Spoken Communications

How one bank rethought automated customer service

There is nothing new that can be done to differentiate brands via IVRs.

Unless, of course, you're a Norwegian bank sponsoring a boys' choir. In that case, you can totally rock the IVR by having the boys' choir sing every prompt.

Really. Must be seen to be believed! Automation does not have to be boring. It can be downright moving.

And note this stunning statistic: in December, the telebank was called more than two million times. The population of Norway is 4.9 million. Think you can't distinguish your brand through your IVR? Think again.

 

Top 5 Call Center Trend Predictions for 2012

2012 will bring shifts to the cloud, to SIP, to at-home agents and show the big data winners

This year has seen a lot of changes in the call center space. Within an industry that is notoriously slow to change and embrace new technology, 2012 is going to buck that trend and show some major shifts in the industry. My predictions for 2012:

1. Shift from premise-based systems to the cloud. In 2010, experts were predicting a shift to the cloud. And so it has come to pass and will continue to pass in 2011. Forrester is making optimistic forecasts for analytics, cloud computing and smart computing, based on their tracking of 40 Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) vendors. Now that solid reports are available showing operating costs savings averaging 40% over five years, the only holdouts are those who have sunk too much into capital expenditures on newer infrastructure. Even so, many are dipping a toe into the cloud with hosted virtual desktops and other SaaS options.
2. Heightened speed of transition from TDM to SIP. The SBC (Session Border Controller) market grew by 45% in 2010, increasing that market to $271 million. SIP trunking is the primary service provided by these SBC adopters and will continue to be through 2012. Let's face it; IP hardware is more reliable and flexible than old-fashioned TDM ware, and with more call centers requiring data streams to support multi-channel approaches to customer service, TDM is no longer an efficient solution.  SIP is rapidly becoming the standard, and it carries cost savings benefits as well.
3. Technology winners will be providers of big data visualization. Analysts have estimated that 80% of business data is unstructured. Leaders in the trend towards big data will be those that can provide an analyst-in-a-box, with simplified data visualization that reduces the signal-to-noise ratio and provides curated, actionable information streams for the average user. While the specialized eye of a trained analyst can't be boxed, key data points required to make a decision can be. The frontrunners in the call center space will be those that can break and restructure the system of data visualization so that it can be used on a daily basis.
4. Increased adoption of work-from-home model. In a 2010 survey of contact center decision makers, Forrester found that 35% of companies had plans for expanding their home agent program over the next year. And those who had already adopted the remote agent model reported expanded skills recruiting, decreased attrition, higher productivity and lower infrastructure costs. The case has clearly been made for the remote agent model, and 2012 will see an expansion of at-home agents. And why not? Organizations can even make the argument that their at-home workforce is greener and more environmentally friendly than a brick and mortar center.
5. Return of focus to customer service over technology. While each trend listed above is a technology solution, what we will see more of in 2012 is technology enabling a return to customer-centricity. As more organizations adopt cloud and SIP technology, send their workers home to be happier and more productive and use big data to drive decisions, the ultimate result will be counterintuitive: more time to focus on the original value of the call center, which is the opportunity to provide cutting edge customer service that keeps customers loyal.

Welcome, 2012. It's going to be a fun ride.

Benefits of remote agents (part 2) - Productivity myths exploded

Myth #2 regarding a remote agent workforce: it's harder to monitor quality and performance of at-home agents. Exploded: with virtual technology systems available today, it's actually much easier.

This post is the second in a series exploring the benefits and drawbacks of the growing trend of homesourcing call centers to remote agents working from home. (Part 1 on expanded recruiting is here.) In part two of our ongoing series, we explore the question of monitoring remote personnel. This is a common objection, and let's explode it right here. This risk comes down to three basic issues: giving up control, enhancing security and maintaining community.

Control

    Myth: With home offices, supervisors won't be able to control agent quality and productivity.

With remote agents, supervisors can no longer walk the floor and get a feel for the productivity and coaching needs of their agents. However, this was more justified as a concern before the modern virtual call center space. Today, a range of sophisticated hosted tools provides supervisors with more information at their fingertips than ever before. Hosted desktop applications, daily metrics, and internet-delivered call recording and screen capture give a complete picture of agent performance. Regardless of where actual agents may be located, supervisors can and should have access to a host of information about agent needs and performance. For example:

• Call recording Record all or a percentage of calls. Sort and listen to calls by agent, call length (do longer calls indicate a training need?), or by client. 
• Screen recording Record all or a percentage of desktop interactions. Capture a larger percentage of new agent interactions for training and a smaller percentage for established agents.
• Quality monitoring View individual agent's success rates with specified benchmarked metrics.

In fact, many remote agent solutions offer ways to link virtual call centers that replicate a brick-and-mortar call center, with additional real-time metrics and data to provide a wealth of information about phone time and success rates.

Security

    Myth: With home offices, customer data is at risk.

One of the risks raised with at-home agents is the concern that remote agents, without immediate visual supervision, might compromise sensitive customer data. As it turns out, levels of employee fraud are in fact not elevated for remote agents. While it may seem to be an issue, this risk is for the large part nonexistant.

