Intelligent Virtual Agents (IVAs): A Bot or Not?Paul 

Stockford, Chief Analyst, Saddletree Research, recently sat down with Verint’s Jen Snell to discuss IVAs and how they can help solve business problems and achieve business goals through conversations—with an eye on improving customer satisfaction.

Click here for “Intelligent Virtual Agents (IVAs): A Bot or Not?”

Use Voice of the Customer to Transform Your Contact Center Results: Part 1

It comes as no surprise to learn that our research reveals that the number one goal contact centers try to achieve is improving customer experiences, considering almost all businesses see the contact center as a vital piece in addressing customer needs. Despite this, the same Aberdeen research where we surveyed 445 contact centers across a wide variety of industries over the world shows that only 57% of contact centers have an established process to regularly capture voice of the customer (VoC) data and gauge how they fare in meeting and exceeding customer expectations.

Briefly, a VoC program is an organizational effort where companies use various channels such as email, IVR, and text message to ask customers their sentiment and receive feedback on their experiences. Aberdeen’s Voice of the Customer study published in 2018 shows that companies that establish a Best-in-Class structure to design and run VoC programs enjoy significant performance improvements, such as 45% greater customer retention rate and 13.3 times greater annual improvement (decrease) in customer service costs, compared to those without a well-designed and executed VoC program.

Aberdeen’s research shows there are four key areas contact centers can focus on to drive significant benefits from VoC programs:

• Understand & Evolve Addressing Customer Needs
• Optimize Customer Journey Management
• Gauge Agent Performance
• Seamlessly Manage Contact Center Activities

We’ll examine the first two here, and the others in a forthcoming post.

1. Understand & Evolve Addressing Customer Needs

VoC data comes in various forms. This includes solicited feedback by the company, where customers are asked to share feedback by filling out an online survey or a post-call IVR survey; and unsolicited feedback, where customers share their experiences interacting with brands’ websites and through social media portals such as Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. Contact centers use social media monitoring tools to monitor customer conversations about company name, products and services, then incorporate it within existing account data to utilize unsolicited feedback available through social media portals.

Contact centers can use tools such as business intelligence and root-cause analysis to uncover hidden insights and trends in VoC data. For example, they can observe if customer complaints about a specific self-service feature emerges as a leading frustration among clientele, and use this information to enhance the self-service experience. They can also uncover that customers contacting the business through live chat about a certain issue indicate that their needs weren’t addressed, and that they needed to contact the business again through phone. In such cases, the live chat interaction can be updated so customers are encouraged to contact the business early in their journey, instead of seeking resolution through chat. These are just a few of the countless examples that illustrate how listening to the voice of the customer and acting on it can help contact centers bridge the gap between customer expectations and their activities.

2. Optimize Managing Customer Journeys

Aberdeen’s research shows that only 37% of contact centers currently tailor customer interactions by using contextual / customer journey data. Those with this capability minimize customer effort and excel in delivering truly omni-channel interactions. If you currently struggle managing customer journeys or plan to put a journey management program into place, then VoC data can help. Specifically, using customer feedback and sentiment data, and analyzing how this data changes in correlation with specific activities across the customer journey, helps contact centers uncover which activities provide a positive impact on customer experience results and which don’t. To do such analysis, you first need to integrate VoC data within existing account information. You should then use journey analytics to observe the impact of each activity throughout the journey on influencing VoC results.

If you haven’t used these two building blocks, we highly recommend you incorporate them into your activities, as doing so will help better align your results with that of the Best-in-Class contact centers.

First-time Resolution –Driving Enhanced Customer Experience

Many businesses spend vast amounts of time analysing what their customers want and try to understand where to invest, their time, money and resources in order to drive the optimum customer experience.  One of the main obstacles to achieving that is that every organisation is different, with their own distinct set of customers and products, challenges and objectives. That in itself makes it difficult for businesses to be confident in which elements go together to make up a great customer experience, and also which are the most important to them and should therefore be prioritised.

The latest ContactBabel research, the UK Customer Experience Decision-Makers’ Guide, sponsored by Enghouse Interactive, goes some way towards answering this question. In a survey of 234 organisations across the UK, 51% of respondents, by far the highest percentage, ranked first-time resolution as the most important factor to a customer (of those listed) when contacting their organisation, with a further 36% placing it within the top three most important factors. Adding to this, short queue / wait time for response was also ranked highly. In a parallel poll of 1,000 UK consumers, having ‘your question / issue solved first time’ scored highly across every age group when respondents were asked: What are the top three most important factors to you when contacting an organisation by phone or digital channel?

