Contact Center Pipeline

Transcription

THE HEROES
AMONG US
www.contactcenterpipeline.com
OCT 2014
ADDING VALUE
THROUGH MOBILE
Want to see a real hero or two? Just
look around your contact center …p10
Follow us on Twitter @ccpipeline @susanhash
LEVERAGING
TECHNOLOGY TO
OPTIMIZE CONTINUITY
AND RECOVERY
BY MATT MOREY AND KEN BARTON
Ever have a nagging feeling that your center is
more vulnerable than you’d like to admit? Odds
are, creating or updating that dreaded business
continuity/disaster recovery (BC/DR) plan has
been on your “to do” list for some time. Today’s
technology and service offerings provide new
options to address risk reduction and just may
change your perspective on (finally) addressing
your BC/DR strategy.
Getting the BC/DR Ball Rolling:
Look at Scope, Costs and Options
The first order of business when preparing and/or
assessing your BC/DR plan is to determine how
far to go in terms depth and breadth. To do so,
you’ll identify relevant risks, the likelihood of their
occurrence, and the associated business impact.
You’ll consider how long you can reasonably toler...p32
THE HERE AND NOW
BY JAY MINNUCCI
the rule for business is adapt and innovate, or lose
out to the competition.
Mobile usage among consumers continues to grow,
as well. The average American now spends 3.3 hours
a day on their smartphone, according to the “2014
Mobile Behavior Report,” from digital marketing firm
ExactTarget. Leading-edge businesses are looking for
ways to deliver a meaningful experience based on
Every few months, someone asks
me what I enjoy so much about this
industry. In truth, there are many
aspects of contact center management that interest me. One of the
most compelling factors, though, is the simple fact
that you cannot succeed strategically with a contact center unless you fully understand the tactical
operation at the deepest level. In other words, there
is no such thing as “faking it.”
At the heart of this link between the strategic
and the tactical is the issue of time. The phrase
“tyranny of the moment” has been used to describe
issues as disparate as poverty and the information
age, and applies equally as well to the real-time
...p04
...p30
CUSTOMERS EXPECT CONVENIENCE AND
MORE CONTROL OVER THEIR TIME.
BY SUSAN HASH
P
eople are passionate about their mobile
devices, as demonstrated by the long lines
that Apple Stores draw days before the debut
of a new iPhone or iPad. Regardless of the brand,
the release of each new smartphone model and operating system brings more features and capabilities
to support consumers’ on-the-go lifestyles. Mobile
technology is advancing at breakneck speed—more
rapidly than many companies are prepared for. Yet
Do you
know what
customers
are saying?
you will.
With Verint Voice Of The Customer Analytics,
Phone. Chat. Email. Social Media. Surveys. Customers have more
ways than ever to communicate with—and about—your business.
With Verint® Voice of the Customer Analytics® solutions, you can capture
their interactions and sentiments, analyze them, then use the results
to surface hidden issues, detect trends, and deliver the kind of
experiences that keep customers coming back again and again.
Find out how Verint Voice of the Customer solutions can help
make Customer-Inspired ExcellenceTM a reality in your business.
Visit www.verint.com/voca or call 1-800-4VERINT.
Speech Analytics | Text Analytics | Enterprise Feedback Management
© 2014 Verint Systems Inc. All Rights Reserved Worldwide.
OCTOBER 2014
01
FEATURE
Adding Value Through Mobile
PUBLISHER
Linda Harden
[email protected]
01
AGILITY FACTOR
The Here and Now
[email protected]
01
TECH LINE
Leveraging Technology to Optimize Continuity and Recovery
Lori Bocklund Strategic Contact
Jay Minnucci Service Agility
10
THE VIEW FROM THE SADDLE
The Heroes Among Us
12
CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE
Customer Experience: The Ultimate Innovation
16
INDUSTRY FOCUS
Backstage at the Patient Experience: Centralized
Appointment Scheduling
20
22
SPONSOR SPOTLIGHT / IQ Services
WebRTC Testing for Today’s Contact Centers
EDITOR
Susan Hash
FOUNDING ADVISORS
EDITORIAL ADVISORY BOARD
William Hartline Springs Window Fashions
Tiffany LaReau Human Numbers
Scott Murphy ERS of Texas
Daniel Ord Omnitouch International
Vince Pepper BCBS of Michigan
Paul Stockford Saddletree Research
Willie Tang Broad Vision Consulting
Sue Weaver Jitterbug
CONTRIBUTING WRITERS
Mike Aoki
Mike Burke
Susan Hash
Janet LeBlanc
Matt Morey
Paul Stockford
DESIGN DIRECTOR
Mark Knight
[email protected]
LEADING THOUGHTS
Challenges to Understanding Customer Journeys and
Optimizing Engagement
26
PERFORMANCE MATTERS
10 Tips to Improve Agent Engagement During New-Hire Training
28
SPONSOR SPOTLIGHT / Volt Delta
The Anatomy of Delivering Exceptional Multichannel
Customer Service
36
INSIDE VIEW
Houston 311
38
SPONSOR SPOTLIGHT / Enghouse Interactive
Smart Advice for Utility Companies: Better Meters Require
Better Communication Channels
Ken Barton
John Cray
David Howard
Jay Minnucci
Kathleen M. Peterson
Koren Stucki
TECHNOLOGY DIRECTOR, EMERITUS
Steve Harden
Print and Online Advertising Inquiries:
[email protected]
(443) 909-6951
www.contactcenterpipeline.com
PUBLISHING GROUP Inc.
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Cover Illustration by Eric Jackson @ecjaxson
OCT 2014
❘
CONTACT CENTER PIPELINE
03
FEATURE | ADDING VALUE THROUGH MOBILE
Continued from page 1
BY PROVIDING
AGENTS WITH A
FULL HISTORY OF
SMS MESSAGES,
AGENTS DON’T
HAVE TO TAKE
THREE STEPS
BACK IN ORDER
TO MOVE
FORWARD WITH A
CUSTOMER.
when, where and how customers are
using their mobile devices.
Having a mobile presence has
become a requirement and not just
a nice-to-have, says Jennifer Waite,
product marketing manager at
inContact. “Customers have gotten
to the point where they expect companies to be where they are. People
aren’t always at home when they
make phone calls or sitting in front
of a desktop computer while searching for information. They’re in their
cars, they’re running errands—they’re
doing a search while they’re waiting
and have a few spare moments.”
For some companies, that may
require a 24/7 or follow-the-sun
service strategy, she says. At the
most basic, companies need to
clearly communicate when they are
available to customers. “Customers
don’t necessarily expect 24/7 service in the mobile channel, but it’s
important to let customers know
when you’re not available and when
they can expect a response.”
TRANSPARENT
BACKGROUND
SUPPORT, WHICH
ALLOWS THE USER
TO SEE THE SITE
BEHIND THE CHAT
WINDOW, MAKES
A SIGNIFICANT
IMPACT ON
CUSTOMER
ENGAGEMENT
IN LIGHT OF THE
SMALLER SCREEN
OF A MOBILE
DEVICE.
Connecting via Mobile
MARINA KALIKA,
How can companies leverage
mobile-enabled channels to add
value for customers? The following
are a few communication tools that
offer considerable opportunities to
enhance the mobile service experience. For more insights on how to
improve the mobile customer service experience, see “5 Things You
Do That Annoy Your Customers in
Today’s Connected World,” on page 9.
Director of
Product Marketing,
TouchCommerce
CLICK TO TALK
AND CLICK TO CHAT
The simplest way to incorporate a
mobile presence into the contact
center is by inserting a click-totalk or click-to-chat button on the
website. This allows customers who
access the company’s website from
JENNIFER WAITE,
Product Marketing
Manager, inContact
a mobile device to get instantly connected to the contact center to have
their issue handled, Waite says.
Some companies are taking it a
step further by monitoring the presence of a visitor on their mobile site,
she adds. For instance, when a visitor lingers too long on a certain web
page or keeps returning to the same
page, a chat box will pop up with an
invitation to connect with an agent.
Since mobile screen space is
limited, offering chat as a transparent overlay helps to keep the
customer connected to the website
with which they’re interacting, says
Marina Kalika, director of product
marketing for TouchCommerce, a
provider of online engagement
solutions. Companies can customize chat skins that allow customers
to see the brand’s website in the
background behind the chat, as well
as actions, such as when the agent
is typing, to assure customers that
the live conversation is still in progress and they haven’t disconnected.
TouchCommerce’s mobile chat solution also helps to keep customers
engaged in the conversation with its
minimized chat mode that offers a
scrolling marquee which displays the
most recent agent message and an
incremental message indicator that
displays the number of unread agent
messages.
TEXT MESSAGING
Text messaging is quickly becoming a preferred method for simple
service-related tasks. A recent Harris
Poll, on behalf of cloud-based business communications platform provider OneReach, found that 64% of
U.S. adults who have text messaging
capability say that they would prefer
to perform some types of customer
service activities through text messaging versus over the phone. The
types of service activities included
checking order status, scheduling/
changing appointments, making/
confirming reservations, asking
questions, finding store locations,
refilling orders and resetting passwords.
Mobile SMS provides an ideal first
point of contact since conversations
can be captured, which can provide
critical insights for the next agent
who needs to pick up the interaction,
says inContact’s Waite. With contactaware SMS capability, mobile SMS
Continued on page 06
04
❘
OCT 2014
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messages can be routed through the
universal queue to the appropriate
agent, who can interact with the
customer in a two-way conversation
via mobile text. inContact’s cloud
contact center solution captures and
routes the full SMS/text history and
conversation ensuring a seamless
experience across multiple interactions for customers. “By providing
contact center agents with a full
history of all of the SMS messages,
agents don’t have to take three
steps back in order to move forward
with a customer,” she adds.
Waite says that companies are
even beginning to advertise SMS
as their new method of self-service
since simple transactions can be
more effectively handled via mobile.
For instance, a bank customer who
wants to find out his balance can
simply text an inquiry. With that
keyword and the phone number
that is associated with the account,
the bank can send him the balance
information. It’s a quick, streamlined
transaction versus the multiple steps
customers typically would have to
take to get the same information
via IVR or web self-service.
CO-BROWSING
While SMS and click-to-talk/chat
are the more common types of
mobile service interactions that
companies are implementing today,
also available but not yet widely
adopted is mobile co-browsing,
in which agents and customers
can access the same web pages.
Co-browsing capabilities allow organizations to offer enhanced technical support, shopping assistance or
real-time help with online forms, just
to name a few examples.
Co-browsing can be integrated
with workflow technology to provide The Mobile Experience
an easy-to-use communication tool Is About Convenience
that delivers an interactive workflow Consumers are starting to spend
experience which is shared with cus- almost as much time using their
COBROWSING
CAN BE
ESPECIALLY
HELPFUL DURING
COMPLEX
TRANSACTIONS
IN WHICH
CUSTOMERS
WANT TO
HAVE A MORE
INTERACTIVE
EXPERIENCE.
MATT LAUTZ,
President and CIO,
CorvisaCloud
06
tomers, says Matt Lautz, president
and CIO of cloud communications
provider CorvisaCloud. This can be
especially helpful during complex
transactions in which customers
want to have a more interactive
experience with the agent. He
points to the insurance industry as
an example, where calls to help new
customers navigate plan options
and fill out complex application
forms can last as long as an hour.
Workflow technology embedded into
the CorvisaOne contact center product suite and platform allows centers
to provide an interactive experience
by sharing portions of the workflow
with the customer.
“Callers can see the steps on their
smartphone or tablet, and they
can interact with it,” Lautz explains.
“When customers call to talk about
insurance options, instead of having
the agent read those to them, they
can view the information onscreen
and walk through the steps in realtime with the agent.”
The ability to both hear and view
complex details ensures that callers
have a better understanding of the
information, and helps to decrease
talk time. “The transformation to
mobile has powerful benefits not
just for the consumer, but when used
appropriately, also for the agent and
the organization,” Lautz says.
❘
OCT 2014
smartphones and tablets as they
spend watching television (127
minutes per day vs. 168, according
to mobile analytics firm Flurry). Or
doing both. Analytics firm Nielsen
found that 88% of consumers use
their tablet or smartphone while
watching TV.
That is what makes mobile channels such a strong differentiator for
brands like Total Gym Fitness. As a
brand that promotes its products
through television infomercials, it’s
very common for viewers to pick
up their smartphone or tablet to
look for more information about
the products being advertised.“We
have realized that our customer’s
first touchpoint on mobile is a very
important one,” says Vice President
of Marketing Joe Crowley.
But purchasing a big-ticket item,
such as home gym exercise equipment, is not a decision that most
consumers make lightly. “Customers
will frequently need multiple touchpoints with our organization before
they ultimately make the decision
to try the product in their home,”
Crowley says. “Our customers’ expectations are that, no matter what
device they pick up at any given time,
they want to be able to interact with
us—24/7, 365 days a year.”
Four years ago, Total Gym partnered with TouchCommerce to
provide live chat for its desktop
site, and more recently, added its
mobile chat solution to the channel
mix. Importantly, the experience is
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offers a live chat
experience that is
tailored for customers
using mobile devices.
tailored for the mobile device. “The
customer who is on a mobile device
may have very different types of
questions,” Crowley says. “They may
be less educated about the product [than a desktop visitor], so the
mobile chat interaction becomes
a critical first touchpoint to answer
their questions.”
Total Gym’s call center agents are
trained to adjust their responses
when interacting with customers via
mobile chat. While the call center
uses a conversational-based selling approach over the phone and
via desktop chat, which involves
engaging with customers to find
out about their goals and objectives,
mobile chat calls for much briefer
responses. “Excessive verbiage can
look very intimidating on a mobile
screen, to the point that potential
customers might close the chat and
move on,” Crowley says.
Besides providing a convenient
and always-accessible channel
for customers, the benefits of chat,
overall, have been considerable for
Total Gym, Crowley says.
“We get so much information from
chat—it’s like having a focus group
of your customers telling your agents
what they can and cannot find on
your website,” he adds. “It allows
us to make the improvements that
benefit our customers.”
Susan Hash is the Editor of Contact Center Pipeline.
@SusanHash
[email protected]
(206) 552-8831
@ccpipeline
FOLLOW
08
❘
OCT 2014
ON
5 Things You
Do That Annoy
Your Customers
in Today’s
Connected
World
By David Howard
IT’S AN INCREASINGLY CONNECTED WORLD. MORE AND MORE, YOUR CUSTOMERS ARE USING
SMARTPHONES—ONE RESEARCH REPORT BY OVUM PREDICTS THAT, BY 2016, 36% OF ALL
INBOUND SERVICE CALLS WILL BE MADE ON A SMARTPHONE. WITH ALL OF THE PERMUTATIONS
OF THE INTERNET AND AVAILABLE CONTACT CHANNELS DENSELY PACKED INTO A SINGLE HANDHELD DEVICE, CONSUMERS NOWADAYS RARELY NEED TO MANUALLY PUNCH IN A TELEPHONE
NUMBER—THEY TYPICALLY DO SO ONLY WHEN ADDING A NEW CONTACT.
