Q407 Aspect ONE Newsletter

The Right Tools for a Positive Customer Experience

How businesses can implement performance optimization solutions to deliver quality service and build customer satisfaction.

You know the stats: Nearly 75 percent of consumers who have had a bad experience with a contact center say they will do less business with that company, and 60 percent of those same customers say they will do much less business¹. Clearly, the quality of customer-company interactions has a direct effect on revenue, reputation, and repeat business.

While companies continue to be focused on growing sales and reducing costs, increased emphasis on customer service is becoming a must in order to remain competitive. Well-informed consumers, thanks to the Internet, are not willing to deal with inept or rude service representatives and can easily identify other vendors where they can take their business. To align the contact center with overall corporate goals, many companies are focusing on maximizing effectiveness and enhancing performance. These companies are convinced that top- and bottom-line improvements by empowering and arming contact center agents with the right information will lead them to win new customers, strengthen customer loyalty and increase revenue.

Help for the Contact Center

Understanding corporate strategy and objectives and recognizing that the performance of the contact center can make or break the company’s ability to meet those goals, can be a heavy load to carry. And it can not be forgotten that the first order of business is to ensure that consumers’ needs are being met. At first, it probably seems an almost impossible task to try to juggle so many demands - ensuring the right agents are available to handle the right number of calls, monitoring their progress to see if they are meeting their key performance indicators (KPIs) or even basic call metrics, and regularly checking to see that workflows are still satisfying consumer demands.

But, there are a number of specialized applications that can help contact center management consider everything that is going on and then develop a plan to enhance agent performance and improve workflows, and measure the impact of that plan on operational and overall business performance:

Workforce management actively enables companies to accurately plan, efficiently manage and optimize the performance of their multi-skilled, multichannel, multisite and outsourced staffing resources. It helps agents to deliver consistent, optimal customer service through efficient schedule creation and adherence.
Call Recording and Quality management establishes agent qualitative performance targets which are difficult to obtain through other, purely quantitative sources. It provides the capabilities for full time or rules-based recording, reviewing and reporting on customer interactions, which can be used in coaching sessions to help improve agent performance and job satisfaction, increase customer satisfaction and revenue generation, and better manage overall costs.
Performance management tools can unite all of the data from the many different applications across the contact center to provide a truly unified view of performance, while aligning operational performance to strategic goals. Companies can define their corporate objectives, translate these objectives into supporting operational key performance indicators, and use performance management tools to share the goals with everyone in the organization. Consistently tracking results against goals provides the basis for coaching the right agents on the right things to improve their performance.
Campaign management leverages best time to call applications to ensure maximum outbound campaign productivity and strategy management by increasing right party contact rates for collections, telemarketing and proactive customer service campaigns. This translates into more dollars collected, higher sales per hour or improved customer contact with lower telecommunications charges. It can track call result history over time and use this information to predict the best number to call and the best hour of the day to reach the customer. Scheduling and managing the right agents at the right times with the highest productivity yields the best return on investment in contact center human and system resources.
Speech Analytics applications automatically scrutinize and report on content, context, purpose and outcome of every recorded customer interaction as part of the quality monitoring process. Its objective is to identify trends or variations in customer interactions that can impact overall customer satisfaction, the quality of the service the agent is providing, sales performance or marketing effectiveness. This information then enables companies to act immediately to improve the overall performance of the organization.
eLearning provides additional skills training for agents that is naturally suited to distance learning or flexible learning. eLearning includes content authoring tools and session scheduling capabilities that enable agents to hone their skills based on the feedback they have received through the quality monitoring and speech analytics tools.

The Results

Many companies have seen significant benefits from implementing performance optimization solutions.

For example, the financial branch of a leading car manufacturer used performance optimization to refine its customer service and collections contact center processes, while improving both the top and bottom line. They wanted to maximize their technology investments and improve customer service levels by automating the process for scheduling agent time and vacation to reduce agent overtime and improve control over agents’ abilities to manage their own work/life balance. After implementing a workforce management solution, the company improved service levels, reduced customer hold times, and lowered agent idle time. The company’s frontline supervisors experienced an 80 percent reduction in time spent creating and managing schedules. The supervisors now have more time to train and empower their agents, and customers are more content with the service they are receiving.

A large travel services company had a similar experience with a performance optimization solution. The company wanted to monitor its at-home agents, reduce costs and improve the agent training process. To address these challenges, the company implemented an advanced quality management solution. With the ability reference recordings of customer interactions, the quality monitoring solution helped the travel services company monitor the at-home agents, reduce operational costs and identify areas for improvement to help streamline staff training.

When contact centers create the alignment between the strategic business objectives of the organization and the goals of the front-line employees, it generates a higher likelihood that it will achieve its goals. Setting expectations in advance ensures that employees can be praised for meeting corporate goals or held accountable for not meeting them.

Looking at the intelligence created in the contact center from a strategic perspective helps you consider everything going on in the contact center and act immediately to provide greater opportunities for engaging customers, maximizing the performance of agents, optimizing resources, and improving the quality of interactions. The right tools won’t make a difference in a contact center that isn’t analyzing and evaluating the right metrics, or has not properly trained its agents. The real mark of a successful contact center is what happens after the agent is connected to the customer, and this is entirely dependent on the customer’s ability to reach a knowledgeable and empathetic agent, who can provide fast and efficient service.

Recent research now confirms what top managers have suspected; a consumer who had an exceptional experience with a contact center is 33 percent more likely to do increased business with that company in the future. Furthermore, consumers who are satisfied with an agent are two and half times as likely to conduct future business with a company². These are stats that can’t be ignored and performance optimization solutions are the key to helping create a contact center environment that keeps customers coming back again and again. They can help develop more productive, happier agents, higher service levels and razor-sharp calling campaigns—which ultimately translate into more satisfied customers and increased revenues.

^{1 & 2} Source: Aspect Contact Center Satisfaction Index 2007. For more information visit www.aspect.com