Survey results from a study AHCC (At Home Customer Contacts) conducted earlier this year with over 90 companies deploying the home agent model showed that 95% of companies experienced same or fewer incidents of fraudulent behavior at home versus at a brick-and-mortar call center.

Concerns about remote agent security can be easily addressed with the following:

• Rigorous employee hiring practices
• PCI compliant IVR for sensitive data collection
• Use chat, webcasts and telepresence to connect remote agents to their supervisors, each other and the corporate culture

Community

    Myth: Remote agents will lose their sense of community, and productivity will suffer.

It is true that call center managers must shift practices in order to maintain a sense of community and achievement with the remote call center model. However, with the wealth of information available through virtual monitoring and through a variety of tools designed for the remote call center manager, this task isn't as daunting as it may seem. Online collaboration and coaching through group chat, individual chat, VoIP calls and web conferencing can keep remote agents in tune with the organization's mission statement and attuned to the corporate culture. And individual coaching delivered through phone and web can be more beneficial than the in-house variety specifically due to the distance involved.

Call Center Links: TDM vs SIP

Confused about the benefits of staying with TDM or switching to SIP?

There has been a lot of talk brewing on call center sites, groups and periodicals on the benefits of making the move from the legacy analog TDM (Time-Division Multiplexing) architecture to SIP (Session Internet Protocol) industry standard. Stay tuned for a full post comparing the two and a cost-benefit analysis, but in the meantime, some of the best links we've found clarifying definitions, benefits, drawbacks and other information to fuel the argument to your CTO and CFO:

• Why SIP rules over TDM PBX Three basic arguments in favor of the newer, more flexible technology.
• What you need to know about moving from TDM to SIP-based systems NetworkWorld recommends two excellent white papers issued by Cisco. Both are extensive yet informative and easy to absorb, even for the non-technical person.
• IP vs TDM Great "copper wires versus the internet" quickie comparison from Telco Depot
• SIP Trunking The NET website gives a basic definition of the industry standard and its advantages over TDM.
• SIP Trunking Bandwidth.com has the best encyclopedic entry on SIP technology and applications
• SIP vs TDM Offers an architecture diagram comparing a legacy TDM with a single point of failure to a common SIP integration

Links of the week: at-home agents, supermarket self-service and mobile customer service

This week's news in the world of call centers, customer service and technological innovation. Miss something? No sweat. We monitored the top stories and bring you the top news for call center managers:

• Getting more bang for your at-home buck. The debate about remote agents rages on, really, with very little argument on the con side. McDonagh points out that working from home can be a reward for top-performing agents, a failsafe for bad weather, a bonus for agent retention (especially when an agent's spouse must move the family out of town) and an easy way to enable weekend and after-hours bonus shifts.
• Workforce management in the multichannel call center. How to get one's ducks in a row when the ducks entail phone calls, web chat and web callbacks? ICMI's latest report shows that workforce management for channels other than phone are lacking: "Of those centers that do report having a WFM system, however, many of them do not have accounting in their system for channels other than telephone. Only 38.5% said their WFM system accounts for email; the number’s even lower for chat (18.5%) and lower yet for fax and video chat."
• Customers don't want to talk to you, either. Forbes reports that customers want their questions resolved immediately, with no waiting. So what else is new?
• In the realm of grocery shopping, at least, live agents are winning against self-service. USA Today reports that supermarket shoppers are avoiding self-service in favor of live checkout help. However, I take exception to the article's original title,Shoppers prefer customer service to self-checkout. What the study determined was that shoppers preferred live agents to self-checkout. Self-checkout doesn't immediately correlate to a 100% lack of customer service.
  Some of us like the ability to check out our five items ourselves and get on our way without inane chatter at the checkout line!
• Is mobile the next frontier for customer service? This article reports on the popularity of smartphones and asks the obvious question: why aren't more companies harnessing mobile for customer service and engagement? A keen insight: "When businesses approach customer service from a mobility perspective, they need to consider their existing customer service strategy and how they can enhance basic customer engagement with proactive contact, personalized applications and location-based services." Move it to the phone and make it two-way communication, folks!

Top 5 Uses for IVR (that customers love)

This week's top five links is a little different. We talk a lot about IVR (Interactive Voice Response) usage here and about how customer cries against IVR tend to be against badly-designed IVRs, not IVR in general. IVR is like most customer service: when it works well, you don't really notice it. But when it works badly, it feels like your fingernails are being ripped out. Slowly.

Lately, quite a few organizations have done studies to determine the best uses for IVR. And time after time, studies show that well-designed IVRs that actually do what they intend to do, easily and effectively, are beloved by customers, not reviled. It's the call trees with eight menu options, the speech recognition systems that condescend to tell you, "I'm sorry; I didn't understand that" and the systems that take longer to complete a simple task with an agent than if the IVR had simply worked correctly to begin with that rouse customer ire.

That being said, it's all about the customer experience. What proof do we have that IVR (a well-designed IVR, that is) actually improves the customer experience?