Smartphones allow your customers to talk, text and exchange pictures with their friends and family
as they see fit. They also provide another unique feature—time travel.
Despite the powerful technology embedded in smartphones, the moment your customers
call your business, they’re taken back to the last century:
1. They typically have to dial your toll-free number digit by digit on the keypad.
2. They struggle with complex IVRs, when what they really want is a live agent to quickly resolve
their problem—and what you really want is for them to resolve their problem in the IVR
without using a representative’s expensive time.
3. Resigned to waiting for a live agent, your customers can’t do anything but listen to on-hold
music, because they’re afraid that they will miss your service representative when he or she
picks up the call and then have to start all over again.
4. T hey have to provide their personal information to your service representative, and explain
the reason for their call, often to more than one representative. And if the call gets dropped
at any one point, they have to repeat the entire ordeal.
5. If there are any support documents to be exchanged to close the transaction, they have to
be faxed separately, with your customer wondering if you received and properly logged them.
Sure, all of this is usually easier and faster than sending a letter, but consumer expectations
have changed in a significant way, and the available technology can support much, much more.
People hate waiting. Federal Express was able to succeed with overnight package delivery because
“waiting is frustrating, demoralizing, agonizing, aggravating, annoying, time consuming and incredibly expensive.”
In the classic service formula, Satisfaction = Perception – Expectation, waiting drives Perception
up, and Satisfaction down.
But you can do things differently.
By leveraging your customers’ smart phone, it is possible to improve the inbound service
call experience:
1. Offer a “contact us” button, embedded in relevant locations of your mobile app.
2. The moment that button is pushed, provide to the contact center all of the information your
mobile app knows about the customer. This could be their profile information, an account
number for a database dip, their recent app activities, even a geographic location.
3. Inform them of their estimated wait time and let them go on with their lives, until the
representative is available and their smartphone alerts them. Place a lower-cost outbound
call to your customer.
4. B
etter yet, involve your customer by requesting the additional information your representative
might need to help them, before that representative comes on the line. Have your customer
type it into a chat window or into a custom form, or have them send a photograph of
relevant documents.
5. With simultaneous voice and chat, the call may terminate and then be reestablished at
any time as needed, helping save time in long transactions and reducing costs on inbound
toll-free.
David Howard is Director of Marketing at Bright Pattern,
www.brightpattern.com.
Not many companies do this today. But those who do (Amazon, for example, does most of the
above) raise the bar for customer expectations, lowering customer satisfaction for everybody else.
OCT 2014
❘
ContactCenterPipeline.com
09
THE VIEW FROM THE SADDLE
PAUL STOCKFORD
THE HEROES
AMONG US
Sometimes even the simplest of acts in the
contact center creates an instant hero.
By Paul Stockford, Saddletree Research
“MY HEROES
HAVE ALWAYS
BEEN COWBOYS,
AND THEY
STILL ARE
IT SEEMS.”
W
illie Nelson sang it.
I lived it. Not that I
grew up on a ranch
or anything, I just always wanted to be a cowboy
when I grew up. In some ways I still do.
When I was a kid growing up in Redwood City,
Calif., before it became Silicon Valley, we could
go to the Fox Theater in downtown Redwood City
every Wednesday during the summer and see
movies all afternoon for 50 cents. Back in those
innocent days, most of the movies we’d see were
old Gene Autry and Roy Rogers movies from the
’40s and ’50s. Most were in black and white
and, no matter what, the good guys always won.
Gene and Roy were my heroes, and they were
heroes to generations of kids who dreamed of
riding the range.
10
❘
OCT 2014
As we grow older, and more skeptical, finding
heroes becomes a bit more difficult. Despite
Gene and Roy’s sparkling white teeth, crisply
pressed fringed shirts and polished boots with
fancy tops, I eventually learned that most cowboys aren’t like Gene and Roy at all. In reality,
most cowboys are day-working drifters who
spend most of their lives living and working
on large feedlots and commercial ranches for
very little money. Most don’t even make enough
money to own their own horse.
Today, the cult of celebrity has made fauxheroes out of action movie stars, but once the
cameras stop rolling, I don’t think Sly Rocky
Rambo is really that much of a hero. On the
other hand, I am heartened by the hero status
that is bestowed upon active-duty military and
military veterans these days. As a veteran of
the late Vietnam era, I can tell you that wasn’t
always the case.
Sometimes heroes appear where we least
expect to find them. Sometimes heroes are
ordinary people doing extraordinary things,
often below the radar and without fanfare or
adulation. Sometimes heroes are right under
our noses and we don’t realize it. Sometimes
heroes work in contact centers.
Regular readers of this column know that I
work under contract as research director for the
National Association of Call Centers (NACC) at
the University of Southern Mississippi. In that
capacity, I am fortunate enough to spend a lot
of time talking to contact center professionals, so much so that last year I started writing a member-focused feature in the NACC’s
monthly newsletter. The feature, called “Meet the
Members,” focuses on one NACC member each
month. I interview them and ask them about
their career in customer service, how they got
started in customer service, and so on. One of
the things I always ask the featured member is
to share one of their most memorable contact
center experiences.
For the August issue of the NACC newsletter,
called In Queue, I interviewed Diane McCarty
who is the Director of Direct Sales and Customer
Service at Things Remembered, the nation’s
largest retailer of personalized gifts and a name
likely familiar to all readers. I asked Diane the
usual question about a memorable contact
center experience and her answer stopped me
in my tracks.
Diane told me about a customer they
assisted this summer who had a very special
set of needs. The customer was terminally ill
and he wanted to purchase engraved gifts for
his wife, children and loved ones to be delivered
to them over the next 10 years. Diane assigned
account specialist Jody Saunders to assist this
customer and, over a period of two weeks, Jody
helped the customer select anniversary gifts for
his wife and birthday gifts for his children to be
opened in the future. Jody kept Diane and her
team updated on a daily basis while leaning on
them for emotional support through the entire
heart-wrenching process.
Jody worked with a sense of urgency, providing
gift suggestions as well as message inspiration.
She was able to maintain her composure as she
helped the customer to deliver his final message
to loved ones and friends. The customer has
since passed away. What Jody did, with the help
and emotional support of Diane and her team,
is in every way heroic.
Sometimes even the simplest of acts in the
contact center creates an instant hero. Maureen
Donzuso, who is a Director at AtlantiCare in New
Jersey told me about a recent experience in her
contact center. You’ve probably read that several casinos in Atlantic City are closing, leaving
@paulstockford
AS WE GROW OLDER, AND MORE SKEPTICAL, FINDING HEROES BECOMES A BIT
MORE DIFFICULT. DESPITE GENE AND ROY’S SPARKLING WHITE TEETH, CRISPLY
PRESSED FRINGED SHIRTS AND POLISHED BOOTS WITH FANCY TOPS, I EVENTUALLY
LEARNED THAT MOST COWBOYS AREN’T LIKE GENE AND ROY AT ALL.
SOMETIMES
HEROES APPEAR
WHERE WE LEAST
EXPECT TO FIND
THEM.
SOMETIMES HEROES
ARE ORDINARY
PEOPLE DOING
EXTRAORDINARY
THINGS, OFTEN
BELOW THE RADAR
AND WITHOUT
FANFARE OR
ADULATION.
SOMETIMES HEROES
ARE RIGHT UNDER
OUR NOSES AND WE
DON’T REALIZE IT.
SOMETIMES HEROES
WORK IN CONTACT
CENTERS.
ILLUSTRATIONS BY DAVID PADROSA
staffers without work or health care benefits.
AtlantiCare received a request from two New
Jersey citizen groups for volunteers who could
in facing his situation. We sometimes become
jaded in the day-in, day-out of our work life.
This encounter really brought alive the power of
provide counseling assistance for these newly
unemployed workers in navigating the Health
Insurance Marketplace, aka Obamacare.
Maureen along with two of her team members, Milagros (Millie) Rodgiruez and Kimberly
Nasseredine, volunteered to help. Turns out that
Millie speaks Spanish and Kimberly speaks
Arabic, which proved to be critically important
in not only helping these recently unemployed
workers, but in easing their anxiety and providing
a sense of relief in an extremely stressful situation. As Maureen told me, “When Millie and Kim
walked up to some of the workers and greeted
them with a big hello in their native tongue, the
look of relief on their faces was a moment I will
not soon forget. In the true spirit of AtlantiCare,
they were honoring our culture of serving others.”
I have to admit, I have thought many times
about the terminally ill customer at Things
Remembered since Diane McCarty told me
about him. I asked her what was going through
her mind as she, Jody and the rest of her team
worked through this unique circumstance. Diane
said, “It was primarily a feeling of gratitude, followed by sadness and wonder at his bravery
relationships and the true connection we have
with our customers and with each other at work.”
I guess I’m fortunate in that I never quite
lived the dream of being a real cowboy although
these days I live on a small ranch with horses
and dogs in the high Sonoran desert of Arizona.
Just like Gene and Roy, I wear boots and a hat
pretty much every day, but I’ve never been able
to pull off the fancy fringed shirt look.
On the other hand, most contact center
customer service representatives live like Jody,
Diane, Maureen, Millie and Kimberly every day.
Want to see a real hero or two? Forget about
Sly Rocky Rambo. Just look around your contact
center.
Paul Stockford is Chief
Analyst at Saddletree
Research, which specializes
in contact centers &
customer service.
[email protected]
(480) 922-5949
OCT 2014
❘
11
CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE JANET LEBLANC
CUSTOMER
EXPERIENCE:
THE ULTIMATE
INNOVATION
Customer experience innovation
will differentiate your organization
from your competitors.
D
eveloping a new product feature and
enhancing a service through new
technology are standard examples
of innovation. They are also the simplest forms
of innovation: Ongoing upgrades and improvements are common sense business objectives
and yet rarely can they offer a sustainable competitive advantage. New products and services
are often copied as fast as they are invented.
Compare this to customer experience
management, which Jeffrey Phillips, author
of Relentless Innovation, characterizes as the
“ultimate innovation”—a forward-thinking investment that can distinguish organizations from
their competitors and continually drive business
results to new heights.
Recognizing that each customer is forming
(and likely sharing) opinions about a company
in multiple, diverse and ongoing ways, it is
critical to consider the impact of the end-to-end
customer experience. Is the customer journey
mapped out? Is it designed to impress customers so that they crave more of it? Is the customer
experience differentiating the company brand,
building and strengthening customer loyalty, and
earning positive reviews and referrals?
The Ritz-Carlton Hotel provides a truly unique
and exceptional customer experience. Walking
through the hotel lobby is like a symphony
where every employee makes eye contact with
a guest when they are 15 feet away and verbally
By Janet LeBlanc
Janet LeBlanc + Associates Inc.
@janet_leblanc
12
❘
OCT 2014
acknowledges a guest when they are five feet
away. This one simple interaction point provides
a truly unique experience that is memorable and
continues to differentiate The Ritz-Carlton from
many hotels around the world.
Unlike the quest for continuous improvement through product and service enhancements, a differentiated customer experience is
remarkably difficult for competitors to replicate.
Organizations that design and consistently
deliver an innovative and unique customer
experience model are better able to attract and
retain customers as lifelong advocates who are
more willing to choose brand loyalty over price.
Innovating Beyond
Customer-Facing Processes
Many organizations today focus customer experience innovation on process improvement—
eliminating non-value-added steps in a process
to reduce the effort customers must make to
fulfill their task. Years of multiple cost-reduction
strategies and efficiency improvements have left
many organizations servicing customers based
on bare-bones service standards and support. In
fact, there are relatively few organizations today
that use innovation to focus on customer delight
rather than process efficiency.
As another point of interest, most customer
experience innovation is channeled into the
front line, such as sales, service and retail functions. A North American benchmarking study on
customer-centricity conducted in 2014 by Janet
LeBlanc + Associates Inc., in collaboration with
the Peppers & Rogers Group, reported that only
20% of companies indicated an excellent rating on their ability to proactively use customer
feedback to improve back-end processes.
In addition, a Deloitte report on customercentricity stated, “Often, non-customer-facing
business units form the greatest obstacle in
preventing a company from becoming truly
customer-centric. Organizations often do not
focus on creating the required mindsets, behaviors and processes within the back and head
office teams.”
Focusing customer feedback strictly on
improving customer-facing processes and
interactions shows a lack of understanding of
the relationship between the front office and
back office in delivering exceptional experiences.
Back-office or head-office teams are usually so
far removed from the customer experience that
they have a limited understanding of customer
needs and expectations.
TAKE THE JOURNEY
Pa#ent Customer Experience Journey Supplies & Associated Cost First Injec7on & Managing Side Eﬀects C
USTOMER EXPERIENCE JOURNEY MAPPING
is an effective method for understanding the end-toend experience from the customer’s perspective. It is
one of the best tools used today for understanding
how customers interact with a company, clearly pinpointing
when and where they experience satisfaction, frustration,
amazement, disappointment, appreciation or judgment. This
method also identifies what motivates customers to move
from one stage of the journey to the next.
More specifically, a customer experience journey map is
a graphical representation of every interaction a customer
has—or could have—with a company and brand (see Figure
1). It uses graphics, pictures and visual cues to illustrate and
examine all encounters from a customers’ point of view. The
foundation of a customer experience journey map includes
the archetypical steps customers travel when going from
Point A to Point B of their journey as they attempt to achieve
a goal or satisfy a need.
Journey maps provide one of the best methods for
understanding how customers interact with an organization
by looking at the customer experience, not from an internal
Figure 1: Example of a Patient
Customer Experience Journey
1 view, but rather from the customer’s perspective. This
important perspective provides a proven framework to
uncover moments of truth and opportunities to delight or
WOW customers. A customer experience journey map also
shows how different departments work together to interact
with the customer and reveals the influence of various
functions on the inputs and outputs of the end-to-end
customer journey.
“Your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of
learning,” says Bill Gates. When done correctly, customer
experience journey mapping identifies high-priority barriers
and opportunities for a great experience. As the number and
complexity of customer interactions increase, the need for
experience mapping becomes critical.
Experience mapping provides an opportunity to take a
holistic view of the customer’s physical and emotional
journey and design ways to differentiate the experience
from competitive offerings. It offers a proven framework to
uncover moments of truth and key opportunities to bring an
experience to life—seamlessly across all touchpoints, with
measurable results.
OCT 2014
❘
13
CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE | CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE: THE ULTIMATE INNOVATION
?
?
Employees at all levels
of the organization
must be engaged in
the innovation process
and understand how
their role impacts the
customer experience.
?
Everyone has the capacity to innovate.
However, innovation must be cultivated as a
competency throughout an organization and
cannot be an occasional occurrence. It must
become a sustainable capability of employees
who have the necessary skills to progressively
create and implement innovative ideas.
