Customer Services Goes Mobile: Is the User Experience Enhanced?

May 13th, 2009 admin Comments off
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Published on FierceVoIP (http://www.fiercevoip.com)

CONTACT CENTER CORNER: Customer Service Goes Mobile: Is The User Experience Enhanced?

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Created 12/08/2008 – 11:13am

By Monique Bozeman

Customer service-related product release announcements in recent weeks point to the continuing advances in offerings targeted at enhancing customer experience over mobile devices, which makes sense given there are more than 3 billion mobile subscribers in the world and that number is expected to exceed 4.7 billion by 2011, according to Gartner Research. That and the fact that the only way I can reach my 19-year-old nephew (who falls into that elusive 18-34 demographic making up a quarter of the U.S. population) is via text messaging to his mobile phone. Forget voice or emails.

That the mobile phone channel will be vital to a successful overall multichannel service strategy is clear. What’s not so clear is whether the user experience will actually be enhanced. Will organizations have the finesse or restraint, depending upon your perspective, to effectively blend targeted marketing opportunities with customer service applications while saving on a cost-effective communications channel inherent in a mobile service channel? Or will they fall into the common trap of mistaking that what’s good for the organization – read lower cost to serve and reach – might not be so good for the customer? How some of the latest technologies and applications recently announced are actually deployed will tell.

Avaya announced in early November the launch of two customer service solutions developed by their professional services organization for the financial and healthcare industries – Proactive Outreach for Financial Services and Proactive Outreach for Healthcare — that use outbound communications over phone, email and short message service (SMS) and self-service automation with the goal, says Avaya, “to drive new efficiencies, improve cost-savings and enhance customer experience.” Think alerts to customers on overdrafts or potential fraud, reminders on annual checkups, scheduled doctor appointments and tests using phone, email, and texting.

Convergys, which in July of this year acquired interactive voice response (IVR) vendor Intervoice, also announced in early November the latest version of Intervoice’s IVR platform Voice Portal 6.0 (IVP 6) along with Interaction Composer, its next-generation application creation environment for developing voice self-service applications. IVP 6 can be ordered as of this week, according to Convergys. IVP 6 comes in various packages flavors; you’ll need the Voice-Portal Enterprise Pro solution package to get the application creation environment and the outbound notification capabilities within IVP which includes a gateway that provides the ability to proactively alert customers to updates and issues via outbound calls, email, SMS and fax.

Fax? Really?

Contact Center vendor Interactive Intelligence announced on November 24th the addition of short message service (SMS) texting channel as an additional media type to Customer Interaction Center (CIC), its all-in-one, multichannel contact center suite. The company says mobile customers will be able to use SMS to communicate with the contact center; have those SMS messages routed, recorded, and reported on the same way as other media types. Contact center agents will be able to reply using SMS and customer notifications can be sent via SMS. The product is expected at the end 2008.

There are a lot of applications that make sense and have truly enhanced my customer experience. I absolutely love getting my weekly summary alert on my financial picture – well, except for the last few months – from Mint.com and text alerts from American Express on my weekly balance, or from Bank of America when a large or small deposit hits my account. I did like receiving via text a phone number from information so I didn’t have to pay two bucks to get the number again, but that was before GOOG411. These mobile service applications make my life easier. Mobile devices facilitate the most personal of channels – you take the channel with you; it’s indeed an anywhere channel and, if my experience with my nephew is any indication, it’s thechannel for “the newest generation of customer.” But organizations will need to think through whether sending unsolicited marketing messages about sale items or collection notices via SMS while text charges are incurred by the customer is enhancing customer experience.

Monique Bozeman is a contact center industry expert/analyst, marketing consultant, writer and speaker.  She can be reached at info@moniquebozeman.com [1]

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http://www.fiercevoip.com/story/customer-service-goes-mobile-user-experience-enhanced/2008-12-08

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Impact of Voice Search on Contact Centers

May 12th, 2009 admin No comments
Wednesday March 11,2009 15:12:12
By Eric Barkin - Posted Mar 5, 2009

SAN DIEGO—With the onset of more viable mobile Web services, experts at the Voice Search 2009 conference predict that call center traffic will increase.

Sitting on the panel “How Will Contact Centers Evolve in the Voice Search Era?,” Monique Bozeman, principal analyst at Monique Bozeman Consulting, says the ease with which users can move directly from the mobile Web to a given channel within a call center will drive the numbers.

“Where are voice search queries going to land?” asks Joe Benzel, chief marketing officer at Speech Cycle. “They don’t stop at the cell phone.”

