This week, it's time to talk about social media. We know you and your contact center have been avoiding having to deal with it, but friends don't let friends leave a channel as important as social media is today out of the contact center solutions mix.
Contact center outsourcing giant Convergys checked in with ContactCenterSolutions this week at the Call Center Week event, and the topic was social networking. The company has developed a new decision engine that has allowed Convergys to reduce agent training sessions and create more effective IVR and self service options. More importantly, the decision engine is being used in social media strategize designed to increase businesses ability to respond to issues from its user base.
According to Senior Marketing Manager Howard Saresky, “What we found is customer effort is the best metric for assessing the customer experience. Customer satisfaction is important but it’s not the best determining factor for loyalty, the better factor is customer effort, meaning how difficult it is to do business with the company. Satisfaction does not mean loyalty reducing effort is a better predictor.”
Reducing that effort means proactively engaging customers regardless of what channel they come through. That means an active social media campaign is as essential to your organization as well trained call center agents.
This week, two leaders from the contact center solutions industry shared their insights and explored developing options for contact center managers and supervisors when it comes to social media, and how to take advantage of social channels.
The TMC webinar, “Preparing Your Contact Center for the Rise of Social Media,” was hosted by Wendell Black of Contactual, and Dan York of Voxeo. The two discussed the recent developments in the social industry in terms of technological advantages that social channels can give businesses. They explored the idea that businesses now need to provide a multi-level user experience over various platforms instead of the standard agent call nowadays.
Also this week in the world of contact center solutions, ContactCenterSolutions's Susan Campbell discussed how Toshiba is broadening the flexibility and efficiency of its contact with a new solution from RightNow Technologies. Susan writes, “With the RightNow CX in place, Toshiba is enjoying a powerful customer experience suite. The company is now relying on RightNow contact center solutions to enable more than 650 contact center agents to deliver a high level of quality support to more than 230,000 customer calls per month. At the same time, the organization is improving agent efficiency, reducing training time and lowering operating costs.”
Agent training is a major concern for call centers, and each year the industry spends millions making sure that the reps directly interacting with customers are doing so in a professional and efficient manner. Though countless methods have proliferated, each offering different training advantages, scripting is one method that’s always been treated with skepticism. Fears of cold or robotic responses and pathways that squelch open and productive discourse have taken it off the table for many call centers. ContactCenterSolutions's Chris DiMarco wrote this week about a new approach to scripting.
The addition of a new call center is always good news for the local economy, wrote Susan Campbell this week. This is especially true when that call center is streamlining outsourced services back into local environments to boost the labor force and advance the delivery of contact center software.
On that note, PrepaYd Inc. has announced that one of its wholly owned subsidiaries has opened an in-house Level 1 PCI Compliant call center to provide service to new and existing customers. Previously leveraging outsourced solutions for 100 percent of its tier-one customer support, the company has now implemented a hybrid call center and robust contact center solutions to direct targeted call traffic during normal business and peak hours within its own call center.
ContactCenterSolutions's David Sims wrote this week about solutions to support home agents. If you have at-home agent programs you know what some of the advantages are. They can be a cost-effective way to scale a business, for one thing, and pretty low on your overhead expenses, wrote David. But still, yours may be one of the many companies which struggle with effectively managing a remote workforce and guaranteeing that all call center operations are successful. David profiles one vendor that understands the problems call center operations have when managing remote workforces.
Finally, on the personnel front, LiveOps, a provider of cloud-based contact center solutions, announced the appointment of Marty Beard as President and Chief Executive Officer effective July 18, 2011.Beard will also join the LiveOps Board of Directors, while Maynard Webb, who served as LiveOps Chief Executive Officer and Chairman of the Board, will continue in his role as Chairman of the Board.
That's all for this week. Tune in next week for all the news that's fit to print about contact center solutions.