4 Steps to Advancing
Customer Experience Innovation
Brainstorming is only one step in the innovation process. Most ideas are developed and
constructed through a series of activities and
events that form the innovation process. There
are four steps to advancing customer experience
innovation:
IDENTIFY CHALLENGING
ISSUES TO DEFINE EMERGING
OPPORTUNITIES
Monitor market trends to uncover future customer needs. Use market research to identify
challenging customer issues that might, in fact,
open up new business opportunities if they are
solved through innovation. Evaluate emerging
social, economic and technological trends to
identify the implications of those trends on
customers. Use search engine tools such as
NowRelevant, which shows you everything on a
subject that has been mentioned on the web in
the last two weeks, or Trends Buzz, which lists
trending topics from Twitter, Wikipedia, Yahoo,
Google, The New York Times, Wordtracker and
more.
RESEARCH AND UNDERSTAND
CUSTOMER NEEDS
Explore the end-to-end customer
14
❘
OCT 2014
experience journey to identify customer pain
points and challenges. Use customer experience journey mapping (see “Take the Journey”)
to understand how customers interact with an
organization by looking at the customer experience, not from an internal point-of-view, but
rather from the customer’s perspective. Break
down complex processes into fundamental
steps and group problem areas into themes for
ideation.
GENERATE NEW IDEAS
AND DISCOVER NEW
TECHNOLOGIES
Collect as many ideas as possible by using
a variety of methods. Engage all parts of the
organization, both front and back office, in the
ideation process with a spirit of inclusivity. Rarely
will one person develop a winning idea, but
more often seeds of ideas will be constructed
together through a collaborative approach. Use
multiple methods to generate ideas including
telephone sessions, in-person ideation workshops, or intranet suggestion boxes to collect
multiple ideas. Create a risk-free environment
for brainstorming by deferring judgment on all
posted ideas.
SELECT THE BEST SOLUTION
TO FULFILL CUSTOMER
EXPECTATIONS
The fourth step requires evaluation of the ideas
in an effort to filter out extraneous information
and any ideas that may be out of scope for the
project. Be sure to have both employees and
customers evaluate the ideas using approved
criteria. For example, employee evaluation criteria could be based on the feasibility of the
idea, time to market, and likelihood of success.
As another example, customer-specific criteria
could be based on the potential of the idea
to solve a customer problem and strengthen
customer loyalty.
Engage All Levels
of the Organization
Creating exceptional customer experiences
through innovation requires a relentless focus on
understanding and fulfilling customer needs. Far
beyond standard product and service enhancements which are process-oriented, it’s critical to
focus on the many touchpoints of a customer’s
end-to-end journey. This should extend beyond
the front lines to include the back-office and
head-office teams—their decisions and behavior
can also directly or indirectly impact whether a
customer has a good experience.
To this end, employees at all levels of the
organization must be engaged in the innovation
process and understand how their role impacts
the customer experience. When the core purpose
of an organization is centered on delighting customers, every employee will look for opportunities to innovate. As customer loyalty grows and
multiplies, so will revenue streams.
Janet LeBlanc is an award-winning
authority on customer value and
experience management. She
consults for companies around
the world by transforming how
they interact with clients, deliver a
branded customer experience, and
achieve measurable performance
improvements.
[email protected]
(613) 730-2709
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INDUSTRY FOCUS KATHLEEN M. PETERSON
BACKSTAGE AT
THE PATIENT
EXPERIENCE:
CENTRALIZED
APPOINTMENT
SCHEDULING
Deliver on the behind-the-scenes
elements to choreograph a showstopping patient experience
performance.
S
etting the Stage: Health care is an
industry whose services we all use or
need at one time or another in our
lives. Its role and purpose have not changed
in centuries, but the tools, structure, regulation
and management have been changing in ways
never before imagined.
Hospitals are merging and acquiring at a rapid
pace to form “systems.” Physician practices are
being acquired to streamline patient access,
improve response time and care, increase efficiencies and improve revenue. As these systems
take shape, the patient experience takes “center
stage” and there are massive organizational and
operational changes undertaken “backstage.”
Health care, like all businesses with mergers
and acquisitions, must address the functional
realignment needed to eliminate redundancies
and posture the organization for growth. Within
this realm, the contact center emerges as an
organizational solution to meet the needs of
today’s changing health care systems and the
necessity for easy and efficient patient access.
This article focuses on what is required “backstage” and “behind the scenes” for success in
centralizing physician appointment scheduling.
By Kathleen M. Peterson
PowerHouse Consulting Inc.
Realities
We have worked with many health care clients
to meet the challenge of streamlining access
16
❘
OCT 2014
for patients (and providers). Access has been
a consumer issue for decades. Trying to get
through to a physician’s office can be frustrating.
Office hours are not consumer friendly… closed
for lunch, not open Friday afternoons, and never
open on weekends. Voicemail has been the go-to
treatment in many practices; call-backs are not
always timely and frustrated consumers sometimes take their business elsewhere. Patients/
consumers want easy access and appointments
within a reasonable period at a convenient location. Patients look at cost and quality, as well;
high-deductible insurance plans have changed
the way patients make decisions about providers. Ease of access impacts that decision.
Hospital systems acquiring physician practices and clinics in multiple locations are wellpoised to provide ease of access to their patient
population; more providers and locations within
the system make for timely and geographically
attractive options. The system also enjoys
improved utilization of physicians, physician’s
assistants and nurse practitioners as well as the
ability to support growth. The obvious challenge
is that no one physician’s office is equipped to
handle systemwide scheduling. Enter the Central
Scheduling Contact Center… taking center stage
for patient access!
Strategic Elements
Access is the strategic component of centralizing appointment scheduling; how it is done
determines whether we have a hit or a flop.
Centralization is the only intelligent way to offer
the patient, in a single contact, access to the
most effective and convenient provider. But logic
is only half the story. A lot goes on backstage!
Behind the scenes is a lot of emotion.
Physicians, once the star of the show, are
becoming something akin to the “studio actor.”
They are under contract and bound by the operational direction of the system. While the physician performs the same show, the backstage
has been altered completely. The “star power” is
shifting to the audience; the patient is in control!
Physicians perceive they are losing control; getting them onboard with the mission is the No.
1 point of success or failure. Those who thought
otherwise have paid a serious price.
Centralization efforts must be carefully crafted,
brilliantly planned and sensibly executed. The
business drivers are clear; patient access is
a strategic objective that creates market differentiation. This contributes to top-line growth
(increased market share) while efficiencies
gained contribute to the bottom line. When
patients can connect via any “channel” with the
system in a simple and streamlined way, life is
“easier.” This is critical in an industry fraught with
emotionally charged situations.
To choreograph a true patient experience performance, critical backstage activity must occur.
The strategic vision must be defined in a way
that allows for adoption at all enterprise levels.
Executing without clarity is like going on stage
without a script. “Ad libbing” is a very chancy
execution and one prone to failure.
The Role of Executives
“PROGRESS IS
IMPOSSIBLE
WITHOUT CHANGE,
AND THOSE WHO
CANNOT CHANGE
THEIR MINDS
CANNOT CHANGE
ANYTHING.”
—GEORGE
BERNARD SHAW
In my experience, senior executives across
industries have difficulty articulating specific
desired elements of the customer experience.
When asked the key elements, executives typically “ad lib” a general response. Health care
leaders are no different. We hear responses such
as:
“We want our patient experience to be a market differentiator.”
“We want it to WOW.”
“We want the experience to be GREAT.”
None of these describes the desired outcome
in behavioral, measurable or manageable terms.
Conversely, consider these elements:
●●
Know patients as individuals;
●●
Respond to caller’s needs;
●●
●●
Anticipate and meet enthusiastically
the needs of patients, physicians and
coworkers;
Make services easily accessible via
multiple channels; and
Make responses proactive, empathetic
and timely.
Once elements are defined and documented,
the alignment of processes, technology and
human factors can be applied to the “script.”
Decisions can now be made: What will be the
best technology? Do our processes support the
vision? What “intangibles” (human, information
and organizational factors) must be considered?
●●
Previously Protected Rituals
Contact centers are not new to health care
(hospitals practically invented switchboards!).
However, centralized scheduling is a new and
challenging performance. To get it right requires
patience, calm and understanding; this change
is massive for many established practices.
Physicians are very protective of their schedules—a “protected ritual” for centuries. The physician whose schedule is managed by a dedicated
secretary perceives themselves to have more
flexibility and control than one managed by an
enterprise. The transition to centralization challenges both that perception and reality. Where
once the dedicated scheduler understood tacitly
that every third hour should be left open, the
centralized scheduling environment may be
directed to fill all open slots.
Success of the centralization effort requires
clear, open and ongoing conversations with
the physician practices; it is critical to manage
the impact of changes to “previously protected
rituals.” An often undervalued aspect of change
management that provides comfort and confidence at the practice level is the message that
the contact center will do no harm!
An additional challenge is in hiring; in many
organizations, the contact center recruits from
the practice. Moving appointment scheduling out
of the practice (system practices often house
several physicians) assumes some redundancy
will occur. This further challenges physicians
because the enterprise’s centralization efforts
now hit very close to home by recruiting “their”
people or making “their” people redundant.
Consider two initiatives. First, change management is essential to minimize the impact
of change; providing project information in a
timely and consistent manner keeps people in
the loop and honesty mitigates fear. Secondly,
those recruited from the practice must meet
contact center requirements. Schedulers in the
practices often perform other tasks that do not
exist in the contact center. There are also more
key performance indicators (KPIs) than were ever
seen at the practice (e.g., adherence, call quality). These components render the contact center
job very different than the scheduling function
within the practice. It is critical to be clear about
how the jobs differ in order to identify those well
suited and to weed out those poorly suited to
the environment. Often, process audits must be
undertaken at the practice level to determine
true staffing requirements.
Developing Protocols
Managing centralized appointment scheduling
involves building custom appointment protocols
for each physician. Most physicians will begin by
OCT 2014
❘
17
INDUSTRY FOCUS | BACKSTAGE AT THE PATIENT EXPERIENCE
articulating how different their practice is; usually when one digs deeper, similarities trump
differences. Documenting appointment types is
critical: new patients, existing patients, followup
appointments, etc. The EMR (Electronic Medical
Records) is the source for appointment types;
scheduling history provides insight to most
utilized appointment types. Documenting physician preferences and information requirements
is critical for a successful contact center.
The contact center must also look at protocols
in terms of simplification. I have witnessed protocol documents that span pages within three-ring
binders—the result of the contact center asking
broadly, “What do you want us to do?” This openended question often yields a script the length of
King Lear and is a setup for failure. Today, there
are centralized scheduling tools often based
within the EMR that streamline appointment
types. When onboarding a new practice, one of
our client contact center leaders always reviews
the previous six months of appointments to
determine the frequency of appointment types.
The ensuing discussion brings a consultative
aspect to the migration.
More Than Just Scheduling
More goes on backstage! Contact center schedulers must be in partnership with the practice.
Patients calling for an appointment may have
questions for the physicians themselves, may
have complications, or may need something
(e.g., prescription refills) that the contact center
cannot provide. This requires a call transfer to
the practice. One of our clients requires that, as
part of the patient experience, all calls must be
able to be “warm” transferred to the practice…
that is, a transfer with an announcement. This
requires a “must answer” line at the practice
to allow quick and seamless handling of the
patient’s request.
A bonus program in many centralized scheduling environments is a nurse triage team that
is authorized to answer medical questions. This
provides another service to the practice and
patients; patients don’t have to wait for answers,
and practices don’t have to use their nursing
staff for patient calls.
In addition to physician appointments, other
types of scheduling include procedures, tests
and lab work. Many systems have now moved
18
❘
OCT 2014
to centralized imaging (MRI, CT Scans, etc.)
appointments. It is easier on the practices; they
no longer have to toggle between the patient and
the imaging center. It is easier on the patient; for
most, it is a one-and-done contact. It is better
for the hospital because the utilization of the
machines involved balances out the cost. This
is a true value-add function!
Technical Infrastructure
Centralization requires a robust telecommunications and network infrastructure to support the
patient experience. While warm transfers are
important, so is maintaining the practice identity.
Answering calls with the practice name goes a
long way to ease the transition to a centralized
environment. A referral matrix, developed with
the practice, assures compliance with patient/
provider preferences.
Important technologies include a “single
sign-on” or “smart desktop” to allow agents to
easily navigate the multiple systems necessary
to facilitate scheduling. Mapping software allows
agents to match a patient’s preferred location
to clinic locations. Online job aids/knowledge
bases allow for fast and seamless access to
required information. A robust quality recording
system and program assures that the patient
experience remains the focal point while capabilities for reporting and speech analytics provide for deeper and richer “business intelligence.”
Closing the Show
As you consider what it takes to centralize physician appointment scheduling, keep in mind that
it is NOT about the contact center. It is about
delivering on those backstage elements… the
vision, the business drivers and the patient
experience. The contact center is the vehicle;
the transition begins with the strategy and the
planning. It ends with the contact center!
Kathleen M. Peterson
is the Chief Vision
Officer at PowerHouse
Consulting, a call center
and telecommunications
consulting firm.
[email protected]
(800) 449-9904
CONTACT CENTER
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SPONSOR SPOTLIGHT
MIKE BURKE
WEBRTC TESTING FOR TODAY’S
CONTACT CENTERS
By Mike Burke, VP Sales & Business Development
WEBRTC IS AN EXCITING,
DISRUPTIVE TECHNOLOGY
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CUSTOMER INTERACTION
WITH YOUR CONTACT CENTER AGENTS MUCH EASIER
THAN ANYTHING THAT’S COME BEFORE IT.
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It is predicted that WebRTC will be available
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to deploy WebRTC interactions to minimize
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metric) or to bypass costly toll-free calls, the
only way to be certain your WebRTC-enabled
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customers’ expectations is to load-test your
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As part of a StressTest™ load and performance test, IQ Services can create tens, hundreds or even thousands of concurrent transactions to access your system and exercise your
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As part of an ongoing HeartBeat™ availability and performance monitoring engagement, IQ Services initiates unique WebRTC
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MIKE BURKE has banked more than 40 years in telecommunications, contact centers and networking while working at Honeywell, GTE, Verizon & IQ
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experience for clients worldwide. Prior to joining IQ Services, Mike was involved in a 1990s Internet startup, wrote code for Centrex, designed and built
networks for the DoD and helped introduce DSL services for the RBOCs. In the rare moment when he breaks away from his desk at IQ Services, Mike can
be found fishing deep in the Canadian wilderness at the Grand Slam Lodge.
20
❘
OCT 2014
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Your Team Behind the Scenes
We Put the Heart into HeartBeat™
IQ Services does things differently. We designed HeartBeat™ availability and performance monitoring
to access contact center technology from the outside-in, so you’ll know how end-users experience your
technology, not how your technology experiences end-users. HeartBeat™ monitoring collects actionable
data 24/7, including verification of step responses and response times. The insight provided will help
accelerate root cause analysis, and it may even warm your heart. Contact us to learn more about
HeartBeat™ monitoring and how it can help optimize your customers’ service experience.
The beat goes on.
Dalton Zilles
Availability Analyst
Mike Hamann
Lead Monitoring Analyst
Colin Koch
Availability Analyst
Suzanne Boston
Availability Monitoring Manager
LEADING THOUGHTS
KOREN STUCKI
CHALLENGES TO
UNDERSTANDING
CUSTOMER
JOURNEYS AND
OPTIMIZING
ENGAGEMENT
Customers expect a more
personalized, consistent experience
across channels.
