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Fonolo: Adding Intelligent Agent Calling to Mobile Apps Benefits Call Center Performance

Financial companies have embraced the opportunities created by the rise of the smartphone. Accordingto officials of industry vendor Fonolo, what’s needed is to add an intelligent agent calling to a mobile application without any changes to the call center.

Fonolo is, in fact, offering such a product. Company officials say its benefits include the ability to reduce operational costs and improve agent efficiency; create a differentiated customer

Experience; provide a uniform interface between the Web and mobile; get rapid, informative caller feedback; and convert more Web visitors to callers.

The company outlines what they see as three of the major challenges this addresses:

• Decreasing cost-per-call without sacrificing the customer experience: Now, more than ever, financial companies place extremely high demands on their call centers. Agents must be highly trained to deal with the increasingly complicated and sensitive demands of their customers. It’s no surprise that financial companies have the highest agent costs of any industry, leading to a high cost-per-call and a desire by companies to keep call handle times as short as possible.
• Using the investment you are making in mobile applications to improve call center performance: Broad adoption of the smartphone has created opportunities for dramatically enhanced interaction with customers. This trend has been embraced by financial companies that were early adopters of mobile applications. But a key piece is missing from these applications: connecting intelligently to the call center.
• Reducing the burden of authentication for callers and agents while maintaining sufficient security for the transaction at hand: Naturally, caller authentication is a common aspect of call center transactions throughout the financial industry. This authentication process often has an automated component through the IVR as well as a live challenge and response component with an agent. Both components tend to increase the frustration of the caller. The latter can add significantly to call handle time and thus increase costs.

David Sims is a contributing editor for ContactCenterSolutions. To read more of David’s articles, please visit his columnist page. He also blogs for ContactCenterSolutions here.

Edited by Tammy Wolf