CUSTOMER-INITIATED FEEDBACK: A NEW WINDOW INTO THE CUSTOMER JOURNEY

CUSTOMER-INITIATED FEEDBACK: A NEW WINDOW INTO THE CUSTOMER JOURNEY

Just as you are, your customers are bombarded by digital information each day. As the noise increases, it grows increasingly challenging to gain and keep your customers’ attention.

In my new blog for Customer Think, I discuss how digital feedback management solutions offer a less intrusive approach.

The customer can click an icon or a feedback tab at any time to get a brief form for delivering whatever feedback they may have. Rather than the ‘brand-initiated feedback’ gathered through online surveys, digital feedback management opens the door for ‘customer-initiated feedback’ through digital channels.

That way your customers can tell you what they want you to know—when they’re ready.

Read more.

EXPERTS SHARE THE VALUE OF EVOLVING QUALITY PROGRAMS WITH AUTOMATION

EXPERTS SHARE THE VALUE OF EVOLVING QUALITY PROGRAMS WITH AUTOMATION

In an age where we all seek to do more with less—and do it better—it seems there’s always an opportunity to use the latest enhancements in technology to help.

Contact center teams have been evaluating call recordings for quality for years now. What is different today is that organizations that embrace automation can potentially leapfrog their competitors and dramatically improve how work is done in their contact centers.

Automated quality management provides the ability to automatically score some or all of the questions—in some or all of your evaluation forms. This offers your contact center the flexibility to introduce automation at your own pace, while providing visibility into the large volume of calls that have been recorded but have previously gone unheard.

For even greater value, organizations can then shift resources from manually evaluating calls to where they can make more significant impact: coaching employees on the specific skills they need to improve. Increasing both customer and employee satisfaction are at stake.

Want to learn more? Read valuable perspectives from Forrester Principal Analyst Ian Jacobsafter our recent Automated Quality webinar in this Q&A document.

You can also access a full replay recording of the webinar, Empower Your Employees with More Data, More Automation, in which guest speaker Ian Jacobs of Forrester Research and Verint’s Kristyn Emenecker discuss how using technology to automate your quality program can produce real-life benefits for your quality team—as well as your frontline employees, your customers and your company.

ARE YOU USING ALL THAT WORKFORCE OPTIMIZATION HAS TO OFFER?

               ARE YOU USING ALL THAT WORKFORCE        OPTIMIZATION HAS TO OFFER?

Enhancing what you have to deliver better experiences

A question being asked within many organizations is—how can we deliver better customer experiences? What solutions should we invest in to help achieve customer experience goals and meet customer expectations?

Often we look to new and shiny when there’s often the opportunity to do much more with what we currently have. This may be true for your organization when it comes to workforce optimization.

The latest advances available today may be just what you need to help you achieve your customer experience goals. Let’s explore how you can use these advancements to tackle your day-to-day business challenges.

Use Automated Quality to Evaluate Interactions

Your agents have a significant impact on your customer experiences, so it is important to be able to identify deficiencies so that you can target specific agent skills for improvement. Autoscoring your quality management forms and evaluating your calls using automated quality solutions can help your organization quickly, easily and objectively evaluate every recorded call for script adherence and other customer service requirements. When you can evaluate many more calls, you can get a better understanding of your agents’ performance and take appropriate action to automatically assign coaching exactly when and where it’s needed.

Increase Employee Engagement by Providing Transparency

Now that you can autoscore all of your calls, it is important to use this data to improve your operations. Scorecards can be incorporated into your quality management program to help you monitor your team’s performance across quality KPIs, make it easy to report and share quality trends, trigger alerts, and follow the results of coaching sessions.Additionally, scorecards can provide agents with greater (daily and intra-day) visibility into their performance against goals so they can identify areas for self-improvement. This combination of scorecards and automated quality can generate a greater sense of fairness in the evaluation process, empowering agents to examine their performance and self-correct behavior—ultimately increasing employee engagement.

The benefits could include improved average handle time, first call resolution, reduced after-call work time, etc., helping your organization to create a better customer experience.

Develop Rich Interactions with Attended Automation

A third way you can see better results with your workforce optimization solution is to implement attended or desktop automation to help your agents do their work more quickly and accurately. These attended automation solutions can provide your agents with guidance scripts that assist them through their processes, providing additional instructions as they reach each step. These software robots can also automatically complete portions of the work for them, reducing the time spent to get that work done.

