This post was authored by Omer Minkara, Research Analyst, Contact Center, Customer Experience & Service Management
The nature of customer–company relations have changed drastically over the past decade. With the growing adoption and use of technology channels and tools, customers can rapidly access and share information that addresses their needs. In other words, they are more educated and demanding.
Aberdeen Group’s recent research on Next-Generation Customer Experience Management validates this trend. The top challenge companies face with their customer experience management (CEM) efforts across multiple channels is adaptation to the new dynamics of the “customer era.” In this first installment of a five-blog series, we will observe the high-level opportunities and benefits companies can gain through effectively utilizing customer analytics to delight buyers while driving quantifiable business results.
As reflected in Figure 1 below, Best-in-Class customer-analytics users enjoy far superior results across a series of key performance measures, compared to their peers.
Figure 1: Performance Benefits of Customer Analytics
Source: Aberdeen Group, March 2013
The performance gains outlined above are primarily a result of Best-in-Class organizations’ ability to convert data into actionable insights used to support customer interactions across multiple touch-points. When asked about their satisfaction from the quality of customer experience data, only 7% of the 374 organizations participating within Aberdeen’s study indicated that they are extremely satisfied. Concurrently only 15% of businesses indicated that they have insufficient data needed to support their customer interactions.
The findings noted above signal that the primary reason why companies struggle in adopting a data-driven approach to manage their customer interactions is not due to lack of data; it’s due to inability to convert this data into actionable insights. This is where customer analytics comes in handy. It helps businesses with a technology and business structure that allows tracking and analyzing historical customer data (e.g., number of calls received within the contact center) to continuously improve customer engagement processes.
For example, a contact center might collect a wealth of information, including customer traffic patterns, resolution data, and customer feedback. If the business manages high volume interactions, manual analysis of data gleaned through multiple systems would require substantial effort for data compilation and insights. This results in a lot of time and effort, which means that the insights captured might no longer be relevant by the time the process is done. Instead, companies deploying an automated approach where they integrate disparate contact center systems and apply analytics to generate insights would streamline the process, reduce unnecessary costs, and improve the accuracy and timeliness of their data analysis activities.
It’s important to note that while customer analytics is a key enabler helping businesses generate actionable insights, companies need to ensure data is standardized in order to reap maximum rewards from these efforts. This helps in aligning data output from numerous business systems such as automated call distribution (ACD), customer relationship management (CRM), and interactive voice response (IVR), and provides organizations with end-to-end visibility on their CEM efforts. Standardization of customer data is an activity deployed 59% more widely by Best-in-Class firms, compared to their peers.
To learn more about detailed best practices that Best-in-Class companies use to convert customer data into intelligence, stay tuned for Aberdeen’s upcoming research report on the topic, publishing at the end of this month. We will follow-up on this research with a deep-dive on how next-generation contact centers deploy big data analytics to optimize their contact center performance — a report publishing July 1st.
This post was authored by Rich Guth. Rich is the Vice President of Marketing at Transera.
My team and I just got back from my first Annual Call Center Exhibition (ACCE) conference in Seattle produced by ICMI. Having come from the Business Intelligence and Big Data Analytics space, I didn’t know what to expect, but am pleased to say there is an exciting paradigm shift happening in the industry.
While there were plenty of new call center applications on display and new vendors entering the space (including one particularly large and well-known cloud CRM vendor), from the attendees I spoke with, there was one on-going theme –
- Understanding the customer journey despite the channel, interaction or system
- “Stitching together” the interactions of a single customer journey from multiple systems and channels
This also became the theme of a thought leadership panel I participated in with industry leaders including Pipkins, Smart Action and Varolii.
So to continue in that vein, I am dedicating a significant amount of my marketing resources and channels, such as this blog, to help us navigate through this new initiative.
