("long" meaning more than four), it's easier for callers to listen first for the reason and then for the action they must take.

The reasoning behind this is simple: callers will pay closest attention when they hear their trigger. In this case, "too expensive." They will then be primed to hear "press 1" correctly. When "press 1" is listed first, their minds may wander by the time they hear "too expensive," and they'll either give up and opt out or be forced to listen to the enire list again.

Tip #3: Avoid repetition

You probably noticed another annoyance in the original call flow: the phrase "if you canceled" was repeated for each option, which would undoubtedly wear on the caller's patience. Keep options as clear and concise as possible, and vet each one carefully for possible misunderstandings.

Check out how the Spoken IVR helped the Neat Company quickly and accurately vet their callers and route them to the right queue the first time.

Customer churn: the causes and the remedy

2016-04-06T13:00:00Z

What causes customer churn, and how do you avoid it?

Customer churn refers to your customer base decreasing due to attrition; it is the opposite of acquisition and retention. For healthy growth, existing customers stay with the company, and new customers are acquired. In other words, growth good; churn bad.

If your company is experiencing churn, the first question to ask is "why?" And if the attrition rate is increasing, are there any trends driving the loss of existing customers? We've written about the cost of acquiring a new customer being far more expensive than the cost of retaining an existing customer. While statistics on the relative costs vary from three times to thirty times the cost, everyone agrees that retaining a customer costs less than acquiring a new one.

Customer retention vs customer acquisition: the real cost difference

According to an article by Lincoln Murphy, there are two basic reasons that a customer will leave your organization. One is unavoidable, while the other is not.

Causes of customer churn

Something happened to/with the customer. This is the unavoidable reason for churn one because it's something your organization has no control over. This could come in the form of the company going out of business or the company getting acquired by someone else. If the company goes out of business, your job is to provide the support that he or she needs while this process goes forward. If you’ve served this client well over the years, it is likely they will lean on you to help in the transitions of selling off the business and it puts you at the top of the priority list when it comes to collecting money owed. If, however, the client is being acquired by a larger company, this can be an opportunity for you to get your foot in the door and support an even bigger client. Again, if you’ve done your job well; this can be a time of great reward.
The customer did not achieve their desired outcome. As you can probably imagine, this is a completely avoidable reason for customer churn. If a customer is unhappy, that means your organization dropped the ball. If customers achieve the desire business results, they have no reason to leave.

If you have an unhappy customer leaving your organization, it's your job to dig down and figure out why.

Reasons for customer attrittion

Lack of critical functions Your product is missing critical functionality required to do the thing they need to do
Bad onboarding You have a poor (from absent to overwhelming) onboarding experience
Bad experience The customer had a bad implementation, configuration or setup
Lack of use The customer hasn’t adopted your product and isn’t using it (for whatever reason)
Bugs There are bugs and other stability/usability/access issues keeping the customer from doing what they need to do.

If you are discovering that your organization is losing customers because they are unhappy with their outcomes, I'd suggest taking the above bulleted list and transforming it into a checklist for your development, marketing, implementation and client services teams. For example:

Marketing Is what the product or services provides a demand of the market?
Development Are the critical functions that will provide the promised service/product working flawlessly?
Implementation Does the implementation plan deliver on the sales and marketing promise?
Client services After the sale, is the customer trained to use the product or service properly, and does everyone have an easy way to get support, report bugs and request features?

I worked for a startup many years ago that would take any contract just to have referenceable customers. While that was a great policy for growth, some customers ended up unhappy because the experience didn't match the promise. Eventually, that startup changed its policy to vet new sales opportunities more carefully and to pass on ones that had a possibility of attrition, even if it meant the growth numbers wouldn't be as impressive.

Knowing when to pass on a customer shows that you’re acting in their best interest instead of your own. This goes a long way in protecting your reputation in the industry. Besides, it’s always easier to protect a reputation then it is to rebuild one.

How to improve service and avoid churn

However, some organization have an issue: we can't always see what's causing customer churn. Sometimes, it takes an outside eye to pull in the data and move beyond the guesswork into the actionable causes. In particular, the Six Sigma process can be incredibly helpful, especially in the hands of a third-party vendor.

For example, HyperQuality's Business Insights team worked with a direct-to-consumer retailer who was not only having difficulty tracking resolution rates but was also facing dissatisfaction rates as high as 11%. They sought to identify specific, actionable improvement opportunities.

In just six weeks, the Business Insights team had discovered the causes of the dissatisfaction rates and made specific recommendations to address them. The results?

Potential revenue gain of over $2 million
Improvement of 4% in overall contact resolution
3.4% improvement in customer experience

Want more detail? The full case study is below.

The HyperQuality Six Sigma Case Study offers a great process on how to improve customer service and avoid churn.

What do you think? Are there more than two reasons for customer churn? Share them with us!

Two call center cloud benefits (that aren't "cost efficiency")

2016-03-31T18:01:45Z

Are you only considering cost efficiency for your cloud transition?

As time progresses, the demand for cloud-based call center applications and services has risen significantly. And why not? After all, cloud-based technologies are much easier to manage than on-premise ones, as they don’t require equipment space or maintenance; this reduces costs as well. Other significant motives for the shift exist, but these are the primary reasons why business adoption of cloud-based technologies is skyrocketing.

And we do mean “skyrocketing”—it’s not an exaggeration. As a matter of fact, a recent report from Research and Markets revealed that the cloud contact center market will grow from $4.68 billion in 2015 to $14.71 billion by 2020, at a CAGR of 25.7 percent.

The report verifies that a dominant factor impacting this growth is cost, or “the financial benefit of moving expenses from capital expenditure to operating expenditure, avoiding costly infrastructure.” Indeed, more contact center decision makers are scouting out technology vendors that can help them reduce costs and improve efficiencies.

Why total cost of ownership shouldn't drive your cloud decision

However, cost efficiency isn't the only reason organizations move toward a more cloud-based contact center environment. If you are one of those business leaders that is adamant about relying on the total cost of ownership (TCO) of new software before investing in cloud for your contact center, you are shortchanging your organization. In fact, you are missing an opportunity to make an optimal purchase decision.

When you attempt to calculate TCO for cloud, even with a pre-built calculator such as the kinds commonly available online, you can’t allocate for revenue losses from such factors as a rigid on-premise system that can’t scale, a long-term contract or a lack of agility to move with the market--all of which are distinct business advantages offered by a cloud model. TCO doesn't account for any of those benefits.

Why Call Center TCO Doesn't Matter

Two non-TCO factors to consider

Let's consider some factors outside of TCO.

What assurances do we have against business disruption?

When speaking with customers and potential customers, the number one concern is ease of transition. Features and benefits of a call center cloud platform are nice, but IT and administrators' primary concern regards the vendor's plans to avoid disruption during the transition: how can the vendor ensure that the transition goes smoothly? What is the vendor's record on rollbacks? At Spoken, we take a novel approach: we provide a cloud wrapper over existing infrastructure and work with the client to develop a plan for gradual transition. We call this "a place to start" into the cloud, with the idea being that the cloud transition can take up to 18 months, if that is what the client requires.

Several clients have chosen their "place to start" with the Spoken Smart IVR, a single application on the Spoken Call Center as a Cloud (CCaaS) platform. They begin with a single, low-volume telephone number, and they gradually import additional telephone numbers onto the Spoken Smart IVR over a period of months.

Guthy|Renker case study: a gradual cloud transition with Spoken Smart IVR

Still another client, a major outsourcer, began not with a single application but with a single client with a low call volume. Over 18 months, 24 clients and thousands of work-from-home agents were transitioned seamlessly to the Spoken Avaya CCaaS, with zero rollbacks.

Arise case study: Avaya CCaaS cloud transition

Is this solution scalable?

Choosing a vendor that can balance rapid ups and downs in call volume as well as enable your expansion to new locations all over the world is essential. If your goal is to grow, then you need to make sure that you invest in a solution that is flexible enough to grow with you. And it's worth considering the reverse possibility: what if your call volume shrinks? An on-premise system has fixed costs, but a cloud solution should be able to scale up and down with your business volume. Take the time to ask your cloud vendor how the pricing model works: do you pay only for actual usage minutes, or is the model based on named agents?

And then, of course, there is the issue of the actual integration. If the vendor offers a wrapper over an existing Avaya system, like Spoken does, how complex will the integration process be?

Give me the details: I want a one-on-one Avaya integration consultation

We know that the contact center won't stop being seen as a cost center any time soon, so it's understandable that cost efficiency is a key driver of cloud transitions for call center organizations. However, it's worth taking the time to weigh additional benefits of a cloud solution in general and of specific features and benefits provided by cloud vendors as well.

How the cloud really affects call center revenue

2016-03-29T18:13:00Z

The phenomenon known as "the cloud" has been one of the most revolutionary business advances in recent decades, especially in the call center. There is no shortage of articles and reports detailing the number of businesses that have successfully migrated their systems to the cloud, including call centers. In fact, it is expected that by the year 2020, 78% of small businesses will use the cloud. To say that the cloud has been successful as it’s entered the mainstream would be an understatement; the cloud is literally changing the way we do business.

We have shared before about the advantages of the cloud and how it impacts revenue, but for today, we’d like to zero in on the revenue question. How exactly does transitioning infrastructure to the cloud affect the bottom line?

Moving IT infrastructure from capex to opex

In years past, organizations typically had their IT resources such as servers, networks, applications and staff, on site. This was true of call centers as well: it was de rigeur for large call centers to purchase an maintain an on-premise ACD with a life expectancy of five to 20 years. This required large outlays of capital expenditures to both purchase the systems and to maintain them over the years. A cloud model eliminates the need for these resources to be housed on site, along with the significant outlay of capital.

Named agent pricing versus concurrent agent pricing

With respect to the call center cloud, there is another rather obscure pricing benefit. Many organizations are still used to the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) model for on-premise purchases, and they try to compare apples to oranges when evaluating the value of a cloud call center. One insidious calculation that is often overlooked is the "per agent" charge. Per agent can refer to several different pricing models. Most vendors charge by named agents, which refers to every single registered agent with a unique ID. Yes, every single agent that has ever been employed by the company. While a company may have thousands of named agents, it's entirely possible that only a few hundred would ever be logged in at the same time--but the cloud vendor still may be charging for every single named agent, regardless of actual concurrent usage.

Enter concurrent agents. Concurrent agents refers to the maximum number of agents that are logged on to the system at the same time during a given month. Finding a vendor that charges by maximum concurrent agency rather than by named agents can cut the cost of a cloud implementation by over 60%. Paying by maximum concurrent agency rather than by named agents typically offers cost efficiency because you are paying only for time the agents are actually consuming the service.

Consumption economics: your guide to pay-by-the-drink call center pricing

Increased business agility

One big drawback of the on-premise model is its lack of flexibility or scalability: if an enterprise invested in an ACD but then experienced a huge spike in call volume, the only solution was to purchase, install and maintain an additional on-premise ACD. And if call volume was reduced for some reason, the enterprise was stuck with an expensive, underused behemoth that required years to pay off.