This can enable agents to focus their time and effort on tasks or processes that require human decision-making, creativity, and empathy—making employees feel more valued in their skill sets and delivering rich customer interactions.

When looking for ways to achieve your top customer experience goals, it is important to first examine what you have and look for ways to help ensure you are fully using all the latest capabilities of the software. In the case of workforce optimization solutions, consider the use of solutions such as automated quality, scorecards, and attended automation to evaluate the quality across all your contact center’s calls, empower employees by letting them know how they are performing, and use tools that can improve the experience for both the employee and customers.

AUTOMATED QUALITY MANAGEMENT DRIVES OBJECTIVE EVALUATIONS, JOB SATISFACTION

AUTOMATED QUALITY MANAGEMENT DRIVES OBJECTIVE EVALUATIONS, JOB SATISFACTION

In 2018, the contact center industry will be all about automation.

The groundswell of interest in automating many of the traditionally routine tasks in the contact center is creating a substantial impact on both employee engagement and the customer experience, and we expect this automation groundswell will do nothing but grow in the months and years ahead.

The latest technology to feel the touch of automation is quality management—the most widely deployed and utilized solution in the U.S. contact center industry, and lkely the global contact center industry. The results of Saddletree Research’s 2017 survey of end users, completed during the third quarter of 2017, reveals the relatively high level of market penetration of quality management in the U.S. contact center industry. The complete overview of the current status of quality management among those in the industry is provided in Figure 1 below.

Current quality management best practices dictate the review for scoring of a small percentage of random calls for each agent, typically less than ten percent. There are several problems with this practice, including its lack of statistical validity for accurately assessing an agent’s overall performance and capabilities. Also, if a new agent is having problems in his or her job, it often takes months of reviewing random calls to accurately discover the root of the problem.

In the meantime, the agent continues to struggle through each call.

Not to be overlooked is the problem of subjectivity in the evaluation process. Adding the human factor into the equation often means that objectivity is lost. Anyone can have a bad day, and only analyzing a small percentage of all calls further adds to the possibility of inaccurate scoring.

Call logging, or the recording of 100 percent of all calls, is a fairly common practice in today’s contact center as evidenced by the fact that 85.2 percent of our survey respondents currently own a call logging solution. Compliance and regulatory issues have been major factors in the adoption of call logging and the practice of recording all interactions. But recording all calls and only listening to a small percentage of them means that key insights are potentially left undiscovered.

The call recording building blocks for automated quality management, which evaluates 100 percent of agent calls, is in place and the reasons for automating the quality management process are compelling. Automated quality management brings new levels of objectivity and fairness to agent evaluations which will, by extension, provide a greater degree of job satisfaction to the agent workforce.

On the management side, automated quality management means that quality assurance professionals will be freed from tedious manual scoring work and can concentrate more on coaching and training activities. The cost savings that result from this redeployment of resources can have a positive and dramatic effect on operational expenses as well.

Despite the current rate of automation adoption in the contact center industry, there will still be some who are unsure about whether or not automation is right for their contact center. For these individuals, automated scoring can be introduced to the contact center at their own pace. While 100 percent of calls can be automatically scored, they don’t have to be. Users can start with the automated scoring of a small percentage of calls and work their way up from there.

Automated quality management means that critical insights into agent performance and customer experience are no longer lost to the random selection of a small number of calls. It joins robotics and other advanced automated solutions in representing the future of the industry and will radically and positively change the face of agent assessment and employee engagement in the years to come.

THE EVOLUTION OF SELF-SERVICE: AN INTERVIEW

                                  THE EVOLUTION OF SELF-SERVICE: AN INTERVIEW

Like just about everything else, the self-service channel will experience significant change in the next few years—potentially more than it has in decades.

What will happen to the classic IVR?

Mark Clark of Contact Solutions recently chatted with Verint’s Mark Kowal, who has spent more than 20 years in customer service and customer engagement technology development—the last decade and a half focused on natural language and speech. He has an extensive perspective of this evolving space.

Read the blog that takes a look at how IVR may potentially change in the near future—and how innovative companies can stay in step.

WHY COMMUNITY IS ESSENTIAL TO YOUR DIGITAL CUSTOMER SUPPORT IN 2018

WHY COMMUNITY IS ESSENTIAL TO YOUR DIGITAL CUSTOMER SUPPORT IN 2018

Serving customers with excellence is imperative in today’s highly competitive, fast-moving world. We all know that—every advantage is important.