As a society we increasingly want instant gratification and immediate results– which is why we are seeing such a strong focus on the issue of fast resolution of customer issues. Technology can play a key role in helping to achieve this and here we explore a few ideas on how you can use it to improve first time resolution.

• Skills-based routing – Create rules for interaction assignment and let skills-based routing deliver the enquiry to the person best suited to resolve your issues.
• Time sensitive – add callback – Businesses, unfortunately, cannot handle all interactions in a timely manner. By adding a simple call-back option, you can give customers the option to receive an automated call back, eliminating the need for them to wait in queue.
• CRM and third party integration – Make sure you integrate your contact centre systems with your customer relationship management (CRM) software and relevant third-party systems. This ensures that all the relevant history, contact information and notes appear on the agents’ screen so that they are equipped to help achieve first time resolution every time.
• Automation and self-service – Customers today prefer to find their own answers and can use self-service solutions such as knowledge bases, mobile IVR, apps etc to resolve queries they may have without having to speak to an agent. That’s increasingly a given, but as a business, you also need to make sure that you have the capabilities to escalate to an agent as and when required.
• Monitor and measure across channels – Make sure you offer channel options to your customers but also measure and monitor across these channels using quality management, screen recording, speech analytics etc. This will help you ensure a consistent approach across each channel and also position you better to add improvements over time to further drive up first-time resolution rates.

Enghouse Interactive has the technology to help improve your first contact resolution figures, both today and into the future. This is why we continue to support the contact centre industry and are sponsoring Contact Babel’s UK Customer Experience Decision-Makers’ Guide 2018.

Download the Contact Babel UK Customer Experience Decision Makers Guide 

Listen to some of the key highlights from the Customer Experience Guide

Summer School 2018

AUGUST & SEPTEMBER 2018

Our Verint Summer School is back for another year and we have a great line up of speakers and webinars across Europe.

We’ll cover the following topics throughout August in English, Dutch and German:

Workforce Engagement, Intelligent Self-Service, Voice of the Customer and Fraud and Compliance.

New this year, is our Back to School webinars scheduled for September in Spanish and French.

Join our webinars and find out how you and your organisation can simplify, modernise and automate your customer engagement.

CLICK HERE TO REGISTER

How Can You Truly Differentiate in Your Contact Center?

You are now competing in a hyper-competitive environment where your customers are less forgiving and have more choice than they've ever had before.

Customers are becoming ever more likely to change who they spend their hard-earned dollars with. And the overwhelming majority are now differentiating on the experience a company provides them with. According to our recent study, 63% of customers globally now say CX is the primary deciding factor in their purchasing decision with a further 22% claiming it has a major impact.

This is simply your new reality.

For this reason, the experience you deliver to your customers is now absolutely critical. One false step and they move on to a competitor. Anything you can do to simplify, modernize and automate the touchpoints on the customer journey can make a difference. This is especially true in the contact center, which provides a significant challenge but also offers a fantastic opportunity to stand out.

The Great Contact Center CX Opportunity

Your contact center is at the very heart of your customer experience.

But due to the ever growing influence of digital, there is some uncertainty about its role and importance – with 41% of business leaders facing challenges in showcasing the benefits of contact centers.

But the reality is that your contact center represents a superb opportunity to differentiate yourself from your competition. So how do you improve contact center CX in a way that impacts key metrics and drives positive business outcomes?

If you don’t have the answer to this question, you’re far from alone. In fact, experts at Forrester claim that “While many firms say that they want to differentiate based on customer experience, few have a focused strategy to accomplish this.”

Differentiate on CX with Voice of the Customer

The key to driving the improvement you seek is your Voice of the Customer. VoC programs can play a critically important role in the contact center, improving operational efficiencies, agent performance, and ultimately driving revenue growth.

However, many organizations face significant challenges in turning this customer data into actionable insights.

Join us on August 30 for a live webinar, “Voice of the Customer: Bringing Value to Your Organization's Contact Center,” featuring guest speaker Forrester Research VP, Principal Analyst Kate Leggett, along with Verint’s Tim Whiting, VP of Marketing.

