A Bird in Hand: Making the Most of Your Technology
1 Jul, 2007
By: Randy JesseeIn the contact center arena, we spend a lot of time focusing on the latest technological breakthroughs, such as Voice over IP, technology for at-home agents and mobile devices that can do everything but wash your car. However, we often forget why we utilize all this technology. It is, or should be, to enhance your communication with your customer.
Reducing Operational Costs
As customers become savvier, they expect customer service to keep pace with their expectations. At the same time, however, you probably find that you have the same budget (or less) as last year for people and technology.
Reducing Staffing Costs
People are your greatest budgetary item. Without automation, calls might be routed to the wrong agent, forcing multiple frustrating transfers for the customer and using expensive toll-free time to get the caller to the right agent. Your agents might be wasting valuable time collecting customer information that could be collected by an automated program. Too much time will be spent collecting the same information from each customer each time. By accessing a database, agents can have a customer record available before the call even starts.
• Additional time and money is wasted if the agent doesn’t have specialized training to help the customer. A generalist will take longer to handle a request than a specialist.
• You might have specialists, but without proper routing, you might not be taking full advantage of their high-value work.
• You must also manage training and staffing schedules. If you train specialists, you’ll spend less time training the entire staff on every topic.
• Many companies are hamstrung by the number of agents they can afford. Without automated applications, they are forced to use expensive agents for simple tasks rather than revenue-generating opportunities.
Reducing Telephony Costs
Telephony costs are another major expenditure that needs to be controlled. You need to find ways to reduce the length of customer calls – every minute a customer talks on your toll-free numbers costs you money. Calls need to be routed faster, and they need to go to the right agent the first time. You need sophisticated queuing and routing rules that can be configured to meet your dynamic business climate.
Reducing IT Infrastructure Costs
The infrastructure costs of telephony are not insignificant, either. Traditional systems cannot easily integrate with software applications. Trunk capacity limits the number and type of interactions a system can handle. Expansion is costly and leaving trunks unused is wasteful. Solutions today should include the convergence of voice and data onto the IP network, which will greatly simplify infrastructure management and reduce your costs.
Configuring, managing and monitoring all of your incoming voice, e-mail and Web interactions requires measuring the performance of not only your employees, but also the systems that support them. You need a solution that simplifies the process of gathering performance metrics; creating routing rules; managing and changing users, workflows and backups; as well as creating and sending meaningful reports that enable you to make business and operational decisions.
Reducing Implementation Costs
In the past, sophisticated contact center solutions have been too expensive, risky and time-consuming for companies outside of the Fortune 1000. In fact, in a Dataquest survey, 25 percent of the respondents reported integration costs as their highest concern when thinking about adding a contact center. A solution should leverage your existing investment, using the hardware and software that you already own, use and support. And the implementation and integration should be complete in days, not weeks or months.
Driving Business Growth
As contact centers play an increasingly critical role in customer transactions, many businesses are seeking tools and applications to generate new revenue during interactions with established customers. Sales and service are extensions of one another. Companies today have two objectives: service the needs of their customers and turn their contact centers into profit centers.
Your agents need to have customer information at their fingertips to help them identify the products and services that each customer might want and need. You also want to use your customers’ wait times to notify them of new offers that can generate revenue automatically, without an agent’s assistance.
It’s clear that generating new revenue in the contact center is more important than ever. Your ability to deliver integrated services – both revenue generating and service oriented – can make the difference between attracting and retaining long-term customers, and struggling to get by.