C
ompanies are relentlessly looking to
improve the ways they serve customers.
With consumers constantly on the go and
endlessly connected via multiple channels to
companies and the brands they interact with, the
global economy we live in has created unique
customer choices, preferences and buying
decisions that are mandating organizations to
adopt customer-centric strategies. Companies
are now grappling with the best way to engage
with customers in an effort to satisfy their varying and highly demanding needs. But, too often
these efforts are narrowly focused on a particular
interaction channel, lacking a holistic view of
how to track, analyze and maximize the flood of
data available across an organization that can
help improve internal processes, procedures and
interactions to better engage the customer.
By Koren Stucki
Verint
@Verint
www.verint.com
Customer Experience Versus
Customer Engagement
Successful companies are realizing there’s an
important difference between customer experience and customer engagement. Customer
experience is rooted in emotion. The customer
owns it. They formulate the image of their
experiences. Customer engagement is rooted in
action. It’s broader in focus and includes both
the customer and company side of interactions,
encompassing everything that happens along
22
❘
OCT 2014
the customer journey. True engagement requires
employees who are empowered, well trained and
equipped with the right information. And lastly,
it requires technologies that enhance the customer’s experience and the supporting analytics
to extract insights in real-time to continuously
engage customers effortlessly in a two-way
dialogue.
Customer engagement is the natural evolution
of customer experience and needs to be considered as the next strategic priority for enterprise
organizations. The benefit of optimizing customer
engagement is that it enables companies to go
beyond managing the experience itself at various touchpoints to include all of the ways that
companies motivate customers to invest in an
ongoing relationship.
One of the key trends driving market demand
for customer engagement optimization strategies is the consumer expectation for a more
personalized and consistent experience across
channels. Consumers have come to expect a
consistent, contextual and personalized experience across multiple channels, and thus, prioritizing customer engagement strategies can
help to achieve better business outcomes by
addressing these consumer expectations and
demands.
Nearly all business leaders are aware of this
trend by now. Some are trying to prepare their
organizations for it, while very few have actually
built a data-driven ecosystem that connects
all parts of the enterprise to deliver a single
view of the company to customers and on the
brand promise. Those high-performing few are
optimized in the customer engagement maturity
curve and are winning in the marketplace.
The Omnichannel Maelstrom
Today’s consumers are using more communications channels than ever before, such as social
media and ubiquitous mobility, and expect
companies to respond to them in an effective,
efficient and personalized way across the channels of their choosing, changing customers’
expectations of the organizations with which
they do business. As more channels are being
used to communicate with—and about—organizations, the balance of power shifts from
organizations to customers, increasingly driving
the relationship with businesses. Consumers are
choosing to interact through different channels
based on convenience, recommendations, the
phase of their journey, or based upon previous
experiences. Moreover, it is clear that consumers
expect an organization to have full insight into
all prior interactions and be able to respond in
a cohesive, customized and consistent manner.
The first step in delivering omnichannel
engagement is to systematically and programmatically capture and analyze the voice of the
customer, channel by channel. Keeping up with
customers’ rapidly evolving communications
preferences across many individual channels—multichannel communications—can be
challenging enough. Capturing that information
across many different channels (which is often
unstructured and undoubtedly high in volume),
processing it into a single, consolidated view of
the customer’s history and behaviors, and then
delivering services and offers that reflect this
customer awareness—omnichannel communications—can be downright overwhelming.
Omnichannel communications are critical for
driving customer engagement and supporting
the level of interaction that consumers have,
either directly or indirectly with a company or
brand over time. Unlike customer experience
programs, the goal is to build an ongoing dialog
and relationship with customers that engenders
familiarity and some level of emotional attachment to a brand, product or service.
ILLUSTRATION BY JEAN-PHILIPPE CABAROC
Empowering and Leveraging
Your Employees
Looking beyond interaction channels, the quality of customer journeys and level of engagement an organization can drive often depends
heavily on people. Employees provide valuable
insight on how customers are engaging with a
business. Frontline staff can identify customer
pain points and recommend improvements to
help enhance interactions. They can also help
organizations understand the amount of effort
required for certain tasks, and—in collaboration
with crossfunctional groups like the back office—
can identify where process, system or knowledge
gaps are hindering the company from delivering
the desired customer experience. By engaging
employees, organizations will gain a greater
understanding of the customer journey, as well
as better define and prioritize improvements to
optimize customer engagement.
Having direct insight from both the front lines
and the back office to help evaluate customer
journeys can enable an organization to understand where silos exist, where handoffs between
groups are inefficient, customer touchpoints are
unnecessary, and expectations are not being
accurately set or delivered upon. Rather than
focusing exclusively on channels and individual
events, business leaders must look to gain a
more holistic view and a deeper understanding
of the broader context of interactions in order
to deliver a more consistent experience across
channels.
Using the Journey
to Create Engagement
As we have established, omnichannel engagement is recognized by most organizations as a
strategic imperative, yet many find it challenging to link all the interaction data together for
contextual insights that present a single view
of the customer’s journey. For example, if a customer makes an inquiry by phone, then engages
in an online chat session and later performs a
transaction on the web, it’s important for an
organization to piece the different interactions
and experiences together to understand when
and why customers switch channels, and how
that impacts the business. Often, enterprises
do not have the right level of visibility across
every channel, interaction, process and outcome.
However, with the ability to gain insight that
provides deeper understandings of customer
journeys, organizations will be better equipped
to truly optimize customer engagement.
OCT 2014
❘
23
LEADING THOUGHTS |
CHALLENGES TO UNDERSTANDING CUSTOMER JOURNEYS AND OPTIMIZING ENGAGEMENT
OPTIMIZED COMPANIES DELIVER ON
THE BRAND PROMISE BY CREATING
A SINGLE-COMPANY, OMNICHANNEL
VIEW TO THE CUSTOMER
One of the biggest challenges that businesses
face today is how to leverage the massive
amounts of structured and unstructured data
and insights that exist within organizational silos.
Creating a seamless experience in an omnichannel environment and being able to diagnose
issues throughout a customer’s journey requires
a collaborative, enterprise approach to analyzing
“big data.”
The key challenges organizations face when
trying to accomplish this include:
●●
●●
●●
●●
●●
Keeping up with consumers who
channel-hop. Organizations must be able
to connect the dots from web to contact
center to social media to surveys.
Having the knowledge and resources to
aggregate and analyze large amounts of
structured and unstructured data. Even
in small organizations, this challenge can
be formidable, given the sheer number of
customers, interactions and channels.
Identifying and understanding the root
causes of customer issues efficiently.
Obtaining solutions and consulting
expertise to help predict customer
actions, deliver personalized service and
reduce churn.
Having a scalable, automated way to
create and maintain customer journey
maps.
Having an omnichannel view of the customer
journey and the ability to identify drivers and
the root cause of customer engagements can
enable more actionable insight that can be used
to better predict customer behavior allowing you
to be more proactive in your efforts to reduce
customer churn.
The Role of Analytics
By evaluating customer interactions across all
channels using a centralized solution, organizations can quickly determine where to focus
customer engagement efforts to help realize
the greatest impact. When captured, analyzed
and acted upon, organizations have the intelligence and insights they require to help achieve
important strategic objectives. Using analytics,
customer journeys across channels can be segmented, targeted, tracked and reported on to
help organizations understand trends and the
root causes of issues, and enhance customer
interactions to create more consistent experiences. Through the facilitation of multichannel
data capture and analytics, visualizations and
automated journey mapping, a deeper, more
contextual understanding of customer data is
possible.
Organizations that strive to be optimized in
their delivery of omnichannel customer engagement must be committed to building data-driven
businesses that break down organizational silos
by putting the customer at the heart of the enterprise. They do so by making the voice of the
customer heard through analytics and customercentric strategies. These top-performing organizations enable, empower and engage employees
to operate with empathy and commitment. They
link all departments of the enterprise using a
common currency of metrics and insights about
customer and employee behaviors, resulting in
better collaboration and productivity. They also
engage customers consistently by integrating
key information and knowledge directly into
operational tools, including customer-facing
digital channels. And most importantly, optimized companies deliver on the brand promise
by creating a single-company, omnichannel view
to the customer through unified operations that
are linked by customer insights.
Optimized organizations will be better
positioned to understand the entire customer
journey, reduce customer and employee effort,
and deliver highly personalized service to gain
a competitive advantage and increase customer
loyalty.
Koren Stucki is Marketing
Director, Customer
Analytics, Verint. Koren
brings experience as
both a practitioner and
a consultant having built
several Customer Experience
and Voice of the Customer programs as
an executive in Fortune 100 and startup
businesses and as a consultant to global
companies and non-profit organizations.
www.Verint.com
youtube.com/ccpipeline
FOLLOW
24
❘
OCT 2014
ON
A Comprehensive Approach to Contact Center Consulting
Strategic Contact draws upon years of
experience across a wide range of contact
center environments and technologies to bring
the right expertise and insights to every project.
Our vendor independence combined with a
passion for helping clients optimize the value of
their technology and operations ensures no
hidden agendas.
Strategy and Vision
Assessment
Recommendations
Roadmap
Requirements
Sourcing Options
Vendor Evaluation
Business Case
Whether you need to plan for, define, assess,
evaluate, or implement change, we can help.
Contact us today.
Project Plan
Design/Development
Testing
Pilot and Rollout
Operations
Technology
Support Models
Monitoring & Management
PERFORMANCE MATTERS
MIKE AOKI
10 TIPS TO IMPROVE
AGENT ENGAGEMENT
DURING NEW-HIRE
TRAINING
How to set up new agents for a
successful transition to the contact
center floor.
I
Reflective Keynotes Inc.
@mikeaoki
3. CREATE A WARM ENVIRONMENT
FOR DAY 1 (AND BEYOND) BY
GREETING NEW-HIRES AT THE DOOR.
There is an old saying, “Treat your agents the
way you want them to treat your customers.” So
create a friendly, welcoming environment for
your new agents. Have your human resources
representative and your trainer greet new-hires
as they arrive on Day 1. Have your contact center’s senior leader drop by in the morning or at
lunch to welcome the new-hires onboard. Some
organizations will even provide lunch on the first
day and invite the new-hires’ future team leader
and manager to this event.
remember my first day as an agent at a
major phone company. It was at the start of
my working life. I was nervous. I had no idea
what to expect for my first day. I walked in the
classroom, sat down and began talking with the
person sitting next to me. She was as nervous as
I was. More importantly, neither one of us knew
what to expect from training.
It has been almost 25 years since that
moment. I still remember that “first day” feeling
of not knowing what to expect or if I would even
like working for this company. “Onboarding” has
become a popular buzzword for managing a new
employee’s first impression of an organization. 4. GIVE NEW-HIRES A TOUR OF THE
That can increase employee engagement and CONTACT CENTER ON DAY 1.
reduce employee turnover. However, new-hire Could you imagine going through new-hire traintraining can have an even greater impact, as far ing at an offsite facility, far away from the contact
as making new agents feel as if they have made center? What would be the impact on your sense
the right choice in joining your company. The fol- of teamwork? Would you have a sense of belonglowing are ideas to reduce your agent trainee’s ing? Alternatively, would you still feel like the
nervousness, while increasing knowledge reten- new kid at school, even though you have been
tion and improving employee engagement.
through several weeks of training? Well, I have
seen that happen. This real-life company did
1. WELCOME YOUR NEW-HIRE AGENTS
their training at one location, while their contact
TO YOUR CONTACT CENTER BEFORE
center was in a nearby city. I remember how disTHEY GET THERE.
connected trainees felt from the contact center.
Work with your talent management/human This can also happen if training is conducted
resources department to develop a welcome let- in the same building that the contact center
ter from your department to include in the new resides in, but on a different floor.
agent’s pre-employment welcome kit. Yes, there
People want a sense of belonging. They want
is probably already a letter from your CEO in the to feel like part of a greater whole. So take your
package that welcomes them to the company. new-hire class on a tour of the contact center
However, an additional letter from your contact on their first day. Have them sit side-by-side with
center vice president or director can make the veteran high-performing agents so they can hear
new agent feel even more welcome.
what great sounds like. This also allows them to
By Mike Aoki,
26
2. SET EXPECTATIONS
BEFORE THEY ARRIVE.
One option to start off on the right foot is to
include a mini-training package as part of their
pre-employment welcome kit. What should be
included in that kit? Suggested items include
the new-hire training schedule, homework
expectations and where to arrive on Day 1.
Some organizations also include pre-work in
the kit. Pre-work may consist of some written
pre-reading about the company, industry or
customer base. Another idea for pre-work is to
have them look up information on the Internet
regarding the company, industry, products and
competitors. (Note: Always check with your
organization’s legal department to see if this
type of pre-employment work is appropriate in
your state.)
❘
OCT 2014
meet the people they will be working with upon
graduation. Encourage team leaders and managers to visit the training room during breaks and
lunches to chat with their future team members.
Invite workforce management staff, quality team
members and other support personnel to present information and/or drop by the classroom
so new-hires can put a name to a face.
5. SHOW NEW-HIRES HOW YOUR
ORGANIZATION SUPPORTS YOUR
LOCAL COMMUNITY.
Millennials (people born between 1980-2000)
make up the bulk of contact center new-hires in
most organizations. One of the things they look
for in an employer is a company’s willingness to
give back to their community. Let them know how
your organization supports local charities, raises
money for worthy goals and is environmentally
friendly within the local community. Anything you
can do to create goodwill with an employee will
contribute to his or her engagement.
6. GIVE NEW-HIRES A SENSE
OF COMMUNITY WITHIN THE
CLASSROOM BY HAVING THEM
WORK IN SMALL GROUPS.
Contact center agents are typically social people.
They like talking with and meeting new people.
Have them work together in pairs, trios and small
groups of three to four people. They can work
together on training exercises, role-plays and
simulations. This will not only increase their level
of knowledge retention, it will also increase the
energy level in the room. Make sure that you use
e-learning in moderate amounts. E-learning is a
great way to learn data. It is also self-paced, so
new-hires can move through modules at their
own comfort level. The drawback is e-learning
does not create the positive energy level or
sense of community that interactive group
exercises create. So be sure to combine group
work with e-learning to achieve the best balance
between independent study and teamwork.
7. PUT YOUR NEW-HIRES
ON A MISSION.
To increase employee engagement, show your
new-hires how their work contributes to a greater
mission in life. For instance, one employee of
a medical supply company believes that all
he does is ship boxes to people at home. This
employee fails to see how he contributes to the
greater good. He just sees his work as a boring
job. On the other hand, one of his coworkers
sees her role as delivering badly needed medi-
cine to people who might die if they do not get
it on time. This person has a sense of mission.
She has connected to a greater good. She feels
engaged and dedicated to her job. As a result,
she tries harder, stays longer and contributes
more. Give your employees a sense of mission
by illustrating how their work helps people. This
will increase employee engagement and reduce
employee turnover.
of the calls you take.” Give them that perspective so they know what to expect.
