Contact centers have long been under pressure to be highly productive whether from senior management or in the case of BPO firms from clients and competition for this business.
Maintaining and enhancing that productivity has become more complex. For example customer satisfaction or CSAT has emerged as a key goal yet it usually but not axiomatically translates into continued or higher sales. Also supporting customers via new text-based channels can have an impact on output.
Aspect has been enabling contact centers to be more productive through its inbound and outbound routing and outreach products and its performance management solutions. TMCnet recently interviewed Serge Hyppolite, director of product management on contact center productivity issues. Here is the exchange:
TMCnet: What trends are you seeing that are affecting contact center productivity and what are the drivers?
SH: Here are the key ones:
* Unified communications (UC) delivers a level of collaboration that never existed before across a host of interaction types: between agents and supervisors, agents and customers, agents and experts within the enterprise (beyond the contact center) and even directly between customers and these experts
* Regulations like compliance and security have become important considerations in how contact centers establish and adhere to best practices in day-to-day operations* Unified multichannel communications across voice, web, social, e-mail, IM/chat, etc. are proving to be necessary for providing truly customer-centric interactions
* Social networking has already transformed the way companies think and behave and will have a continuing, growing impact * Distributed workforce (remote, at-home or flex-time agents) is an increasing trend as organizations look to efficiently staff contact centers, given global, round-the-clock operations, while keeping overhead costs down
* Proactive contact is becoming a well-established trend. Reaching out to customers proactively – to remind them of everything from upcoming appointments to outstanding credit card balances – lowers contact center costs while increasing the likelihood of more timely payments
TMCnet: Briefly outline how does Aspect’s (News - Alert) solution (s) and which ones specifically directly boost contact center productivity? Examples?
SH: Aspect solutions directly boost contact center productivity by delivering a next-generation customer contact center including unified solutions for both contact management with Aspect Unified IP and Aspect Contact 2011, as well as workforce optimization.
Some specific capabilities addressing current trends are the Ask an Expert functionality, PCI (News - Alert) with call recording capabilities, campaign management, self-service by customers getting assistance through online chat, contextual enterprise routing and Advanced List Management functionality.
For example, one Aspect customer, a large American retailer serving a social-networking-oriented, teen demographic is:
* Using social media, like Facebook (News - Alert) and Twitter, to track trends on what is hot in the teenage retail market
* Using SMS text to obtain feedback from the end-customer and then posting information on their website for the retail audience
* Tracking orders via text and chat
* Gathering information to identify what to sell to their market, as well as marketing to their base
TMCnet: 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?
SH: Aspect’s new or enhanced solutions within the past year include:
* Aspect Workforce Management: improved scheduling and enhanced productivity, enabling organizations to optimize the use of enterprise knowledge workers, including back office employees, to provide better customer service
* Aspect Performance Management: improved dashboard usability, enhanced workforce management and automatic coaching
* Aspect Quality Management: provides rich search capabilities for fast retrieval of recordings and is fully integrated as part of the supervisor’s dashboard, automated workflows that send quality scores to schedule agent coaching or evaluate agent requests
* Aspect Unified IP 7: features contextual enterprise routing and manageability, high availability, dynamic inbound routing, enhanced agent desktop to support Microsoft (News - Alert) UC&C, improved notification and outbound campaign management and enterprise recording and monitoring
* Aspect Contact 2011: newly introduced software-based solution that delivers essential customer contact capabilities for small to mid-sized contact centers and IT, HR, travel or other help desks operating with 20 – 100 seats
TMCnet: What caveats if any are there in deploying your productivity tools that if not properly installed or used could negatively impact other areas of contact center operations?
SH: Like any new technology or tool, it is important to fully understand its potential and capabilities to drive the greatest benefits while minimizing risk.
While UC has proven to drive significant productivity increases, people need to be mindful of how and with whom they share data. For example, parameters around desktop sharing and instant messaging must be considered so as to not to inadvertently share confidential information, like credit card information, or misdirect an instant message to an unintended recipient. With social communications, people must realize that social responses are permanent and spread quickly.
So it is important to have some audit processes and controls in place so that employees, agents or others understand the rules and circumstances. It’s also important to understand that in a multichannel environment not all agents are skilled in every channel. That should be evaluated in advance to avoid finding out the hard way.
TMCnet: What are the best practices that Aspect has recommend in setting up and using your tools to boost productivity?
SH: There are a number of best practices that are good to follow when setting up and using tools to boost productivity in the contact center. Research is the first step. Then determining the appropriate tools and ensuring that all of the components work together seamlessly is an important next step.
Contact center mangers should have full visibility into the solution to be able to map skills appropriately and make changes as necessary. For instance, if someone cannot type fast they probably should not be the main agent handling only e-mail or chat queries. In addition, there should be appropriate tools tracking performance like quality assurance or speech analytics that can be tracked through reporting or dashboards. This way, if an agent is underperforming, a coaching or training session can be triggered: which will ultimately save time and money.
Brendan B. Read is TMCnet’s Senior Contributing Editor. To read more of Brendan’s articles, please visit his columnist page.Edited by
Jennifer Russell