To kick off, we have entered into a partnership with Omer Minkara of Aberdeen, a well-respected contact center, customer experience and service management expert to share some research, best practices and insights. Over the next six weeks, you will see:
- Five guest blogs from Omer featured on Transera’s blog
- Omer sharing some of his most recent research during a Transera- sponsored webinar on June 6 on TMCnet: “Customer Engagement Analytics – more than a sum of interactions!”
- Our offering of two Aberdeen research whitepapers: “Customer Analytics: Converting Data into Insight for Superior Customer Experience Results” for which you can pre-register now and “Call Center Optimization” which is coming next month.
And if you haven’t participated in Aberdeen’s current survey on "Contact Center Optimization", we encourage you to do so.
So come back tomorrow and Thursday to read Omer’s first two guest blogs and we hope to see you online for Omer’s webinar, taking the survey and downloading the whitepapers.
Let’s get the dialog going.
This post was authored by Prem Uppaluru. Prem is the President & Chief Executive Officer of Transera.
Contact centers should think about modeling successful e-commerce strategies, which gather very precise information about who’s visiting their website—including their spending habits—before deciding how to engage with them.
In the world of e-commerce, each unique online visitor is identified through their cookies and demographically and behaviorally profiled through consumer or customer databases. They are greeted by a landing page customized to their profile and guided through a workflow that balances their needs and the online merchant’s business goals in a way that maximize conversions and order values. Upon a successful transaction, customers are often encouraged to purchase additional matching products, accessories, or services to increase total transaction value.
A similar paradigm can be applied to customers interacting with a contact center. Customers can be identified and classified using a combination of their caller ID, the number they dialed, the menu options they selected, and the digits they entered into the IVR. Once identified, customers can similarly be profiled using consumer and customer databases. These profiles can be used to match them with the right agent profile and call script to deliver the best business outcomes. If the interaction is successful, customers can be offered relevant add-on products and services to increase transaction value.
This is a unique approach that puts a business focus on managing interactions. Contact centers can maximize the impact of this approach by leveraging the power of Big Data and predictive analytics to make recommendations for call routing, customer-agent matches, scripts, and cross-selling.
I’ll talk about how contact centers can take advantage of Big Data and predictive analytics in subsequent blogs.
This post was authored by Arnab Mishra. Arnab is VP of Products and Solutions at Transera.
The ability to store data inexpensively in the cloud has brought data warehousing within reach of contact centers, which can now use available technologies to build Customer Interaction Repositories. Why is this important? The need to capture information about customer interactions is essential for business success. Yet this information is scattered across systems and vendors inside and outside the company. This leaves contact centers and business analysts with a lot of unanswered questions. So they tediously and manually compile information about customer interactions and business outcomes from a variety of data sources.
Conceptually, a Customer Interaction Repository is a purpose-built, open source-based, cloud hosted, Big Data warehouse for customer interaction data. It extracts data from disparate operational systems that deal with customer interactions – ACD, CRM, IVR, WFM, QM and dialers – and provides an integrated, 360-degree view of customer interactions.
Each record in the Customer Interaction Repository represents a customer interaction with all the relevant data: contact details, agent profile, customer information, and business results. Customer interaction data also includes operational metrics, such as speed of answer, hold times, agent staffing, and agent availability at the time the interaction occurred.
The extracted data is continuously cleansed, transformed, and loaded into a Big Data Customer Interaction Repository in the cloud, where it resides active, accessible, and actionable.
Transera has architected a Customer Interaction Repository. We run segmentation and profiling scripts continuously on top of the repository to generate pertinent statistics and analytics relevant to contact center operations. The analytics supported by the Customer Interaction Repository can answer questions as varied as assessing customer experience across multiple channels for a given customer to calculating a predicted customer satisfaction score for each interaction.
Transera uses the segmentation and profiling output to feed three business applications: one for real-time operational visibility, a second for interactive business insights, and a third for predictive-analytics-driven recommendations for adaptive engagement. Fundamentally, it’s a data warehouse specifically tailored to the needs of contact centers.
This post was authored by Prem Uppaluru. Prem is the President & Chief Executive Officer of Transera.