• Well, there's the fact that a study shows that customers prefer automated solutions for simple or routine tasks, such prescriptions refills, checking flight status and tracking checking balance.
• Customers also prefer IVRs for polls and surveys, office call routing, selective information lookup and call center forwarding
• Tips for a good IVR design that customers will respond to, including language caliber, artificial intelligence and dynamic design  [Edited 7-14-11 -- link no longer active]
• And don't underestimate the importance of choosing the right voice for your IVR system
• And always keep in mind that we live in a multichannel world in which customers will use three or more channels to get their issues solved, and the IVR experience should be consistent with the chat and email experiences

Top 5 contact center links: remote agent work from home

One of the fun aspects of monitoring articles, blogs, and Tweets about the call center and contact center space is that it's easy to see trends emerging. Predictions aside, a few observations from monitoring the contact center news and blog feeds this week: the attraction of cloud-based services is on the rise, and hand-in-hand with that comes the appeal of using remote agents working from home. 

• Contact center managers embrace home agents as a smart move (from Forrester Research) The title says it all: Forrester’s 2010 survey of contact center decision makers found that 35% of companies had plans for expanding their home agent program during the next 12 months.
• Likewise, Forrester reports that Cloud communication stirs buyers' interest: For contact centers only 2% use the CaaS (Communication as a Service) model today (with IVR as a major exception). However, 23% of decision makers stated they would consider both UC and contact centers as a cloud based service in the future.
• Simultaneously, one blog featured a case study showing Work at Home agents damage net promoter and customer satisfaction: "It is estimated that the work at home agent model is growing by 40% annually. Attrition among work at home agents is only 10% compared to attrition rates of nearly 50% in typical call centers." And "previously top-performing agents struggled to maintain even average-level performance" when sent home to work.
• As a counter to that study, Donna Fluss offers advice on Managing remote call center agents by providing a best practice model
• The argument for the positive effects remote agents working from home can have on the U.S. economy: Arise Virtual Solutions CEO Angela Selden on the push to bring American jobs back home

Survey Shows Customer Need for Cross-Channel Communications

Original study write up by Leonard Klie published in Speech Tech Magazine.

Customers still prefer to hear a human voice, but they want to connect with companies and brands to solve problems in a channel of their choosing, whether that be online, web chat, email or the POTS (plain old telephone system). And when they switch from one channel to another, they still expect a consistent level of customer service and prefer not to have to repeat their service data and issue.

That's the conclusion drawn from a survey conducted by Genesys Telecommunications Labs and research firm Ovum. The survey was aimed at measuring and qualifying consumer behavior and used a pool of 8,800 consumers from 16 countries around the world, not just the United States.

Additional survey findings:

• A majority of consumers started on the Web and then went to a customer service representative. A large number of people identified telephone conversations with live agents as that the most satisfying channel of customer service, and further identified better agent training as one of the customer care industry’s top needs.
• Though no single industry overwhelmingly was able to deliver cross channel conversations, the financial services industry and consumer products manufacturers seemed to have addressed the issue better than most other industries.
• Consumers still largely prefer to interact with customer service via the phone, followed in second by email; Web self-service finished a distant third. 
• Consumers want to be able to conduct self-service via the Web or interactive voice response system and then get live assistance from an agent if needed without having to re-enter information already provided. The leading suggestion on how to best improve cross channel conversations from 44 percent of the respondents was to provide “better human service,” which includes the agent already having the information provided via a different channel.
• When asked where organizations should invest more in customer service communication, consumers overwhelmingly asked for better integration of human contact center agents with other channels. They also wanted newer delivery methods, including avatars, social forums, and multimedia. 

Conclusions to draw from this study: customer service centers must take steps to integrate CRM across contact centers, online and with email support. With the contact center still being the primary form of communication with the customer, centers must facilitate interaction across other channels. If your IVR doesn't integrate with your CRM, how much are you losing in customer satisfaction and retention?

I don't know about you, but this study made me want to run to each of our contact center customers and verify CRM integration. I know that our newest customers are benefiting from a new IVR feature that automatically creates a new case in Salesforce, populating the CRM with content from the IVR, but what about those who haven't yet included this feature?

What does this study make you want to run out and implement?

VIDEO: Spoken's Call Center Suite

Spoken has a ton of solutions for call centers, many of which aren't yet publicized on our main website for various reasons. Some are custom solutions we've developed for specific clients and have only shared behind closed doors; others are popular by virtue of their plug-and-play functionality but not something that visitors would Google for.

Still, it's all pretty cool. And while we tend to keep the Obvious Marketing Collateral to the main website, sometimes, we treat devoted readers to sneak previews of Spoken's cool new tools here. So, if you thought Spoken was just Guided Speech IVR and nothing more, here is why we totally rock the call center space:

Automation vs. humans: Improving Customer Experience podcast

The Improving Customer Experience podcast is up!

David Milstein and I had a great time talking automation, speech recognition and the future of customer service and the customer experience in the world of self-service and IVRs. Big hat tip to our panel of hosts, Michelle Romanica, Jim Love and Steve Smith--thanks for giving us the chance to talk about hybrid solutions in speech recognition. And the robot apocalypse. :-)

Customer Experience podcast #9