Supercharge Your CRM
1 Mar, 2009
By: Clare DorrianFive Technologies You Need to Know About
Is your contact center taking advantage of the latest in new technology? Are your agents still navigating multiple screens to fulfill customer requests? Are you getting the most out of your staff? Are you able to respond in real-time to the changes facing your contact center? The fact is that recent advances in customer-centric software development have injected some exciting new capabilities to the world of CRM.
Whether it’s software that operates at the very frontline of customer service or applications that help improve efficiency in the back office, there are lots of areas benefiting from new technologies that help improve the customer experience.
Intelligent Desktop
A common source of inefficiency in the contact center is when agents are faced with an enforced navigation through different systems and multiple screens in order to fulfill a customer request. This obviously has a negative impact on agent productivity, which in turn affects the customer, who is forced to experience a longer interaction than is necessary. In addition, performing repetitive or duplicate tasks on multiple screens increases process errors, leads to low agent motivation and hence to attrition. Other disadvantages include the increased length of training time required by agents and the significant maintenance overhead of using multiple systems.
There are a couple of ways of describing an intelligent desktop. One concept is purely driven by efficiency: reducing the number of screens that agents must navigate. For example, if a customer request previously required visiting 14 screens to complete was consolidated into a single desktop view, then that could be considered an intelligent desktop.
But there is also the intelligent desktop that is context-driven and personalized. This is a desktop that ensures the agent knows all of the required information available to help the customer reach the best outcome and that he or she understands the full context of the interaction, even if only joining half-way through a process. Furthermore, with role-driven entitlement, agents see only what is relevant to them, and also only what they need at any given point in time, reducing the clutter often experienced with traditional desktop applications.
Ultimately, an intelligent desktop must be intuitive – guided where it needs to be but also allowing the agent to guide it, if necessary. The best intelligent desktops provide a single, context-based application where agents go to fulfill customer service and sales requests. They should provide a dynamic and intuitive interface that makes it easy to use, easy to adopt and easy to deliver the right information at the right time, to the right user.
From the desktop, agents should be able to access a range of features as standard, including work lists, performance dashboards, FAQs and search facilities. Organizations can then concentrate on increasing responsiveness and enabling a truly personal customer experience. The agent desktop should also provide a central communication hub for organizations to distribute important messages to staff such as key metrics on their performance, broadcasts of up-to-date information or latest promotions.
An effective intelligent desktop should bring agents a consolidated view of the customer, including contacts and cases across multiple channels. This helps to build the bridge between disconnected enterprise systems, while removing the chaos and inefficiency associated with handling multiple desktop applications. This single view of the customer contains all the key attributes that you need to know about them, be it who they are, where they live, what they buy, what brands they use or how they want to be addressed. Such a profile can be configured to reflect the types of information that are relevant to your organization making this the first port of call for any agent looking to understand their customers.
Overall benefits of an intelligent desktop include improving agent productivity, thus improving the customer experience and reducing interaction times. Reduction of those repetitive and duplicate tasks over multiple screens improves agent motivation and can lower attrition. Intelligent desktops also help to shorten agents’ training time and reduce the considerable maintenance overhead associated with running multiple systems.
Case Handling
A significant portion of the work conducted within any contact center is dedicated to handling the work that needs to be done to complete a customer inquiry that cannot be completed at the first point of contact. Often, tasks require collaboration between multiple people, including specialist resources within different parts on an organization, to resolve.
Standard case-handling software will help contact centers automate this process, ensuring that work is routed through specific stages to ensure its completion. New advances in this area now enable much more than just automation.
The latest case-handling systems are essentially dynamic, business-defined filing systems that create, assign and manage customer service requests across multiple channels, whether it is contact by phone, email, in-person, text message or Web. Furthermore, they allow business users to predefine case templates as well as construct them as they go. Modern case handling should also track performance against predetermined service level agreements, which can provide proactive rather than reactive information and alerts, which are needed to help to drive the next step in processing a piece of work, as per the established rules of the contact center.
Case-handling software can now make use of prioritization, routing and decision-making capabilities to ensure that each piece of work is delivered at the right time to the right person with the right skill set. The best products can be easily tailored to ensure they can work with whatever the specifics of your business dictate, whether it is complaints, order processing or booking reservations. New case handling tools also contain auditing features that allow managers to access real-time information about all system and user actions, ensuring that progress can be reported on and providing a greater degree of control over the business operations.
The use of advanced case-handling software ultimately benefits customers by providing them with the satisfaction of having their specific cases dealt with more swiftly and increasing first contact resolution, but it also improves the customer experience by ensuring the contact center has greater access to detailed information about the status of a case, rather than simply stating “It’s being processed.”
Work Management
When agents aren’t on the phone, dealing directly with a customer, they are usually needed to manage e-mails or documents or issue outbound campaigns. A work management tool will help an organization effectively manage offline requests and thus truly integrate a company’s end-to-end customer-facing processes all the way from its frontline staff to its back-office specialists.
By providing support for automated and manual work distribution, skill- and role-based routing and reassignment, work management software ensures that the right request is routed to the right person the first time, every time. Additional features like dashboard reporting and alerts can provide the information needed to ensure that the business can adjust in a timely fashion to meet operational demands.
E-service
Web self-service is a rapidly growing trend, and rightly so. Use of the Web has now become so ubiquitous that companies must take it into account if they intend to offer their customers a complete array of contact options. Using the Internet, contact centers now have the chance to give their customers a direct link to the customer service desk, reduce costly inbound inquiries and ensure a consistent service by allowing customers to help themselves.
But this should never be at the expense of detracting from the level of service a customer receives, and the latest Web self-service capabilities allow companies to make the customer service processes from their contact center directly available to their customers. By modifying what activities the customer can perform and simplifying how the processes look to them can allow seemingly complex contact center processes to be shared with customers in a clear and easy-to-use manner.
Another exciting development in Web self-service is the ability to allow contact center agents to share a customer’s desktop during a Web chat session. This kind of real-time collaboration allows customers who prefer to conduct most of their business online to ask for help when they need it, thus helping to reduce contact abandonment.
Business Controlling Change
As the demands on an organization’s business change, its contact center needs to have a system that allows it to adapt to these demands as they happen or, in real-time. Businesses are no longer prepared to wait long periods of time for IT to implement changes on their behalf. Process-based business administration software provides companies with the ability to make swift and simple modifications to the contact center to allow real-time changes, which can also help make a real difference to operational performance.
Using such software, the business is able to modify the blend of work in the contact center in real-time in order to meet changing business dynamics and optimize operational performance. For example, assigning more or less staff to phone answering duties as demand dictates.
These are just five of the many technologies out there that can help turn your CRM operations from contact center to profit center, delivering real value to your business in addition to an outstanding customer experience.
