WOMEN OF ENGHOUSE

WOMEN OF ENGHOUSE

Say hello to Deb Maud, R&D Manager for Communications Center at Enghouse Interactive!

Tell us about your history with Enghouse Interactive?

I was part of the Zeacom acquisition and have been with the company for 9 years. My history within Zeacom/Enghouse was firstly as the Installation Manager, followed by Support and Services Manager, R&D Product Owner and then CC R&D Director.

What is your favorite part of your job?

The favorite part of my job is working with Product Management on what endless possibilities the CC R&D team could develop for our customers. I also love building a great team who are great at what they do and deliver great products.

What is the most gratifying part of your job?

The most gratifying part of my job is finally release a world class product every 8-12 months that we can be proud of. I have a wonderful team who are passionate about what they do and the products they build.

What’s on the horizon in the world of communications center?

Outlook is Cloudy with a chance of TouchPoint Agent.

How have you seen Enghouse evolve since you’ve been part of the team?

Enghouse’s evolution since we have joined the team has been an exciting journey. Firstly becoming part of a larger wider global company and then forging a path to have Enghouse recognized as a player in the world of Contact Centers and moving towards a leader in the world of Contact Centers.

Tell us 3 fun facts about you!

• I have been known to pull out some gymnastics at the occasional Christmas party
• I have three wonderful children who are all taller than me and the youngest is only 13 years old
• My birthday falls on the Financial new year (1st November)

DEMONSTRATING CUSTOMER ENGAGEMENT SUCCESS THROUGH ROI MODELS

DEMONSTRATING CUSTOMER ENGAGEMENT SUCCESS THROUGH ROI MODELS

Are you engaged in a customer engagement optimization initiative that you feel has the potential for broad impact at your organization?

Are you working on an automation or robotics project where you wish you could have just one more round of funding from your business unit’s budget—or just one more shared resource from the IT group?

The intelligence created through customer engagement and customer experience initiatives can facilitate quick, informed decision making, drive positive customer and business outcomes, empower and engage employees—and drive meaningful ROI.

If you introduce ROI models and assumptions early in your planning, you can potentially amplify the momentum of your project and clearly show the business impact of project outcomes.

Much ROI model information is available online—one of the more comprehensive ROI toolsets I’ve seen is an offering from Harvard Business Review’s (HBR) resource library. While the HBR ROI tools cost $29.95, they are well worth the investment. The toolkit comes with several files including a glossary of ROI terms, the four fundamentals for calculating ROI, a module on understanding the key concepts and logic around ROI, and comprehensive Excel templates that you can use right away.

Click here to read more about the toolkit on the HBR Web site

What might some ROI business case outcomes look like? Here are some ROI examples from Verint customers who have driven results at their organizations:

Back office automation improves efficiency at a financial services firm by 10% in 18 months, saving $1.5M

A financial services firm with more than $600B in assets and over 5,000 employees in 13 countries is rewriting the rules of workforce optimization by creating significant value with automation. The operations group responsible for the back-end execution of financial transactions lacked reliable, operational information needed for data-driven decision making—this made it difficult to pinpoint where it could improve efficiency and effectiveness.

The organization leveraged desktop and process analytics and workforce management for back-office operations and improved efficiency by 10% in 18 months. They calculated a $1.5M in cost savings through headcount redeployment, reductions in idle time and overtime, as well as increased productivity for hundreds of employees. They also reduced idle time by 50%, decreased overtime by 37%, and increased associate activity by 9%. Additionally, they gained management insight into whether or not associates were using the appropriate means and data to resolve customer issues.

Analytics powers $1M in savings for a leading retail bank

A global provider of business process management (BPM) services leveraged multi-channel insights to drive an 18% reduction in cost-to-serve for a savings of more than $1 million per year for a leading retail bank. Before the project was implemented, only 45% of customers engaging the bank’s contact centers were getting their issues resolved—19% of calls resulted in call-backs, 17% were transferred, and another 14% were referred to a local branch office.

The organization introduced text analytics and speech analytics to analyze more than 11,000 calls and customer comments from customer satisfaction surveys.  This integrated approach revealed root causes ranging from too many website contact numbers, to a non-intuitive IVR, to a flawed call-back process. So after making modifications to bank technologies and processes based on the insights, the retail bank achieved significant cost-to-serve savings—a $400,000 reduction in call-backs, another $400,000 saved in IVR processing, and $300,000 saved on website service.