9. LET THEM KNOW HOW
THEY ARE DOING.
People want to know how well they are doing.
This is especially true for the two-week to twomonth-long training sessions common to contact centers. Let your new-hires know how they
are doing by providing weekly updates on their
8. GIVE NEW-HIRES A PERSPECTIVE
test results, level of participation and schedule
FOR HANDLING IRATE CALLERS.
adherence during training. You can also give out
When I was an agent, guess how many of my weekly awards during the course for things like,
phone calls were from happy customers want- “Highest Quiz Score” or “Top Contributor at Asking
ing to thank their phone company for great ser- Questions.”
vice? Three. Three positive calls in the four years
I spent online. That is less than one positive call 10. CELEBRATE SUCCESSES.
per year. The other 50,000 calls I took were Plan a graduation party. Even a simple pizza
from people who wanted to change services, lunch will help boost spirits. Invite your contact
complain about their bill or cancel their service. center’s management team to participate. Have
I train agents on how to handle irate callers. a graduation cake for dessert. Give out graduaI am continually amazed at how many of them tion certificates. Take a team graduation photo.
seem shocked that most of their calls are from Make your new-hires feel good about graduating
complaining customers. Prepare your new-hires from training.
for this by asking the class, “How many of you
have ever called a company because you felt
Mike Aoki is a popular
happy about their service?” Only a few hands
conference speaker and
will go up. Ask, “How many of you have ever
seminar leader. His company,
called a company because something went
(www.reflectivekeynotes.com),
wrong?” Normally, every hand will go up. Then
helps organizations improve
say, “That’s why people call. They have a probtheir contact center sales,
lem and need your help.”
customer service and management skills.
Another way to add perspective is to say
[email protected]
something along the lines of, “Only 10% of our
(905) 567-8432
customers ever call in, but they make up 100%
OCT 2014
❘
27
SPONSOR SPOTLIGHT
VoltDelta
VOLTDELTA
R
OnDEMAND SOLUTIONS
O
The Anatomy of Delivering Exceptional
Multichannel Customer Service
How to establish a solid
technology foundation.
the agent screen along with the
voice recording to ensure the
correct information is displayed
at the appropriate time.
There is no end to the number of tools and
technology available for contact centers.
Managers who are evaluating technology to
invest in a multichannel support organization
can potentially spend an inordinate amount
of time determining what is needed and
which vendor to select. When it comes
to improving the customer experience,
creating a satisfying work environment
for agents and managers, and optimizing
company operations (and profitability), three
components are fundamentally required:
Automatic Call Distribution (ACD), Customer
Relationship Manager (CRM) and Call plus
Screen Recording. Focus on these three
components first to establish a solid customer
care technology foundation. Here is what you
need to know:
CLOUD VERSUS
PREMISE SOLUTIONS
The benefits of the cloud typically outweigh premise solutions
for the following reasons:
●●
●●
●●
ACD
ACD is responsible for receiving
and routing calls and other types
of customer interactions, such
as email or chat, to designated
people in your organization
based on predetermined rules.
It supports a single queue that
prioritizes one type of interaction
over another, such as phone call
over email.
CRM
The CRM keeps track of customer information and shares
the data across channels within
the organization. This data can
be used to identify highly valued
customers, analyze the customer
28
❘
experience, and provide an
opportunity to target customers
with special offers.
Integration of telephony and
other contact channels directly
within an existing CRM enables
the tracking of customers as
they move between channels.
Expertise—Many cloud
solution vendors employ
experienced staff in
the areas of networking,
speech, integration and
voice user interface design.
CALL AND SCREEN
RECORDING
Call and screen recording captures the voice of the customer
for evaluating performance,
ensuring regulatory compliance, and assisting with agent
training. To be effective, the
call recording solution must
capture every channel transfer
and agent transition as a unified
experience. It also must record
OCT 2014
●●
Single CRM screen
for ease of use.
BENEFITS FOR
MANAGERS
●●
●●
Consolidated reporting
from multiple channels
within CRM systems.
Supervisors can prioritize
channels for agents
working with multiple
forms of inbound contact.
BENEFITS FOR
COMPANIES
●●
●●
●●
Complete agent control
to respond or transfer
to any channel.
Improve customer
retention—Studies
Increase in profitability—
According to Gallup, fully
engaged customers
represent an additional
23% in wallet share,
profitability and revenue
than the average customer.
BENEFITS FOR
CUSTOMERS
Cost—Cloud solutions
do not require capital
investment or hardware
maintenance.
BENEFITS FOR AGENTS
●●
●●
Flexibility—Adding
features, agent seats,
and channels is easier to
implement in the cloud.
A “WIN” FOR
EVERYONE
CONTACT CENTER
BUILDING BLOCKS
indicate that 86% of
customers who were
“very satisfied” with
their customer service
interactions are likely
to purchase from that
company again.
Quicker resolution—
Anticipating why
customers are
contacting you helps
to resolve issues or
answer questions more
efficiently and provides
the opportunity to
proactively contact them.
Personalized service—
Knowing what your
customer preferences
are not only allows them
to feel valued, but also
helps you to identify
products and services
that better suit their needs.
Read more on this subject in a
white paper by DMG Consulting
titled, “ACD vs. CRM: How to Win
the Battle,” at:
www.VoltDelta.com.
ABOUT VOLTDELTA
VoltDelta is a global cloudbased contact center provider
with 35 years of experience.
Learn more at:
www.voltdelta.com
Sponsored by VOLT DELTA  www.voltdelta.com
Make your CRM the PIVOTpoint
for Multichannel Customer Care
• Voice and messaging support for your customers
• Channel focus and priority for your agents • Consolidated reporting for your managers
www.voltdelta.com
AGILITY FACTOR JAY MINNUCCI
THE HERE
AND NOW
Decisions made in the heat of the
moment often conflict with the
organization’s mission.
demands of a contact center. In the executive
offices, it is easy to place high value on metrics
like employee engagement, customer satisfaction and first-contact resolution. The milliondollar question, though, is not how committed
you are to these concepts in the C-wing or at the
three-day off-site meeting. It is how committed
you are to these concepts on the call center
floor, when there are 79 calls in queue and 53
reps on the phone. The “here and now” exposes
the level of allegiance to your strategy, and the
way in which you manage this very moment will
have an impact that extends far into the future.
By Jay Minnucci
Service Agility
The Metrics That Define
the Moment
In a contact center, if the
moment is not managed
correctly, the chances
that caller #79 in queue
will “recommend us to a
friend or colleague” are
slim.
30
❘
OCT 2014
To manage the moment, you must first identify
the key metrics to monitor. “Dashboard” is an
overused term in business that has unfortunately
become synonymous with almost any reporting. But if you think of a dashboard in a car or
plane, you realize the content is much more discriminating. Those indicators that can potentially
require immediate attention—speed, altitude,
warning lights—are front and center. Other data
is either off to the side or must be accessed by
using other tools. It is not that the other data is
necessarily less important than what is on the
dashboard, it is simply less urgent.
And that is exactly how things should be in a
contact center. There is plenty of very important
data—quality rates, customer satisfaction data,
etc.—which requires our attention. But these
metrics change slowly over time. Their importance merits key positioning and attention on our
monthly scorecards, but serves only to clutter
a dashboard. The urgent data is that information—calls in queue, agents available, adherence
and longest wait—which can change in the blink
of eye. Yes, those metrics sound very transactional and tactical, but we need not apologize for
tracking them closely. In a contact center, if the
moment is not managed correctly, the chances
that caller #79 in queue will “recommend us to
a friend or colleague” are slim.
The Impact
In deciding how to react to our 79 calls in queue,
we are, in essence, deciding how to balance the
needs of the caller on the line with those waiting.
Our strategic objectives direct us to allow our
agents as much time as needed to converse,
probe, offer and engage. They also encourage
us to take our staff off the phone for coaching,
training and career development time. Doing all
this should optimize customer satisfaction and
employee engagement—for now. Ten minutes
from now, though, our agents will be dealing with
one angry caller after another, all of them fuming over a long wait that sent a strong message
about how little they are valued. Satisfaction and
engagement plummet despite your best efforts.
How, then, do we walk that tightrope between
managing the moment and meeting our strategic
objectives concerning the customer experience
and employee engagement? The secret is in
planning and preparing for these moments
in advance, rather than simply reacting when
they (inevitably) occur. Why? Because decisions made in the heat of the moment often
conflict with the mission of our organization.
When queues and abandoned calls are rapidly
escalating, we do things like cancel training that
is in progress, cut coaching sessions short, and
hover over agents that are flashing red on our
screen because they are trying to complete a
POTENTIAL CAUSE OF QUEUING
PLANNED APPROACH
REACTIONARY APPROACH
Low adherence
(enough staff scheduled,
they just are not on the phone)
We evaluated the data and set a high
but achievable goal for adherence. We
communicated it effectively to everyone, and
made it part of the expectations for both
agents and their supervisors. We do not track
people down every time they are two minutes
out of adherence—though if calls are queuing,
we will do an adherence check as a courtesy to
those customers who are waiting.
Set the system to flash every time someone
is out of adherence for two minutes or more.
Make it an expectation for supervisors or realtime coordinators to run staff down whenever
this happens—regardless of conditions, and
regardless of the fact that our 93% adherence
objective actually permits roughly 30 minutes
of non-adherence throughout the day.
Peaking traffic
We knew it was coming. We saw it in the
forecasts and did all we could in advance
to lessen the impact. We let everyone know
in advance the time periods that would be
toughest throughout the day. We asked staff to
be especially mindful of coverage during those
times.
The WFM team saw it coming, but we do not
send those reports out to the floor. We hope
things will not be as bad as the forecasts
indicate, but if they are, we will “lock it down”
and maybe put supervisors on the phone.
Understaffing
We have a strong long-term planning process
that allows us to hire “just in time” to meet
demand, so these situations are infrequent. But
when they do occur, we meet and make rational
decisions based on the expected severity
and length of the impact. The decisions and
reasoning are shared with all team members.
This is part of life in a contact center, and
we expect our supervisors and agents to
understand this. We will cancel training,
meetings and coaching sessions as long as we
need to until we climb out of this situation. We
will also be extra diligent in monitoring realtime conditions and ensuring that talk, aftercall work and non-adherence are minimized.
We also expect, though, that we will continue
to meet our enhanced objectives related to
first-call resolution, cross-selling and customer
satisfaction.
YOU CANNOT SUCCEED
STRATEGICALLY WITH A
CONTACT CENTER UNLESS
YOU FULLY UNDERSTAND THE
TACTICAL OPERATION AT THE
DEEPEST LEVEL
case in a way that will eliminate a call-back.
Planning out our approach puts time back on
our side, allowing us to make better decisions
that could ever be made when under the gun
(see the table above).
Plan Ahead for Success
And so, for all the seemingly tactical elements
related to managing the here and now, success
really depends on strategy, leadership and communication. Will you plan and staff in such a
way that the rough patches will be minimized?
When the queue starts to build, will you still
want your reps engaging in conversations and
providing proactive service, or will you (secretly
or otherwise) hope they revert to a “churn and
burn” transactional approach that clears out
the queue and turns the dashboard green
again? Will your agents know what to expect
in advance, and understand not only what
will happen but why you are taking a certain
action? In contact centers, the here and now
is the tyrant that threatens to disrupt all our
well-defined objectives. Be prepared. Be very
prepared.
Planning out our
approach puts time
back on our side,
allowing us to make
better decisions.
Jay Minnucci is Founder
and President of the
independent consulting
firm Service Agility.
[email protected]
(215) 679-5250
OCT 2014
❘
31
TECH LINE MATT MOREY & KEN BARTON
●●
LEVERAGING
TECHNOLOGY
TO OPTIMIZE
CONTINUITY AND
RECOVERY
Reduce your risks and position your
center to take care of customers…
no matter what happens.
By Matt Morey and Ken Barton
Strategic Contact Inc.
@StratContact
ate an interruption—e.g., minutes, hours or days.
Then you’ll define your levels of risk mitigation.
Categorize the likelihood of each risk occurring and the associated impact (see Figure
1). Knowing how each risk and impact affects
your operation helps you determine the level of
redundancy to build into your overall architecture
from a network and system perspective.
Natural disasters are the obvious starting
point when defining vulnerabilities. Hurricanes,
tornadoes, earthquakes, snow storms and
floods can significantly impact your business.
You’ll want to identify alternate location strategies where agents can handle contacts in the
event your building is inaccessible, and make
sure they can readily access your systems when
they get there. Beyond Mother Nature’s threats
lie other risks:
●●
Matt Morey is a Senior
Consultant at Strategic
Contact.
[email protected]
(913) 681-5133
Ken Barton is a Consultant
at Strategic Contact.
[email protected]
(954) 942-3598
32
❘
OCT 2014
●●
While redundancy can protect you from
hardware or software failures, there are
no guarantees. A technology failure can
limit functionality, customer access and/
or center performance. This category is
a big one, so list the elements of your
infrastructure and applications and the
things that can go wrong, and define your
options to address them.
Are you prepared for construction
equipment severing a cable or other
network outages? Consider multiple data
centers and/or access points with diverse
routes into your data center(s) in the
event your main access is disabled.
●●
What if you lose power? Review your
backup power approach and ensure
that you know exactly how long you
can operate, then look at options such
as generators to increase resiliency, if
necessary.
Are you prepared for employee illnesses
or a pandemic? You may need plans—and
technology in place—for non-contact
center employees to handle simple calls
or look to an outsourcer or remote or
home agents to cover your bases.
Take a look at these types of scenarios (and
others on your list) and assign a rating of likelihood. Then you can prioritize the highest risk
situations.
Now you are in the position to assess the
scope of your plan and truly examine the costs
of your BC/DR options. You’ll need to determine
the financial impact to the business and the cost
to support different configurations and aspects
of the plan from operational and technical perspectives. Start with identifying and addressing
single points of failure. Typical single points of
failure include network access points to your
facilities and hardware (e.g., routers, gateways
and servers). Next, you will want to consider
the operational side of delivering calls to your
agents. For each scenario, you need to consider
if you can get enough people in the right place at
the right time, with access to the right systems,
and the costs of doing so.
Many multisite centers’ BC/DR plans include
adding seats in unaffected sites by placing
agents in training rooms, conference rooms or
other areas. They build sufficient network capacity in advance and have work stations available
and configured to quickly place in the temporary
locations. Some offsite data centers can provide
expanded space for hardware and seats as well
as added capacity. Some data centers even
provide agent stations already wired and set up
for use just for DR purposes. Many data management services vendors assist with data backup
and recovery, which should be considered in your
plan. Outsourcers sometimes offer space for your
agents in addition to their own agents answering
your calls.
Each of these scenarios can have an impact
on hardware, software and network capacity
requirements. Consider the number and types
of seats you need for business continuity, including agent, supervisor and support staff, and the
bandwidth demands when contacts are diverted.