A cloud model offers a much more flexible and cost effective “pay as you go” pricing model. If a call center, for example, has a temporary spike in call volume requiring additional infrastructure, a cloud call center vendor would be able to accommodate the incremental increase in call volume at a per-minute price that didn't require a purchasing and installation cycle. This flexibility has proven to be a huge cost savings for companies investing in a cloud call center model.

Transforming the call center from a cost center to a customer loyalty center

This wouldn't be an article about call centers without a hat tip to the old bugaboo: that the call center is almost always seen as a cost center--and those costs always need to be reduced. However, here's a statistic that bears repeating: 68% of consumers have reported changing brands because of ONE poor customer service experience. If the call center can be used to drive positive brand experiences, the financial benefits are enormous.

Ian Kingwill wrote an excellent post on LinkedIn citing fifteen different sources claiming it costs anywhere from 3 to 30 times as much to acquire a new customer as to retain an existing one. Whichever statistics you choose to cite, almost everyone agrees that putting time and budget into customer retention saves money in the long run. And our 2015 Call Center Report indicated that empowered agents are the key drivers of positive call center experiences. Agents with access to a cloud platform that can log in from anywhere, at any time and instantly have all the resources needed to address a customer service issue at their fingertips are not only highly efficient; they are also the key drivers of customer loyalty. And a flexible cloud platform with an easy-to-use interface is a key tool to empower agents to deliver positive customer experiences.

The Spoken 2015 Call Center Report: Telephone Wins and IVR Loses

A cloud platform, especially in the call center, provides a number of financial benefits that would have any CFO smiling. Ready to dip your toe into the cloud? Check out this case study, by which an outsourcer reduced its calls to internal IT support by 99%, resulting in a cost savings of over $300,000.

Case study: Arise Virtual Solutions transitions to the Spoken Avaya Cloud

What is an IVR?

2016-03-23T13:00:00Z

Part of our ongoing call center technology glossary series: what is an IVR?

Welcome to the second installment of our call center technology glossary series. In this installment, we’re going to be looking at the acronym IVR. If you’ve ever called a customer service center and been greeted by an automated recording rather than a live person, then you are familiar with an IVR system.

What is an IVR?

What does IVR stand for? Interactive Voice Response. The IVR works closely with the Automated Call Distributor, which we highlighted in a previous blog post. The IVR system is the software that allows customers to interact with the company via the voice channel. IVRs often serve three main functions:

Improve the customer experience A primary function of the IVR is to route the caller to the correct queue. Billing queries go to the billing department, and sales calls go to the sales department, for example. With misrouted calls and transfers being a key indicator of customer dissatisfaction, getting to the right queue the first time is a key indicator of call quality.
Service high call volume During periods of peak call volume, an IVR can be a useful tool. First, the IVR can offer self-service for some types of inquiries, reducing the agent load. Second, the IVR can give an estimated wait time to allow callers the option of a callback (virtual hold) or of IVR or web self-service. Third, the IVR can help to identify callers quickly, so that the agent already has the caller information when he does answer, thereby shortening the call length.
24/7 service While it may be cost-prohibitive for many organizations to staff phone lines outside of regular business hours, an IVR can take messages or provide automated information so that the caller might be able to self-service. For example, if a caller simply wants to know shen her package was shipped, the shipping information could easily be delivered through the IVR, even at 2:00 in the morning, and the caller would never need to speak to an agent nor call back during business hours.
Reduce cost It would be disingenuous not to acknowledge that IVR minutes cost far less than agent minutes. One of Spoken's customers was able to reduce the cost per call by 15% through effective IVR automation.

Download the case study: 15% reduction in cost per call with the Spoken Smart IVR

A brief history of speech recognition

In this age of Siri and Smart IVR, it's hard to remember when speech recognition systems were more rudimentary, shall we say. Prior to 1963, telephone numbers were dialed by users with a loop-disconnect (LD) signaling using rotary dials. DTMF, or dual-tone multifrequency signaling, was first developed by Bell In 1963; it used a voice frequency band to deliver information using tones.This revolution spelled the death of the dial phone and the birth of "for sales, press one." Under the trademark brand Touch Tone, land line customers could now purchase a phone with buttons that were pushed rather than dialed.

Speech recognition research was going full swing in the 1960s. At that time, speech recognition followed the trigram model, by which each word required a 350 millisecond pause afterwards in order to be recognized. So speech recognition sounded something like this: "I... want... sales." Then, in 1969, John Pierce at Bell System famously defunded the speech recognition research that Bell was doing at the time. He compared speech recognition research to "turning water into gasoline, extracting gold from the sea, curing cancer or going to the moon." Happily, the research continued despite Pierce's beliefs. In fact, in 1971, DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, part of the Department of Defense responsible for emerging technologies for use by the military, established the Speech Understanding Research (SUR) program. The SUR program had a goal of developing machines that would understanding continuous speech, without that 350-millisecond pause after each word.The project was somewhat successful, but it took computers 100 minutes to decode each 30 seconds of speech!

In the 1980s and 990s, huge strides in speech recognition were made. Under Fred Jelinek's lead, IBM created a voice-activated typewriter, known as Tangora, that had a 20,000 word vocabulary in 1985. In the 1990s, speech recognition vocabulary actually exceeded average human vocabulary and became speaker-independent.

In the 1990s, speech recognition technologies became commercially available, and call center technologists took notice. Companies began to invest in Computer-Telephony Integration systems, which connected the analog voice systems with the digital customer relationship management databases. This meant that call centers could use speaker-independent speech recognition instead of DTMF signaling. Now, callers could say "sales" instead of pushing one on the touch pad!

In the following years, voice and speech recogntiion technologies became less expensive and easier to deploy, thanks to ever-increasing CPU power and the introduction of the VXML standard. With those innovations, IVR became a cost-effective call center solution.

An IVR illustration

You’re likely familiar with the drill. You make a call to a particular business, you are asked to state the purpose of your call by answering a question or by pressing a certain number. Once you answer or press said number, you are routed to the correct department. The software that does this is the Interactive Voice Response. The infographic below illustrates how this works.

Spoken's approach to the IVR

All that being said, let's acknowledge that many IVRs can provide a frustrating experience, usually due to thoughtless or inexpert design. A well-designed IVR call flow is a thing of beauty: the caller always feels understood; the call is always routed to the right queue the first time, and the caller is accurately identitied within the CRM system so that the agent can have a successful interaction with the caller.

However, we all know that there are many roadblocks to that IVR utopia:

Unclear utterances A dog barking or a siten in the background will break most speech recognition IVRs and ask callers to repeat their answers, which send 80% of them to dialing zero immediately, thereby canceling any automation cost savings and increasing caller frustration. Also, the word "um" breaks most automated speech recognition systems.
Confusing menus Callers don't always pay attention to every menu choice or may not be able to figure out which choice will get them to the right queue.
Lack of CTI Computer-Telephony Integration allows the voice channel (IVR) to interact with digital databases, such as the CRM database and the agent screen. If a company hasn't installed CTI, the caller's utterances will be used only for IVR routing, and the caller will be forced to repeat his information to the live agent.

We have taken an innovative approach to IVR innovation: we combine machine automation with pinpointed human intervention where needed. The Spoken Smart IVR has a human Silent Guide that monitors up to ten simultaneous calls, just in case there is an unclear utterance. Then, instead of asking the caller to repeat a response, the system continues to the next question, while the Guide quickly makes a real-time correction to the utterance. The result? The caller never has to repeat a response and gets to the agent faster.

Don't believe it? View a demo of the Spoken Smart IVR and tell us what you think!

Speech recognition still has a ways to go before every caller is automatically understood every time. In the meantime, we believe in innovating the solutions that do exist to provide the best IVR experience possible.

Four tips for working with Millennials

2016-03-15T13:00:00Z

Four tips for getting the most out of your Millennial workforce

Millennials, those people between the ages of 18 and 34 as of the year 2015, have now surpassed the number of Gen Xers as being the largest generational population in the US workforce. Based on a recent Pew Research Center report, there are about 53.5 million Millennials working in the US, with a large portion of them still in college. This generation will be leading the workforce for decades to come. So what say we get over our differences and focus on leveraging Millennials for the unique skills they offer?

Digital natives prefer digital learning

Millennials are tech-savvy and came of age in a digital world. They have probably never consulted an instruction manual nor used an analog device of any kind. They are referred to as "digital natives," which are defined as "children raised in a digital, media-saturated world [that] require a media-rich learning environment to hold their attention." It’s like they came out of the womb knowing how to navigate to EVERY setting on their iPhones in order to figure out how to solve a problem, and they will quickly become bored during an interaction that doesn't promote active engagement or leverage rich media. As Kathy Cuprino wrote in Forbes, perhaps we should stop trying to engage Millennials and simply appreciate their unique set of skills. Maybe we should stop seeing digital natives as having an obstacle to be overcome and start appreciating that they are self-starters and encourage them to do their own research and learning:

"... while Boomers and Gen Xers needed to attend live classes, visit the library for research, and read all the required materials in order to succeed, huge number of Millennials have found more efficient ways of learning. Between Wikipedia, Kahn Academy, recorded lectures, mobile study apps and Google searching through books (why read and browse for data or quotes?), Millennials have learned that they will succeed by doing things their way. Thus, they’re deeply drawn to work that promises self-direction, work-life balance, fulfillment and other benefits and perks that come across as entitled to older generations."

Get over their bad spelling

In a recent article in The Thought Board, a corporate CEO noted that across the board, millennials tend to be weak when it comes to grammar, penmanship and even writing a business letter or proposal. Because they have been limited to communicating their ideas in 140 characters or less, there tends to be an inability to express ideas in great detail and they tend to shy away from face to face conversations that may require confrontation.

Again, why not choose to view this downside as an upside? Delivering an idea in a concise manner is a sought-after skill, so give it the right amount of value in the workplace. As for the spelling and grammar mistakes, keep in mind that a spellchecking robot can perform that task. What a robot can't do is deliver an honest analysis in a pithy manner--you need a Millennial for that!

View entitlement as initiative

Another observation about millennials is that they seem entitled. While other generations have patiently waited their turn to climb the corporate ladder, Millennials don’t seem to have that same patience and don’t feel they need to wait around at all. They are eager for responsibility, and having grown up in the world of start-ups and explosive technical know-how, they’ve seen the relative ease with which today’s entrepreneurs have had growing an idea into a multi-million-dollar business. They believe “if they can do it, so can I.” They’re not a “pay-your-dues” generation and those who manage Millennials say they’re unafraid of responsibility and when it’s entrusted to them, they take the ball and run.