Cloud computing is the broad umbrella under which not only SaaS (Software as a Service) fits but also PaaS (Platform as a Service) and IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service). SaaS refers to an end-user application. Salesforce.com, for example, is a very popular SaaS application. PaaS is a slightly different animal, often referred to as “middleware.” In other words, it is software but it is not an end-user application. Dropbox, which provides a platform for storing multimedia in a single location that can be accessed by a number of different applications and devices, is a good example of PaaS. At the far end of the spectrum, Amazon web services provides infrastructure in the form of storage and servers for hosting websites and applications, an offering that includes both hardware and software. Said another way, SaaS is for end-users, PaaS is for developers, and IaaS is for IT folks.
While the offerings from Salesforce.com, Dropbox, and Amazon are all different, each provides a technology over the Internet cloud as a service. Most importantly, the customer is using software and hardware that has been optimized to run over the Internet via a browser as a service. The traditional hosted model takes an application that wasn’t originally designed for hosting, makes a few modifications if it’s to be delivered over the web, or, more typically, delivers the application “as is” over a dedicated network via servers dedicated for each customer.
Why should call centers care?
Many businesses do not wish to lock up capital in call center technology purchases and many, in addition, lack the operational staff to manage implementations of increasing complexity. When call centers look for ways to benefit from technology without suffering the headaches of owning and managing it, they often turn to hosting vendors.
This is a false promise to cure IT headaches. A hosting vendor charges for the dedicated software and hardware as well as staff to manage it on the enterprise's behalf. There are no scale advantages or call center virtualization advantages. Consequently, there are no real cost savings. Frequently, a hosted solution also adds additional transport costs because calls have to be backhauled from the hosting vendor's data center to the enterprise's call centers.
True on-demand virtual call centers deliver real cost savings for businesses without sacrificing functionality or features. Enterprises can't get these savings by simply having someone else host and manage traditional on-premise call center solutions.
This post was authored by Arnab Mishra. Arnab is VP of Products and Solutions at Transera.
It’s not uncommon for direct marketers to use shared agents. In discussions with customers and prospects, however, I have been surprised by the number of direct marketers that rely on shared agents exclusively. Although the scalability and cost effectiveness of shared agents can appear compelling, direct marketers who do this ignore the fact that it is nearly impossible for a shared agent who is taking calls for other clients to be wholly proficient on every client’s products. The implicit trade-off is cost for performance. Recognizing this fact, many contact center outsourcers allow customers to staff dedicated agents and give them the ability to overflow to their shared pool. The key drawback of this approach is that it requires the direct marketer to send all of its calls to one outsourcer, limiting choice in vendors and the flexibility of using multiple outsourcers.
Transera best practices strongly recommends that direct marketers employ a strategy that uses dedicated agents as well as multiple outsourcers. This approach provides the best of both worlds: the benefits of staffing agents with high degrees of knowledge and proficiency in the marketer’s products while also providing the choice, flexibility, and price competition inherent in multi-vendor environments. In this model, direct marketers can choose to locate both dedicated agents and shared agent pools across multiple vendors.
Transera’s Scorecard Routing solution takes the advantages of this model up to another level by finding the best available resource across the entire environment regardless of agent type or vendor. The key advantage of this approach is that direct marketers can staff highly trained, dedicated agents for expected call volumes while preserving the ability to burst to the best performing shared agent pools for unexpected call spikes. A common approach of Transera customers is to staff dedicated pools of agents at 80% of expected call volumes and to send the remaining volume to the best-performing shared agent pools. This ensures that dedicated agents are fully utilized, while also continually “exercising” shared agent resources. Greater use of highly proficient dedicated agents, coupled with intelligent real-time call allocation to the best-performing shared agent resources, increases both conversion rates and order values.
This post was authored by Prem Uppaluru. Prem is the President & Chief Executive Officer of Transera.