FIGURE 1: Categorize Risks and Impacts
High
Probability
Long
Duration
Low
Probability
Short
Duration
Limited
Business Impact
Extensive
Business Impact
Low-Medium Risk:
High Risk:
May happen, but won’t
cause big problem;
bonus if you can
address these.
Likely events with a big
impact; pursue solutions
that address your most
likely, most costly events.
Low Risk:
Medium-High Risk:
Unlikely events with small
impact; don’t focus
time/money here!
Unlikely events but
potentially big impact;
consider options that
address these risks
as well.
Times Change
and So Does Technology
The past decade has given way to a number of
new technologies to support the scope of your
BC/DR plan. These new technologies include
cloud services, server virtualization, mobile
computing and social networks. While you may
want to consider any or all of these developments, cloud services are a great place to start.
Your cloud vendor can provide complete contact
center technology solutions at their data centers
or backup to your premise solution in the event
of a disaster. When using cloud services, you
can secure service level agreements for performance that includes uptime (see “Win! Win!
Win! The Cloud Contact Center Has Something
for Everybody,” Pipeline, December 2012).
If new cloud contact center technology has
spurred your BC/DR rejuvenation, make sure
that the services you are considering are BC/
DR-ready for your environment. Top items to
address are:
Ensure that your vendor supports the
proper network access and application
configuration for your routing and
reporting.
●●
●●
●●
●●
●●
Negotiate SLAs for uptime.
Determine how calls will be routed in BC/
DR mode.
Understand the processes for transition
and the impact on the customers.
Define multiple ways to contact your
cloud vendor in the event of a disaster
and the process for initiating switchover.
Server virtualization is another technology
development that makes it easier to support
your BC/DR plan from a hardware perspective.
Using virtualized servers results in a smaller
footprint, which is easier to maintain as it
requires fewer boxes and can lower your overall
total cost of ownership. Place virtualized servers
in geo-redundant data centers to bolster your
survivability.
Mobile computing and BYOD (bring your own
device) enables your contact center resources to
work remotely in the event you need to implement BC/DR measures. These options give you
the flexibility to quickly open a center in nearly
any unaffected location using cell phones, tablets and/or laptops. You may not have access
to your full back-office applications and may
not handle interactions using the most efficient
processes, but at least you are answering the
calls and responding to emails. This could be
a very viable alternative to hold you over until
your backup location is set up and ready to go.
Social media and SMS texting expand your
lines of communication with your employees, if
an event should occur. You can quickly inform
employees what BC/DR measures have been put
into place, where they need to be, and what next
steps are. The bonus: These technologies are
not reliant on your corporate communications
systems (that may be down if you are enacting
BC/DR measures).
Don’t Forget Documentation
and Testing
Documentation and testing processes for BC/DR
continue to evolve, as well. From a documentation perspective, many folks simply distribute
plans in binders, which can be a challenge to
keep current. Enter the cloud again: You can
store the plan electronically in your own systems
as well as third-party cloud storage. Keep paper
OCT 2014
❘
33
TECH LINE | LEVERAGING TECHNOLOGY TO OPTIMIZE CONTINUITY AND RECOVERY
copies to accompany the electronic version and
be sure that employees know how to quickly
access the plan.
The keys to success in documenting the plan
are to be thorough while keeping it as simple
as possible. Then, put it to the test. If you can’t
successfully execute a test run, your design is too
complicated or documentation unclear. But also
realize a solid BC/DR test involves more than
simply your IT department testing your technology. A BC/DR plan is of no value if corresponding operational plans are not in place, aligned,
updated and tested for all personnel (IT and CC).
Test your BC/DR plan on a regular basis. The
level and frequency of testing varies with the
scope of your plan, your vulnerabilities and risks,
and your budget, but once a year should be the
minimum. Test the network, access and technology. Test call routing and access to data in the
telephony and back-office systems. If utilizing
alternate sites or outsourcer services, be sure to
test transitioning contact routing to these locations and restoration when things are “back to
normal.”
Testing should encompass the operational
side, as well. Does your staff know what to do,
where to go, how to get there, and what to do
when they arrive? Test how people will get to the
right place at the right time in the alternate sites.
Test all your communication methodologies: IVR
messages, social media, SMS texts, etc. Clearly
identify responsibility from a program manage-
ment perspective. Know who executes the overall
plan and who is responsible for specific areas and
tasks, including primary and backup resources.
Work with and get to know your vendors and how
to contact them for their assistance in execution
of your plan. You never know if your plan is going
to work unless you test it!
The scenarios that you identified as high
impact and high probability when you conducted
your risk analysis should be first on your list to
test (see Figure 1). Be sure to revise and adjust
processes and documentation as necessary
based on testing outcomes and reviews of how
technology and staff performed. Additionally,
it is imperative to clearly define the “owner” of
updates, maintenance, and distribution/communication of the plan. That role should include
updating based on new technology configurations and processes, as well.
The First Step Is the Hardest;
Start or Update Your Plan Today
If your organization currently doesn’t have a BC/
DR plan, it’s time to get started. If you currently
have a BC/DR plan, maybe it’s time for an update.
Consider how technology changes can help you
fine-tune your plan. Technology additions and
improvements provide a nice counterbalance to
the nagging feeling that we are more vulnerable
than ever. It’s time to reduce your risks and position your center to take care of customers no
matter what challenges get thrown your way.
WHAT THE “BEST” CENTERS DO FOR BC/DR
Use this checklist to
align your contact
center with best
practices, and ensure
that you are ready
for continuity and
recovery when bad
things happen.
❏ Define a strategy for BC/DR that considers vulnerabilities and impacts.
❏ Consider that BC/DR strategy in all technology requirements, purchases and design efforts.
❏ Make the appropriate investments to mitigate risks and be prepared to act when events
occur.
❏ Build resiliency into architectures through things such as geo-redundant data centers,
diverse network routing, high-availability solutions and routine backups.
❏ Develop detailed and thorough BC/DR plan(s) that address technology and operations.
❏ Test BC/DR scenarios routinely (e.g., twice a year) from start to finish, including restoration
of normal operations, with IT and business leader involvement.
❏ Leverage technology advances to improve BC/DR execution.
❏ Update BC/DR plans routinely based on changes to systems or processes, new capabilities,
test results or other factors.
34
❘
OCT 2014
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35
INSIDE VIEW
SUSAN HASH
HOUSTON 311
City of Houston leverages technology to
improve the lives of citizens and agents.
By Susan Hash,
Contact Center Pipeline
@SusanHash
T
here is a boom going on deep in
the heart of Texas. According to
data from the U.S. Census Bureau,
Houston has become the fastest-growing large
city in the United States, second only to New
York for gaining new residents.
Houston’s growth has been largely fueled by
a strong job market—in particular, an upswing
in STEM (science, technology, engineering,
mathematics) employment. While the expanding diverse and technically savvy population is
good news for local businesses, the rapid growth
rate, combined with the city’s property tax cap,
has resulted in severely constrained operating
budgets for public services.
One of the most vital services is Houston’s
311 department, the city’s information and
non-emergency service center, which offers a
single point of entry to a variety of city services.
The 311 Houston Service Helpline is a 24/7
operation that handles approximately 2.1 million contacts per year, covering a wide range of
issues—from reporting a pothole to inquiries
about court hearings. There are about 270
different types of service requests, and 2,600
frequently asked questions.
The Perennial Call Center
Challenge: Doing More with Less
In 2011, funding cuts forced the 311 center to
reduce its staff from 75 full-time agents to 55
FTEs and 20 part-time staff. Contact center oper36
❘
OCT 2014
ation leaders were tasked with a daunting challenge: How to provide information and answers
quickly, accurately and efficiently to a growing
citizen base using fewer staff? The solution was
a twofold strategy that began with leveraging
technology to increase engagement with citizens,
according to Frank Carmody, assistant director
of operations for Administration and Regulatory
Affairs, City of Houston. “We needed to rely on
technology to help us bridge the gap,” he says.
Easing the workload on current staff would then
allow center leaders to focus on improving agent
performance and retention.
Since the 311 staff spend a large part of
their time (about 74%) responding to requests
for information, the operation required a robust
knowledge management system that would
enable agents to access the right information to
answer callers’ questions quickly and accurately.
The city implemented the LAGAN Enterprise
customer service suite from KANA, A Verint
Company. The system is interactive, Carmody
says, so agents can continually improve the
speed and accuracy of search results by voting on the most relevant answers, which pushes
those to the top of the list in future searches.
Technology as Force Multipliers
and Workload Levelers
With the knowledge management system in
place, Carmody and his team then began to
look for ways to leverage technology as a “force
multiplier,” in which the citizen becomes the
agent, or as a “workload leveler” to ensure an
average speed of answer (ASA) of under 60
seconds. “We recognized that, if citizens could
service themselves, it would relieve some of the
pressure on our agents,” he recalls.
The first step was to redesign the Houston
311 website to ensure that citizens could quickly
and easily access the information they need. At
that time, the website was not particularly userfriendly, Carmody says. “It was very city-centric,”
he explains. “If you wanted to enter a service
request because you were having a water prob-
lem, you couldn’t look under ‘W’ for water. You
needed to look under ‘U’ for utility maintenance,
which is the division.”
The redesigned website provides users with
multiple options to find information. The most
common requests are easily accessible from the
311 home page. Users can also view a table of
contents or pull up an index of all city departments. Citizens soon will be able to access the
same knowledge management system via web
self-service, ensuring that the information is upto-date and consistent whether they contact 311
via web or phone.
Prominent on the Houston 311 landing
page is an interactive map that shows all open
service requests within minutes of a request
being entered. The map is a popular first stop
for online visitors, says Carmody. Citizens who
wish to submit a service request can view the
map to see if there is an existing request, check
the status of the request and when it is due to
be addressed. Website visitors can also access
311’s interactive performance dashboards that
provide data on service request volume and
response performance, which can be filtered by
department, request type, neighborhood, channel and status.
In addition to increasing citizen engagement,
the city has found that publishing the service
response data on the website helps to improve
local departments’ accountability. Internally, the
information is used to track each department’s
performance against their response objectives.
“Every service request has a deadline,” Carmody
says. “We want to see which departments are
addressing their service requests within the
required deadline.”
The combination of a more user-friendly
design and access to real-time information
has substantially increased website usage—
from 20,000 hits per year to about 300,000.
Carmody equates the increase in self-service
transactions to an annual workload that would
typically be handled by 10 agents, “which is no
small matter,” he points out.
The City of Houston has also released a free
mobile app that allows citizens to quickly and
easily submit service requests from their smartphones. With more than 10,000 downloads so
far, the app appeals to frequent users of the
311 site and currently accounts for nearly 6%
of service requests.
While the online and mobile self-service tools
have proven to be successful force multipliers,
the city also relies on other technologies and
tools to help balance the workload for the 311
 DOWNLOAD MORE INSIDE VIEW ARTICLES @ http://tinyurl.com/CCP-InsideView
center staff. Email, for instance, is one of the
most basic workload levelers, Carmody says,
since agents can respond to email during the
lower-volume shifts. The center is also exploring
additional workload levelers, such as providing
SMS service and a call-back manager, which
holds a caller’s place in the queue without them
having to stay on the line, or enables the caller to
schedule a call-back at a time more convenient
to the customer.
A Focus on the Human
Side of the Equation
FRANK CARMODY
Assistant Director of Operations
for Administration and Regulatory
Affairs, City of Houston
10 MOST POPULAR
HOUSTON 311
SERVICE REQUESTS
Garbage Container Problem
Missed Garbage Pickup
Nuisance On Property
Traffic Signal Maintenance
Sewer In Residence or Business
Meter Leak
Water Line Break (Minor)
Sewer Excursion
Dead Animal Collection
Pothole
The website and mobile self-service options have
deflected a considerable amount of calls from
the contact center. Of the 2.1 million annual
contacts, approximately 1.7 million were liveagent calls, the rest were handled via the web
and mobile channels. This bit of breathing space
has allowed the 311 center management team
to focus more resources on developing, rewarding and retaining its agents.
Importantly, the center was able to revamp its
new-hire training approach. Initially, new agents
received 14 weeks of training before going live
on the floor. But, as Carmody points out, “In the
theoretical classroom, handling the calls looks
easy. However, it can be very stressful when they
go out on the floor—particularly if they have to
deal with someone who is irritated,” which is an
unfortunate reality of call center work. Add to
that pressure from the wide variety of inquiries
that a 311 agent has to be able to handle. In
short, no amount of classroom training can truly
prepare agents for what it’s like to be on the floor
taking calls, he says.
To help new agents successfully make the
transition from classroom to call center floor,
contact center leaders split the training into two
seven-week blocks. New-hires are trained to use
the knowledge management system and handle
basic requests during the first stage. They then
spend a couple of months on the floor taking
calls and applying what they learned. Once
they’ve mastered the basics, they return to the
classroom for seven weeks of training on the
court system—an area that can be particularly
stressful for new agents. “It’s a more complicated
system with no room for error,” Carmody says.
For instance, if an agent provides inaccurate
information to a caller about if, when and where
they need to show up for court, it can result in
fines or even jail time for the citizen.
In addition to training, center leaders also
rolled out a peer-mentorship program to help
ease new-hires into the role. New agents are
partnered with senior agents who take time each
day to sit with the trainee and coach them.
To motivate agents—both new and veterans—
to continuously improve their performance,
center leaders introduced an merit order ranking system, which is based on the number of
calls an agent takes a day multiplied by his
or her quality control score. For instance, if an
agent takes 200 calls in a day and has a quality
control score of 80%, he or she would have a
merit order ranking of 160. Agents are eligible for
various types of rewards that are associated with
their scores. For instance, during the annual shift
bidding process, top-ranking agents get their first
choice of the 14 different shifts available—which
is a key motivator in a 24/7 operation.
Promotions to a higher pay grade or from
part-time to full-time positions are also based
on the merit order ranking. “We don’t interview
our staff for promotions because every day is an
interview,” Carmody says. “If we have an opening,
we offer it to the highest-ranked individual.”
A display board in the center lists the top five
agents for each hour, which creates a friendly
internal competition for bragging rights. There
is also a monetary incentive awarded to the top
25 agents each quarter.
Service Performance Is High
and Continuously Improving
The City of Houston’s technology- and peoplecentric efforts are paying off. The 311 center has
reduced ASA from 111 seconds three years ago
to 66 seconds today.
“We’re here to make everybody’s life a lot
easier,” Carmody says. “Citizens don’t have to
go through the blue pages in the phone book
to try to figure out who they should call. They
can call one number to get the answers to their
questions quickly.”
The increased visibility into service request
data has all departments paying closer attention
to their performance. “Every department is striving to ensure that they’re hitting their deadlines
for closing service requests,” he notes. “When
performance information is out there for everyone to see, it creates accountability.”
Susan Hash
is the Editor of Contact
Center Pipeline.
Follow @SusanHash on Twitter
twitter.com/SusanHash
[email protected]
(206) 552-8831
OCT 2014
❘
37
SPONSOR SPOTLIGHT
JOHN CRAY
SMART ADVICE FOR UTILITY COMPANIES:
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EFFICIENTLY, THEY’D BE WISE TO MAKE SURE THEIR COMMUNICATION CHANNELS KEEP UP.