If you leverage some of the tools and ideas above, you too may be able to amplify customer engagement optimization at your organization.  Take the next steps and execute on your ideas for ROI creation—and you also might find significant benefits to your career path.

Is Customer Service the new Sales & Marketing?

Is Customer Service the new Sales & Marketing?

Recruiting a new customer is typically many times costlier to an organisation than retaining an existing one. That’s why reducing customer churn should be a key driver within any business and why customer service is just as, if not more, important to long-term success than sales or marketing.

The 2016 Microsoft State of Global Customer Service report found that customer service impacts brand choice and loyalty for 97% of consumers around the globe, while according to analysis carried out by Dimension Research on behalf of Zendesk, 79% of high-income households and 54% of Generation X respondents avoid vendors for two or more years after bad customer service experiences.

The focus on customer service is fuelled by the unattractiveness of the alternatives. For most businesses, competing on innovation is unrealistic. In the developed economies, successful products are often not genuinely new but evolutions of what has gone before. Markets are often dominated by powerful incumbents that benefit from economies of scale; as well as significant discounts when they buy raw products, enabling them, in turn, to sell them on cheaper at better margins. Competing on cost with these giants is likely to be difficult for most organisations while ‘mixing it’ with the myriad greenfield start-ups engineered from the ground up around a cost model, may be just as challenging.

So, for many businesses today, customer service is the key differentiator of competitive success. – but how can they deliver it most effectively? Ultimately, most customers want service to be fast but also effortless. In line with this, Amazon has opened an Amazon Go store in the US, which uses a combination of sensors, cameras and human staff to bill customers for items they take from the shelves without shoppers having to check out before they leave the store.

This is the kind of effortless, seamless service delivery that customers are increasingly looking for. Of course, businesses must also be aware that in any long-term customer engagement, there are likely to be what McKinsey defines as ‘moments of truth’, “those few interactions (for instance, a lost credit card, a cancelled flight, a damaged piece of clothing, or investment advice) when customers invest a high amount of emotional energy in the outcome.”

Ultimately, if businesses can deliver effortless, efficient service as standard and yet still ensure customers are handled in an exemplary manner at these moments of truth, they will have achieved a low-risk, high-return competitive differentiator in their chosen marketplace.

VERINT LAUNCHES UPDATED WFO SUITE

VERINT LAUNCHES UPDATED WFO SUITE

DestinationCRM.com recently spotlighted Verint’s announcement that it has significantly updated its Enterprise Workforce Optimization suite, which includes major enhancements to mobile apps, an omnichannel recording platform, and embedded real-time analytics.

These enhancements enable organizations to interact with customers across many channels, including a consolidated platform for recording calls, text messages, Skype audio, chat, and video, in which real-time analytics are embedded to find and evaluate interactions.

The suite also expands automatic call distributor (ACD) neutrality, supporting all leading on-premises and cloud ACD suppliers, with an open application programming interface (API) library.

Read more.

HOW DO SSN DATA BREACHES IMPACT YOUR CONTACT CENTER?

As fraudsters become more and more sophisticated, contact centers need to equip themselves with every advantage to outsmart them.

At the same time, they have to protect the customer experience so that legitimate callers do not have to endure an authentication maze just to get something done.

Using behavior analytics, the fraudsters can be separated from the legitimate callers—even if the bad guys have all of the data required to authenticate. Sound too good to be true? It isn’t.

Learn more by reading the blog from Contact Solutions’ Tim McCurry that highlights how you can help protect your contact center from the growing frequency and severity of today’s threats—while keeping your customer experience strong.

ENGHOUSE IS TAKING CENTER STAGE WITH ARSHT

ENGHOUSE IS TAKING CENTER STAGE WITH ARSHT

The Arsht Center for the Performing Arts, located in the heart of downtown Miami has been one of the world’s leading performing arts organizations and venues since 2006. With 110 full-time staff members and two buildings, the Arsht Center hosts more than 500 events every year that mirrors South Florida’s diversity and brings in 40 million dollars in annual revenue. The Arsht Center’s prominence and popularity has created a demand for and interest in its many events and programs. To keep up with customer demands, The Arsht Center needed an effective and responsible contact center answer consisting of these two main components with the second factor presenting a more challenging explanation:

• A contact center team with a sufficient number of agents to handle all customer inquiries and effective managers to ensure high- quality service;
• An easy-to-use but powerful contact center solution to support the agents’ interactions and their managers’ supervisory needs.