The old adage, “You can't improve what you can't measure,” applies in spades to call center operations. In the world of call centers, metrics drive daily operations: call volumes, call wait times, call handle times, agent staffing levels, sales conversion rates, customer satisfaction scores—the list goes on. Continuous call center improvement comes from listening to customer calls, assessing first-call resolution rates, measuring agent performance, and then using this information to improve agent recruiting, training, and staffing, IVR menus, CRM knowledge bases, and other business processes.
Visibility is everything. Call centers that produce the best results and provide the highest quality customer service know what is going on - in real time, not in hindsight. "Actionable intelligence, now!" should be the mantra of every call center manager.
Office Depot, a global retailer of office supplies has found a way to do that. They mix agents from in-house call centers and multiple call center outsourcers and combine them to form a single global virtual call center. Any agent anywhere can answer any call from any customer anywhere in the world, period. Office Depot call center managers know the exact status of every call and every agent regardless of their location or affiliation. They can perform call monitoring on any call in real time and record any customer interaction for later inspection. They can also hire and fire call center outsourcers at will based on their performance.
For the record, Office Depot has been using Transera's SaaS virtual call center software (Transera Virtual Call Center Solution) for more than three years to run their contact centers. “Virtual” is the key word here.
Only a virtual call center can provide centralized management of distributed resources to normalize the variations across multiple contact centers while delivering consistent functionality and performance. Businesses are already adopting virtualization across a wide spectrum of business applications and IT infrastructure. Modern data centers employ virtual machines, storage networks, web services and service oriented architectures (SOA) to gain centralized control of distributed resources. The same benefits can accrue to call centers that adopt similar virtualization solutions for customer interaction management.
Restoring visibility through centralized management is the key to regaining control of your call center operations. With real-time visibility we get actionable intelligence and then, and only then, do you get continuous call center improvement.
This post was authored by Arnab Mishra. Arnab is VP of Products and Solutions at Transera.
Direct marketing campaigns containing offers to respond to a toll-free number are particularly challenging to call centers—especially if they are successful! The responses flood in soon after the campaign is launched, creating call spikes that require careful resource planning. In addition to staffing issues, a more significant challenge lies in routing these calls to the call center agents who can convert the leads into sales while keeping abandoned calls to a minimum.
Direct marketers typically manage these unpredictable call volumes by contracting with call center outsourcers. However, they face a fundamental tradeoff in terms of staffing versus service levels: paying for more call center agents reduces wait times for callers (decreasing call abandons) but also increases costs. Given the unpredictability of consumer response to specific campaigns, it is hard to commit to strict staffing levels at each chosen contact center outsourcer. The inability to accurately gauge staffing needs is further exacerbated by the fact that many companies simply allocate the incoming traffic across multiple call center outsourcers (known as multi-sourcing) in fixed ratios. This “spray and pray” strategy typically yields suboptimal routing decisions and results in high abandon rates and lower sales performance.
Level the playing field. What if call center agents were rated in real-time based on their service levels and performance? Calls could then be routed to the best-performing agents while maintaining the desired service levels. This approach takes the guesswork out of call routing and levels the playing field across call center vendors. It forces outsourcers to compete for their client's business by staffing their call centers adequately with the most skilled agents they can hire and train.
When call center outsourcers compete in real-time for the business of their clients, everyone wins: call center customers are assured the best performance across their vendors, and the outsourcers are assured more business from their clients if they outperform the competition. Enterprises choose the set of contact center outsourcers they wish to do business with and keep everyone honest.
Transera enables this approach with Scorecard Routing, Transera’s intelligent call routing software overlays the software in the call centers of your outsourcers and consolidates their operational data to compute and compare agent performance. Automatically routing calls to the best-performing agents—whichever call center they are operating from—is a sure way to increase sales conversions and drive revenues.
This post was authored by Prem Uppaluru. Prem is the President & Chief Executive Officer of Transera.
Apple’s recent announcement about its new cloud service—and the subsequent attempt by pundits to once more explain cloud technology—made me realize that this might be the time to revisit this subject in the context of call centers. Hosted call centers are often equated with on-demand call centers in the cloud. Let me clear up some confusion on this subject from a business-case perspective.