Again, instead of viewing the lack of patience with advancement as an obstacle, I'd encourage you to see the shoot-for-the-stars approach as a valuable commodity. In short, you want employees that see the big picture and want to be a part of it. The U.S. Chairman of PwC, Bob Moritz, did a study on Millennials within the organization and offered advice on leveraging that desire for effecting organizational change:

"... we’ve implemented programs to engage all our people, so they know what the firm is doing and why, and so they can have a voice in where it’s going. For example, we’ve asked them for ideas on how to invest in human capital and what the firm’s next $100 million idea should be. Some of their suggestions were pretty compelling, but what was even more important to us was that 70% of the organization took part in the ideation process."

Show your true colors

Finally, while there are some in this age group who tend to be very motivated by money, others are not and find great satisfaction in finding a career that offers a greater sense of purpose. They have little patience for organizations whose values don't align with their own, and they will leave an organization if there is the perception of a disconnect between words and actions. Says Moritz:

"At PwC we see greater retention and higher performance when people are engaged in corporate responsibility programs. For example, those who participated in more than one CR activity had an average tenure of 7.4 years, while those who participated in none stayed with the organization an average of 6.3 years... Millennials are quick to react negatively to any perceived disconnect between the firm’s words and its actions. If they don’t believe us, they leave."

Make sure you live your mission statement. Ask Millennials if any of the organization's activities don't seem to align with that mission statement. Offer opportunities for participation in corporate responsibility programs--that volunteer day at Habitat for Humanity may keep that Millennial with your organization for months or years longer than anticipated!

Call center glossary: What is AHT?

2016-03-10T17:18:00Z

Part of our ongoing call center technology glossary series: what is AHT?

In the call center world, we love our three-letter acronyms. From ASA to NPS to AHT, most of our metrics can be neatly condensed into three letters. Today, let's talk the first and most controversial call center metric: Average Handle Time.

Average Handle Time is a call center quality metric that indicates the average amount of time that one customer transaction takes. AHT is typically measured from the customer’s initial outreach to the call center and can include hold time, talk time and any other task related to the call. AHT is a primary factor used when determining if a call center is sufficiently staffed or not. The goal of every efficient call center is to minimize handle time. The challenge, however, is to reduce handle time without degrading the quality of the customer experience. After all, no one wants to feel rushed on a call, and if the customer has to call back a second time, all that neat efficiency would be lost. (Additionally, your First Call Resolution or FCR score would decrease, indicating a lack of efficiency.)

How to lower Average Handle Time

We found this nifty infographic that shows how to reduce AHT when training agents on call handling.

Roadblocks to lowering Average Handle Time

That first infographic makes it sound easy to reduce the time spent on calls, doesn't it? However, many call centers are challenged to reduce the time spent on each call. Following a survey, they gave these common reasons for those challenges:

Interestingly, the number one roadblock to reducing AHT was a technological one: the existing systems are either slow or incompatible with some of the other systems used to service the call. So here is a question: is your Customer Relationship Management software, your Interactive Voice Response or the Computer-Telephony Integration between the call and the CRM blocking your ability to lower handle time?

If so, the good news is that there is an easy technological fix. While system updates and software switching tends to put the IT team in a tizzy, a transition to a newer, more agile system doesn't have to result in headaches and outages. Take one of Spoken's Smart IVR customers, Corporate Telecom Solutions, for example, who was amazed when they transitioned to our system without a single rollback nor a single customer complaint!

Skeptical? Download the case study and read for yourself!

How does the presidential election cycle impact your business?

2016-03-03T14:30:00Z

What effect does the election cycle have on your business?

In this year, 2016, the United States will elect a new president to lead and govern our nation for the next four years. We’re not here to tell you how to vote (or how we plan to vote for that matter) but we do think it’s interesting to watch the political process unfold. At this writing, it’s anyone’s guess as to who will win this year’s election.

However, in this election year, there are some questions we have about the election in general and its impact on business. For example, are people worried and therefore holding off on certain business decisions or are people more hopeful about the future and therefore more willing to take a risk? Well, perhaps these questions could best be answered by taking a closer look at one particular area of our nation’s economy and how IT responds during the election.

How the election cycle affects the stock market

A recent article published by Merrill Lynch, takes a look at the election process and its effect on the stock market. Since the stock market is a major force in the US economy, it can have more of an effect on businesses than almost anything else. During an election year, what happens in the stock market can have a “trickle-down” effect on business. For example, the more volatile or uncertain the election process is, the more bumpy things can become in the stock market. The stock market tends to like certainty, and when things look uncertain in the election process, this uncertainty can impact the stock market. If an incumbent is up for re-election, less risk is perceived, and the stock market responds accordingly. And historically, an incumbent will tend to obsess over the economy more during a re-election cycle, so it's likely that more market-friendly policies will be promoted to boost the incumbent's chances of re-election.

How the election cycle affects business

We would never write a blog post about a subject as controversial as politics without including the WIIFM (What's In It For Me?) angle. The question is: how does the election cycle impact the small- to medium-sized businesses during an election year? According to an August 2015 article in Economics Help, falling market share prices can impact business investment across the board. Businesses who are seeking to expand and scale can usually raise capital by offering more shares at a lower rate, which becomes a low cost way to borrow money. However, if share prices are plummeting significantly, this can become difficult.

Confidence is another issue that comes into play with the stock market. If tthe stock market is volatile, consumer and business confidence might be reduced, especially if other factors (such as housing prices) are falling as well.

So, does the presidential election impact business as usual in the call center? Perhaps not directly, but it’s like a domino effect: an unpredictable election cycle tends to make the stock market shaky because the market thrives on certainty. The uncertainty in the stock market can then impact whether or not a business will expand or be cautious until things stabilize once the election has been decided.

What do you think? Have you noticed a change in your business since things have started heating up with the upcoming election? Share your experience in the comments.

Afraid of the cloud transition? These three steps can help

2016-03-01T16:26:47Z

Three steps for a smooth call center transition to the cloud

Today, many contact centers employ a remote workforce, as virtual desktops and cloud-based infrastructure make working from home just as efficient as toiling away at the office. In fact, research from IDC indicates that the U.S. mobile worker population will grow at a steady rate over the next five years, increasing from 96.2 million in 2015 to 105.4 million in 2020. As such, contact centers that haven’t yet gotten on board with this workforce upgrade might be feeling pressured to migrate to the cloud and enable a more flexible workforce.

Many contact center leaders, however, worry about implementing remote work-enabling technologies due to concerns regarding system connectivity, reliability and security. What’s more, managers and IT staff might fret about maintaining a cost-efficient facility and shudder at the thought of a complex, nightmarish migration to the cloud

Step #1: One step at a time

So, if you’re a contact center manager who wants to keep pace with your competitors but you’re just not ready to migrate to an entirely cloud-based infrastructure, try investigating solutions that allow you to make the transition at your own pace.

For instance, look for cloud-based contact center vendors that allow you to build your way up to the cloud, and only if you want to go all the way. That is, partner with a vendor that enables you to test a virtual work environment with the number of agents you choose, rather than mandating the size of the test group.

Dip a toe into the remote workforce pool by starting out slow. For example, get your team used to the idea of working from home by rewarding your top performing agents with a trial run of the virtual desktop technology. If the experiment is deemed successful, then slowly begin transitioning other worthy candidates to the virtual environment at a pace that feels comfortable to you.

Step #2: Consider a hybrid cloud model

Once you become more at ease with the transition, you might begin to realize the advantages of employing a hybrid workforce—that is, using both on-site and remote staff. For instance, in the event of inclement weather, more employees can stay at home, rather than hazard their own safety on dangerous roadways.

What’s more, you’ll come to realize that slowly transitioning to a cloud-based environment that takes advantage of virtual desktops for remote workers is simpler than you initially imagined. Employees gain access to a full range of outbound and inbound call center capabilities straight from their desktops or laptops. All they need to get started is a phone, an Internet connection and a Web browser. It’s truly that easy! And with a solution that is PCI-compliant and uniquely encrypted, you’ll never lose sleep worrying about a security breach caused by moving data to and from your on-premises location.

Step #3: Ramp up

As you and your staff become more comfortable with a cloud contact center, gradually increase the volume on the cloud platform and decrease the volume on your on-premise platform. Determine the pace at which you want this to happen to allow time to shift IT focus to core projects, train remote and in-house staff and prepare the accounting team for cost savings.

Why? Business continuity

At this point, the advantages of a cloud solution are all but given: scalability, business agiligy and cost efficiency. What isn't given is the ease of the transition to a new platform of any kind. It's imperative to select the right vendor to meet your needs and who will work with your schedule. A vendor that allows you to gradually transition to the cloud ensures that you’ll maintain full business continuity throughout the migration process so that no outages nor rollbacks occur. Conversely, a vendor that only allows you a switch from legacy to cloud cold turkey will likely also require network downtime—a costly implementation strategy.

Most of our customers prefer this strategy, which allows time to both adapt to the new system and to tweak any elements that could stand improvement. What about you? How did your cloud transition go?

To find out more about Spoken's integration and connectivity options, click here.

Becoming more productive at work: It’s easier than you think

2016-02-23T14:00:00Z

Have you ever been frustrated that you can't seem to accomplish enough in a day? You get bogged down in unimportant tasks, while others seem to be able to move mountains with very little effort.

It turns out that some of the world's most productive people share a few common traits and daily habits, which we pilfered and tested for you:

They are in the habit of taking the time to set the agenda for their day. You would think that the first thing they do is to go through and answer emails and return phone calls, but we consistently found that was NOT the case. In fact, the worst thing you can do first thing in the morning is to check email. Instead, we found that the most productive people tend to take the first half hour or so of their day and determine what their priorities are for the day ahead. Once they’ve taken the time to do this (followed by #2 below), then they go through their emails and phone calls. Emails and phone calls are arranged according to priority and either answered or delegated accordingly. By setting their own agenda first, productive people guard themselves against a day that is spent reacting to other people’s priorities and instead move through their own to-do list and accomplish their priorities. I had difficult with this, but I tried it for a week: I spent the first half-hour of my day setting my priorities. Then I did my most important task, sometimes two. By the end of the week, I wasn't checking my email until noon! And it turns out that I was far more productive. Knowing what you need to work on when you start your day beats checking email, hands down.
They are in the habit of getting the more difficult tasks done first. Or, in the words of Mark Twain, they “eat a frog.” Mark Twain once remarked that if you eat a live frog first thing in the morning, nothing you do the rest of the day will be as bad in comparison. As unpleasat as that may sound, the idea of getting the most hated or daunting tasks done first is a key to productivity. I have to admit that I don't like this idea. But this month, I've tried the following technique: make a list of all your tasks for the day. Then rate each one according to impact and effort, each on a scale of 1-10. Then you select the highest impact, highest difficulty tasks first. In other words--I've been eating a frog first thing every day for the last two weeks. But you know what? My productivity has skyrocketed! Eating a frog before answering email is amazingly efficient (and that is a sentence I never thought I'd write!). Human nature likes to put off the tasks we dislike, but productive humans habitually do the opposite.
They tend to NOT be multitaskers. We’re all familiar with the term “multitasking” because we hear it so often and it does seem to be a highly esteemed skill in today’s world. However, the ability to multitask is really not all that it’s cracked up to be. In fact, studies have shown that multitasking actually lowers your IQ, lowers your work quality and efficiency and is a poor substitute for taking the time to prioritize your day. In fact, it can take longer to accomplish any task when trying to do more than one thing at a time, so then the quality of every task suffers. Stay focused on one task at a time moving onto the next once that’s been completed. Highly productive people tend to be highly focused people.
They tend to take notes. Yes, highly productive people have a habit of writing things down. Have you noticed how much time you can waste by trying to remember details? Or worse, you may have messed up a project because you couldn’t remember everything that needed to be done. Taking the time to write things down, either in a notebook or on an app, keeps you from having to commit everything to memory (which is impossible) and can save you a lot of time and headache in the long run. Get in the habit of writing things down and keeping detailed notes; it will make your life and your work much more productive.
They don’t waste time on the non-essentials. To be a bit more exact, highly productive people spend the majority of their time on the tasks that will have the most impact. This goes back to the Pareto principle that says 20% of effort generates 80% of the results. Here’s a good example, when Microsoft took the time to fix 20% of its software problem, they saw the incidence of crashes and errors drop by 80%. Identify what, in your day takes up much of your time but eats away at your productivity. Once you figure this out, you can better eliminate those things and focus on what will make you more productive.