They will explain the key steps to take to maximize the data sources at your disposal to jump-start your contact center VoC program and provide a number of key tips to help ensure it delivers positive business outcomes. 

You can register to attend now.

“Is Your Digital Transformation Strategy Driving Seamless Customer Journeys?”, a commissioned study by Forrester Consulting on behalf of Contact Solutions, https://www.opinionlab.com/resources/whitepapers/forrester-research-is-your-digital-transformation-driving-seamless-customer-journeys/

Art Schoeller, Design Your Contact Center To Be Customer-Centric: Strategic Plan: The Contact Centers For Customer Service Playbook https://www.forrester.com/report/Design+Your+Contact+Center+To+Be+CustomerCentric/-/E-RES78901

3 Ways to Boost Call Center Efficiency with Speech Analytics

Speech analytics solutions have helped users tackle a number of contact center business challenges over the years, including cost containment, risk mitigation, more streamlined customer experiences, and the identification of process and product gaps. New advances such as automation, artificial intelligence, and machine learning are helping organizations leverage their speech analytics solutions even further.

Let’s look at how speech analytics can give even more power to these three solutions.

Automate Quality Management with Speech

Quality management solutions have been widely used in contact centers to listen to and assess the quality of the interactions taking place, but not without issues. While QM solutions are effective, there’s always the possibility of running into issues such as statistical validity, scoring inconsistency and lack of objectivity.

This is where speech analytics comes into play. Automated quality management solutions overlay the transcription capabilities from speech analytics with rule building and evaluation to automate some or all of an organization’s quality form. Doing so can help increase the confidence level associated with quality data while freeing up coaches to coach and delivering more consistent, unbiased feedback to agents.

Power Predictive Analytics with Speech

Predictive Analytics is a key tool in understanding and driving business outcomes. But in order to predict outcomes successfully, extensive and varied data is needed. How can you retrieve this sort of data, though? Through conversations that agents have with customers, speech transcription can be integrated into any organization’s activities for enhanced predictive power.

Enhance Robotic Process Automation with Speech

Robotics technology is the latest and greatest—changing the way we work today. In the contact center world, software robots can provide employees with guidance and assistance on handling or fully automating tasks, and executing them repeatedly at high levels of accuracy.

Virtual assistants (VAs), a robotics application, is used to respond to simple natural-language inquiries and requests, as well as engage in dialogue with customers. In order to get the most effective benefits from your VAs, it is important to define and refine VA responses—speech transcription can help you achieve this.

For example, an emerging trend in the marketplace can be quickly identified by analyzing voice conversations, then applying intelligence to adjust VA responses and guidance.

Overall, using speech analytics solutions to power artificial intelligence, automation, predictive analytics, and big data can help you make more effective use of skilled talent by redirecting resources away from automated tasks toward value-added activities that drive better outcomes.

Monitoring Quality Across all Contact Centre Channel

Great customer experience is becoming the driving factor for many businesses with the call centre acting as the nucleus for many of the customer interactions. Therefore it is important that quality of service is maintained within this hub.

In this blog we will take a look at some top tips on how to improve quality management across all channels, to help guarantee consistent good service.

Make sure you are measuring the right things – analysing the optimal customer journey will give you the answer

The ongoing march of digitisation is making it easier for organisations to measure contact centre performance. Historically, most have focused on ‘nuts and bolts’ metrics like average handle time, how many calls are processed per day and what channels did they come through.

These quantitative measurements are attractive because they are relatively easy for businesses to manage. These are easily defined and give organisations fast results with minimal effort – but are they really telling them what they need to know?

Businesses need to start thinking more about what are the key customer journeys within their business and the top interactions they deal with. Then they can start to map the process of what the optimal journey looks like for each interaction, what technologies they need to put in place, and the desired outcomes. Is it that the business wants a fast transit time? Is it that it wants to cross-sell and upsell to the customer?  Is it that it wants the customer to recommend its services and come back to buy more? Once the business has established this desired outcome, it can then decide what needs to be measured and begin collecting the relevant metrics.

These processes need to be carried out in the above order. Businesses need to know their optimal customer journeys and business outcomes before they can come up with an accurate measurement framework.