One of the immediately obvious consequences of heavier call volumes is the strain placed on call center resources. Benzel says he’s seeing some firms trying to deal with this by moving to a pay-for-agent model, where callers pay for an interaction with a live agent and shoulder part of the economic burden. He has seen some traction for that model in Europe, but points out that it has some significant drawbacks.

“Pay-for-agent puts a burden on call centers to make sure their tech is good,” he says.

“That trend that they’re paying in Europe is disturbing. I don’t know how many interactions with live agents I’ve ever wanted to pay for,” quips Bozeman, drawing a handful of chuckles from the room.

“In a tough economy, there are call centers that are just trying to answer calls,” she adds.

Bozeman contends that even as technology advances, its implementations are not consistent. She points to a “continuum of sophistication” in call centers. Many are overloaded and comprised of agents lacking the talent or training to handle calls in a smooth way. She maintains that as long as contact centers continue to pay employees around $25,000 per year, they won’t see any real improvement. Annual salaries of $50,000 to $60,000 are needed to draw the right talent.

Bozeman also believes that the infrastructural problems of call centers are artificially keeping call numbers and call duration low. People aren’t calling about all their needs because they are frustrated. She argues that the recognition technology is strong, probably strong enough to handle most call center needs. She places the blame for call center shortcomings on implementations—especially the logical flow of dialogs.

“Forget if recognition is 100 percent,” she says. “When we’ve done analysis on some of the largest firms, you’d be amazed what the business analysts have come up with. Ninety percent of the time the logic was wrong. It had nothing to do with the technology.”

She goes on to cite an example: At an unnamed call center where the points of departure—those points where frustrated callers hung up before completing transactions—were monitored, it was found that 99 percent of the departures took place at the same point in the dialog. When users were asked to give their phone number, they tried repeatedly and failed. Recognition aside, the phone number was unnecessary and played no part in completing the transaction. It wasn’t even needed for verification. Most calls were failing for an entirely unnecessary reason. If design were taken more seriously and streamlined, the argument follows, resources and money could be saved.

Pointing to another way of cutting costs without cutting service, Bentzel asserts that a software-as-service model may be ideal in a number of situations. He admits, however, that there has been significant resistance to adoption.

“The reality is that a shift for customers in payment plans makes them think they must be getting a bad deal,” Bentzel says. “Software-as-a-service model is breaking through that, but plenty of companies that have said, yes, they would be okay with success-based pricing, go back to the traditional because, over time, they think it will cost less.”

A steady drumbeat of calls, however, may force them to reconsider.

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Unified Communications (UC) and its Role in the Contact Center

May 12th, 2009 admin No comments

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Published on FierceVoIP (http://www.fiercevoip.com)
Thursday November 13,2008 17:00:22

By Monique Bozeman

At the risk of alienating those drinking or selling the UC Kool-Aid, here’s a rose-colored glasses-off summary of what I think, have heard and have read about Unified Communications: you can’t define it; it’s not new (hard to define in the early 90s too); the vendor landscape is confusing; it’s hard to prove ROI and customers are not sure about the value; proof points in actual deployments are limited; most organizations have yet to develop best practices and vendors, analysts, consultants and press have jumped on the bandwagon like lemmings promoting and professing expertise.

What I do love about these jello-like monikers/acronyms – think CTI, CRM, VOIP, UC – and market focus shifts around voice and data, is that the contact center is never far away, given its dominant position as the core interaction touch point with customers. Thus the apt question in an industry panel discussion of representatives from Avaya, Nortel, Genesys, Siemens and Cisco at VoiceCon San Francisco 2008: What role will unified communications tools, systems, architectures play in the contact center?

Before I get into a summary of their answers to that question, what do we mean by Unified Communications? The best attempt I can muster is to echo what two stalwart analysts had to say about UC in various tutorials and market overview sessions earlier in the week. Collectively, these analysts, Gary Audin and Allan Sulkin, have over 50 years experience with voice and data, and you can count on them to call a spade such.

“There is no uniform definition of UC, and what is included depends on who wrote the definition,” notes Audin. The many functions include PBX functions and features, IP Telephony, presence and presence management, unified messaging, voice and multimedia conferencing and collaboration. Sulkin, in some random thoughts about UC, points out that UC is a concept, not a technology or single product. He thinks of UC as CTI grown up, meaning telephony systems plus client/servers. And he also skeptically points out that while “the demand for fully-featured UC solutions is moderate, the media continues to hype UC in overdrive mode as if everyone is buying.”

