One of the largest, if not the largest, vertical where providing a great customer care experience through font line employees aka contact center agents, is the communications industry. With service providers around the world seeking to cut churn rates while increasing operational efficiencies and revenues simultaneously, concentration on contact center enhancement has become a priority.
An example of just how important enhancing the customer experience is of operators came recently with the announcement that customer experience and OSS/BSS solutions provider Amdocs. It has been selected by OJSC VimpelCom (Beeline™), one of the largest communication operators in Russia, to enhance its customer experience capabilities using Amdocs Customer Management to improve agent efficiency at its call centers, boost call center revenues, and increase customer satisfaction and retention rates.
A big deal for Amdocs
Delivered under a five-year development, maintenance and support contract, the Amdocs solution will unify 26 third-party applications under a single customer relationship management (CRM) application. The goal is to provide contact center agents a single view of customer information across multiple lines of business. The solution, part of the Amdocs CES suite, provides agents with:
"Agents are the front line of customer communication and need to be knowledgeable about the products and services they sell, and also find their way through the many different applications and processes," said Rebecca Prudhomme, vice president of product and solutions marketing at Amdocs. "Amdocs' smart guidance capabilities deliver context-sensitive advice during the call and a streamlined, process-driven user interface to guide the agent through the interaction to allow them to provide the best possible customer experience, no matter how complex the inquiry."
This concentration on customer experience as recent similar announcements from service providers around the world is a welcomed trend. As all of us who have had less than wonderful experiences doing things like activating mobile phones, trying to figure out our bills or getting failed features to work can attest, not getting our issues resolved is a top reason for looking at alternatives. This is a universal frustration and at least we can take comfort in the fact that executives at our service providers have become sensitized to the voice of the customer as heavily impacting their bottom lines and are willing to invest in making us more satisfied.