They also need to be closely aligned. It is likely to be pointless and even counter-productive for the business to spend time measuring how many calls agents handle if the ultimate desired outcome is to raise net promoter score, for example.

Use Real Time Speech Analytics to drive compliance, improve training and take the emotional temperature of interactions

The use of real-time speech analytics (RTSA) solutions to continuously monitor conversations between agents and customers enables businesses to ensure the compliance of all calls by helping agents adhere to scripts, ensuring contracts are explained correctly and reducing cancellations and customer disputes.

The latest RTSA systems also offer a checklist for every call and key indicators, providing live warnings to agents so they can stay compliant. By delivering live feedback, RTSA can improve performance but also increase training efficiency by enabling agents to self-coach, and by allowing supervisors to provide coaching in real-time as required.

RTSA can also be used to effectively measure stress levels, script clarity, over-talking and raised voices. This effectively allows organisations to take the emotional temperature of any interaction and provide agents and supervisors with the information they need to quickly adjust the tone and calm down potentially difficult situations.

Use a fully integrated quality management suite

Businesses can benefit from using fully-integrated quality management suites that incorporate dashboards that allow the business to measure at supervisor level but also empower the agent, employee or customer service person to see how they are performing on a range of real-time variables against whatever goals or targets they may have been set.

Scorecarding; benchmarking; call recording and screen recording can all be delivered within a single package and presentation layer that can be used by managers, supervisors and agents or contact centre staff.

5 manufacturing goals to smash for business success

5 manufacturing goals to smash for business success

• Employee retention
• How to grow your business

By tackling your manufacturing goals, you will help your business to achieve success. But which ones do you need to be aware of? This article highlights five goals your company needs to tackle and it offer you tips on how your business can smash them.

Manufacturing goals

Manufacturing is a complex and demanding industry, where businesses must contend with challenges ranging from rapid developments in technology and customer expectations to skills shortages and rising costs.

If your business is targeting long term, sustainable growth in this sector, it’s crucial to have the right tools and strategies in place to ensure you can seize opportunities, reach your goals and negotiate any difficulties you might face.

To put this into perspective, here are some of the most common manufacturing goals and some tips to help you achieve them.

1. Bringing in new business

New business is essential fuel for the growth of any company. For your organisation to succeed in its efforts to expand the client base, your sales and marketing teams must be able to rely on methods and systems that have been shown to deliver results.

There are many distinct approaches to client acquisition, so it’s important to find the one that works for you. Asking existing and happy customers to act as advocates and give the business a positive review could prove beneficial for some, while others might get results from investing in paid search marketing.

Whatever approach you decide to take, it is always vital to showcase the benefits of your product offering and how it can help clients achieve their own goals.

Your business acquisition efforts can be optimised with the help of a dedicated sales and marketing management solution, which can provide the valuable data and insights required to identify new customers and manage ongoing relationships.

2. Balancing customer satisfaction and cost efficiency

Acquisition of new business is a vital function of any company but equally important is keeping existing customers happy. The key challenge in this regard is ensuring you continue to deliver the service standards and quality required to maintain client satisfaction, without losing control of costs.

The secret to success on this front is efficiency and in order to be efficient, your organisation must place an emphasis on core functions such as managing customer data, analysing business intelligence and making financial projections. In the manufacturing sector, processes such as warehouse management and inventory control are particularly crucial.

With the right software solutions and business support tools in place, your company can ensure it meets high standards in these areas  and therefore consistently meets customer expectations – with maximum cost efficiency.

Looking after your workforce will help you achieve your manufacturing goals

3. Workforce wellbeing

Even in sectors such as manufacturing, where robotics and automation are having an increasingly significant impact on how firms operate, no organisation can afford to overlook the importance of its people.

Workers who feel satisfied and engaged in their work, and have confidence that their employer is invested in looking after their needs, will be more productive and efficient, helping to deliver the best results for customers. Furthermore, strong staff loyalty helps to mitigate recruitment costs.

In May 2018, industry association EEF and Westfield Health published a study that urged British manufacturers to “grasp the opportunity of greater investment in the wellbeing of their workforce and reap [the] significant rewards of improved productivity and performance”.

Steve Jackson, director of health, safety and sustainability at EEF, said: “More and more companies are recognising the benefits and opportunities of promoting the wider wellbeing of their employees. This can bring significant benefit to companies with employees who are better motivated and engaged.”