So back to the question of UC as it relates to contact centers. The panelists agree the primary role of UC is to have the contact center more hooked into the rest of the organization and vice versa, by making it easier to collaborate back and forth between agents and non-call center experts. Al Baker, of Siemens Enterprise Communications, says it’s about bringing collaboration into the contact center and the enterprise online. Contact center agents need assistance, but not from just anyone. He says UC brings expertise, brain ware if you will, into the front line contact center. Jim Hickey of Avaya echoed this sentiment saying access to experts anywhere is the fundamental breakthrough that UC offers the contact center. Nicolas de Kouchkovsky of Genesys sees three things enabled by UC in the Contact Center: collaboration, presence to locate the expertise within the organization and the ability to pass interactions back and forth from the contact center to other experts or groups within the organization.

What didn’t get answered for me in this contact-center focused session was a sense of actual penetration of IP in the contact center, which I think is the real precursor to any real traction of UC solutions in the contact center. I’m still on that moniker. What do you think the penetration rate is of IP-enabled formal contact centers?

Monique Bozeman is a contact center industry expert/analyst, marketing consultant, writer and speaker.  She can be reached at  info@moniquebozeman.com

Source URL:
http://www.fiercevoip.com/story/unified-communications-uc-and-its-role-contact-center/2008-11-19
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CONTACT CENTER CORNER: Wading Through the Quagmire That Is Reporting and Analytics

May 12th, 2009 admin Comments off

Wednesday November 12,2008 12:41:32

By Monique Bozeman

Analytics applications are hot, still emerging, mixed in with more mature applications and well, very confusing. Research analysts attempt to categorize, re-categorize and coin market segment terminology, niche vendors strive to extend beyond their core competency and claim functionality they may yet be growing into, and larger suite vendors move to add an analytics piece -all in search of market stature, wallet share and longevity.

In doing my own structural market analysis, I have a compiled a running list of over thirty-five different market segments for reporting and analytics that touch the contact center depending on which definition you use: channels covered, functions performed and analyst’s origins of expertise. Contact Center Performance Management, Customer Experience Analytics, Interaction Analytics, Service Process Integration, Workforce Optimization, Operational Analytics, Web Analytics, Speech Analytics, Multi-Channel Campaign Management … and the list goes on.

I’m not about to attempt to clarify the market structure in a mere 500-word column, in no small part because I myself am still wading through buzz words, market buckets and overlap. Stay tuned. What I will attempt to do is set up a very simplistic view and provide a few key questions you’ll want to ask yourself and prospective vendors.

Lest we forget, at the heart of any analysis is a desire to gain an understanding of the data so that you can take some action to effect change. The goal is to get good data, see it in a visually pleasing report format, analyze it, understand it and act on it so that you can reduce costs and improve your customers’ experience, your operations and ultimately your bottom line.  My educated but unsubstantiated guess, taking into account my own first-hand experience as a consumer, is the majority of companies still don’t know in any truly meaningful way who is contacting them, how often, for what reasons and by what combination of paths.

Here are a few key questions you need to ask yourself and vendor prospects during the evaluation of analytics applications:

Can we get good data and critical mass to support analysis? One of the biggest obstacles to good analysis is getting at good data. Organizations should also understand the requirements and dependencies a software solution may have on the data it’s fed in order to actually make real use of the information.

How basic or sophisticated an application do we really need? Applications run the gamut from very basic to very sophisticated. Do you really need a sledgehammer to crack a walnut? Or do you want to buy a solution you can grow into, such as one that has the ability to do cross-channel analysis whether your focus is marketing campaign effectiveness or customer experience analysis?

When the vendor deployment team leaves, will we really be able to use the application ourselves with the skill set we have, or will we require ongoing vendor or outside consulting resources to make the application sing? Knowledge is power and historically, only a few experts within an organization, residing no doubt deep in the bowels of the company in a windowless office next to Milton in the basement, provide insights. One of the key benefit statements you will find on every other product data sheet you pick up is ease-of- use interfaces and roles-based views and reports— in other words, extending the ability to gain insight across the organization to various user groups.

Do we want a software as service (SaaS), usually pronounced sass, or a premise-based deployment option? Some vendors offer both deployment models but usually lean more heavily towards one or the other or only offer one option. Many emerging analytics applications are trending towards the SaaS model with most web analytics vendors offering a SaaS solution. Any privacy and security concerns need to be addressed, as well as whether IT or business units will be the first line of support.

