Whitepapers

No matter how sophisticated the ACD software used or the cutting edge multi-media contact streams available, it is the contact centre agent’s voice interaction with a caller that remains the most vital part of the contact centre experience.

This complimentary whitepaper will examine the three essential elements to headset design: sound quality, hearing safety and wearing comfort, as well as highlighting the latest innovations in their contact centre headset range.

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Measuring the performance of a contact centre shouldn’t just be about how many calls are received and how quickly they have been answered. In order to reach the ‘Promised Land’ of first call resolution and call avoidance, surely it is just as important to know WHY customers are calling, and how their experience has been? This thought provoking white paper from CTI Labs (a division of IP Integration) explores this further.

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The recent economic downturn has seen a significant paradigm shift in the demands that organisations place on their contact centres. In better times, contact centres were always seen as the growing part of the organisation and the common approach tomeeting increasing demand was to simply add more agents.

With the recession has come a new phrase - ‘deliver more with less’.

Many contact centre managers have not faced such a major challenge before; working harder will not be sufficient and given that we are unlikely to return to the days of free expansion for many years to come, finding long-term ways to work smarter, as well as harder is most definitely the approach needed.

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Functionality, resources, deployment, availability and security are important issues to control whenever a business, but especially a contact centre, considers moving its communications applications to the cloud. Richard Snow, Vice President and Research Director at Ventana Research, and Jason Alley of Interactive Intelligence, discuss how cloud-based contact centres can actually offer users a greater level of control than premise solutions do.

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Intentionally create differentiated and consistent customer experiences that deliver business value

In today's customer-centric environment, consumers expect superior customer service and real-time responses from brands. Whether it's via the web, the contact centre, or an online social mechanism, they demand that businesses meet them where they are, no matter what the channel. How organisations choose to engage consumers has a critical impact on customer satisfaction levels, customer loyalty, and brand advocacy—ultimately affecting the bottom line.

This strategy paper, authored by Customer Experience Expert Shaun Smith, details a strategic alignment model that outlines the steps needed to create a branded customer experience that is intentional, differentiated and consistent, creating value to your customers.

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Customer Intimacy is one of three 'value disciplines' that drive company success. In this Whitepaper, you’ll learn how this strategic initiative can be implemented in five practical steps:

1.       Plan: Clearly define the problem you’re trying to solve.

2.       Capture: It all starts with the data. Where is your data? What does it tell you?

3.       Predict: Using predictive analytics, you can anticipate customer actions. Which customers will switch their loyalty? Which will become more valuable over time?

4.       Act: Use the knowledge you’ve gained to drive your decisions and optimize outcomes.

5.       Expand: Build on early successes, using the cost savings and increased profits to fund next steps, and continually expand and refine your initiatives.

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Many would agree that customer experience management is still in its infancy. But as people, processes, and technologies evolve, they will alter the way that companies serve their customers. Looking ahead to the next three to five years, can you list those areas that are expected to have the greatest impact on your customer experience efforts?

Eight Customer Experience Megatrends, a newly-revised report authored by Customer Experience Transformist Bruce Temkin, identifies eight of those trends that will reshape customer experience management, while also offering a look at the 2011 implications.

Download your complimentary copy today, and learn how these multi-year trends will play out in 2011 and beyond.

Download this complementary whitepaper to learn more.

Alcatel Lucent.

Your customers are coming to you via an ever-growing variety of channels: phone, e-mail, the corporate Web site and social media. As a result, every employee is now customer facing — either directly or indirectly — and distinctions between the front office and back office are blurring. With many more channels and a much more dispersed workforce, organizations today are forced to manage a dizzying array of customer service systems, customer touch points and customer-related tasks.

The question becomes: How do you make sure that employees possess the right skills and information to provide excellent service to your customers, while also effectively leveraging existing corporate systems and resources? And, how do you boost employee engagement to ensure that what employees do aligns with company objectives, increases profitability, and provides a competitive advantage?

The answer: By implementing an Employee Effectiveness Model that brings together a host of capabilities under a single umbrella to align training, job assignment, job scheduling, quality assurance and career development so that your workforce has the right skills to provide stellar service to customers.

Such a model should be built on the following five steps to ensure a more engaged, efficient and effective organization — one with happier

employees, more satisfied customers and a much healthier corporate balance sheet.

STEP 1: PLAN

STEP 2: DELIVER

STEP 3: CONTROL

STEP 4: ANALYZE

STEP 5: DEVELOP

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Benchmarking is a critical process for any Service Desk that wants to gauge the quality of their service delivery and processes. Too often, desks are overly concerned with industry benchmarks and hitting industry metrics for call waiting times, time to respond and the perennial cost per email/call. It is true that industry benchmarks can be extremelt useful in discerning at what level your service is, but true benchmarking and true benefits to service industry delivery come from benchmarking from within.