When you think about it, these are really fairly simple things that really just require a change in habit. If you’d like to see yourself become more productive, take one of these tips and spend three weeks purposefully implementing it. Once you’ve established this new habit, move on to the next tip. You’ll find, by the end of the year, you’ve developed new habits that will make you highly productive during the course of your work day.

Three ways your IVR can cut costs (while delighting customers)

2016-02-18T15:00:00Z

Three ways IVR automation can cut call center costs while delighting customers

While customers love to hate bad IVR design, organizations love effective Interactive Voice Response (IVR) automation for retaining customers in self-service and reducing agent time and energy. And a well-designed IVR will do just that: keep customers happy while cutting costs.

So how does an organization create an IVR that will leave a customer pleasantly surprised at the ease of doing business while leaving the call center manager happy at the cost savings of doing business? There are two key functions of the IVR that can be technologically addressed to accomplish those goals: knowing who the customer is and what she is trying to do, also known as caller identification and caller intent.

1. Identifying the caller

The first key to an effective customer experience is identifying the caller. This is typically achieved by taking information the caller says or inputs into the IVR and using it to match that caller to an entry in the organization's Customer Relationship Management (CRM) database, with the ultimate goal of providing a screen pop filled with caller data to the agent.

The challenge is that every business has a different way of positively identifying the caller, a system we refer to as "matching." Elements such as the ANI (the number the customer is dialing from), caller name, email address or member number are common identifiers for positively identifying a customer in the organization's CRM system.

ANI lookup While it's easy to automatically look up the ANI, match rates for ANI-only lookups tend to be quite low for a number of reasons. The caller could be calling from a different phone, such as a VoIP phone or an office phone that doesn't happen to be the phone number listed in her customer record. So a second piece of information is typically required to positively match the caller with her record in the CRM database. But each additional piece of information has its difficulties in terms of IVR collection.
Name First and last names can be difficult to hear and spell correctly via most speech recognition systems, leading to repeated questions, caller frustration and opt-outs
Email address Email addresses are notoriously difficult to accurately collect via speech recognition systems, once again leading to repeated questions, caller frustration and opt-outs
Member ID Numeric member numbers are ideal for IVR data collection. However, most customers do not have their number memorized, so they tend to skip this step or opt out.

Addressing name and email address matching How can the challenges of name and email address matching be addressed? One way is through technological innovation. The Spoken Smart IVR adds a human in the background to make pinpointed corrections to traditionally difficult-to-understand caller utterances (such as name and email address). Through a patented software interface, corrections can be made on up to 10 simultaneous calls to caller utterances where needed. The human sits at a dashboard like the one below and only listens briefly when a tab flags red or yellow:

The result is a dramatic increase in the caller identification match rate, which is the cornerstone of a personalized caller experience and accurate call routing. And here's the proof for one customer:

Average Handle Time was reduced by 12%, since the IVR was doing the heavy lifting of caller identification
Self-service rates increased to 73%

2. Identifying the reason for call

The second half of the formula for an easy and elegant IVR interaction is accurate call routing, but in order to route accurately, the IVR must correctly capture the reason for the call. Whether the caller is calling to question a bill, cancel service, order new service or get technical support, the key to an excellent customer experience is getting the right agent in the right queue the first time, without transfers.

Both caller identification and reason for call figure into routing accuracy. The better the caller identification match rates, the higher the likelihood that the call will be routed to the right agent accurately, the first time.

Let's look at an example. A customer call in to an organization and asks for technical support. However, from a combination of the ANI match and the email address, the CRM record indicates that the caller isn't entitled to technical support over the phone. So instead of routing the caller to the technical support queue, forcing the agent to do a manual look up and having to deliver the unpleasant news that the caller isn't entitled to live technical support, a better solution would be to route the customer to either a Frequently-Asked Questions (FAQ) self-service queue to deal with a common question or to a sales queue so he can purchase the support he needs.

And voilà! Misrouted calls decrease dramatically. In the case of Neat:

Misrouted calls were decreased by 30%

3. Analyzing the numbers

The third and final part of the IVR cost-cutting equation is to analzye the customer experience to verify that the cost-cutting measures aren't degrading the quality of that experience. For many of our customers, retaining callers in IVR self-service is a goal, since that automation is far less costly than live agent time. However, if the caller gets frustrated or leaves the brand, the cost of acquiring a new customer would override the cost savings of the IVR automation.

For that reason, it's important to do a monthly IVR review to track all the relevant information, including:

Percentage of positively identified callers
Distribution of reasons for call
Percentage of accurate caller intent
Percentage of satisfied callers retained in self-service
Percentage of opt-outs
Percentage of misroutes
Call length
Overall customer satisfactions scores

It may sound surprising, but many callers are more satisfied when they can easily accomplish a simple task, such as checking an account balance or a flight status, within the automated self-service system. However, it's the numbers that will speak to the value of the cost-cutting: if the IVR is accurately capturing caller identification and reason for call while customer satisfaction scores improve, there is little danger of losing a customer due to bad IVR design.

Three things a smart IVR can do that Siri can't

2016-02-16T14:00:00Z

Three things a good IVR can do that Siri can't

For those of us who have iPhones, and even those of us who don’t, Apple’s Siri is a familiar automated virtual assistant. It provides driving directions and conducts Internet searches for us while we’re on the road, so we don’t have to take our hands off the wheel to use our smartphones for such vital information as, for instance, the score of the Seahawks game. Siri’s genius capabilities rely on speech recognition technology, which enables her to understand our language and provide an appropriate, human-like response.

Try asking Siri what zero divided by zero is, fo example. A little humor goes a long way in terms of smartphone user experience!

Siri’s abilities are advantageous for smartphone users; however, they are creating unrealistic expectations for customer service centers around the world. That is, the interactive voice response (IVR) technology employed by many call centers just doesn’t seem to provide the instantly fun user experience that Siri can, thereby displeasing and even angering today’s consumers.

In reality, Siri’s speech-recognition technology only seems more reliable than that of many contact centers because it is programmed to understand questions relating to Apple apps or products and, when she doesn’t know the answer, she brings up list results curated from Google.

How a smart IVR beats Siri

But never fear: an intelligent, well-designed IVR can beat Siri in terms of customer experience, hands-down. Here's what a thoughtful, analytics-driven Spoken Smart IVR can do:

Increase ROI A truly intelligent IVR can correctly identify the caller based on a combination of the number the caller is dialing from and information that the caller gives to the IVR, accomplished through a dip into the organization's Customer Relationship Management (CRM) database. Secondarily, the smart IVR should be able to determine the reason for the call, even if the caller mumbles, says "um" or isn't quite sure how to word the request. Higher caller identification and caller intent rates mean increased routing accuracy, which leads to reduced Average Handle Times and overall cost savings. For example, one customer reported a budget savings of 16 percent; the Neat Company was able to save the equivalent of seven full-time agents with a smart IVR system.
Heighten security Privacy is a major concern for consumers who are prompted to share sensitive, personal data such as credit card or social security numbers with an automated voice response system. Using a secure IVR system that is PCI-compliant not only protects the caller but the organization handling the information as well.
Improve customer experience Smart IVR technology that leverages human Silent Guides to increase the accuracy and flow of each and every call means that customers don't have to repeat their responses. In turn, this reduces opt-out rates and increases customer satisfaction scores. That is, when humans and robots are combined, contact centers can reduce the amount of errors, hence consumer frustrations, produced by the IVR system.

Can Siri do all of that? We asked, and Siri modestly joshed us back.

Read more about how you can maintain a competitive edge in the contact center space by reading our free essay, “Modern Call Center Best Practices in the Age of Siri.”

Customer retention 101: five tips for customer service

2016-02-11T14:30:00Z

How to keep your customers from running for the hills

Customer retention is a bit like the red headed stepchild in the customer service space. Everyone agrees that it's important, but pulling resources to support customer retention and loyalty programs can be a challenge. But what could be more important than making sure that your customers stay with you rather than go to one of your competitors? Sounds simple enough, after all, it’s easier to keep current customers than it is to find new ones. But customer retention can be tougher than you think. Today’s market is highly competitive and customer’s expectations are exceedingly high in every industry. Let’s face it, customers have numerous options across the board from cell-phone carriers, to retailers, to auto-body/repair shops, and a single bad experience with your customer service can send them running for the hills (and telling all their friends about it).

Tips for building customer retention

So, how does a company differentiate itself from the myriad of others that are all vying for the customer’s loyalty? Well, here at Spoken, we have found the following tips have served us well and enabled us to enjoy a high rate of customer retention.