Although the delivery of natural gas and electricity hasn’t changed much over the years, the way
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Empower Agents with Tailored
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The more intelligence utilities can provide their
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The more options your agents have to effectively handle customer interactions, the more
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JOHN CRAY is Vice President of Product Management for Enghouse Interactive (www.enghouseinteractive.com), which delivers contact center technology
and expertise to maximize the value of every customer interaction. For over 15 years, he has delivered numerous contact center and CRM products to
market. Prior to this, he has lead consulting projects for several years, delivering successful software solutions for telecommunications, publishing, health
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888 284.9900
[email protected]
www.convergys.com
Conscious Success helps call centers save
money and increase profits by reducing
absenteeism, attrition and medical claims.
As these profit drains are eliminated,
customer service and morale increases.
Our clients’ representatives are happier,
healthier and stay employed longer.
Sales increase, difficult calls are handled
with ease and customers appreciate the
enhanced service.
A global leader in relationship
management. We deliver a broad range
of customer and HR solutions, backed
by technology, business analytics and
consulting services that help create
valuable relationships between our clients,
their customers and their employees.
To join the Pipeline Directory, contact: [email protected]
Consona Corporation
Customer Contact
Strategies
888 826.6766
crm.consona.com
972 510.8591
[email protected]
www.Customercontactstrategies.com
At Home Customer Contacts helps
companies develop and deploy remote
working strategies, with a focus on contact
centers. Michele Rowan, President, moved
1000+ positions home with Hilton Hotels
in both the US and Europe. She conducts
workshops around the country, webcast
trainings, and customized gap analysis/
consulting for organizations around the
globe.
Knova knowledge management from
Consona is a full-featured KCS Verified
solution, especially designed to handle
even complex queries across channels.
Consona solutions span self-service, agentassisted service, customer management,
chat, and proactive support. We work with
the world’s most demanding, high-volume
service and support organizations, ensuring
our products meet their high standards.
Contact Center Insights
Connect First
513 673.9054
[email protected]
www.contactcenterinsights.com
888 965.1588
[email protected]
www.connectfirst.com
Contact Center Insights can bring real-world
customer service and contact center
experience and expertise to the table to
improve customer satisfaction and increase
efficiency. Our experience encompasses
strategy, operational processes, technology,
employee and cultural issues, structure,
sourcing options, merger integration, labor
relations and, specific to the utility industry,
the impact of smart grid on customer access strategy and contact center operations.
We partner with organizations to tailor engagements to meet their needs and achieve
their objectives.
Connect First provides contact centers
the industry’s most passionate and
comprehensive US-based support. Quick to
deploy, full-featured and fault tolerant, the
reliable and robust Connect First platform
is suited for inbound, outbound, and
blended contact centers serving a range of
industries with intuitive solutions. To learn
more about creating profitable customer
experiences, visit www.connectfirst.com.
Culture.Service.Growth.
(CSG)
Customer Bliss
210 475.1155 [email protected]
www.cultureservicegrowth.com
425 444.7654
[email protected]
www.customerbliss.com
Culture.Service.Growth. (CSG) is
revolutionizing the Business Process
Outsourcing (BPO) industry. Founded by
two of the most experienced and respected
experts in contact center customer service
management – and further supported
by a “dream team” of advisors – CSG
offers world-class outsourcing solutions
for organizations committed to delivering
unparalleled quality and customer
experiences.
OCT 2014
CustomerBliss coaches chief customer
officer and customer experience leaders
in creating clarity and an actionable path
for driving profitability through customer
focus. Jeanne Bliss helps companies
bring the silo-based operations together
to understand the customer perspective,
gain consensus on the desired customer
experience and required hand-offs for
optimum performance. She also gives
keynote speeches and workshops.
❘
41
DIRECTORY
Doherty Customer
Contact Solutions
eGain Communications
Enghouse Interactive
Envision
800 821.4358 | 650 230.7500
[email protected]
www.egain.com
602 789.2800 or 800 788.9733
[email protected]
www.enghouseinteractive.com
206 225.0800
[email protected]
www.envisioninc.com
eGain is the leading provider of
multichannel customer service and
knowledge management software for
on-site or on-demand deployment. Based
on the Power of One™, the concept of one
unified platform for multichannel customer
interaction and knowledge management,
eGain solutions improve customer
experience, optimize service processes
end to end, increase sales, and enhance
contact center performance.
Helping your customers reach you
anytime, anywhere, and anyhow,
Enghouse Interactive is a solutions driven
technology company that specializes
in helping you to maximize the value of
every customer interaction. Our global,
cross channel portfolio of interaction
management solutions include contact
centers, attendant consoles, IVR, call
recording solutions and more to support
any telephony environment - on premise or
in the cloud.
Envision is an industry leader that
specializes in contact center solutions that
help companies drive revenue through
a comprehensive workforce optimization
suite and committed partnership.
Envision Centricity™, our Web-based
product platform, addresses every facet
of workforce optimization, including
quality monitoring, eLearning, workforce
management, performance analytics, fulltime recording and speech analytics from a
single Web-based interface.
Five9
Fresh Perspectives
Genesys
Great Brook
800 553.8159
[email protected]
www.five9.com
210 913.0868
[email protected]
www.freshperspectivesllc.net
1 888 GENESYS
[email protected]
www.genesys.com
978 779.6312
www.greatbrook.com
Five9 is the largest pure cloud contact
center software provider with more than
1,600 customers and facilitating more
than 3 billion calls per year. The Five9
Virtual Contact Center and Predictive
Dialer are revolutionizing the contact
center industry, bringing the power of
the cloud to customer service and sales
organizations around the globe.
Drawing upon a 30-year career with
customer service champion USAA, and
expertise as a certified coach, Beverley
McClure founded Fresh Perspectives,
LLC. As an executive coach, consultant,
facilitator and speaker, Beverley provides
clients with fresh insights, actionable
solutions and accountability partnerships
to facilitate knowledge transfer and resultsbased behavior change.
Genesys is a leading provider of contact
center and customer service software
– with over 20 years of contact center
innovation and experience. Our software
maximizes the value of customer
engagement and differentiates the
experience by driving personalization and
multichannel customer service – as well
as extending customer service across the
enterprise.
HigherGround
HireIQ Solutions
Human Numbers
ICMI
810 229.9194
[email protected]
www.higherground.com
678 279.2830
[email protected]
www.hireiqinc.com
770 887.8802
[email protected]
www.HumanNumbers.com
800 672.6177
HigherGround, Inc.,a premier software
developer of call recording, data integration and reporting tools, offers solutions
designed to deliver timely, accurate
information for analytics and decision support to improve operations, performance
and ultimately increase profitability.
HigherGround applications are used by call
centers as well as organizations in public
safety, financial services, healthcare,
government and many other industries.
HireIQ Solutions, Inc. helps call centers
improve hiring decisions, reduce recruiting
costs and increase talent performance
using its innovative virtual interviewing
technology. HireIQ’s hiring optimization
software suite uses rich media, web and
voice response technologies to automate
the early stage interviewing process,
resulting in better-qualified candidates
presented for hiring consideration.
Human Numbers is passionate about
forecasting and scheduling. We offer
workforce management services to call
centers that can’t afford to purchase WFM
software, or who do not have a full-time
Workforce Manager. Our customers receive
the expertise of a seasoned Workforce
Manager who takes on the weekly duties
of ACD data collection, forecasting, and
scheduling, without having to hire a fulltime staff member.
952 818.3257
[email protected]
www.dohertycontact.com
Doherty is a women owned staffing
firm specializing in the direct hire and
temporary placement of contact center
professionals. Doherty can help with your
executive searches, large scale ramp ups
and contact center attrition consulting.
Eric has 20 years in the industry and
serves the board of the Midwest Contact
Center Association. Contact: Eric Berg,
CSP, Director—Doherty Customer Contact
Solutions, [email protected].
42
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OCT 2014
Great Brook enhances its clients’
organizational effectiveness through
improved feedback management and the
application of that feedback for operational
improvement and strategic competitive
advantage. We assist organizations design
and improve their feedback programs
through our unique Survey Design
Workshops, Feedback Audits, and targeted
Survey Mentor services. [email protected]
www.icmi.com
ICMI is the leading global provider of
comprehensive resources for customer
management professionals – from frontline
agents to executives – who wish to improve
customer experiences and increase
efficiencies at every level of the contact
center. Since 1985, ICMI continues to help
organizations through training, events,
certification, consulting, and informational
resources.
DIRECTORY
Impact Learning Systems
inContact
IntelliResponse
Interactive Intelligence
800 545.9003
866 965.7227
www.inContact.com
866 454.0084
[email protected]
www.intelliresponse.com
800 267.1364
[email protected]
www.inin.com
IntelliResponse Answer Suite technology is
an industry leading On Demand software
platform that empowers customer-focused
organizations to quickly and effectively
address their customers’ questions with
“One Right Answer” across a wide variety
of interaction channels, including corporate
web sites, agent desktops, social media
platforms and mobile devices.
Interactive Intelligence offers unified
business communications for contact
center automation, enterprise IP telephony,
and business process automation, with
our open standards, all-in-one software
suite. Over 4,000 organizations worldwide
currently benefit from our on-premise
or cloud-based solutions, both of which
include value-added services for software,
hardware, implementation, consulting,
support and education.
[email protected]
www.impactlearning.com
Impact Learning Systems provides
customer contact skills training for
customer service, technical support,
telesales staff and their managers.
Their programs teach usable skills while
building team spirit and a positive work
environment. The programs give step-bystep guidance and practical techniques to
assure that your customer relationships
are dynamic, responsive and effective.
Intradiem
888 566.9457
[email protected]
www.intradiem.com
Intradiem is the leader in intraday
management solutions for multi-channel
contact centers. Intradiem’s customers
achieve an invincible customer experience
with a real-time workforce by automating
manual processes such as intraday task
management, intraday staffing, reskilling,
channel balancing, and real-time alerts.
This ensures front-line workforces are
poised to react to whatever the market
throws their way.
LIMRA LOMA
Assessment and
Development Solutions
888 785.4672
[email protected]
www.talentsolutions.limra.com
Recruit and Hire Top Performers
LIMRA and LOMA help contact centers
identify and develop top-performing reps
and managers. Clients have relied on our
research-based pre-employment tests
for 75 years. By incorporating our hiring
solutions into your center, you can improve
service quality, boost productivity, shorten
time to hire, reduce turnover, and enhance
training results.
inContact is the cloud contact center
software leader, helping organizations
around the globe create high quality
customer experiences. inContact is 100%
focused on the cloud and is the only
provider to combine cloud software with
an enterprise-class telecommunications
network for a complete customer
interaction solution. To learn more, visit
www.inContact.com
Janet LeBlanc +
Associates Inc.
613 730.2709
[email protected]
www.janetleblancassociates.com
Janet LeBlanc + Associates Inc. is a
team of dedicated professionals who
are passionate about using the voice of
the customer to drive business results.
Working with senior management, our
team integrates operational, customer
value and business performance measures
to influence strategic planning, employee
performance management and process
improvement initiatives. With awardwinning results in driving transformational
change, we help clients tie customer
strategies to bottom-line results.
iQor
IQ Services
800 811.4214
www.iQor.com
612 243.6700
www.iq-services.com
Headquartered in New York City, iQor
provides intelligent customer interactions
and outsourcing solutions. Our 17,000
employees in 39 Centers of Excellence
around the world are dedicated to
understanding each customer’s DNA. We
use data science and real-time analytics
intelligence to deliver extraordinary
customer experiences that enhance
revenue while promoting and protecting our
clients’ brands.
“IQ Services provides customer experience
quality assurance services for contact
centers. Services include performance
testing, monitoring and related professional
services for self service (IVR) and agent
supported customer interactions. Our
mission is to provide flexible and cost
effective approaches giving customers
confidence their business solutions deliver
the required customer experience before
they are deployed and in production”.
Live Xchange
LiveOps
Look.Listen.Be.
866 963.0049
[email protected]
www.contractxchange.com
800 411.4700
www.liveops.com
443 742.1291
[email protected]
www.LookListenBe.com
Equip your corporation with the means
to successfully develop and operate your
“own” remote enabled contact center.
Livexchange provides a fully hosted Virtual
Multi Channel Contact Center Platform with
all the tools to recruit, train, record and
coach agents and a full suite of detailed
reports at one low price.
LiveOps is revolutionizing the world of work.
The company offers innovative solutions
aimed at solving technology and workforce
needs for today’s businesses. LiveOps’
Contact Center Cloud is the awardwinning technology platform that enables
companies to enhance their consumer
experience while achieving measurable
operational efficiencies.
OCT 2014
Look.Listen.Be. is a consulting company
providing no-nonsense training solutions
and customized answers for contact
centers. With more than 20 years in the
customer service and sales industry,
Wanda Sitzer coaches management
teams and the frontline to elevate
their interactions and maximize their
performance.
❘
43
DIRECTORY
Medallia
650 321.3000
Melissa Kovacevic
Consulting & Coaching
www.medallia.com
[email protected]
www.mkcallcenterimprovement.com
[email protected]
MTB5
866 WIN.MTB5
[email protected]
www.mtb5.com
NorthEast Contact Center Forum
The Guiding Light to Contact Center Management
www.neccf.org
NorthEast Contact
Center Forum
www.neccf.org
Since 1983 Melissa has partnered
with contact center and front line retail
team clients to develop strategies that
blend People, Process and Technology
for improved Customer Experience and
business success. Her proven training
solutions are designed for maximum
knowledge retention, and are customized
for your goals, mission, customers
and staff’s needs through workshops,
classroom, and one-to-one coaching for
leads, supervisors and managers onsite or
via phone/email/Skype.
Mastering the big 5 is a leadership
development company which enhances
Contact Center Supervisors, Managers,
and Directors ability to successfully lead
diverse teams through books, workshops
and onsite consulting. MTB5’s System
of Success results in major performance
gains and expense reductions, with
launches in 5 nations in only 2+ years.
The NorthEast Contact Center Forum is
a regional contact center professional
organization. We are a non-profit group
focused on creating an environment for
education, personal and professional
growth and improving networking
opportunities. Our Board of Directors are
involved in contact center operations and
serve on a volunteer basis to host topics of
interest and importance to our attendees.
We host four meetings each year.
NICE Systems
Nuance
Greg Levin
OpenSpan
www.nice.com/enterprise
[email protected]
www.nuance.com
512 212.4577
[email protected]
www.greglevin.com
678 527.5400
[email protected]
www.openspan.com
Greg Levin, Principal and Founder of OFF
CENTER, has been researching, reporting
on and satirizing contact centers and customer care since 1994, and is considered
one of the most authoritative and refreshing voices in the industry.