Investment in the protection of your workforce and the management of your human resources will help to set up your organisation for future success through the effectiveness of its people.

4. Manageable growth

Consistent growth is a fundamental goal for most (if not all) businesses, but it’s important to be aware of some of the new challenges that can arise as your firm gets bigger.

Supported by a tried-and-tested business management solution, you can ensure your company is fully prepared for any obstacles it might encounter on its growth path.

One key aspect of business that can become increasingly complex as the organisation expands is supply chain management. It’s imperative that you are able to respond quickly to customer demands and fulfil orders on time. This requires reliable systems and methods that allow you to source raw materials when you need them, manage demanding delivery models and quickly resolve disputes.

Growth can also bring fresh challenges such as complying with new or more complicated regulations, and the extra work and investment required to get products to market in a timely, cost-effective way.

If your firm aspires to long-term international growth, you will need to spot these potential difficulties on the horizon and identify the strategies and solutions required to handle them.

Staying on top of the financials will help you crack your manufacturing goals

5. Business agility

Business agility is a concept that is becoming increasingly important in many industries, including manufacturing.

Rather than settling for outdated, limited legacy software and systems, to succeed in the long term your business will need to make the most of new technologies that allow you to be on the forefront of change and to meet evolving client expectations.

To be agile, manufacturers need to have excellent financial visibility and access to detailed business intelligence. Availability of real-time data on cash flow, for example, could prove critical when it comes to making key strategic decisions.

Being open to change is also proving increasingly important on the frontline of manufacturing. Organisations have to ensure they are committing to the right business models and product offerings to stay relevant in an evolving industry.

A recent report from professional services group Capgemini predicted that the development and sale of smart, connected devices will deliver up to $685bn (£515.8bn) in value-added revenue for the industry by 2020.

Jean-Pierre Petit, head of digital manufacturing at the firm, said: “With the significant potential gains of smart, connected products and digital continuity predicted in the next two years, the requirement to invest in new technologies is too large for manufacturers to ignore.”

In this swiftly changing, increasingly demanding sector, it has never been more important for companies to future-proof their operations by investing in modern solutions to support sustainable growth.

With the help of powerful software and support systems to aid everything from stock and supply chain management to business intelligence and customer relationships, your organisation can overcome challenges, reach its goals and achieve lasting success.

Tips for a More Accurate Contact Center Forecast

This is the last in a blog series based on two, rapid fire, 60 ideas in 60 minutes sessions for tips and techniques in workforce management held at the Society for Workforce Planning Professionals (SWPP) Annual Conference. The first was, Three Tips to be Proactive vs. Reactive in Scheduling Your Contact Center, the second was Five Tips to Make Your WFM Team More Effective.

Now I’ll share some tips on how to make your contact center forecasts more accurate.

1. Continually review and update inputs, especially shrinkage. You should continually assess the inputs into your forecast for accuracy and relevance. For example, using the same shrinkage calculations you used three months ago may not work for the next scheduling period.
2. Know your concept. Similar to reviewing the inputs, review your underlying assumptions and algorithms to help ensure they still align with the changing needs of your business.
3. Understand what the outputs are telling you. What does a 1-minute average handle time cost your business? What does one extra call handled cost or generate? Know the financial impacts of your KPIs and how to communicate the impact of changes on these to the various stakeholders.
4. Continually analyze incoming events and trends. Are fewer calls coming into the contact center due to self-service? Are more steps being automated, speeding up handle times? Has speech analytics identified opportunities to improve processes that will impact the forecast?
5. Know your data. You should be able to analyze the day-to-day reports and mark special events in your forecasting model. This way you can look back and understand why anomalies occurred and be better prepared for similar occurrences in the future.
6. Hire the right skill set. Forecasting is a numbers game. Hire an analyst for the position with a finance or accounting background. In the words of one customer, “not a people person or admin, but an analyst.” Another customer shared that they recently hired a data specialist on their WFM team to support forecasting.
7. Periodically validate your data collection. New queues are being added, work being re-routed, etc.; make sure your source data mapping is still operational and encompassing of all data sources.
8. Invest in vendor training. A repeat from the Five Tips to Make Your WFM Team More Effective is worth repeating here: Proper training helps ensure you are using the solution effectively and to its fullest potential.
9. Don’t forget about the call-back feature. Implementing the callback feature on your ACD to help improve the customer experience will help decrease service levels and move more work for later time slots or shifts. You need to evaluate your forecasts to make sure you are properly forecasting those volumes at the later time.