Know your value While there are less expensive and more established call center cloud providers out there, no one is more experienced with the technical cloud transition process than Spoken. So we leverage the experise of our management team to act more as consultants rather than salespeople. And we get our customers on board, too--they help us share the story of how we stood by every step of the transition to the cloud. If your brand isn't the least expensive or the fastest, what special value do you provide? Why do your customers choose you over the competition? Find that value and trumpet it to the hills!
Provide valuable and relevant content; give first People like to do business with people they know, like and trust. Trust is the foundation of any relationship, and that principle applies to business relationships as well. When we launched in 2005, our brand was unknown, and we didn't have buckets of cash to spend on marketing. So we looked at what we did have: a few customers who trusted us with their business, and a management team with a wealth of experience in the call center space. So we started an outreach program, writing weekly blog posts to share our expertise for free and providing valuable content that could make a difference in our potential clients' businesses. We focused on the customer service industry, covering topics from cloud infrastructure to employee relations to avoiding sickness in the workplace. In addition to our regular blog posts, we also send out a monthly e-mail newsletter with the latest product updates, live demos and time-saving technology to our clients. This is just one more way that we can stay connected and engaged with our clients on a regular basis and continue to build on the trust we’ve established with them.
Make it about them, not you Social media has taken the world by storm. There are a number of social platforms available that will allow your organization to stay engaged with your customers in a non-sales environment. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and LinkedIn are among the top social media sites, with more being added all the time. Many brands make the mistake of treating social media as a megaphone to shout their brand messaging at others. While it is important to include your product announcements, you get the most bang for your social media buck by being social. ReTweet your client's award announcement; comment on their daughter's win at the robotics competition; tag them in a virtual reality news article you think they'll like. In short, engage on social media by making it about the customer, not about you.
Stay ahead of the game This relates back to the expertise mentioned above, but we have found that when we can help a client look down the road a bit and anticipate changes before they arise, we, again, make ourselves indispensable to them. Anticipating your customer’s needs is something that can be adopted and applied by all industries, not just the customer service industry. When we make ourselves indispensable to our clients, they are not likely to be tempted by our competition.
Provide a great product Perhaps we should have listed this one first, but when it comes to retaining customers, product quality is only a part of the picture. Still, make sure your marketing and customer loyalty efforts aren't empty hype: start with a great product, solicit customer feedback for needed improvements and tell customers when you've take their advice to make the product better.

What do you think are they keys to customer retention? What programs have you implemented that worked well?

The fine art of under-promising and over-delivering

2016-02-09T14:00:00Z

Do you under-promise and over-deliver?

In the world of customer service, it's fair to say that the bar is set quite low. Most people just want to have their issue resolved and be on their merry way. And in the office, when it comes to product offerings and deadlines, we've been musing over whether it would be better to set a high bar and perhaps miss it by a day or two or to under-promise and deliver a pleasant surprise when the product is ready earlier than anticipated. You know, like when the hostess tells you a table will be ready in 20 minutes but then seats you in ten minutes. What's the harm?

Aim high or aim low?

On the surface, under-promising and over-delivering sounds good because customer service always seeks to exceed expectations. Falling short of expectations is a great way to lose customers and eventually work your way out of business. We all know that people will be more than happy to express their dissatisfaction when you let them down. So, falling short of expectations or “under-delivering” is certainly something to avoid.

On the other hand, is it a good idea to under-promise? Hmm, now there’s some food for thought. Under-promising can be a little dangerous in that it implies that we are setting the bar extremely low. Low expectations will do us no favors in business, or in life for that matter. Constantly keeping the expectations low in order to cover yourself in the event of a mistake is simply not good business. You will never stand out from your competition by maintaining low expectations. So, how do you balance the equation of delivering the goods while setting a high standard?

Here’s a great example in a recent article by Thomas Phelps in about careers.

“Imagine that you are a Financial Adviser, who, after conducting days, weeks or months of research, have found a stock that is primed to deliver tremendous gains. You call several of your clients whom you feel will be able to and interested in investing in this stock. While there are no guarantees in the stock market, all evidence points to nothing but growth for this company, so your optimism is high.

If you tell your clients that the stock should deliver 15 to 20 points of return over the next few months but are more comfortable in assuming a 10 to 12 point return, you have officially over-promised. You now need the stock to hit at least 15 points in order to deliver on your promise.

If, however, you suggested that the stock could produce an 8 to 10 point return, you have created a much safer assurance. Now if the stock performs at the expected 15 to 20 points of return, your under-promise will be met with elation as the stock over-delivered.”

First, notice in this example that the Financial Advisor spent much time doing his research before he made any recommendations. In a sales situation, knowing as much as possible before diving in with unfounded promises is a key way to avoid disappointing the client. At the same time, this example illustrates how the bar was not set too low, but perhaps more reasonably or conservatively, allowing the FA to under-promise on expectations and over-deliver on results.

Under-promising in project management

Here’s another example: Say you’re a project manager and you have promised the client that the project will be done by Friday. You know that you and your team are capable of getting the project completed and delivered by Wednesday, and this deadline becomes your internal goal (not expressed to the client). Provided no unforeseen issues arise, the project is completed and delivered by Wednesday; you have an extremely happy client whose expectations have been exceeded. If, however, there are issues, you’ve built yourself and your staff a buffer of two extra days to resolve those and deliver the project to the client on Friday, as promised. In this scenario, your timeline given to the client is a realistic one that sets your team up for success rather than failure. Your early delivery of Wednesday rather than Friday, exceeds your client’s expectations and makes you and your team look stellar! Either way, you have a happy client. You under-promised with a reasonable time-line and over-delivered with an early delivery.

So, do you prefer to aim high or to under-promise? What do you think? Comment and let us know your thoughts!

The quality smackdown: live call monitoring or agent evaluations?

2016-02-02T16:00:00Z

Which is more valuable for call center quality: live call monitoring or agent evaluations?

I don't know about you, but I'm pretty passionate about customer service quality. In fact, I recently wrote about quality monitoring best practices for 2016. For those of us contact center geeks, we know that quality assurance is an ongoing process. And we have two basic tools in our toolbox to tackle it:

Call monitoring Real-time call monitoring has the advantage of enabling the saving of troubled calls in real time, but it's unrealistic to attempt to monitor anything other than a tiny percentage of live calls.
Agent evaluations Agent evaluations are the bread-and-butter of performance management and can be quite precise in helping to pinpoint agent coaching needs. However, agent evaluations are a long-term solution and can't help improve quality right this second.

While both tools point toward coaching to improve agent performance and therefor the overall customer experience, which one is best?

The magic of "and": blending real-time monitoring with post-call agent evaluations

Why not both? We've found that a blended approach that incorporates both live call monitoring and agent evaluations brings the most complete view of agent performance. Our customers have seen the following improvements by utilizing both real-time and post-call quality measures:

Ensure a consistent level of customer service when calls are monitored in real-time, that is, at the time they are happening, managers are alerted to any issues that may arise between the customer and the agent. This allows the manager to step in, if necessary, and bring a quick resolution to a situation that had the potential to get out of hand. If the call can be saved while in progress, the chances of maintaining that customer improve dramatically. Current statistics show that 89% of customers will leave your brand for your competitor if they experience poor customer service. Preserving your customer base is a pretty important reason to implement call monitoring.
Pinpoint which agents need more training Everyone brings strengths and weaknesses to the table regardless of profession. The same holds true in the contact center. Some agents are going to do great at maintaining their composure when the call gets stressful, while others may have more difficulty doing so. Agent evaluations provide objective and consistent scoring on every contact and provides efficient feedback on each agents’ performance enabling managers to pinpoint those agents who would benefit from more one-to-one coaching.
Ensure compliance Agents have critical compliance requirements they must adhere to in every interaction and with litigation on the rise due to non-compliance, both call monitoring and agent evaluations will ensure that agents are in compliance with these standards.

The Spoken Observer real-time call monitoring tools allows supervisors to listen in on the live call and whisper to the agent or "barge in" when needed. And HyperQuality's ClearMetrix reporting software allows managers to review recorded calls and provide immediate and actionable feedback to their call center agents. We even offer call recording for a full-service solution in the cloud.

What is your quality mix?

Quality is something that the best organizations live and breathe every day rather than a one-time project. And because most supervisors spend a huge amount of time and energy coaching their agents, it makes sense to implement the right mix of quality tools to help to pinpoint the areas in which the worst (or best!) -performing agents need coaching. Think of call monitoring and agent evaluations as a self-driving car: you tell them where you want to go, and they'll help get you there.

Want to find out more about HyperQuality's ClearMetrix online quality tool? Check out our three-minute demo video by clicking below:

Yes, the cloud can reduce your carbon footprint

2016-01-28T14:00:00Z

Since we're based in Seattle, one of America's most eco-friendly cities, we talk quite frequently in the Spoken offices about going green.

And going green isn’t just about what you do as an individual, like recycling plastic bottles and cardboard boxes and turning off the heat when you’re not at home. There are larger, even more impactful ways that you, and your entire organization can contribute to a cleaner, more sustainable earth. In fact, there is a movement towards greening up the contact center!

The call center's carbon footprint challenge

Contact centers face the same carbon footprint challenge as any other on-site enterprise: electricity consumption, waste and carbon emissions from hundreds of staff driving to the office. To combat that waste, an obvious solution is to implement a remote agent workforce using cloud-based infrastructure. In this 2010 article, Greg Levin quotes Michael DeSalles, strategic analyst for Frost & Sullivan’s Information & Communication Technologies division: “…IT departments world-wide are embracing hosted, thin-client contact center technology to leverage the distributed “anytime, anywhere” agent model and reap the environmental benefits.”

Greening the contact center: enable remote agents

Cloud-based contact center technology can reduce your company’s electricity costs, your staff's oil and gas consumption and your bottom line, all while taking advantage of a remote workforce for recruiting.

Puts an end to long commutes Many of your employees are stuck in traffic five days a week driving to and from your office location, contributing to air pollution and wasting valuable logged-in time. By enabling remote agents to work from home, you can not only cut out thousands of miles of commuting; you can also benefit directly with the ability to hire and retain the best agents, even as they move to new locations. Enabling your employees to work from home using virtual desktops and soft phones is not only greener; it can give you the edge you need to recruit the most qualified work force from any geographic location--and keep them, even if they move their family to a new location!

Reduces paper waste Instead of printing out paper manuals and forcing everyone to commute to a common location for training, embracing e-learning will keep your enterprise lean and green. Use online learning tools to train staff; online observation tools such as Spoken Observer to monitor new agents; and online chat to keep everyone motivated and dispensing down-to-the-minute peer-to-peer advice. Instead of flying supervisors around for training, use online reporting and performance management tools in combination with text and video chat to keep the lines of communication open. Plus, no security lines at the airport!

Turn it off when you're not using it Most cloud-based contact centers not only enable remote agents but also offer utility-based pricing: you pay only for what you use, rather than paying for a peak energy usage. Think about it: why should you pay for all the energy and connectivity required for 1,000 agents at 2:00 AM on a Tuesday, when only 10 agents are logged on? Use only what you need, and pay only for what you use. Think of it as turning out the lights to save energy when you go home for the night.

So, if you’ve been hesitant about the cost of transitioning your contact center to the cloud, then maybe you’ve been looking at it from the wrong perspective. Not only is the cloud more eco-friendly, but it can also help increase your overall cost efficiency.

To find out more about the benefits of enabling remote agents, download our free white paper, Contact Center Without Walls: Harnessing the Power of Remote Agents by clicking below:

Call center tech glossary: what is an ACD?

2016-01-26T16:39:48Z

Part of our ongoing call center technology glossary series: what is an ACD?

If you're new to the call center space, you're probably overwhelmed with the plethora of acronyms floating about: ACD, IVR, CRM, AHT, VoIP, SIP and more. So we'd like to welcome you to the debut post of our call center technology glossary series, where we define and demystify those three-letter bugaboos.

What is an ACD?