Recently, I was a panelist on a session at the Incite Customer Service Summit in New York City called “Proactive Social Care: Engage Your Online Community.” Attendees learned how to proactively engage their communities to solve their issues before they become complaints, as well as raise awareness of social care channels and facilitate self-service, facilitate peer-to-peer service, identify customers and potential issues on social networks and online communities, and learn when it’s appropriate to engage and when it is not.

While better customer service was naturally front and center at such an event, what we also examined was how communities can help build customer loyalty and brand trust. Those are big. A modern digital customer service experience is what customers expect and a great online community, available 24x7, delivers that.

If it isn’t already, community should be a critical part of your digital strategy for customer service and for digital marketing. I can potentially turn a one-time customer into a lifetime customer by helping them feel empowered, cared for and valued.

Along with this event, I participated in a podcast called Socially Supportive—if you’re not familiar with it, check it out. This podcast explores how leaders in strategy and technology in the digital customer care industry are getting real business results and transforming their businesses and their brands’ reputations. In 20 minutes or less, listeners can find strategic and tactical information that can move their digital customer care program forward and give them a competitive advantage.

Sound interesting?

Check out the podcast I did in November and learn more about how communities can provide call deflection away from more expensive service channels such as voice and chat, and how your business can gain valuable insights from the community interactions to improve the products and services it provides.   

All of the podcasts are available to listen to or download for later, so I encourage you to listen to the archives and tune in (or download) daily.  There’s even one from today you’ll find helpful that talks about giving exclusive access to community content with private groups (or micro communities we sometimes call them).

Happy listening!

JOIN VERINT MAY 14-17 IN DALLAS, TEXAS FOR ENGAGE 2018

It’s time to start thinking about Engage! The Verint Systems global customer conference is an interactive event designed to help you engage with your industry colleagues, get the full benefit of your Verint solutions, and enhance customer engagement—and have some fun while you’re at it.

Registration is open for this year’s event at the Sheraton Dallas Hotel in Dallas, Texas. The conference starts at 6 p.m. on Monday, May 14, 2018 and concludes on Thursday, May 17 at 10 a.m. Pre-conference workshop sessions (available for an additional fee) start at 9 a.m. on Monday, May 14 and conclude at 4 p.m. that day.

The conference is a great opportunity to take part in breakout sessions, learn from industry visionaries and product experts, share best practices with your peers, and discover how Verint solutions can benefit your organization. Many of the breakout session presenters are actual Verint solution users who share their expertise and real-world experiences to help attendees gain new perspectives, solve problems, swap tips and techniques, and leverage your solutions more effectively.

Register before January 31, 2018 to take advantage of the early bird discount. The registration fee includes all conference events, materials, conference meals, and the customer appreciation event. Need help convincing your boss that you want to attend?  Download the conference justification memo that you can easily customize. Group discounts and discounts for repeat attendees are available, so email us at conference@verint.com for details on these and other offers.

We’re excited about this event—and we want you to join us. Click here to register. Learn more on the conference website and check out the FAQ as well.

EIGHT AREAS TO CONSIDER AS PART OF YOUR AUTOMATION STRATEGY

Paul Stockford, Chief Analyst, Saddletree Research, mentioned in a recent blog postthat “the contact center industry will be all about automation” in 2018. Does your organization have a strategy and plans in place for automation innovation?

Verint’s Customer Advisory Board (CAB) met earlier this month and the agenda included a session on automation, artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics. Board members discussed strategies that would help them simplify and modernize their customer engagement operations—and several members mentioned that automation is a critical part of their 2018 customer engagement strategy planning.

Craig Seebach, Verint’s vice president, enterprise workforce optimization strategy, kicked off the automation discussion with a review of takeaways from a panel discussion he participated in at the Automation Innovation Conference in New York City on December 5. The panel session was called “Building a Comprehensive Business Case for Automation and AI” and Craig shared these insights:

• Carefully evaluate the process(es) you might automate—and be careful not to automate “bad” processes. Review the processes closely and identify any corrective actions before you automate.  This seems like common sense, but is a common oversight.

• Develop scorecards/dashboards to measure and manage success and expected outcomes. These tools can help you optimize cost, quality and service and regularly measure performance against goals.