Hosted call centers were initially seen as a bane for businesses that did not wish to lock up capital in call center technology or didn’t have the operational staff to manage the complex implementations of a sophisticated call center. Why not move your call center operations to the data center of a hosting vendor and focus on your core competencies? Seems to make sense, right? However, hosted call centers turned out to falsely promise to cure IT headaches. Hosting implies dedicated software and hardware as well as staff to manage it on an enterprise's behalf. There are no scale or call center virtualization advantages and hence no real cost savings. Frequently, hosting solutions actually add additional transport costs because calls have to be backhauled from the hosting vendor's data center to an enterprise's call centers.
On-demand contact centers, in contrast, are deployed as software as a service (SaaS) in the “cloud.”They are built from the ground up as multi-tenant software applications. These virtual call centers use web services that reside on an inexpensive shared infrastructure and scale simply by adding servers (think about how Google scales). On-demand contact centers typically offer browser-based user interfaces for call center agents and supervisors, reducing their desktop footprint and associated support costs. On-demand contact centers commonly make extensive use of open-source technologies and commercial off-the-shelf networks, storage, and servers to reduce acquisition and call center operations costs. They also wrap their applications with service management software and utilities to reduce monitoring, diagnosis, and break-fix costs.
True on-demand contact centers deliver real cost savings for businesses without sacrificing functionality or feature set. Enterprises can't get these savings by simply having someone else host and manage traditional on-premise call center solutions. For an example of a
SaaS virtual contact center solution, check out
Transera.
This post was authored by Prem Uppaluru. Prem is the President & Chief Executive Officer of Transera.
Cloud computing for call centers is a simple but very powerful concept: it delivers the infrastructure and applications required to run your call center as a service. Rather than incurring large upfront equipment and software costs for each of your locations, you subscribe to a service that allows you to scale your operations up and down according to demand. Running a virtual call center in the cloud has many benefits, including lower costs, simplified management of your operations, greater flexibility in how calls are queued and routed, and a centralized view of your call center's performance.
Cloud computing in the context of call centers is slightly more complex than other cloud applications because we are dealing with two clouds: the voice cloud (public and private networks carrying voice traffic) and the application cloud (customer interaction management software). This is important to understand because decoupling the application cloud from the voice cloud gives enterprises the flexibility to choose the voice telephony and transport networks that best meet their business needs. This can generate significant cost savings.
This is an important differentiation. Call center solutions that intrinsically couple the voice and application clouds (rather than decoupling them) fail to deliver the full benefits of cloud computing. Here is a checklist of the qualifying criteria for a genuine contact center in-the-cloud offering. Cloud solutions that adhere to these criteria will inevitably lower operating costs and simplify call center management:
- Can it manage virtual agents? Cloud offerings should be able to source agents internally or outsource them and locate them anywhere: onshore, offshore, or at home.
- Does it support virtual telephony and transport services? Genuine cloud offerings can use IP or TDM telephony from any vendor and IP or TDM transport from any carrier.
- Does it offer multi-tenancy? Multiple enterprises should be able share the same call center application instance while enjoying performance customized to their service level agreement and privacy pertaining to their data.
- Can you access the offering through a browser? A true cloud offering provides web access to agents and supervisors for all elements of the application and doesn’t require you to download client-specific desktop applications.
- Does it operate as Software-as-a-service (SaaS)? Application software in genuine cloud offerings are hosted in a data center on virtual machines and delivered as a service paid for by subscription.
- Does it enable Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) integration? A genuine cloud offering is built using SOA with web application integration protocols and techniques (such as SOAP, XML and HTTP). This enables the application to integrate readily with other applications, such as Workforce Management, Customer Resource Management, and Quality Monitoring.
With the above checklist in hand, you can separate the true call center in-the-cloud solutions from those that are pure fluff—and get ALL the benefits cloud computing can offer call centers.