What exactly IS an ACD? The acronym stands for Automatic Call Distributor. The ACD is the hardware or software that routes an incoming call to the correct queue. The primary job of the ACD is call routing, which can be determined by a number of factors, including the dialed number, the number the caller dialed from (ANI) and the reason for call collected by the Interactive Voice Response (IVR) system.

Many ACDs support skills-based routing, which routes the call to the most qualified agent rather than the next available agent. For example, if a caller selects Sales from the IVR menu and is calling from a number that is not in the database (most likely a new customer), a skills-based-routing-enabled ACD might route the call to the sales queue rather than the first available agent in the general queue.

An ACD illustration

ACDs often work hand-in-hand with Interactive Voice Response (IVR) systems, which you probably recognize as the automated voice systems that often first pick up a customer call and ask a series of questions to guide the call's routing.

The infographic below is a simple illustration of how this software works. You, the customer, make a call to a particular business but instead of your call being answered by a live person immediately, you are asked to choose what your call is about and then you are routed to an agent in the right queue to get your question answered quickly.

On premise or cloud ACD

Traditionally, ACDs were purchased as hardware systems that were installed on the organization's physical location, a model known as "on premise," "premises-based" or sometimes "CPE." However, this on-premise model has some drawbacks:

It requires a huge capital expenditure.
It requires a professional services contract to maintain the physical hardware.
It's difficult and costly to switch to a newer, better ACD.
Most on-premise solutions are proprietary and can't easily be customized to fit the organization's changing needs.

In short, once an organization purchases and installs an on-premise ACD, they are stuck with it for a very long time. In contrast, many vendors are now offering cloud-based ACDs, which have the following advantages:

No capital expenditure; organizations subscribe to the service and pay only for actual usage.
Maintenance is typically included in the subscription contract.
It's relatively easy to change from one cloud vendor to another.
Some cloud ACD vendors take an open-source approach and let organizations write their own applications.

Spoken offers both an Avaya-based cloud ACD and the Spoken Cloud ACD. Click to find out more.

5 tips for avoiding the office flu this winter

2016-01-21T14:00:00Z

How to keep your call center humming (instead of coughing)

The winter months can often seem really long. If you're based in the Pacific Northwest, like me, the short, gloomy days take a real toll on your mood and on your health. And if you make it through the holidays without getting sick, the January blues will keep you from your overconfidence!

Once we get past the fall and early winter, it can seem like all we have to look forward to is a long, cold winter highlighted by peak flu season. But there are a lot of little things you can do do avoid getting sick this winter.

Top five tips for keeping ahead of the flu

Get a flu shot If you didn’t get a flu shot during the fall, it’s not too late! A flu shot is the number one thing you can do to protect yourself from getting the flu. Additionally, this year’s shot seems to be effectively protecting against the correct strain. So if you had any doubts, banish them and get your shot!
Hydrate, hydrate, hydrate. Avoid alcohol, which slows your metabolism and serves only to dehydrate your system. Pilots often point out that the biggest factor in travel-related illnesses is the extremely dry air on airplanes, which serves to dehydrate mucous membranes and reduce their effectiveness at warding off disease. The same can be true in the office. At the office, keep a 16- or 32-ounce bottle of water handy at all times, and be sure to drink the recommended 6-8 glasses of water a day.
Wash your hands Wash your hands multiple times per day to keep germs at bay. It's a simple task that goes a long way to protect you from cold and flu germs. If you don’t have access to soap and water all the time, then use an alcohol-based hand sanitizer. If you hate the dryness of frequent washing, keep a bottle of your favorite lotion on your desk, like I do. In fact, my office mates often pop by in the winter for a dose of moisturizer and a quick chat!
Avoid sick people This may be hard in the workplace when you’re forced to be around people who are coughing and hacking, but do your best to keep your distance and try not to shake hands. Mythbusters did a wonderful episode on how to avoid sharing one's cold/flu germs by touching elbows rather than shaking hands and coughing into your elbow rather than your hand or a tissue.
Keep your surroundings clean Doorknobs, phone receivers and other common objects are top transmitters for cold and flu germs. Keep those things clean by wiping them down frequently with a clean, sanitizing cloth. This is particularly important for those of us who are in the customer service industry where headsets are used on a daily basis. Typically, all agents have their own head-sets in order to minimize the spreading of germs, however, by not cleaning your own equipment daily, you continue to expose yourself to the germs on your head-set. Daily cleaning is essential, and cleaning several times a day can be helpful if you’ve got a cold.

Although these steps are helpful, sometimes, despite our best efforts, we can still get sick, so what’s the best course of action when you feel symptoms coming on? Talk to your doctor about the many anti-viral medicines and supplements that can help shorten a flu or cold and alleviate your symptoms.

In case of flu, stay home

If you are sick, STAY HOME! If you have the option of working from home, that’s great; do it. If not, take a sick day (or two) and get well before coming back to work. One of the best ways to NOT spread the flu or severe cold is to stay home with your sickness and get yourself well. It’s always better to take a couple of days off to heal rather than fight through it and encourage the germs to hang on for weeks.

Here’s to a happy and healthy winter!

Top 10 Call Center Trends to Track in 2016

2016-01-19T14:00:00Z

The top 10 trends to track in your call center in 2016

It’s hard to believe that it’s already 2016. Each year seems to go by faster than the year before, doesn't it? The only thing that seems to change more rapidly than the years are the rapid changes in technology. Technological changes impact every facet of life, from how we communicate with family to how we do business.

By the end of 2015, for example, it was estimated that 42% of the world’s population owns a smartphone. That is almost half, and chances are, by the end of this year, that percentage will be significantly higher. With society becoming more mobile, businesses are forced to keep up with this trend, and adjust their focus from prioritizing sales and marketing to prioritizing customer service. Customer service has become the means by which brands can differentiate themselves, and the quality of the customer experience you offer can have a huge impact on your brand.

10 trends to track in 2016 to make your customer service shine

Mobile Support Today’s customers use their mobile device for almost everything, so your brand should be optimized for the mobile demand. Phone, social, chat, e-mail and FAQ should be mobile-ready.
Self-service Customers actually like having the option of trying to solve their issue on their own. Provide a self-service option by offering a website, app and/or Interactive Voice Response (IVR) Frequently-Asked Questions service. One Spoken client added key FAQs to their IVR, resulting in 47% containment within self-service! (Download the case study!)
Call back from the Queue Waiting on hold is universally despised, and it erodes the quality of the customer experience more rapidly than a rude agent. Sixty percent (60%) of customers will abandon a call after waiting on hold for too long, but 61% would use a callback feature (also called "virtual hold") if it were available. If your call center does not offer this feature, consider adding it to your priority initiatives for 2016. Virtual hold is a great way to show that you respect your customers' time and value their overall experience with your company.
Personalization The majority of customers now say that personalization plays a role in their purchasing decisions--just look at all that Amazon does to anticipate customer needs. Computer Telephony Integration (CTI) is the tried-and-true method of adding personalization to your caller's experience. By connecting the information submitted in the IVR through the voice channel, dipping into your Customer Relationship Management (CRM) database and popping the customer information onto the agent's screen, your agent can address the customer by name and easily understand their reason for the call. In fact, in our 2015 Call Center Report, 38% of respondents said their biggest frustration points with call center customer service was having to repeat to the agent information already given to the IVR. Additionally, implementing CTI can reduce AHT and increase customer retention, thereby saving the cost of acquiring a new customer.
24/7 Support We live in a 24/7 world now, and if you’re customer service center is not available 24/7, well... let’s just say you’ll make it easy for your customers to switch brand preferences. Not only do today's customers expect round-the-clock support, but more than half say 24/7 support can make them love a brand.
Predictive Support A step beyond personalization, predictive support can automatically predict the reason for a customer's call. As an example, Spoken implemented an IVR for a customer that would automatically look up the number the caller called from, ping the database, note the last interaction, predict the reason for call and change the IVR path accordingly. Here's what it looked like: Bill calls in. The IVR captures his phone number, finds it in the database, sees that he recently ordered a prescription that was shipped yesterday, verifies the caller and then asks if Bill is calling about his recent prescription order. Bill says "yes," and the IVR asks if he wants delivery information, usage information or if he has additional questions about his order. A personalized and predictive experience!
Engaging Content What kind of content do you provide via your promotional e-mails? How about your blog? Do you have great videos showing how to best use your product? Is your content engaging and relevant? Don’t wait until your customers reach out to you. Keep them engaged with valuable content such as new products and features, or the latest news and updates in your industry.
Automated Support Did you know that IVR accounts for almost one-third of the entire call experience? An efficient and simple IVR system can provide a seamless customer experience by quickly and efficiently routing the customer to the correct department so that their issue can be resolved quickly and easily. And remember the #2 trend of self-service? Self-service IVRs, when properly implemented, are a thing of beauty that can drive customer love.
Customer Journey Mapping Basically, journey mapping is understanding how your customer interacts with your brand over time. Knowing where the points of friction are and developing a company-wide plan that will improve your customer service overall.
Omnichannel Support Omnichannel support is a growing component in today’s customer service environment. The vast majority of customers, in fact a whopping 95%, will use more than one channel to contact customer support. Phone support is still the number one means, but other channels should not be ignored. Your team should be available on any channel your customer chooses to use, whether it’s phone, live chat, e-mail or reaching out through social media and these channels should integrate seamlessly with your helpdesk and CRM.

What trends are you seeing the call center space in 2016? Which key trends are you tracking? Sound off in the comments!

What is open source and why should you care?

2016-01-14T17:00:00Z

How does the open source software movement affect the call center?

Even if you're not a developer, you might have heard about the open source software development movement. Even as a non-technical gal, I've been fascinated by the success of the movement and its proponents. For those of you like me who aren't software developers, here's the Wikipedia definition: a broad-reaching movement of individuals who support the use of open-source licenses for some or all software. Open source software is made available for anybody to use or modify, as its source code is made available. Open source software promotes learning and understanding through the dissemination of understanding.

A good way to look at this aspect of software development is to consider two access points: the front end and the back end. The front end refers to the interface presented to the end user--what you see when you open up Microsoft Word or Mozilla Firefox. The back end refers to the data access layer used to code the software, something the end user typically never sees.

The proprietary philosophy

With traditional or "proprietary" software, only the software vendor owns the back end and has unique and legal access to it. The software is covered by copyright, and proprietary software vendors usually regard source code as a trade secret. The idea is that the vendor develops the software, controls its development and charges for its use. Microsoft Office is an excellent example: Microsoft created and owns all the back end code that makes Office work, and outside developers are generally not allowed to dig into the back end code and customize it to create additional functionality. Users have the right to access the software's functions through the front end (think creating a Word document or an Excel spreadsheet), but not to access the back end to change the software's functionality.

The benefits of the proprietary approach include tight control over look and feel; the vendors issue regular bug fixes for their paying customers; and it's often considered the industry standard. The drawbacks include lack of ability for users to fix software bugs on their own or customize it to their own needs. Additionally, most proprietary software requires a fee for use and typically limits the number of users that can access it through licensing.

