VoIP Solutions
1 Mar, 2007
By: Ed KusIP Solutions Engender Customer Satisfaction
Regardless of what industry they serve, call center managers all have one key objective in common: making sure the customer experience is a positive one.
A 2005 study conducted by industry analyst firm Gartner found that customers tolerate longer queue times as long as they get helpful answers from the first agent they encounter. Such “first-contact resolution” is among the most important best practices call centers can implement to avoid alienating customers, higher abandon rates and lost revenue, high agent turnover and decreased productivity.
Organizations that practice first-contact resolution end up receiving 10 percent fewer calls by reducing abandon rates and need for second contacts. The math is easy: Because a typical agent handles 1,400 calls a month, that’s a savings of 2.5 full-time employees or US$112,000 a year, if those agents earn a typical $45,000 per year.
In addition to providing helpful assistance from the first contact, the most effective call centers typically have a central point of enterprise management; can easily see agent call flows through multiple phone systems; and are able to configure systems with multiple user interfaces.
Achieving such efficiency and implementing best practices takes commitment, vision and of course, the right technology solution. Today, that means IP-based communications from companies such as Mitel. Traditional PBX-based phone systems in many cases simply don’t offer the necessary functionality or ability to integrate data with voice that can be achieved with IP-based offerings. IP solutions also provide call center supervisors and administrators with intuitive and easy-to-use configuration and administration tools to help manage costs and resources and ultimately improve the customer experience.
Mitel has worked with call center managers to help them eliminate the need for technical staff to configure automatic call display (ADC) call flows, resulting in a solution that provides a visual representation of ACD call flow and the ability to easily direct overflow of calls to geographically dispersed agents. It also readily configures ACD call flow in a single interface with automatic synchronization. The solution provides supervisors with the ability to dynamically adjust queues by dragging and dropping agents and contacts. They can also see details of the callers in the queue, their answer state, name and account information. Contacts can be reprioritized or moved to a different queue to evenly distribute calls among dispersed agents in a virtual call center and, using integrated real-time presence, quickly locate available experts irrespective of the agents’ geographic proximity to avoid blind transfers and callbacks, and enable first-contact resolution.
Applications such as updated position in queue (UPIQ) fix the problem of lost callers by continuously informing them of their position in line. UPIQ can be enabled or disabled on a per-queue basis; you can control the frequency of the message playback; you can choose to limit the top number of callers who begin to hear the UPIQ message, which allows for it to be broadcast across multiple queues; and maximum allowed position can be configured so as not to discourage callers from waiting in queue.
As for how those customers are treated in the first place, agents can and do make mistakes when answering calls for multiple business lines and they’re often inconsistent with their greetings. One reason for this may be the repetitious nature of their job. Such repetition is hard to overcome and is deflating to employee morale. A simple though useful solution to this is enabling a “softphone” feature that allows agents to set up virtual greetings based on the business line being answered, thus only requiring them to set up greetings a single time, alleviating mistakes and providing a healthier, happier environment.
Such comprehensive customer interaction solutions are helping managers meet service level commitments and customer expectations by streamlining management and administrative tasks to efficiently manage calls and serve customers at the more than 4,500 Mitel call center installations worldwide.
IP technology is the primary catalyst behind the scalability, resiliency and virtualization attributes that enable today’s call center best practices, including customer interaction solutions that can grow with call centers regardless of agent geography; allowing any power outages to automatically fail over and switch to a secondary controller and ensuring that calls can be evenly distributed based on which agent has been idle the longest irrespective of their physical proximity to the originating call.
These and other IP-based advances are positively impacting the quality of the customers’ experience, which ultimately will determine the strength of your customer relationships, and, of course, their loyalty to you.
