For insights and possible solutions ContactCenterSolutions recently interviewed John Konczal, worldwide communications/media industry executive with Sterling Commerce, an IBM company. Here are the highlights:
ContactCenterSolutions: What trends are you seeing which are affecting contact center productivity both positive and negative, and what are the drivers?
JK: A positive trend we are seeing is the greater deployment and adoption of self-service capabilities, thereby enabling customers to manage basic sales and service transactions online, such as gaining access to troubleshooting guides or looking up an order status. This helps reduce the number of transactions the call center needs to handle, thus helping increase call center productivity.
However, self-service has created a negative trend in call center operations by creating inconsistent data and processes across customer interaction channels. As interaction channels have proliferated – call center, web and mobile – businesses have struggled to ensure the same information and processes are made consistently available across all channels. For example, it's not uncommon to find a promotion represented differently across interaction channels. This negatively affects productivity when the call center must try to process the customer's request for a promotion seen online but not made visible in the call center.
ContactCenterSolutions: Briefly outline how does your solution(s) and which ones specifically directly boost contact center productivity? Do you have any benchmark results or illustrative case studies?
JK: Sterling Commerce provides a multi-channel selling solution that ensures consistent sales information and process presentation across all customer interaction channels. With IBM Sterling Multi-Channel Selling, a business can define how promotions, offers, products and services are ordered across all of its customer interaction channels, while also ensuring consistent information, processes and validations are performed across each channel. Furthermore, IBM Sterling Multi-Channel Selling uses guided selling and interaction capabilities to guide users of any type through finding the right information to facilitate making a purchase decision. It then guides users to make the purchase while also handling any complex product configuration actions.
Here is one example. In the case of a large pay television company, IBM Sterling Multi-Channel Selling provided guided selling capabilities in its call center and across other interaction channels. The solution helped this company reduce call center processing times for new orders by greater than 30 percent.
ContactCenterSolutions: What new or enhanced solutions have you come out with in the past year or will be rolling out this year that will increase productivity and if so how?
JK: Key advancements in our technology will be the integration of customer analytics into customer interaction processes to drive improved decisions when representatives are handling customer requests. For example, by applying customer historical data during a customer interaction, we can target and personalize specific offers and promotions to customers. This helps to improve call center productivity by reducing the time it takes for a representative to find an offer that meets the customer's specific needs.
The application of real-time customer analytics also can be used to improve service processes. For example, by automatically recognizing the customer has repeatedly had the same service issue for a period of time, a call center agent can use the data to automatically recommend a resolution and course of action. Instead of the representative having to manually research the situation and decide the course of action, the software can analyze customer information in real-time and automate the recommendation process.
ContactCenterSolutions: What caveats if any are there in deploying your tools that if not properly installed or used could negatively impact other areas of contact center operations, for example, agent burnout and churn, legislative compliance?
JK: Our solution provides considerable flexibility in how a business can design and implement rules and processes for executing guided sales interactions across any interaction channel. With that flexibility is the responsibility to design sales processes with the users in mind. Adoption of any new system or process is usually damaged when the users have not had the opportunity to contribute to the design of the system or process. So, if the users are not comfortable with the design and they find the process too cumbersome or inflexible, they will not adopt it and productivity will fail. That is why we recommend that our clients take full advantage of the flexibility of our solution and involve users in process design to facilitate rapid adoption of the new system and process.
ContactCenterSolutions: What are the best practices that you recommend in setting up and using your tools to boost productivity?
JK: To boost productivity, we recommend that our clients consider automation through integration. In a call center, many decisions and actions require information access and decision validation through myriad business systems. In many businesses, users are required to manually access these systems to get information or validate a decision, which in turn, drags down productivity. We recommend our clients put in place an integration infrastructure where these external business systems can be seamlessly integrated with call center systems and processes to automate information access and decision validation. Having this infrastructure in place enables us to design and implement processes that automate manual actions in the call center and significantly boost call center productivity.