The open source philosophy

On the other hand, open source software (OSS) creators provide users with access not only to the front end but to the back end as well. Generally, OSS developers provide the source code to the general public for use and/or modification from its original design. A community-based approach, open source development is generally more collaborative, where developers change, customize and improve upon the source code and share their changes within the community. For example, Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome and Open Office all take an OSS approach to their software, opening the back end to developers to create custom scripts to be shared with the community. The benefits of this approach include constant innovation, adaptability and the collective intelligence of the broad user community rather than a small group of developers. Additionally, OSS is usually free. The drawbacks include a lack of control over changes and an inelegance or inconsistency to the software.

This rather humble video provides a simple overview of explaining the proprietary and open source software approaches:

And this video goes into more detail on the licensing and copyright details of proprietary vs. OS software models.

Advantages and disadvantages of OSS

Advantages

Free It’s generally free. Free is always good, especially when free has the potential to save businesses billions of dollars. These days, for every piece of proprietary software that is on the market, there is an OSS version.
Innovation It’s continually evolving, which means it’s continually improving. Because there is a huge community devoted to improving the software, OSS often offers better quality and more security than proprietary models.
Freedom As a user, choosing OSS software means you are not locked into a particular vendor’s system.
Customization OSS allows you to adapt the software to your own business needs, something not available with proprietary systems.

Disadvantages

Quirky Because there is no requirement to create a commercial product that satisfies the needs of all users, OSS products can tend to reflect the developers' wishes rather than those of the end user.
Obtuse Due to that overcustomization, OSS can be less user-friendly than proprietary software that is user-tested before being presented to the public.
Support There can be less support when things do go wrong, and this can sometimes result in extra costs in paying for external support.
Vulnerability Although OSS means there are many people identifying and fixing bugs, it can still be vulnerable to malicious users.

Why you should care

More and more software vendors are seeing the value in leveraging the OSS community to improve upon their existing software products. According to Fortune, which recently reported on Facebook's backing several new open-source projects:

Facebook, like Yahoo, Google, Yelp and older-school companies like IBM, take growing pride in turning over key software code to the open source “community” of developers. Even Microsoft, long viewed as the enemy of open-source development, has focused on making its Azure cloud computing platform a hospitable place for open-source software, including different flavors of the Linux operating system.

Why would a proprietary software vendor support OSS projects? Two simple reasons:

Free advertising If the OSS community develops a popular plugin or patch, the appeal and market for the vendor's software grows.
Paid support Remember the #3 disadvantage above? Proprietary software vendors who build an OSS community around their software can then offer paid support that the community doesn't provide.

OS in the call center

If you're in charge of call center hardware and software, you might be wondering why this blog post even exists. It's true that OSS has been all but absent in the call center software space. While many vendors are eager to sell you their Call Center as a Service (CCaaS) cloud platforms, very few have built those platforms on anything other than a proprietary approach to software. The traditional pay-for-license model has been extremely slow to die.

However, we are seeing glimmers of openness. At Spoken, while our CCaaS platform is proprietary, we consciously made the choice to build on free or OSS systems whenever possible. And we are working on creating an Application Marketplace, where our clients can share their custom scripts with the Spoken community.

Have you applied OSS tools to your contact center? Share your experiences in the comments!

What is Six Sigma and why you should care

2016-01-12T16:00:00Z

If you have anything to do with quality, you've probably heard of the term Six Sigma and are aware that it is a method for dealing with organizational problems and quality. But Six Sigma actually has a very interesting history you might not be aware of.

What is Six Sigma

Six Sigma is a set of techniques and tools for process improvement. It differes from previous methods in that it is a highly disciplined, data-driven approach and methodology for eliminating defects. It has its origins in the manufacturing process (thus the drive toward six standard deviations between the mean and the nearest specification limit), but is applied in practice to many different processes from products to services. The value of Six Sigma lies in the ability to define on a quantitative level how any process is performing. By defining what a defect is and offering a statistical model for the frequency of defects, any process, from manufacturing to customer service, can be evaluated and improved.

Six Sigma was first introduced in 1986 by Bill Smith, an engineer with Motorola. Jack Welch, of GE brought it more into the mainstream when he made it central to his business strategy. Now, many of today’s top companies employ Six Sigma to quantitatively measure and improve their processes.

What is the key to Six Sigma

The DMAIC process (define, measure, analyze, improve, control), an inherent part of the Six Sigma system, is applied to existing processes that might be falling below specifications and seeks to make incremental improvement.

Define: define the problem This step is just what it says, the opportunity for management and staff to come together and discuss what isn’t working within their process or system of doing things.

Measure: map out the current process This step would likely consist of writing out step by step the current process allowing the group to see where the problem is creeping in.

Analyze: identify the cause of the problem Pretty self-explanatory, but a key step in the process. This step allows the group to pinpoint where the breakdown is occurring.

Improve: implement and verify the solution This part of the process is where the solution is determined and implemented.

Control: maintain the solution Make sure the new process is actually being implemented, pay close attention to how well it’s working and tweak the new process to make improvements along the way.

This is a very basic overview of the DMAIC model, but a great way to see how the process can work.

Why should you care: a case study

The benefit of the Six Sigma model is that it removes the element of guesswork from the quality process and replaces it with quantitative measurement. Let's take an example in the customer service space. We worked with one customer, a lifestyle and health care retailer with over three million customers.

Define

They had two challenges: resolution rate wasn't being consistently tracked, and their percentage of dissatisfied customers was as high as 11%.

Measure

And the next step is where many organizations fail: taking the time to painstakingly map out every element of the current customer journey, from first touch with the brand to the latest customer service experience. This step can involve a tremendous amount of time and resources, as the process is typically spread out over several departments. When HyperQuality performed this step, we first divided the factors into three categories: agent-related causes, process-related causes and other (caller hung up, for example).

Analyze

Next comes the analysis to discover the weak links in the process that are the best targets for improvement. In this phase, we drilled down to discover what were the drivers of resolution in terms of both agent behaviors and process-related factors, and we determined four of each. The agent behaviors drivng the issue were:

Lack of ownership
Not maintaining pace with the customer
Lack of confidence
Frequent interruption by agent while customer explained the issue

The process elements driving the issue:

Return: Agent would say “As the order exceeded XX days, we cannot exchange / refund the product”
Warehouse: Agent would say “We are sorry that we cannot modify the order as the product is already processed  to warehouse”  
Third Party: Agent would say “We cannot access the account as the order is placed with OtherCompany.com”  
Refund: Agent would say “We cannot refund as the product is not received at company”

Improve

In light of this information, we recommended training agents to keep the customer informed on steps being taken for resolution, particularly on calls where the reason for call is either to request a refund or an order status/incomplete order. Whenever required, the supervisors should be readily accessible in order to keep the customer wait time as low as possible, thereby avoiding potential call disconnection and improving the overall customer experience. HyperQuality strongly recommended the tracking of dropped volume to study the causes (people or technology) of disconnection.

Control

We worked with the organization to close the identified gaps and monitored for six weeks. The consolidated list of recommendations was fed to cost benefit analysis to generate opportunities for the company that require immediate focus to improve overall resolution. These high bar opportunities cumulatively translated in to potential revenue gain of over $2 MM with improvement of 4% in overall contact resolution and 3.4% in customer experience.

What can Six Sigma do for you?

Much of what goes on in the contact center in terms of quality improvement is guesswork. We believe the Six Sigma model gives organizations the best chance of improvement and methodical, continued success. Want to see the full case study for the above client? Click below.

When you partner with HyperQuality, our ASQ-certified Six Sigma black belts will walk your contact center management team through each step and help you devise a plan for improvement.

Even if your call center measures every metric and does frequent reviews, it’s not uncommon for goals and strategies to get out of alignment over time. If this is the case in your contact center, call HyperQuality, and let us show you how Six Sigma can bring significant improvement to your organization.

Quality news: what will Process Analytics bring in 2016?

2016-01-07T15:00:00Z

As we approach the end of each calendar year, predictions have a way of taking center stage for everyone. Everything becomes a prediction from which celebrities will split, to what will be the biggest box-office hits and everything in between. The corporate world is the same; in fact, it’s really essential for any corporation, large or small, to be looking ahead and anticipating what trends are likely to impact their business.

The world of quality control is no different. Ours is an industry that monitors the quality of customer service interactions. One of the peculiarities of our business is the ever-changing technology that impacts almost everything we do, so for our industry, knowing what types of changes are on the horizon is essential. So, what is on the horizon for quality monitoring and more specifically, the process analytics piece of quality monitoring?

Process analytics, sometimes called "business process analytics," is the means by which call centers analyze how effective and efficient the processes of a customer service are. At HyperQuality, we supply our customers with a tailored range of scientifically validated high-performance solutions that save time and money and ultimately serve to increase efficiency.

Those goals most likely won't change. However, the latest predictions might shift the scope of how HyperQuality approaches quality process analytics.

Two trends: real-time predictive analytics and extreme collaboration

Process analytics First, what exactly are predictive analytics? Predictive analytics is really just fancy guesswork: it tells you what might happen in the future based on existing data. Basically, this allows companies to look at existing data sets and extrapolate patterns to predict future trends.

Extreme collaboration Extreme collaboration, sometimes abbreviated XC, is basically an environment where people can come together to work on a common goal. How will these two pieces come together and affect process analytics?

According to a recent article published by Hewlett Packard, both will rely more on Artificial Intelligence. Artificial Intelligence, or AI, has often been portrayed (thanks to sci-fi movies) as an autonomous robot that will ultimately take over the human race. Well, ok, maybe that’s a little extreme, but there has always been a sense that the more we rely on AI, the less we will need the human factor. However, according to this report, “the ability to analyze big data can deliver distributed machine intelligence that complements human ability ultimately making both humans and machines more effective in addressing a wide range of social and business needs.” Basically, we need the human factor in order to implement the data that the AI has provided.

And in To the Best of Our Knowledge’s recent radio program Automate It, David Krakauer, Director of the Wisconsin Institute for Discovery, professor of genetics at UW-Madison and external professor at the Santa Fe Institute, assures us that, even in cases of machine learning, robots will only take over the world if we program them to do so.

What results can we expect?

According to the Hewlett Packard article, there are several benefits big data analytics will deliver to businesses in 2016. The key effects for call center customer care are:

Choice in the multi-channel world: with the advent of numerous channels of communication such as mobile and social media, there is a great need in the call center, for technical support to be available to support those channels. If it is not, this impacts the customer experience in a negative way. Big data analytics can help organizations, including the call center, to become more “channel agnostic,” meaning they can analyze data quickly and accurately regardless of the channel being used, because Big Data analytics can support a frictionless cross-channel process.

