The Contact Center Blog

Finding and Fostering Contact Center Agent Stars

With sales plateauing and margins shrinking, online retailers must optimize the use of their contact center, whether in-house or outsourced. One way to do this is to make sure that your agent staff is the best it can be.  At the Internet Retailer Conference and Exhibition in Boson this past June, Greg Fettes from 24-7 INtouch and client Leslie Agerland from ShopNBC.com discussed how to select, identify, and motivate agent stars to ensure program goals are being met. Here are some of the main tips from their presentation that are somewhat simple in nature, and yet sometimes the first to be overlooked.

Establish a Culture of Excellence - Expect excellence throughout your organization. Lay out clear goals and tie them into your overall contact center culture. Empower your employees to add value at all levels, and accountability will come naturally.

Communicate & Share Information - Communicate what is happening within your company.  Communicate program goals and where each person is doing well or needs improvement. Allow for networking to build a close culture.

Be Flexible - Contact centers have a bad reputation for being rigid in scheduling. Flexibility will result in higher retention and increased productivity in the long run.

Recognize. Recognize. Recognize - Everyone likes a pat on the back for a job well done. This is especially true for the typical younger demographic that works in the contact center. Remember to be creative – it’s not only about money! Have other incentives and perks that tie into your program goals.

Use Mentors to Build Teams - Your own employees are usually the best knowledge experts to help develop lower performing agents. Foster a mentorship atmosphere to develop tomorrow’s leaders and maintain your culture of excellence.

Don’t Forget to Have Fun - Improve morale by providing recreational facilities and break areas where employees at all levels of the company can socialize.  Invite top-performing agents to company functions such as awards dinners and by reward them with perks.

Incorporate these tips into your recognition and reward strategy. The value-added ROI will be a more motivated workforce, enhanced brand, empowered agent group and higher retention of your top subject matter experts.

Happy 4th of July!

To those celebrating this weekend, happy 4th of July!

Happy Canada Day!

Is it Possible To Reduce The Cost of Customer Service and Enhance The Consumer Experience?

Is there really a way to "Do More With Less" and increase customer satisfaction?  This is a popular theme within all business verticals in today's economic climate.

We have all experienced the frustrating scenario as a consumer where we seek information for products and services on-line, do not find the answer we need and then call a contact center agent only to be "transferred" and have to repeat the same set of questions with a new customer service channel to find the answer we are looking for. 

This leads to a negative experience, reduced satisfaction and higher cost for the company that is providing the customer service. 

By now we are all familiar with the options to enable multi-channel customer service via email, voice (live agents), live web chat  and self service via on-line search tools or IVR options; but how many companies provide consumers with consistency across all these channels? 

The key to increasing CSAT and reducing service cost is to enable a seamless escalation path across all channels and enable multiple communication channels for consumers to find the answer they are looking for.

How is this accomplished?  First it is important to understand where your consumers typically begin the process of searching for information when making a buying decision or customer service inquiry.

Let's take the example of a traditional company web site.  A typical consumer will start their search for information on the web.  By providing easy to use self service options on-line  the company is able to take the first step in handling the majority of questions via basic FAQ's or key word searches, this is also the most cost effective way to handle these contacts and reduce calls into the contact center. 

But what happens when the consumer does not find the information there are looking for?  Unfortunately for many businesses the consumer is then forced to call into the contact center which results in a higher cost to handle the contact with live agents and results in lost opportunity for those consumers that abandon because they do not want to call for help.

The most overlooked avenue to bridge the communication gap, provide your consumer with increased choice and reduce site abandonment is live web chat.  By providing consumers with the ability escalate from self service to chat companies are able to handle a larger portion of consumer contacts in a cost effective manner and further deflect costly phone calls into the contact center.

In addition, enabling this channel allows companies to collect valuable information on the web site by evaluating chat transcripts to make self service and web site enhancements that increase overall satisfaction and further reduce costly phone calls.

While there are some consumers that would prefer to call the contact center directly, a growing majority prefer to get answers while on the web, providing all three communication channels allows businesses to provide choice to the consumer for how they would prefer to interact with your business.

So what are the keys to a successful multi-channel strategy for your customer service? Aside from providing multiple communication channels that include web self service, live web chat and phone support the most overlooked component is consistent content across all these channels. 