• Don’t try to address new compliance processes as part of new automation projects. Address and improve processes before you look at automating them. Otherwise, you make the automation initiative more complex.  
  

CAB member contributions to automation innovation ideas and considerations included:

• Business Services Company: We’re in the process of automating more than 20 back office processes. Sometimes the project is an IT-driven initiative, and sometimes it’s a business initiative. We see broad opportunity to drive operational efficiencies through automation.

• Global Financial Services Firm: We have various pilots under consideration including automating 1) processes around fraud transaction notifications 2) parts of the collections process where delinquency notice processes have human touches 3) manual processes around warranties/price matches for customer purchases. We are also looking at integrating process automation with knowledge management automation.

• Major Insurance Company: The dynamic of the contact center and back office is changing for the individual. We are asking ourselves: do we have the right skill sets if agents are going to focus on the more complex work, and automate the more routine and redundant work? As you change the work time, you need to look at employee training and competency to do the more complex work. We are also looking at how salaries, staffingand overall training may be impacted.

• Leading Retail Firm: There are discussions around making sure security concerns are addressed—ensuring that automation processes and bots/robots can’t be breached from a security perspective.

• Major Utility: We are moving now toward universal agents where agents handle all types of customer and call types. This has caused some uncertainty among agents as they aren’t sure they have all the knowledge they need to do that type of job. We’re also changing our training a great deal and looking at an increased focus on knowledge management to help in this area.

So, what areas should you consider as your automation innovation strategy framework? Consider creating your plans starting with the primary areas of 1) Business Objectives 2) Technology 3) People / Culture and 4) Outcomes and ROI.  Be sure you have a specific goal, outcomes and expectations for each area.

As I discussed in a blog post last month, there is a place for everyone to contribute to customer engagement automation ideas and planning. And you never know—you might just have one of the recommendations or ideas that will help your organization revolutionize customer engagement in your industry.

PARTNER SPOTLIGHT: LUMENVOX

PARTNER SPOTLIGHT: LUMENVOX

Enghouse Interactive and LumenVox have partnered together to provide a cost effective, dependable option for next generation speech self-service. We are proud to feature Lumenvox in our Partner Spotlight and want to share a few reasons why our partnership with this brand is an integral part of the Enghouse Interaction solution.

LumenVox is a speech automation software company providing core speech technologies that include the LumenVox Speech Recognizer, Text-to-Speech Engine, Call Progress Analysis, Speech Tuner, and natural language solution support. Based on industry standards, LumenVox Speech Software is certified as one of the most accurate, natural sounding, and reliable solutions in the industry. LumenVox technology provides tools for effectively connecting and communicating with users, increasing user satisfaction, and improving employee productivity. LumenVox’s core Speech Software is certified as one of the most precise, natural sounding, and dependable solutions in the market. The LumenVox technology provides tools for individuals to effectively connect and communicate with users, increase customer satisfaction, and improve employee productivity.

At LumenVox, each client is considered a true partner. The brand is known for outstanding customer service and support. The Enghouse and Lumenvox partnership helps users to understand, navigate, and assess each phase of their projects to make the process simple and user friendly. Our unique partnership focuses on joint sales, marketing, education, training and customer support to ensure satisfaction as soon as the solution is deployed. LumenVox technology is used worldwide by companies of all sizes .

Lumenvox’s priority is creating interactions and relationships that illuminate advanced communication which aligns perfectly with the Enghouse Interactive vision.

Enghouse Interactive and LumenVox have partnered together to provide a cost effective, dependable option for next generation speech self-service. We are proud to feature Lumenvox in our Partner Spotlight and want to share a few reasons why our partnership with this brand is an integral part of the Enghouse Interaction solution.

LumenVox is a speech automation software company providing core speech technologies that include the LumenVox Speech Recognizer, Text-to-Speech Engine, Call Progress Analysis, Speech Tuner, and natural language solution support. Based on industry standards, LumenVox Speech Software is certified as one of the most accurate, natural sounding, and reliable solutions in the industry. LumenVox technology provides tools for effectively connecting and communicating with users, increasing user satisfaction, and improving employee productivity. LumenVox’s core Speech Software is certified as one of the most precise, natural sounding, and dependable solutions in the market. The LumenVox technology provides tools for individuals to effectively connect and communicate with users, increase customer satisfaction, and improve employee productivity.

