Transforming your Call Center into a Multimedia Contact Center

"The convergence of two trends, the move to e-commerce and the consolidation of all customer interactions into a contact center, with its self-sales and self-service functionality and advanced call center technology, will quickly become the dominant market segment in the CRM space,"

Customers want the freedom to choose among multiple contact points, depending on what is most convenient to them. As more people become comfortable doing business through alternative interaction channels, unified messaging and web technologies are becoming a necessity for enabling companies to support these channels through their call centers. Companies willing to invest in these technologies stand to reap huge rewards. Many call centers are reducing the cost of sales and customer service while increasing revenues through improved cross-selling and up-selling capabilities from their Web site. More importantly, companies improve the overall quality of customer interactions by providing online customer service via the Web and accurate, timely responses to voice mail, fax, and email. As a result, organizations are achieving increased customer loyalty and satisfaction and ultimately greater profitability. As we move beyond management of phone calls to management of all customer interactions, the demand to transform your call center into a Multimedia Contact Center becomes the critical key to success.

Unified Messaging

A call center agent can open a single, universal "inbox" from their desktop that supports delivery and retrieval of all types of messages. With all messages in one place, forwarding, saving, prioritizing, and managing customer messages becomes much simpler. Emails and faxes will no longer accumulate until someone has time to address them, or worse, not addresses at all. Instead, your agents can handle these requests according to each message's real priority and urgency, just as they would incoming phone calls.

Although the concept seems simple, the benefits of unified messaging can be remarkable. Agents can spend more time focusing on the content and quality of their replies to customers and less time on the mechanics of how they retrieve and manage their messages. Agents will have convenient access to all message types since voice mails and faxes become messages along with their email. Call centers will realize a tremendous productivity boost from unified messaging since their agents will no longer need to make round-trips to the fax machine or spend time dialing into voice mail systems to retrieve messages.

From a customer service perspective, Unified Messaging helps agents to easily maintain and manage a customer's interaction history of email, voice mail, and fax. With easy access to customer interaction history, agents can forward messages with combined media quickly to other parts of the organization. Visual scanning of email, voice-mail, and fax messages also allows agents to better prioritize their messages and respond rapidly to critical messages.

There are several key elements that should be part of a true unified messaging system. Voice mail, faxes, and email should all be treated the same as an "interaction message." In the instance that your mail system should go down, unified messaging should provide fault tolerance by creating local copies of voice mail and faxes and handle the queuing of these incoming messages.

Integrated Multimedia
Future enhancements in the support of the Multimedia Contact Center will bring about new technology that can fully integrate all types of customer contacts. All interactions will be queued and routed by a single process. Call centers will be able to build rules and logic into this process to determine how and where an interaction should be handled. For example, in some instances Web chats may take precedence over phone calls, so these types of interactions would be given a higher priority in the inbound queue. Or, some customers may receive priority treatment regardless of which contact method they use. A specific type of email may require specialized skills, so this interaction would be routed to an agent with the appropriate skill set. As the dynamics of the call center change, the traditional phone, web, and messaging systems will need to merge into one to create a super "contact distribution" system for support of an integrated media environment.

  

The Quest for Affordable, Superior Customer Service!

For years, organizations have struggled to balance customer satisfaction with the requirement to increase revenue and minimize the cost of customer service.
Managing these conflicting goals is difficult, but is complicated even further by the many different enterprise functions and supporting processes involved in serving customers. These include the traditional customer touch points — the contact center and branch offices — as well as back-office operations.

Not surprisingly, each of these areas within the organization has its own systems, processes, and procedures for managing workflow and assessing effectiveness. These pose a variety of challenges:

• Although management applications and workforce management, IVR, ACD, and CRM systems provide a staggering amount of statistical data about what is happening in the organization, they do not explain why — and unit-level managers may lack the time, tools, and expertise necessary to perform meaningful data analysis.
• Applications often cannot share information readily, and data may remain hidden or inaccessible. Moreover, since the applications typically are purchased, implemented, and administered independently, they usually require duplicate effort and expense to install and maintain, thereby reducing their return on investment.
• Different functional areas within the organization often lack standardized processes for sharing and correlating data with other areas. This problem becomes magnified as data and reports are disseminated to successively higher levels in the organization. Reporting periods and units of measurement may vary from one business unit to another. Each unit, branch, or contact center may report on a different set of metrics altogether, making it difficult for data to be rolled up into meaningful reports. This prevents organizations from receiving a holistic view of performance, making data analysis for enterprise decision making nearly impossible.
• Many — if not most — organizations have developed their customer service processes to fit around their internal systems and procedures, such as accounting, order fulfillment, and delivery. These systems and processes are convenient for the organization, but not necessarily for the customer. Unless organizations have a means of collecting, analyzing, sharing, and acting on statistically valid customer feedback, they run the risk of alienating customers without even realizing that a problem exists somewhere within their service delivery chain.

Collectively, these challenges pose a formidable barrier to strategic decision making and superior customer service. In fact, they tend to foster fragmented customer service. In a survey of 176 North American firms with revenues of $500 million or more, Forrester Research presented respondents with a list of potential issues. Seventy-three percent of firms selected “getting alignment across organizations” as a significant obstacle for improving the customer experience they deliver. Organizations need a way to capture, analyze, share, act on, and learn from actionable intelligence™ — customer and workforce performance data—to deliver a unified, quality customer experience. 

Leveraging Actionable Intelligence
 
Escalating costs, competition, and customer expectations have translated into huge pressures in every industry. In recent research conducted by Gartner, businesses identified the following as their top five priorities.

1.  Improve business processes
2.  Control enterprise-wide operating costs
3.  Attract, retain, and grow customer relationships
4.  Improve the effectiveness of the enterprise workforce
5.  Grow revenue

Recognizing the need to deliver a superior customer experience, some organizations are implementing customer-centric management strategies, through which customers’ wants and needs — rather than organizational convenience — drive business processes. These strategies require process re-engineering, but the net result — particularly when paired with appropriate technology — is a customer-focused, highly competitive enterprise that is able to sustain its competitive advantage over time. 

Other organizations have turned to technology to help them improve efficiency, manage performance, and reduce the cost of customer service. In particular, contact centers — often the front line of customer service delivery — have benefited from a range of technological improvements, including recording and quality monitoring systems, as well as automated forecasting, scheduling, and adherence tracking provided by workforce management applications. More recently, speech and data analytics have enabled
root-cause analysis, allowing centers to transform customer data — structured and unstructured — into actionable intelligence. 

While such technology undeniably provides greater efficiency and effectiveness in managing customer service,the degree of its success hinges upon the nature of the deployment. Often, these applications support specific functions, perpetuating the siloed environment and forcing each part of the customer service value chain to act  independently.

Some organizations have taken the next step to improve their customer service operations by implementing workforce optimization (WFO), a solution that combines quality monitoring, workforce management, performance management, and eLearning to drive better performance. WFO breaks down the barriers among siloed applications, allowing contact centers to capture, analyze, share, and act on cross-functional information concerning workforce performance, customer interactions, and customer service processes. 

The growing use of IP telephony has expanded WFO’s reach from the contact center into remote, branch, and back-office operations. When enterprise WFO is brought together with speech and data analytics, the result is a powerful, end-to-end software solution that helps organizations uncover trends, determine why certain employee and customer behavior is occurring, and respond appropriately — across all departments — to achieve continuous performance improvement. This combined solution is known as customer  service analytics. 

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