Well that’s it—three posts with tips and tricks to help improve proactive scheduling, WFM team member effectiveness, and forecasting accuracy. Thanks to the SWPP for a great event—I hope to see you there next year!

Optimizing the Workforce: A Guide for Small and Medium-Sized Businesse

VERINT WHITEPAPER

Organizations of all sizes have to keep up with the rising customer demands and expectations. This can be particularly difficult for small and medium-sized businesses as they are often without the resources they need. Therefore, small and medium-sized businesses must ensure they have sophisticated, omnichannel solutions that allow their workforce to be most effective and efficient when handling customer interactions.

Get the guide to learn 6 ways a modern workforce engagement solution can consistently improve your organization’s daily operations.

CLICK HERE TO REGISTER

Building a Strong Relationship Between Brand and Customer Experience

Building a Strong Relationship Between Brand and Customer Experience

In a recent Enghouse webinar we were privileged to be joined by Kim Bright from LEGO Education who discussed the relationship between their brand and customer experience and how it is interwoven within everything they do.

Listening to LEGO and the way the power of brand shines through every aspect of their customer experience was certainly refreshing. Their approach of F.R.K.E, (Fun, Reliable, Knowledgeable, Engaging) is used in every interaction with builders (customers), adding a consistent community feel to the relationship between customer and brand.

Achieving this requires the development of customer journeys that meet and match the builder’s requirements, demonstrate the brand’s strong ethnics and emphasise the lifetime value of builders to the brand. With an NPS (Net Promoter Score) of over 90%, Lego’s approach appears to be working rather well and they have certainly embraced the concept that the “customer experience is the brand”.

Thinking about the brand values approach, enhancements in contact centre and UC technology have made it even easier to connect customers with the right people in your organisation. They have also made it easier to monitor brand consistency and the service customers receive.

Here are some key points to consider for shaping the relationship between brand and customer experience:

Use technology to speak to the right individual in the organisation

Review your customer journeys dependent on personas, and utilise your database or third party systems to understand the customer history, predict future enquiries and route them to the right channels or person based on previous interactions.

Define your channels and overlay your contact centre to your unified communications strategy. This will enable seamless transfer to any expert across the business, seamlessly building empathy and rapport for a personalised service, resolving customer issues first time.

Use tools to evaluate for a consistent service

Use your technology to ensure the service delivered is consistent and follows your brand ethnics or F.R.K.E in LEGO’s case. This can be achieved through self-evaluation solutions such as quality management, vocal coach or speech analytics to monitor in real time and inform a consistent future approach. In addition, use simple post-interaction surveys to continuously review and evaluate service.

Ensure messaging is as consistent as your service across channels

Businesses wrangling with the channel approach must ensure they are offering consistency across all channels including web chat, social media and voice and that customers can switch seamlessly from one to another. This can be achieved by setting SLAs for each channel and monitoring activity so that tweaks can be made to the customer journey.

Kim Bright gave some great insight into their approach to customer experience and how it has helped to propel them to their status of one of the largest toy makers in the world. But what did everyone else think. We asked our delegates what they felt was the most important part of customer experience and thought we would share a few of them with you in this blog.

“The need for personalisation and consistent messaging across channels” – Train Operator

“We want to help the customer live better in their home, and support them in any aspect of their life that ensures this outcome” – Housing Association

“Creating a hospitality culture so guests come back again and again” – International Fast Food Chain

“Initial first call /contact with us as this sets the potential clients expectations of how their case will be dealt with by the firm as a whole” – Legal Firm

LEGO is of course a unique brand but from questioning our audience on the webinar, it is clear that every business is different and the customer service approach must be aligned to the business strategy.

The relationship between the brand and the customer experience is vital. Everyone within the organisation needs to be responsible for customer service and the continuous monitoring and evolution of customer journeys based on personas, channel approach and the right people within the organisation dealing with a case that fits into their area of expertise. These are the building blocks to world class customer service.

Click here to watch the webinar on demand with LEGO.