At LumenVox, each client is considered a true partner. The brand is known for outstanding customer service and support. The Enghouse and Lumenvox partnership helps users to understand, navigate, and assess each phase of their projects to make the process simple and user friendly. Our unique partnership focuses on joint sales, marketing, education, training and customer support to ensure satisfaction as soon as the solution is deployed. LumenVox technology is used worldwide by companies of all sizes .

Lumenvox’s priority is creating interactions and relationships that illuminate advanced communication which aligns perfectly with the Enghouse Interactive vision.

PREPLANNING FOR THE HOLIDAYS AT YOUR CONTACT CENTER WILL KEEP YOU ON THE NICE LIST

During the holidays, contact center managers face unique scheduling challenges. Employees may want additional flexibility with their schedules, and they may even want to rearrange their shifts to spend extra time with family and friends.

Enghouse Interactive Workforce Management (WFM) was designed with these scheduling challenges in mind, and can simplify the process of holiday scheduling.

Communication is Key During the Holidays

When managing your employees during the holiday season, it’s important to communicate your expectations clearly. Prior to the holiday season madness, managers are able to analyze the historical call traffic data to give a clear idea of how many hours and employees will be needed when forecasting and scheduling work assignments during the holidays.

Additionally, supervisors are able to quickly and efficiently view agent schedules using the graphical user interface. Using a built-in communication framework, supervisors can easily communicate expectations to all employees.

Communicating Policy is Integral

At the beginning of the holiday season, being sure to clearly communicate company policy to all agents is important. Giving them an opportunity to ask questions and clear up any confusion they may have about company policies will prevent them from misunderstanding on issues such as unplanned absences and shift trading.

Offer Perks to Boost Morale

Many contact centers require some employees to work overtime during the holiday season. Some employees are even expected to pick up additional shifts to cover for people who call in sick. In order to boost employee morale and prevent burnout, it’s always a good idea to consider offering extra perks. If certain employees are ambitious enough to volunteer for overtime, reward them over and above their standard paycheck.

Extra breaks, bonuses, and even promotions are a great way to show that you appreciate your employees going the extra mile. WFM will allow you to easily schedule extra breaks for your employees as a reward.

Be Fair to All Employees and Don’t Play Favorites

Although it can be challenging to schedule time off for everyone during the holidays, no employee wants to feel like their manager is playing favorites (or putting them on the naughty list.) In order to be fair to all employees, time off should be given on a first-come-first-serve basis. Employees with seniority shouldn’t be given preference over newer employees.

Set Reasonable Deadlines for All Employees

Aiming to set reasonable deadlines for call length during the holiday season is another way to smooth over holiday shifts. WFM allows you to set realistic service level expectations for your employees based on previous year’s call data. Supervisors are able to assign each person with a reasonable workload, and shorten wait time in the queue for your customers.

Allow Employees to Trade Shifts

Trading shifts allows employees to take holiday scheduling into their own hands. It boosts employee satisfaction because it allows them to have more control. When employees want to trade shifts, WFM allows users to quickly visualize and change schedules without a hassle.

Quite simply, WFM helps simplify holiday scheduling. It provides a greater sense of control, and it will even create greater sense of satisfaction for your agents!

To contact Enghouse Interactive or learn more ab out WFM click HERE

Contact Centre Predictions For 2018

Contact Centre Predictions For 2018

2017 is rapidly drawing to a close and our attentions are now turning to the year ahead and what it might bring. The following article takes a look at the contact centre and what we can expect to see in 2018.

The role of the contact centre agent will continue to evolve

We expect to see ongoing investment by businesses in self-service and automation solutions during 2018. The focus will continue to be on empowering customers to do more of the routine and straightforward interactions themselves. As a result, the kinds of interactions handled in the contact centre are likely to be more complex and of higher value than in the past, consequently requiring more advanced technical and interactions skills.

This trend is encouraging businesses to think differently about the kinds of contact centre agents they are looking to recruit. They will need to train and re-skill existing agents, effectively empowering them to take more difficult decisions independently and, where appropriate, to upskill across a range of new digital interaction channels.

The push to self-service will continue to reshape contact centre metrics

As businesses move more and more of their customer interactions through a self-service channel, they will increasingly need to re-assess the contact centre metrics they collect.

That’s partly because on the one hand, they are relying less and less on human intervention, while on the other, when they do need humans to get involved, the problems concerned are typically more complex and more protracted.