Greg educates, empowers and entertains
contact center professionals worldwide
via a variety of compelling resources,
including: his brand-new ebook, Full Contact:
OpenSpan is a provider of activity
intelligence and desktop automation
solutions that improve performance,
drive revenue and increase efficiencies
in contact center, back office and retail
storefront environments. OpenSpan
solutions are deployed on more than
300,000 desktops across the world, and
are optimizing billions of transactions in the
banking and financial services, insurance,
telecommunications, retail and technology
industries. For more information, visit
www.openspan.com.
Medallia, the global leader in customer
experience management provides solutions
that enable companies to gather, monitor,
and act on customer feedback while
improving call center metrics. Global 2000
companies around the world use Medallia
to track customer satisfaction across all
touch-points including phone, email, IVR,
social media, and web.
NICE Systems enhance customer
experience while meeting the organization’s
operational, revenue and compliance
needs. NICE enables organizations to
”impact every customer interaction” by
capturing interactions and transactions,
analyzing cross-channel data to reveal
business insights, and applying insights in
real time for business impact.
NICE serves over 25,000 organizations in
more than 150 countries, including over
80 of the Fortune 100.
Nuance provides tailored customer service
solutions that support intuitive and
pleasing interactions between companies
and their customers. Our full suite of
customer care solutions – including
speech-enabled IVR, full-service hosting,
proactive outbound notifications, routing
and CTI services, desktop optimization and
business consulting – enable organizations
with complex and evolving customer care
operations to earn happy, loyal customers.
Contact Center Practices and Strategies that
Make an Impact.
The Pace
of Service
ORACLE RightNow
Cloud Service
866 630.7669
www.oracle.com/rightnow
Oracle’s Service Solutions make your brand
stand out with the most complete crosschannel customer experience, combining
leading technologies for Contact Center,
Web, Social and Mobile.
44
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The Pace of Service
Contact Center Solutions
Pegasystems
www.thepaceofservice.com
Twitter: @mpace101
800 776.7712
www.oce.oregon.gov
The Pace of Service helps organizations
realize the full benefit of Customer
Service, Social Business, Business Process
Management, and People Leadership.
Michael Pace is considered one of the
country’s leading speakers and writers on
the topic of social media customer service,
and has created scalable, high quality
social support environments. You can
connect with Michael on Twitter
@mpace101 and on LinkedIn. Michael
also writes a weekly blog at www.
thepaceofservice.com.
Our business model is simple: A private
sector company operates their business
within the walls of an Oregon prison;
utilizing their own supervisory staff, servers,
software applications and telephone lines.
OCE provides the infrastructure, agents,
building, personal computers and staff
(liaisons for institution). If you would like
more information on this unique and
exciting business opportunity please let us
know. We can arrange a tour, or come to
your location for a full presentation of our
operation.
617 374.9600
[email protected]
www.pega.com
OCT 2014
Today’s customer service and contact
center organizations must deliver a great
customer experience and maximize
the productivity of their contact center
personnel. With Pega, you can easily
capture your service goals and best
practices directly within the system, engage
customers in any channel, deploy a guided
contact center desktop, and rapidly adapt
to change.
DIRECTORY
PowerHouse Consulting
Pelorus Associates
800 449.9904
[email protected]
www.powerhouse1.com
434 589.2131
[email protected]
www.pelorusassoc.com
PowerHouse Consulting, Inc. is an
internationally-recognized consulting firm
specializing in Contact Centers and Telecommunications. Our services include Strategic
Planning, Contact Center Assessments/Solutions, Telecommunications/IT Assessments,
Workforce Optimization, Outsourcing Management, Custom Training, and Procurement
Management. Collaborating with more than
350 clients, our seasoned consultants work
with organizations of different sizes, varying
budgets, different industries to bring quick,
practical, and cost-effective solutions.
Pelorus Associates provides market
research, consulting, and marketing
communications services to over 35
contact center vendors in seven countries.
Engagements include opportunity analysis,
market potential estimates, market
segmentation, acquisition research, white
papers, ROI models, regulatory analysis,
blog posts, product briefs, and strategic
partnering. Projects are client-driven,
conducted professionally, and with
complete confidentiality.
PoundZero
PowerNet Global
919 525.1020
[email protected]
www.poundzero.net/video
888 516.4972
[email protected]
www.powernetglobal.com
The Complete Mobile Solution for
Contact Centers.
PoundZero’s Visual Multichannel
capabilities solves the voice menu
frustration for smartphone users by
replacing it with a Visual Menu, and
satisfies smartphone communication
preferences by adding multichannel
interaction capabilities, such as chat, text,
and call-me-back. PoundZero’s Mobile
Content Management System empowers
smartphone users who prefer to find
answers for themselves.
Celebrating 20+ years as a leader in
the telecommunications industry and
achievement as a multi-award winning
company, PowerNet Global is a premier
provider of call center solutions. Get cost
effective, stable, long term outbound and
toll free inbound termination specifications
with free call back service and 24/7 NOC
support. We also offer Inbound DIDs and
quality International termination. With
PNG, you can experience Tier 1 call quality
without the high cost.
Saddletree Research
SATMAP
480 922.5949
[email protected]
www.saddletreeresearch.com
201 888.5407
[email protected]
www.satmapinc.com
Founded in 1999, Saddletree Research
provides custom and syndicated industry
research covering emerging and highgrowth contact center technology solutions
and markets including Web 2.0 framework
and applications (social networks),
analytics, workforce optimization (WFO),
and Internet Protocol (IP) telephony.
Papers and publications feature an
emphasis on demand-based end-user data.
SATMAP is the world’s only technology
which employs a non-linear neural network
to align callers and agents based upon
more than 100 personality attributes
to optimize call outcomes in real time.
SATMAP adds a measurable, critical layer
of business intelligence to the call routing
process and works in conjunction with all
existing routing systems and platforms.
Proactive Planning
Group
Plantronics
866 965.7227
www.plantronics.com/contactcenter
443 451.4301
[email protected]
Making Workforce Management work for
you!
The Proactive Planning Group is a full
service contact center consulting firm
specializing in Workforce Management
issues. Our mission is to improve contact
center performance by focusing on root
causes, real world solutions and return on
investment.
Plantronics offers the industry’s most
comprehensive and widely adopted
families of corded and wireless headset
solutions for contact center and the
enterprise. Recognized for their sound
quality, reliability and comfort, Plantronics
solutions improve the effectiveness of
internal and external communications
regardless of where professionals are
working.
OPTION 3 -Professional
Original Purple
RCCSP
(C=100 M=97 Y=27 K=24) and Black
Education Alliance
708 246.0320
[email protected]
www.the-resource-center.com
The Resource Center for Customer Service
Professionals (RCCSP), celebrating its
thirteenth year of service to the contact
center community, provides access to
world’s largest network of call center,
help desk, and IT support center training
and certification providers: the RCCSP
Professional Education Alliance.
Experience the industry’s most
comprehensive training curriculum.
905 567.8432
[email protected]
www.reflectivekeynotes.com
Reflective Keynotes Inc. specializes in
helping inbound contact centers improve
their sales results. Our workshops,
webinars and keynote speeches provide
key insights to help your Agents close more
sales and help your Managers coach more
effectively towards sales results.
Service Agility
Sennheiser
Communications
215 679.5250
[email protected]
www.serviceagility.com
860 434.9190
[email protected]
www.sennheiserusa.com
Sennheiser Communications is a joint
venture between electroacoustics specialist
Sennheiser Electronic GmbH & Co. KG
and hearing healthcare specialist William
Demant Holding Group. It manufactures
wireless and wired headsets for mobile
phones, contact centers, offices and
unified communications, as well as PC/
Mac-compatible computer headsets for
VoIP, entertainment and gaming.
OCT 2014
Service Agility provides guidance to organizations seeking substantial improvement
in customer satisfaction levels and in the
efficiency of their service and sales operations. Our expertise is delivered through
four channels: consulting, training, speaking, and writing. We serve call centers
and face-to-face operations. We offer our
clients industry expertise, real-world experience, knowledge transfer proficiency, and
guidance independent from partnerships
with other vendors.
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45
DIRECTORY
SPi Global
SQM Group
Strategic Contact
TantaComm
888 906.2369
www.spi-global.com
800 446.2095
[email protected]
www.sqmgroup.com
866 791.8560
[email protected]
www.strategiccontact.com
800 444.8522
[email protected]
www.tantacomm.com
Since 1996, SQM has been a call center
VoC expert for improving organizations’
FCR, operating cost, customer service
and retention. We have done this by
benchmarking, tracking, consulting and
recognizing our clients’ FCR and customer
retention performance.
Over 70% of our tracking clients improve
their FCR and operating cost year over
year. For the average call center SQM
benchmarks, a 1% improvement in their
FCR performance equals $276,000 in
annual operational savings.
Strategic Contact is an independent
consulting firm that provides objective
perspectives based on its deep experience
in contact centers large and small. The
firm helps companies plan for change
and growth, assess current environments,
develop strategies, evaluate and implement
new technologies, develop outsourced
and virtualized center configurations, and
conduct business case analysis.
TantaComm is a leader, innovator and
trusted partner in customer interaction
recording and quality management
solutions. Balancing innovation with
practicality, TantaComm delivers todayís
most cost-competitive path to compliance,
service optimization, operational excellence
and customer satisfaction.
TelePlaza.com
Touchpoint Associates
Uptivity
Varolii Corporation
TelePlaza is a comprehensive online
directory that provides more valuable
and relevant call center content than any
other “niche” industry Web site and is
the ultimate resource for locating quality
contact center information. TelePlaza offers
more industry specific information than
the search engines AND more call center
supplier listings than any other online
industry search site.
901 230.0567
[email protected]
www.touchpointassociates.com
888 922.5526
[email protected]
www.uptivity.com
800 206.2979
[email protected]
www.varolii.com
Touchpoint Associates takes your contact
center to a higher level of service and
profitability. Our Strategic Call Center
Roadmap is an actionable plan to
refocus people, process, leadership and
technology for maximum results. Our
Frontline Management Workshop is an
engaging program to develop frontline
managers into top performers. Call today
to learn more.
What boosts the bottom line for any
contact center? You want the best
every agent can deliver while optimizing
contact center management for a better
understanding of the customer. Only
Uptivity gives you the tools you need to
continuously improve your contact center.
For more information, visit us at www.
uptivity.com.
Varolii is a leading provider of customer
interaction management applications. Its
cloud-based communication service helps
organizations more effectively interact with
large numbers of customers and employees
through voice, text messages, smartphone
applications and email, while reducing cost
of operations, driving regulation compliance
and improving service.
SPi Global stands for Solutions, People,
Innovation. We are the largest Filipinoowned BPO company in the Philippines
specializing in CRM Contact Center
Solutions that generate award-winning
results. We provide geographic and
price-point flexibility with more than 30
global locations and 18,000 employees. Our clients profit from our world-class
practices, IT resources, financial security,
and processes—part of our 32-year history. We deliver service excellence 100% of
the time. VoltDelta
R
OnDEMAND SOLUTIONS
O
Verint
VoiceLog
1 800 4VERINT
[email protected]
www.verint.com
800 830.9896
[email protected]
www.voicelog.com
Verint® Enterprise Intelligence Solutions®
help organizations capture and analyze
customer interactions, sentiments, and
trends across multiple channels, improve
performance, and optimize the customer
experience. The solution portfolio includes
the Impact 360® Workforce Optimization®
suite and Voice of the Customer software
for increasing customer satisfaction,
enhancing products and services, and
driving revenue.
For more than a decade and nearly 100
million calls, VoiceLog has been a trusted
third party verification and call recording
services partner. VoiceLog provides cost
effective services to ensure quality sales
and control. Product offerings include Call
Recording, Automated Scripted Recording,
and Live Operator Verification.
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OCT 2014
VoltDelta OnDemand
Solutions
866 436.1169
[email protected]
www.VoltDelta.com
VoltDelta OnDemand Solutions provides a
hosted infrastructure for enabling virtual
contact centers and home agent call
distribution and management, inbound and
outbound voice recognition applications,
and voice of the customer call and agent
screen recording. VoltDelta supports more
than 2.4 billion calls and 2 billion SMS text
messages per year.
www.youtube.com/voltdeltachannel
www.twitter.com/voltdelta4u
XO Communications
800 421.3887
[email protected]
www.xo.com
XO Communications is the leading unified
communications provider of Contact
Center on Demand (CCOD) and Interactive
Voice Response (IVR) services for the
contact center industry. These cloud-based
applications from XO will help enterprises
better manage their contact center
infrastructure by improving productivity,
increasing customer satisfaction and
reducing costs.
THOUGHT YOU SHOULD KNOW
301.3 million
According to final data from International Data
Corporation, vendors shipped a total of 301.3 million
smartphones worldwide in Q2 2014, up 25.3% from the
240.5 million units shipped in the second quarter of
2013.
SOURCE: INTERNATIONAL DATA CORPORATION (IDC) WORLDWIDE QUARTERLY MOBILE PHONE TRACKER;
WWW.IDC.COM
44%
Forty-four percent of businesses surveyed cited improving customer satisfaction as the primary objective of
their contact center. 27% said that focusing on reducing
the cost of customer engagements was the most important, with 12% focusing on revenue generation through
customer acquisition as the call center’s main focus.
SOURCE: CALL CENTER IQ’S EXECUTIVE REPORT;
WWW.CALLCENTER-IQ.COM
27%
In a recent Workplace Bullying Survey, over one-quarter
(27%) of American adults said that they have current or
past direct experience with abusive conduct at work.
SOURCE: “2014 WBI U.S. WORKPLACE BULLYING SURVEY,” WORKPLACE BULLYING INSTITUTE;
WWW.WORKPLACEBULLYING.ORG
60%
The percent of Internet users who will opt for mobile
customer service applications as their first option by
2015.
SOURCE: GARTNER’S “PREDICTS 2014: CUSTOMER SUPPORT AND THE ENGAGED ENTERPRISE”;
WWW.GENESYS.COM
Call-Handling
Productivity UP
Turnover DOWN
More social interaction
at the workplace leads
to higher productivity
and less turnover,
according to
Sociometric Solutions,
a management services
firm that analyzes
communication
patterns with social
sensing technology to
drive innovative
transformation
services. After tracking
workers at a Bank of
America call center, the
firm observed that
those in tightknit
communications
groups were more
productive and less
likely to quit. After the
call center switched
from staggered
15-minute breaks to
having teams take
breaks all at the same
time, call-handling
productivity increased
more than 10%, and
turnover declined
nearly 70%.
SOURCE: “UNBLINKING EYES TRACK EMPLOYEES,”
THE NEW YORK TIMES;
WWW.NYTIMES.COM
ILLUSTRATIONS BY;
LUIS PRADO
Connect with Contact Center Pipeline:
LINKED-IN
@ tinyurl.com/ccpLinkedin
YOUTUBE CHANNEL
@ youtube.com/ccPipeline
TWITTER
@SusanHash
❙
@CCPipeline
Contact
Center
Outsourcing
REINVENTED
Great Cultures Enable
World-Class Service
Driving Growth for Clients
CultureServiceGrowth.com
210-475-1155
8415 Datapoint Drive, Suite 600 San Antonio, TX 78229

Contact Center Pipeline

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