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Improving Customer Service with Communications-Enabled Business Processes
November 2011
Marlon Machado, Product Manager, IBM
Brad Herrington, Product Marketing Manager, Interactive Intelligence

During an economic slowdown, customer service managers need to take a close look at their contact center operations to find ways to reduce costs while maintaining high levels of customer support. Too often, customer service managers continue with established practices for handling customer interactions that don’t reflect the changes in customer expectations and their communication preferences. Singlechannel focus for customer service that separates telephone calls from online transactions results in higher operational costs and lower customer satisfaction ratings. Now is the time to take an innovative approach in managing your contact center to deliver consistent multi-channel support and automate more transactions. Contact centers represent a complex ecosystem that supports numerous processes and applications that may be too expensive to upgrade at this time. But as a customer service manager, you can start with 10 things you can afford to do today to improve performance and build greater efficiency into your operations.

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May 2010
chase response

Companies are facing an increasingly competitive landscape where the battle for market share and changing customer behaviour present constant challenges.   

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Thought Bubbles - Ideas from Rapide

We've all heard of Search Engine Optimisation: the tweaking of content, keywords and links to capture and convert the maximum number of customers searching the web. 

But what about "Customer Service Optimisation" - intervening at just the right moment to improve a customer's bad experience or make the most of a good one? 

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Empower Your Customers & Frontline Employees

Think about a time you had a terrible experience dealing with customer service.

Perhaps you waited on hold for an eternity, or sent an email and the reply took days, if it came at all. When you finally connected, you had to repeat information you'd already provided and the agent, who didn’t have access to the information you needed or a record of your past interactions, seemed more interested in ending the call than solving your problem. When the call did conclude, the agent tried to pitch you a service that you either already have or that is not relevant to you.

It's natural to blame a poor service experience on the person who delivered it. The human factor is an undeniable part of any service problem, particularly in the high-turnover, timepressured, cost-conscious, world of the contact center.

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September 2010
Paul Weald, Strategy Director-Customer Innovations, ProtoCall One 
Andy Turner, Solutions Director-Customer Innovations, ProtoCall One

To achieve excellence in your contact centre you need to have three things in place – engaged staff; a true customer focus; and a clear vision of what success looks like. The KPI measures that you use have an important role to play in balancing these people, customer and strategy levers. 

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February 2011
Paul Weald, Strategy Director responsible for Customer Innovations at ProtoCall On

Our latest survey of senior contact centre managers carried out in December revealed the extent of the measures that contact centres have taken to survive through the recession. The majority of the respondents surveyed reported imposing cost saving measures during 2010 with half (51%) having reduced staff numbers within their contact centres, 45% imposing wage freezes and 32% reducing working hours and overtime levels. 

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Assessing the Progress Of Customer Loyalty Programs
Satmetrix
The Challenge of Day-to-Day Operational Execution

In the spring of 2007, Satmetrix, the co-developer of Net Promoter®, sponsored a survey of the global Net Promoter community to assess the challenges and opportunities facing companies that have deployed customer loyalty programs and related customer-centricity strategies. The questions were based on the Satmetrix Maturity Assessment Model of Customer Loyalty Programs, which gauges best practices among companies that implement customer loyalty programs and initiatives. More than 100 organizations responded. These organizations assessed their own customer initiatives in terms of specific behaviors and attitudes within their company.

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SPD gets great customer experience and a 30 per cent cost saving with BT Next Generation Contact Centre

SPD is a world leader in the research, design, production, and supply of advanced consumer diagnostic products. Its brands such as Clearblue and PERSONA are familiar in many countries, trusted for their accuracy and simplicity by women keen to know more about their own reproductive health. SPD was formed in 2007 as a joint venture between Procter & Gamble and Inverness Medical Innovations (IMI). The company is headquartered in Geneva, Switzerland, with R&D and support facilities in Bedford in the UK.

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Balancing Service Cost and Service Level
ClickSoftware

One of the greatest challenges in service optimization is increasing customer service levels while reducing operational costs. It is often difficult – if not impossible – to achieve one without sacrificing the other. The reason is the inherent conflict between sending the most cost-effective resource and sending the best qualified one. Service operations must also take into account a number of other factors when dispatching field resources, including geography, parts required, breaks, unforeseen emergencies, service levels, and other constraints. A relatively small workload of 100 service calls in a single eight hour day makes it virtually impossible to effectively balance all of the simultaneous calculations and decisions required to ensure happy customers at the lowest possible cost. 

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