As a result, traditional measurements like average handle time are increasingly outdated and outmoded. Over 2018, we will continue to see businesses dropping this metric in favour of alternative measures that focus more on the value to the customer or the strength of the relationship with the business such as first contact resolution (FCR) or Net Promoter Score (NPS).

Businesses will increasingly focus on optimising the customer journey across all channels

As organisations move more of their interactions through automated or self-service channels, they are increasingly thinking about customer journey types. They are, in particular, looking to assess what kinds of customer journeys particularly lend themselves to self-service and which would be better served by some kind of human intervention.

That’s why during 2018, we expect to see more organisations focused on developing customer personas, and putting effort into segmenting their customer base. It might be, for example, that most of their customers are millennials who are heavy users of Instagram and are used to interacting in a visually-based way or it might that they are mainly baby boomers who continue to favour face-to-face or traditional fixed-line interactions. Either way, we expect to see a greater focus on understanding and optimising customer journeys.

Businesses will place a greater emphasis on aligning and integrating channels

Very little annoys customers more than having to go through a long and detailed online interaction which fails to resolve their problem and then getting passed to a contact centre agent who immediately asks them to repeat the information they have just submitted.

In 2018, we expect to see a greater focus on aligning and integrating channels in a way that makes the interaction quicker and easier for the customer but also for the agent.  Real time speech analytics (RTSA) technology can listen in the background to the conversation and quickly retrieve information to aid the agent on the call.

Applications like the Presence functionality in Microsoft’s Skype for Business can help agents to access help from staff working in the front and back office to help resolve customer queries. Solutions like Microsoft Teams can also help businesses bring together constituencies working within a safe ‘sandbox’ environment to share information and help resolve a complex customer problem quickly.

MEET KAI, THE MAN BEHIND THE ENTERPRISE!

MEET KAI, THE MAN BEHIND THE ENTERPRISE!

Tell us about your history with Enghouse Interactive?

I’ve been with the company for over 18 years and was originally brought into the Enghouse family via the Apropos Technology acquisition.  I’ve held several management and technical leadership roles within the R&D organization throughout my time at Enghouse and have been directly involved with evolving Contact Center Enterprise (CCE) to the product that it is today.  My team’s focus is to ensure we are delivering software that’s targeted to meet enterprise market demands and adding value for our existing customers.

What is the most gratifying part of your job?

Working with some of the smartest minds in our industry of course!  Joking aside, I really enjoy the relationships that are built along the way both internally within Enghouse as well as with our customers and partners.  I believe we have some of the greatest technology in our industry and it takes a team effort to create that technology.  Technology enables solutions but it’s the creativity of the people I work with who build solutions that solve real business problems.  It’s seeing all of this come together and being part of building solutions which is the most satisfying to me.

What’s on the horizon in the world of CCE?

I think CCE is well aligned with industry trends for enterprise software deployment models.  CCE’s cornerstone is its flexible and resilient architecture which allows for deployments into private clouds, hybrid clouds, traditional on premise, or any combination thereof.  Any of these deployment models can be managed by customers themselves, partners, or Enghouse.  So what’s exciting is that CCE customers have complete freedom to choose where the platform resides and who manages it.  Our architecture and deployment flexibility sets CCE apart from our competitors and has positioned us for a great future in the enterprise space.

What are a few signs to customers that may indicate it’s time to start considering an enterprise solution?

Our customers should look towards an enterprise solution if they meet one or more of the following requirements:

• Their contact center is mission critical and cannot afford to be offline even for 5 minutes.  CCE provides the architecture to achieve high availability with 99.999% uptime.
• Their contact center has 100’s or 1000’s of agents today or are expecting growth to those numbers in the next couple of years.
• Their contact center is distributed across multiple geographies or data centers.
• Finally, enterprise customers often require some level of customization to better enable agent workflow or capture information in various backend systems.  CCE is an open and extensible platform via APIs and integration points supporting any range of out-of-the-box configurations to sophisticated custom applications.

Anything else about CCE we should know?

Aside from the core CCE capabilities, I’d like to highlight that CCE maintains integrations for many of the products in the Enghouse portfolio such as Quality Management and Call Recording (QMS), IVR and Mobile IVR (Communications Portal), Outbound Notifications, Predictive Dialing, and more.  This is important because the R&D investments that are going into each of these product’s roadmaps will add direct value to CCE customers by enabling new solutions via new and exciting features.