Do you need really require real-time or near real-time analysis for what you are trying to find out? This criterion is important to ask internally. Often real-time analysis is critical to point to changes you can actually make pretty quickly to affect operational performance. Analysis that will point to changes and recommendations that will take time to implement don’t really require real-time reporting and analysis.

Finally and most importantly, if you find the right analytics application(s) and do the analysis, will you/can you really fix the issues highlighted by the insight? We’ve all worked in organizations where a flurry of activity is mistaken for productivity and effectiveness, where folks would rather move papers around on a desk rather than effect real, but sometimes painful change.  Will your company really make the changes the analysis and insights point to? Believe it or not, many don’t. If not, save your money and go ask Milton where that one analyst in your basement hides.

Monique Bozeman is a contact center industry expert/analyst, marketing consultant, writer and speaker.  She can be reached at info@moniquebozeman.com

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CONTACT CENTER CORNER: Web 2.0 Apps – Better Than Call Center Support?

May 12th, 2009 admin Comments off

Friday October 17,2008 12:16:40

By Monique Bozeman

I’m a marketing person by nature, but I do have a manifest geek gene that pops up from time to time, driving me to late night surfing of sites billed as news for nerds. I guess that accounts for me being among the 3 percent of woman (I’m guessing) who listen to podcasts like Leo Laporte and his roundtable of techies waxing on about the latest technology trends. So emboldened, I try to tackle the odd technical problem such as installing a new sound card (I said I was a marketing person), or troubleshooting whether the issue is with the cable modem, wireless router or my computer LAN port connection. (I had almost forgotten about that nightmare and the finger-pointing responses, but I digress.)

I, like many of you, run into problems, not limited to technical support quests, and find myself calling into my vendor’s call center and initiating a chat session, often simultaneously, to see which channel can solve my problem the fastest. Forget email, unless I’m sending it to another customer I’ve found on a discussion board or forum. That brings me to what I see as the yet untapped, unharnessed and still-gelling customer service potential of a relatively new set of applications. The world of Web 2.0 tools like wiki’s, blogs, forums and online support communities, which usually fall under the umbrella term social media, are online applications that can foster sharing and discussing experiences with people in more efficient ways.

Wikis are just one form of collaborative social media – a type of website where visitors can easily share, edit, manage and expand online the knowledge of many. Wiki is the Hawaiian word for quick; the first wiki was created by American computer programmer Ward Cunningham in 1995, according to Wikipedia, the best know wiki to date. Blogs, short for web logs, are postings usually by a single person on a particular topic with folks commenting with posting organized with the most recent entry first.

Cone LLC, a Boston-based strategy and communications agency engaged in building brand trust, recently conducted a study on business in social media based on the findings of an online survey of just over a thousand American respondents completed in September of this yea. Survey participants were over the age of 18 and almost equally split among men and women.

Sixty percent of those surveyed say they use social media, and, of those who do, 93 percent believe a company should have a presence in social media, and 85 percent believe a company should not only be present but interactive with its consumers via social media, according to Cone’s results. Those responsible for customer service channel strategy should zero in on  the fact that 43 percent of the social network users surveyed think companies should use social networks to solve their problems, and 56 percent reported they “feel both a stronger connection with and better served by companies when they can interact with them in a social media environment.”

Two core operational pains for call centers, high agent turnover and a shortage of well-trained agents, could start formally using social media applications as another customer service channel by leveraging customers as experts. There are well documented hurdles to establishing more formal, monitored and measured Web 2.0 applications, especially IT department and employee resistance and the lack of formal managing and monitoring or measuring. A recent report by Forrester Research says one in five firms have not measured the value of Web 2.0 deployments. However, as the Cone survey indicates, social media applications are being used today by customers. And to use Clay Shirky’s analysis from Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations, “The invention of tools that facilitate group formation is less like ordinary technological change and more like an event, something that has already happened.”

I wouldn’t turn over customer service entirely to the natives, as some start-ups promoting social media customer service software solutions enthusiastically advocate, but customer knowledge and input can and should be harnessed with social media.

Viewing these Web 2.0 applications as mere consumer technologies is an underestimation by organizations. These forums, blogs and wikis can be great customer self-service assets for both customers and organizations, and they can form important feedback loops into the rest of the organization through product management, marketing and engineering.

Savvy companies will see the value sooner rather than later to both their service organization and customer base in promoting, managing and most importantly mining these social networking tools as yet another interaction channel to get and give useful information. Who knows? Customers may indeed provide better, faster, and more accurate answers that we are getting with live agent support.

Please visit Monique’s website at www.moniquebozeman.com or send comments on social media as the next customer service channel to info@moniquebozeman.com

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