Automated personalization: In 2016, we can expect to see machines do a better job of analyzing what we’ve called in the past, “squishy details” such as tone of voice, facial expressions and other forms of non-verbal behavior. Until now, those non-verbals have only been gathered by human intelligence; however, big data is now able to interpret what’s called “unstructured data.” Combine this with the vast quantities of structured data, and that provides a wealth of information the call center agent can use in serving their customers. In addition, big data analytics can also provide a smoother customer experience as it provides a history of every point of contact for the customer.

Of course, these are predictions, but if these predictions come true, we can expect many positive results in the contact center, including superior levels of customer service, revenue growth, cost reduction and risk avoidance.

Want more information on HyperQuality's predictive analytics services? Click here to contact us!

The top five ways the cloud model impacts revenue

2016-01-05T14:00:00Z

In recent years, the advent of the cloud has had a significant impact on the IT world. In fact, industry insiders believe that cloud computing has the potential to be one of the most significant forces of change to impact business over the next decade.

If you're still mulling over the benefits of the cloud, we've written about the top ten things all business owners should know about the cloud. And we recently posted our six cloud predictions for 2016.

But let's talk today specifically about the bottom line: revenue. According to a recent article in PWC, by 2017, cloud service providers are expected to generate about $235 billion in revenue from cloud services. Cloud services have proven to be a winner when it comes to reducing costs and improving efficiencies. Needless to say, the cloud is here to stay and will continue to take on a growing role in IT services in the not-so-distant future.

How the cloud affects revenue

Cost savings The most obvious way that the cloud model impacts revenue is the overall cost savings it provides. The cloud offers a very cost-effective means of storing information that used to come from on-premise, physical networks that were expensive to set up and maintain. Being able to eliminate this huge expense has benefitted both large corporations and the small business owner as well. Because most cloud services are set up as a “pay-as-you-go” system, businesses are able to pay only for what they need with a very minimal upfront cost. It's replacing the capital expense (capex) model with operating expenses only (opex).

Reduced waste In addition to this huge cost savings is the reduction of waste the cloud offers. Gone are the days when everything needed to be stored on a hard copy. The cloud offers a virtual means of storage, eliminating the need for the paper that was required for these items in the past.

Business agility and scalability In addition to the obvious cost savings, organizations can benefit from the business agility and scalability that the cloud offers. Because there is no hardware to purchase, approve, set up or maintain, organizations can quickly scale up or down depending on current need.

Staffing costs IT staff can spend more time on core products that help the overall company mission rather than spending time and resources on data storage. Additionally, the cloud providers, who are experts in their field, become an extension of your business, enabling you to scale back on your staffing needs.

Technical efficiencies The cloud also offers a higher level of technical efficiency, such as customization of business applications. Since there are fewer glitches and hardware issues, upgrades are needed less frequently, and when they are needed, they are implemented by the cloud provider.

Are you taking advantage of the many ways the cloud can positively impact your business revenue? If you’d like to learn more about dipping your toe into the cloud in 2016, contact us. We are happy to help answer your questions and explore how the cloud can benefit your business.

Three resolutions call center technology professionals will love to keep in 2016

2015-12-29T14:00:00Z

I hate January at the gym. Why? Because at the beginning of every year, my gym is flooded with new members suddenly motivated by the new year’s dawning to get into shape. By February, however, I know that the equipment will free up, the group class sizes will shrink, and I’ll be able to get a lane in the pool again. Those new exercise aficionados drift away from the gym as their will to sculpt love handles into rock hard abs diminishes along with their memories of countdowns and midnight kisses.

The problem, you see, is that individuals who try to obtain their New Year’s goals in one month aren’t focusing on the bigger picture of long-term wellness, so it’s easy to burn out rather quickly. Setting specific, measurable goals throughout the year is not only a better strategy for fitness seekers but works equally well for contact center leaders interested in transitioning their legacy infrastructure to the cloud.

Indeed, technology professional facing the daunting idea of replacing brittle legacy infrastructure with all new cloud technology in one fell swoop—including the time, effort and costs involved—can easily become overwhelmed and skeptical. So why not consider toning down resolutions you have to entirely overhaul your infrastructures in 2016 and set more realistic goals? With the assistance of a flexible and customer-oriented cloud contact center vendor, setting specific, incremental goals can be a walk in the park.

Top Three Resolutions for Contact Center Technology Professionals

I’d like to suggest three easy-to-achieve resolutions for your infrastructure transition in 2016:

Dip a toe (just one) into the cloud The primary reason cloud seems so challenging to contact center technologists is because most vendors encourage you to migrate data, applications and systems all at once. However, as with fitness resolutions, starting small and gradually increasing the investment proves to be the best strategy. For instance, start out by implementing cloud-based call recording, and leave all other systems in place. Try it out for size and see if you like it. Then, move on to more robust implementations, such as transferring a portion of your call volume to a cloud-based Automated Call Distributor to lighten your on-premise load. By taking the transition slowly, you can avoid resolution burn out and keep going strong all the way to Demember!
Go green by enabling remote agents In 2016, send your agents home! Increase your workforce’s flexibility and productivity by giving them remote access to the applications and tools they need to succeed, regardless of work site location. With a remote desktop and softphone, agents can securely gain access to the applications they need anywhere. Remoting enables you to reduce CAPEX by limiting your use of on-premise infrastructure and costly licenses and paying only for what you use. And enabling a remote workforce reduces your organization’s carbon footprint, as employees can decrease emissions from daily commutes. What’s more, a solution that relieves employees from work week road rage will undoubtedly correlate to improved team morale.
Heighten security measures Finally, when you begin your cloud transition, strengthen your security measures as well. Look for solutions that offer PCI-compliant data centers, perfect forward secrecy for call encryption and remote desktops that offer features such as two-factor authentication. For more information on Spoken’s security offerings, download our cloud security brochure.

So, it’s OK to get a little gung-ho about making New Year’s resolutions, but if you want to obtain substantial results, remember that slow and steady progress wins the race.

Social customer service: the changing call center landscape

2015-12-22T15:00:00Z

We've seen many changes in the field of customer service over recent years. Technological changes have definitely impacted the day to day operations of the customer service industry, enabling call centers to operate at a higher efficiency overall. However, another significant change that is impacting the call center: social media.

How are social platforms such a Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and SnapChat changing the call center? Check out this infographic for key insights on how social is affecting customer service:

According to this info, the younger the customer, the more likely a social channel will be used for a service issue.This is noteworthy, since Generations Y and Z will be paving the way in the future. What about you? Are you more likely to complain on Twitter, Facebook or the phone?

Need to know more about implementing a strong social media program in your organization? Share 7 things CEOs should know about social media with your executive team. You can also review Social Customer Service in Action, which includes some best practices from Gartner that still hold true today.

How automated Voice Assessment can save you time and money

2015-12-15T22:28:03Z

Evaluating and onboarding new call center agents can be time-consuming, labor-intensive and expensive.

One of the most time-consuming aspects of vetting new agents is the process of listening to their voice samples to ensure that they will be easy to understand over the phone. And while that may seem like a trivial task, many outsourcers are challenged with filling hundreds or thousands of customer service seats in a short period of time. Listening to 1,000 two-minute voice samples, even just to make simple pass-fail determinations, can be a laborious process. So why not automate?

Virtualizing the voice assessment process

Prospective agent voice assessment is an excellent candidate for cloud virtualization and automation. After all, there is no reason for a human to sit and listen to those thousands of minutes of analog voice samples to make a simple determination of pass or fail.

A well-designed cloud Interactive Voice Response system can easily automate the process, minimize administrator time and ultimately prevent dissatisfied customers down the line.

How the Spoken Voice Assessment IVR works

The Spoken Voice Assessment IVR is designed to identify agent candidates with a strong vocal comprehensibility score while flagging for further review those with negative conversational markers that might result in a lack of comprehensibility in a telecom situation. Using the Spoken Smart IVR technology, agent candidates can be evaluated on:

Caller authentication Identify and validate agent candidates
Prepared speech evaluation Evaluate candidate's ability to follow instructions and simple recorded utterances
Unprepared speech evaluation Evaluate candidate's ability to repeat unprepared utterances accurately
Listening comprehension Evaluate candidate's ability to listen and demonstrate comprehension

As with most Spoken offerings, the IVR is highly flexible and can offer any combination of the above options, along with additional options, such as the ability to redial or retake the assessment within a given period of time, full API integration and integrated online reporting.

In practice, candidates simply dial in to a number and respond to the Spoken Voice Assessment IVR accordingly. An automated score is readily available to administrators, who can either receive the scores as a flat file or log in online to review scores.

How is it priced?

Billing is by completed assessments only. So, as with other Spoken services, you only pay for what you use.

Want to find out more?

Curious about how Spoken Voice Assessment might benefit your organization? Dowload a summary of the features and benefits by clicking below:

Seven call center must-read books for 2016

2015-12-15T15:00:00Z

Seven books that will keep you and your call center at the top of your game

In some ways, call centers and customer care never seem to change. In other ways, the industry is constantly changing, and it can be a challenge to find the time to keep up with it. So, as an early holiday gift, we thought we’d share with you our top picks of Good Reads for customer care and call center aficionados.

Call Center Agent Motivation and Compensation, the Best of Call Center Management Review: The Best of Call Center Management Review By Brad Cleveland. This updated version focuses on strategies used by top call center managers to motivate their agents as well as effective reward and compensation programs.
Call Centers for Dummies. Mock the title all you want; we keep these in stock and give them to our new recruits to get them up to date on technology and industry trends in the call center.
Performance Dashboards: Measuring, Monitoring, and Managing Your Business by Wayne W. Eckerson. A host of tips and techniques on how to use dashboard technology to optimize business performance.
Operations Strategy In Action: A Guide To The Theory And Practice Of Implementation by Kim Hua, Rupert L. Matthews. Excellent read for an overview of operations strategy with a focus on implementation.
The Service Level Agreement SLA Guide - Sla Book, Templates for Service Level Management and Service Level Agreement Forms. Fast and Easy Way to Write Your Sla by Gerard Blokdijk, Ivanka Menken. This SLA guide is filled with hints, tips and guidance on how to successfully implement SLM and contains several Service Level Agreement Forms giving you a fast and easy easy to write SLAs.
A Manager's Guide to Virtual Teams by Yael Zofi. A solid roadmap for managing all the challenges of managing teams working remotely exploring the four most critical elements to team success.
Six SIGMA Demystified: A Self-Teaching Guide: A Self-Teaching Guide by Paul A. Keller, Thomas Pyzdek. The authors describe helpful tools for Six Sigma teams, identifying their uses, limitations and applications during multiple stages of DMAIC.
VoIP Deployment for Dummies by Stephen P. Olejniczak. The title says it all; this is basically your crash course in VOIP implementation written by an expert with real-world experience.

There were too many to choose from, but if you read these eight books, you'll be in the know for 2016. If you’d like to read more, here is a more extensive list. We picked these as our favorites because they cover the basics of technology, analysis and motivation in the call center.

Got a favorite book you think we missed? Mention it in the comments!

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