Q407 Aspect ONE Newsletter

Unified and Performance Optimization: A Winning Combination

Over the last several years, the proliferation of instant one-to-one and one-to-many communication, as well as the widespread availability of information on products and services on the Internet has created the empowered consumer – a new breed of customer with the unprecedented ability to make or break a company. The result is an even more challenging environment for businesses that are striving to stay competitive in an already tough market. The contact center, in its role at the front lines of customer contact, is squarely positioned to influence what today’s consumers do with their newfound power.

To determine if they are prepared to manage the demands of these newly empowered consumers, contact centers need to ask themselves the following questions:

Can I address my customers’ changing business needs quickly and easily?
Am I able to deliver an exceptional customer experience?
Do I have a complete view into my contact center’s operations?
Are our agents as efficient as they could be? Do they have the tools they need to make the most of our customer relationships?

A “no” answer to any of these questions means there may be room for contact center improvement. The good news: there are applications and processes available that can make a difference.

Challenges of Delivering the Right Customer-Company Experience
Many consumers complain about having inconsistent experiences with a single company. In one call, an agent may have the knowledge to resolve an issue, yet in a subsequent call or chat interaction, a different agent may not be able to help at all because they cannot access the same information. Most of us, being consumers ourselves, know that inconsistency breeds unhappiness. Who wants to deal with a company that has different agents giving contradicting answers every time they interact with them? Consumers have become savvier in conducting research and making buying decisions, and they are now turning to companies they can rely on to meet their needs on a regular basis.

Additionally, the growing use of customer communication channels, such as Web, email, text and chat has made the integration of contact center products and data much more difficult. How can a contact center be efficient and productive if its various functions – automatic call distribution (ACD), voice self service, dialer, workforce management, monitoring, recording – lack cohesiveness? Providing better service to customers should be the focus, not getting disparate contact center systems to work together, not to mention trying to gather meaningful, cohesive reports from multiple systems or trying to easily administer agents across various applications.

Bringing it All Together with Unified
While most companies recognize that there will likely always be a human element necessary to making customer-company interactions more consistent, there is a lot that companies can do to ensure they are meeting customers' needs and delivering pleasant, reliable experiences across all channels – including those that are automated or include self service.

Unified solutions, which bring together an automatic call distributor, dialer, IVR, quality monitoring into one application, have emerged with the ability to reduce the overall complexity of contact center integrations while providing greater flexibility to quickly and easily make adjustments. The big picture is revealed not only to management, but also to agents working on the frontlines with customers. With real-time access to information centralized from front- and back-office systems, agents have a clearer view than ever before, enabling them to prioritize helping customers over tracking down information. Plus, better informed agents know that the customer sent an email yesterday and had a Web chat with another agent three days ago. They can use this data to more quickly and efficiently resolve the customer's inquiry. As a result, customers are much more likely to realize consistency regardless of the channel they choose for their interactions. This, in itself, is a benefit with immeasurable positive impact. The bottom line is that a unified contact center is an affordable, flexible and reliable way to break the tyranny of integration that has troubled contact centers since their inception.

Adding Contact Center Optimization to Achieve the Holistic View
One of the other challenges that contact centers face is gaining perspective on how the entire center is operating. Take a unified approach ensures greater insight into contact center performance, but does not tell the full story. Contact center optimization closes the gaps by providing an understanding about where opportunities lie to enhance business processes, workflow and showing how the center is performing against the overall corporate strategy. Contact center optimization includes workforce, performance and campaign management, recording and quality management, as well as coaching and eLearning.

Workforce management enables the contact center to actively balance agents versus service or campaign goals in an effort to meet overall contact center objectives at a minimum cost. This helps agents deliver consistent, optimal customer service across inbound and outbound operations through efficient schedule creation and adherence.
Performance management tracks agent productivity and identifies gaps in compliance and consistency. It measures and communicates results to continuously improve business processes by providing scorecards and analysis that can automatically initiate alerts and actions on the fly, helping agents stay focused on the key performance indicators (KPIs) that will drive the most significant performance improvements.
Quality management applications record calls to pinpoint and evaluate customer interactions. When combined with speech analytics, quality management automatically scrutinizes and reports on content, context, purpose and outcome of every recorded customer interaction as part of the quality monitoring process. Recording and analytic capabilities help contact centers deliver repeatable, consistent customer interactions.
Campaign management enables contact centers to leverage best time to call capabilities to ensure maximum outbound campaign productivity and strategy management by increasing right party contact rates. This can translate into more dollars collected, higher sales per hour and improved customer contact with lower telecommunications charges.

Information such as real-time and historical data, gathered by performance optimization solutions, ACDs, dialers and voice portals, can provide a holistic view of the entire contact center and thus, provide insight into the customer experience and the center's performance. With the contact center increasingly being looked at as a revenue-generating profit center in many companies, a solid performance optimization strategy can help companies ensure they are operating at their peak to support strategic business objectives.

The Impact on the Consumer Experience
When companies combine a unified solution with a complete performance optimization suite, it can offer significant capabilities and functionality, enabling the contact center and the business to deliver competitive service to its customers and meet company objectives.

Now that consumers are armed with easy access to information, pricing alternatives and market reviews and they have the tools to tell vast amounts of people about their experiences -- they are more empowered than ever before. Companies that deliver positive, consistent customer experiences will gain and maintain the competitive advantage.

Finally, contact centers that have invested in unified solutions and performance optimization will stand out from the competition due to the enhanced service they provide, and consumers will continue to recognize and reward them for it.