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

As I mentioned, I came into the Enghouse family relatively early on and I’ve seen the company grow both organically and through acquisition.  For me personally, this has created an environment of opportunity and professional growth.  Looking at Enghouse as a company, I think the primary contributing factor to the company’s success is consistency and the ability to stick to a plan and execute on it.

Tell us 3 fun facts about you!

• I was born in Germany just outside of Munich which makes me a Bavarian.  They have the world’s best soccer team and also produce some of the world’s best cars!
• I used to compete in power lifting and set a few records in bench press during that time.  My personal record in competition was 480 lbs.
• I play guitar and sometimes play around with drums as well.  At one point I was in a heavy metal band (yes, there’s a correlation to power lifting there! )

Snowstorms Hit The UK – How Customer Communications Can Cope in a Crisis

Snowstorms Hit The UK – How Customer Communications Can Cope in a  Crisis 

Once again weather is making the headlines – many parts of Britain have woken up to heavy snowfalls, freezing temperatures and dangerous black ice. For businesses, disruption is almost inevitable at this time of year as employees struggle to make it into work, find offices closed when they get there, or simply choose to ‘batten down the hatches’ and stick it out at home.

Keeping customer service up and running is the biggest worry for many businesses – and the pressure is often exacerbated as inbound call volumes rise as customers start to worry about service disruptions. Fortunately, help is at hand in dealing with these kinds of challenges. The best cloud-based contact centres ensure complete business continuity in three main ways.

First, good cloud solutions deliver a high level of disaster recovery integrally, meaning clients should not require significant additional cover. For clients with existing onsite customer premises equipment, cloud solutions can also provide reserve back-up disaster recovery protection.

Second, cloud contact centres enable agents to connect to the technology platform and necessary applications from anywhere that has Internet access. Companies can, therefore, continue to service the client base – even in an outage – reducing the impact of what could otherwise have been a disastrous situation, resulting in dropped calls, negative customer experiences and lost revenue.

Third, cloud-based solutions are ideally-suited to supporting homeworkers, allowing businesses to benefit from a pool of agents dispersed across a geographic territory or region that can ‘ramp up’ quickly in the event of one or more facilities going down.

Companies can always benefit from switching on an extended contact centre at any times of raised demand – whether that is planned or unplanned. Cloud allows them to do that while only paying for what they use when they use it. If they are launching a new gadget or game onto the market, they will need to scale, particularly if there are issues with distribution or supply. And if there is a sudden customer surge due to a product failure or a serious concern, they will need to be agile enough to deal with it quickly and efficiently.  The latest cloud contact centre solutions allow them to do all of this and more.

TOUCHPOINT AGENT HAS ARRIVED!

TOUCHPOINT AGENT HAS ARRIVED!

We are thrilled to introduce the newest member of the Enghouse portfolio; TouchPoint Agent, a rich call center solution for Microsoft Office 365 and Skype for Business Online. Not only is TouchPoint Agent lightweight and server-less the software provides CRM screen pop, call recording, directory searching for experts, call categorization and control, graphical reporting and real-time dashboards. When asked about what makes TouchPoint Agent unique, Anna Riley, Product Manager R&D said “TouchPoint Agent is low cost and can be up and running in minutes.”  It uses Skype for Business online for the routing and an award winning graphical UI for the agent, so they can focus on the information they need to be successful in the interaction.”

This solution includes Enghouse Interactive’s award-winning graphical interface, TouchPoint, leveraging intuitive interaction handling, context-sensitive control and colorful metrics. The familiarity of the TouchPoint interface makes it simple for customers to migrate to higher levels of functionality without the need for user retraining.

“TouchPoint Agent is a response to our customers and partners who want call center functionality that is easy and effortless, and native to both Microsoft Office 365 and Skype for Business Online,” said John Cray, vice president of product management, Enghouse Interactive. “Simply download the application from our website and TouchPoint Agent will have you managing call-flow and customer service more efficiently in a matter of minutes. For businesses that leverage Office 365 for productivity and communications, TouchPoint Agent is the only server-less application that can evolve their interaction capabilities without complex and costly integrations, training and support.”

Also for a limited time, we are offering a FREE 30-day trial. Get the chance to try out the call center solution that adds value to any business and creates a contact center with capability. We invite you to try out the cloud-based Skype for Business call queues to see how you can create superior user and customer experiences today! Learn more at http://info.enghouseinteractive.com/Tpagentwaitlist.html