Agents were interacting with customers over the web, through email and fax communications, but mainly via voice calls over the Arsht Center’s unreliable legacy phone system. The current system did not support remote employees which was becoming problematic due to the extreme weather in Florida plus the lack of call recording and agent performance monitoring was not helping the overall customer experience.

The Arsht Center’s first step toward building an advanced new contact center was to migrate their old PBX to a highly-functional unified communications (UC) platform followed by selecting a contact center solution to integrate with their new Skype for Business UC platform. Communications Center and Quality Management Suite were by far the best choices for what the Arsht Center needed. Among the many factors that made Enghouse Interactive’s technology so appealing were its native integration with Microsoft Skype for Business and Office365, omnichannel functionality, agent-centric design, and the breadth and depth of Enghouse Interactive’s engineering and support teams.

Future Arsht Center plans with Enghouse involve implementing a live chat application so customers can engage with agents via instant messaging in real time. As the Arsht Center’s requirements evolve and Enghouse Interactive’s solutions continue to advance, the collaboration will surely endure.

To read the Arsht Case Study in it’s entirety click HERE

VERINT LAUNCHES MODERN, FLEXIBLE AND OPEN SUITE FOR ENTERPRISE WFO

VERINT LAUNCHES MODERN, FLEXIBLE AND OPEN SUITE FOR ENTERPRISE WFO

Announced this week, this suite now offers wide-ranging enhancements that enable organizations to interact with customers across many different channels. These enhancements include a consolidated platform for recording calls, texts, Skype audio, chat and video—in which real-time analytics are embedded to quickly find and evaluate interactions to improve compliance and enhance customer journeys.

Key features and qualities include:

• Industry-leading single platform recording solution that transforms the ease and ownership costs with which organizations can capture interactions—from telephones, to video, to radio dispatch units, as well as face-to-face interactions on a tablet
• Embedded omnichannel real-time search and evaluation, enabling organizations to seamlessly search and evaluate all interaction types (voice, text, social and video), shortening the time it takes to get the complete picture
• Record, play and evaluate video-based interactions by displaying synchronized audio, video and screen playback, enabling users to view customer and employee video interactions side-by-side
• Chat interaction access and evaluation, providing visibility into both customer and employee dialogue within chat interactions
• Enhanced ability to share intelligence with data warehouses through easy to extract speech transcriptions
• More open APIs that continue to expand access to data, such as the ability to replay captured interactions directly from CRM systems, easily tap into adherence data, trigger real-time events during recording, and import additional interaction media, including chat and email

Read more.

ENGHOUSE BROUGHT THE MAGIC TO IGNITE 2017!

ENGHOUSE BROUGHT THE MAGIC TO IGNITE 2017!

Now that the Microsoft Ignite hangover has subsided, it’s time to recap one of the biggest Microsoft events of the year and talk about the presence Enghouse had throughout the weeklong conference. The event attracted over 24,000 IT professionals, developers and other members of the tech community to learn what’s new in the world of Microsoft. It’s true, Microsoft had some big news to share, but Enghouse had a few surprises as well! During the show, the Enghouse team had the pleasure of meeting customers and partners at booth #1007 where we were proud to demo the brand new TouchPoint Agent with a live cookie demonstration. Attendees were able to experience TouchPoint Agent first hand from start to finish by placing a cookie order and receiving the product while watching every step of the interaction. The inaugural display of TouchPoint Agent with new features and functionality was well received and created quite the buzz on the expo floor. We also showed off the privately hosted cloud solution providing an option for people craving a new opportunity. Enghouse Regional Sales Manager, Brandon White noted that “Enghouse made an impact during Ignite by establishing themselves as a go to supplier when it comes to contact centers for Skype in general, on or off premises.” He also pointed out how fantastic it was to see firsthand the interest around contact centers when it comes to Skype and the positive reactions during demonstrations.

Of course the team worked hard at Ignite, but were able to celebrate the Enghouse success at a VIP magical reception held at the Epcot Food and Wine experience after day 2 of the conference. 50 VIP’s joined our team for an evening of cuisine and cocktails under the Epcot stars complete with swag bags, professional pictures, and of course a set of authentic Mickey ears. Director of Global Strategic Alliances, Sandra Crawford said, “From the booth discussions to the meetings with customers, prospects, partners, and Microsoft to the private event we hosted at Epcot for our partners and customers – I can honestly say this was the best event Enghouse has attended!”

