Unified Communications: Empowering Agents for More Successful Customer Interactions
1 May, 2007
By: John JosephUnified communications provides a common infrastructure to deliver, manage and support a wide range of applications spanning IP telephony calling and management; Web, audio and videoconferencing; voice, e-mail and text messaging; presence and IM; click to X, event-driven communications and more. It enables true multi-channel contact center solutions that satisfy increasing customer demands for convenience and the need for consistent, responsive, prioritized handling of all communications – no matter their source. Unified communications provides a tremendous amount of data that can easily be integrated with other customer relationship management (CRM) and business applications to provide a better understanding of who is contacting you, and why, what they need and who in your organization is best suited to help. It can also be employed to empower agents to be more successful with each customer interaction by:
• Enabling unified desktop solutions that increase agent productivity, effectiveness and satisfaction
• Ensuring that each agent handles the customer issues for which he or she is best trained
• Integrating presence and skills for greater access to experts, and higher first call resolution rates.
The Empowered Desktop
Robust screen pop solutions help agents to be more successful with customers from the start by enabling more robust screen pop applications. Rather than simply delivering a standard CRM screen that displays the customer’s name, robust screen pop applications also enable the inclusion of cross-sell offers, scripts, product information and more. Agents will be more effective when they can personalize the conversation from the start and don’t have to hunt around for the information they need.
You can also take the solution one step further and eliminate some of the tedium agents experience when forced to navigate from one CRM system screen to the next in a rigid manner to get to the fields they need. With a better understanding of what customers need, you can pop specialized screens that not only display relevant customer information, but also transaction specific data collection fields. For example, you could use DNIS or Web address data to know that a customer needs to add new services to his or her existing account. You can also display customer information along with the fields needed to complete this transaction. By eliminating repetitive work, agents will thrive while performing more value-added, satisfying tasks.
While most think of screen pops as happening only with transferred calls, you can gain the same productivity advantages with text-based inquiries. In this case, however, the screen pop is generated by the e-mail or text message address.
Sending Your Best Customers to Your Best Agents
Developing agents is a top concern for every contact center manager. Managers need to ensure that highly trained agents make the best use of their skills, while, at the same time, others are not being overwhelmed by customers they cannot help. Because unified communications solutions give greater insight into who is calling and why, they offer a unique opportunity to ensure the best match between customer needs and agent skills.
Imagine finding that your best customer is on a Web page featuring one of your newest products and has just initiated a chat session to get a quick answer to a specification question. Sending this interaction to an agent trained on this new product – and those deemed as important – becomes easier in the unified communications world.
Greater Access to Experts
With presence and skills data, unified communications solutions provide an opportunity to more closely integrate experts, no matter their location, into the service process. Without ever leaving the customer, applications that check on the availability of knowledge workers within the enterprise, but outside the call center, can provide agents with a quick instant messaging (IM) method for gaining the information needed to complete a call. If a transfer is required, all the call or chat information can be sent as well, eliminating the need for the customer to repeat him- or herself.
By allowing agents to monitor these calls, they can learn new skills on the fly to become a more productive part of your workforce with greater job satisfaction.
Keeping Customers Informed, Even When You Can’t Get to Them
Some organizations need specialized agents to handle more complex issues for a specific group of customers. Managing all these inquiries and getting back to everyone is time consuming. Knowing who is contacting you can help. For example, some organizations are using specialized text-to-speech messages to communicate personally with important callers they cannot answer immediately. Imagine a salesperson is on a conference call when he receives an alert letting him know a valued client is trying to reach him. The salesperson can then type an instant message that is read to the client over the phone. The valued customer hears, “John, I did receive your order. I am on a conference call until 4:00 and I will call you back when it is over.” Consider a technical specialist who is helping one client when another with a nagging problem calls in. He or she could quickly send a text message with a status update.
The ability to ensure high-priority communications in all circumstances is invaluable to organizations and individuals of all kinds. This also enables agents to better control their interactions and keeps them from feeling overwhelmed by customer requests.
Putting Unified Communications to the Test
The Council of Smaller Enterprises (COSE) in Cleveland, OH is the second-largest Chamber of Commerce in the nation, boasting more than 15,000 small business members --- from consulting groups to real estate firms; restaurants to local retailers. To enhance service to its members, COSE chose a unified communications solution for the integrated, intelligent management of live calls, instant messages, voice mail and e-mail. The unified communications solution enables intelligent routing based on business rules COSE created using member information, request type, message type, agent skill sets and more. The solution’s screen pops combine member information with data collection fields. This shaves 45 seconds off each call --- the time it previously took an agent to identify the organization and navigate through the CRM system to open the correct data entry screen.
COSE is also making expert advice more accessible to its agents. It features an integrated internal chat function they can use to quickly ask another colleague a question without ever putting the customer on hold. If the call does need to be transferred for expert assistance, the member data along with a detailed note is sent with the call. Therefore, the expert can quickly begin an intelligent conversation without making the caller feel like he or she is just being transferred around.
More important, COSE has also made the solution available to its members. In this way, COSE is helping small businesses use unified communications to make their employees more successful in all their customer communications.
“We wanted to offer our members a comprehensive communications solution that would provide a tremendous impact on service, sales and marketing operations,” said Carol Haines who led the Telecom Task Force for COSE. “Because the unified communications solution we chose is so flexible, our members will find endless ways to apply the technology in their own organization to offer superlative service and rival their larger competitors.”
Creating Your Deployment Strategy
To get started, you need to understand where and how unified communications can add value in your unique contact center environment. Along with agent empowerment solutions, look for opportunities to prioritize customer communications to maximize their value. Consider the following:
o Do you have separate DNIS, Web pages or chat programs associated with specific products or services?
o Does your CRM system have fields for capturing additional customer details such as multiple phone numbers, e-mail address, text message originator, etc.?
o What transaction types are generating the most value? How much agent training is needed to be successful? Which require experts for complete resolution?
o What communications channels do you need to add to offer total customer convenience? How do you need to integrate the channels or prioritize across channels? Which communication channels should have priority? Can these channels be broken down to further illuminate priority assignments (DNIS, receiving e-mail address, page-specific Web chat, etc.)?
o What specific pieces of data and applications best help agents do their job? Are there ways to shortcut their presentation?
The power of unified communications lies in your ability to connect data from many sources to better understand who is contacting you and why. Share this information with agents to make them more successful each time they interact with a customer. Allow them to focus on a personal conversation rather than a, “What is your name and account number?” interaction. Design more flexible supportive agent systems versus a “click contact tab, enter account number, click services tab…” approach. Empowering agents will translate to better service and lower turnover. Employ unified communications today for a more productive, efficient and happy contact center.