Overall, Ignite was a dream come true in many ways and the future of the ever expanding Enghouse portfolio is bright.  Mickey Mouse said it best- “If you can dream it, you can do it!” and that’s exactly what Enghouse did at Microsoft Ignite 2017.

Setting up House

Housing Associations across the UK are under pressure to balance the need to cut costs and drive operational efficiencies with the requirement to keep levels of customer satisfaction high. It's a difficult balance to achieve with welfare reform bringing added complexity and the long-term economic outlook uncertain. 

The following Whitepaper demonstrates how technology can be brought to bear in delivering a best practice approach for associations that enables them to overcome the challenges, build more positive relations with tenants and face the future with confidence.

To download the whitepaper, please submit the form below.

WHITEPAPER FORM

CELEBRATING OUR CUSTOMERS AND OUR EMPLOYEES WHO SERVE THEM

We’re thankful for the confidence that you have instilled in us and work each day to earn your business.

We also want to tip our hats to the Verint professionals who work with our customers every day. In a Customers for Life organization such as ours, customer service isn’t a department—it’s a way of life.

From the back office to the front lines, our teams work diligently to understand our customers, proactively communicate and make it easy to do business with us. While we are always striving to raise the bar, we also take time to celebrate our successes.

Our Customer Support team, for example, has exceeded customer satisfaction goals for four concurrent quarters! Here are two examples of our support team’s dedication—through the words of our customers:

“I have worked with this person a few times now on different tickets, and he is always a pleasure to work with—he always manages to find a resolution to the issue at hand. He always gives sound advice and clearly communicates technical steps—and is just a good engineer all around to work with.”

She is not only very knowledgeable, but leaves no stone unturned to assist me (in resolving) issues that I encounter. Her solutions have been well thought through, effective and solve problems! She also possesses excellent interpersonal and people management skills. She is an EXPERT with the Verint tool....The surveys that I do often come from high powered office officials, and that comes with a lot of pressure. Whenever I get stuck and I call and get this person, I feel like I have been rescued! There has NEVER been a single time where she did not help me solve my issue, and I go on to shine like a diamond to my superiors!! I have her to thank for that.”

We extend a huge thank you to the Verint employees who understand the power of one person’s actions on developing customers for life. Mostly, we are thankful for our customers and recognize their hard work and dedicated attitudes.

This is Ryan talking here—I want to share something with you. Nancy has been named today as one of CXPA’s Customer Experience Impact Awards winners. A few years ago she realized at our annual Engage customer conferences that we needed to take advantage of the opportunity of having so many of our incredibly valuable customers in the building with us, so she spearheaded the creation of the onsite “CX Zone.” We invite customer attendees into “the zone” to provide an opportunity to interact in-person with Verint’s customer experience professionals and our giant, wall-sized customer journey map. As part of the CX Zone, feedback collection options include scripted questions on notepads to place on the walls, survey kiosks placed on tables throughout the room and flip charts that include sentences for customers to complete that answer questions such as, “I wish my experience included…” or, “You didn’t ask, but…” and so on.

The customer response has been incredible. Their honest and productive feedback on improvements has been invaluable—and customers were honored to be asked for their input. With the feedback captured and transcribed, we have compared it with existing customer journey maps and created plans to close gaps between actual and intended experiences. It is truly amazing what can be accomplished when you ask for your customers’ candid feedback.

From both of us, thank you again! Happy CX Day to all of you CX professionals out there—keep up the great work!

BREAKING LANGUAGE BARRIERS IN COMMUNICATION CENTER

In this edition of Tips and Tricks, Dane Smith, Education Manager at Enghouse Interactive addresses how to help every customer comprehend the call back feature within Communication Center.

DID YOU KNOW?

Communication Center has a very powerful, built in, multilingual system that allows CC system administrators the ability of add new languages and importing the default system prompts in those languages?

These prompts range from callback prompts to voicemail prompts to numbers that are used when telling a caller their expected hold time. By recording both English and Spanish in one single announcement or Auto Attendant, it’s easy to see that this is a simple way of keeping your Communications Center organized and easy to manage.