Too often the information at the finger tips of the contact center agent is inconsistent with the content on the website, creating confusion for the consumer.  Consolidating content and answers to questions that is consistent across all channels ensures brand consistency, lower cost and increased customer satisfaction.

This is only part of the customer service optimization process. By tracking the questions that you do not have prepared answers for when customers escalate to a live web chat or a voice agent creates an immediate feedback loop where on-line self service tools can be enhanced to provide more useful and relevant information for your consumers. 

The reason most consumers escalate to an agent is because they did not find the answer they were looking for via self service. 

Thus, the key to reducing the cost of providing customer service and increasing CSAT for your consumers is to utilize the data collected at the agent level and then feed the missing content back into the self service or live web chat response library.  This creates an ongoing commitment to brand consistency, a more satisfied consumer and most importantly reduced cost to provide the service.

Google Mobile AdSense

Ads and promotions are coming - will this cause an increase in traffic or customer service? Time will tell. Applications for mobile devices keep flowing. As Apple keeps reminding us, what ever we can imagine "there's an ap for that". Traffic and downloads in the mobile world are increasing, meaning more opportunity for advertising views - just not sure if they'll translate the same way as they do on a webpage.

Read more about Google’s Mobile AdSense For iPhone and Android Apps Now In Public Beta in this Tech Crunch article.

Save Energy While Searching Online

One small change can make a difference, if enough people take the time to do it. This is the concept around Blackle, the energy saving search engine, powered by Google custom search. Created by Heap Media, the goal of the site is to have enough people switch from a white to black search page, taking small steps to save energy in our everyday lives.

As Blackle states, "In January 2007 a blog post titled Black Google Would Save 750 Megawatt-hours a Year proposed the theory that a black version of the Google search engine would save a fair bit of energy due to the popularity of the search engine. Since then there has been skepticism about the significance of the energy savings that can be achieved and the cost in terms of readability of black web pages. We <Heap Media> believe that there is value in the concept because even if the energy savings are small, they all add up. Secondly we feel that seeing Blackle every time we load our web browser reminds us that we need to keep taking small steps to save energy."

This is a great concept, and allows everyone to make a small change that can have a great effect. I have converted this to my home page and do not find any issues with readability.

To make Blackle your home page visit - http://www.blackle.com/set-home-page/.

Cross-Channel Strategies

Do you have a cross-channel strategy? A true strategy? An article in the E-Commerce times article talks about how multichannel is the path out of recession. A good point it raises relates to cross-channel strategies and how it can increase sales conversions.

Many talk about the importance of having a multichannel approach to customer service, but to expand and benefit from this, you need to utilize them accordingly. It's not just about answering phone calls, emails, etc. How can you use a channel to make the overall customer experience as satisfying as possible?

For example, lets say a customer is shopping for a product online. She has a few quick questions before deciding to purchase - and has them answered through self-service modules on the website. Now that she decided to buy, she prefers to place the order on the phone as opposed to online - where a phone representative will easily fulfill the request.

Two benefits here: 1) The customer gets what she wants through the channels/means she's most comfortable with, and 2) from a service perspective, the handle time of the phone call is decreased and other calls are potentially deflected.

I know this was a very general example - but think about how many other scenarios there are. How can we leveragee a cross-channel approach and how do we optimize it? 

"Cloud" Telephony

I recently came across The IVR Blog by Angel.com, and was drawn to an entry refering to the term "Cloud Telephony". David points out"cloud" meaning, imagery and term being used more frequently. I personally haven't heard the term as much or don't recall seeing many incorporate it into certain imagery (Maybe I have, but just don't notice it). I probably see it more in diagrams and presentations.

Though I'm not familiar with it, I like the concept and agree with David's definition of it:

The notion that cloud represents is, to boil it down as I see it, the ability to access any solution you want, from any where you want, at any time you want — not being tied to hardware or installed software somewhere — and the ability to easily intermingle different types of solutions so everything works in conjunction.

He also points out the increased use of this in the telephony space. I think this holds true with not only this space, but in all spaces as well. To me, products or services of any kind need to have theflexibility to be adaptable and "do it all" with convenience. It reflect today's ssociety demands of wanting and needing things on demand, whatever it may be.

When speaking about "clouds" I immediately think of social media and technology. Think about devices, programs, and applications that are designed to connect together - they all fit somewhere within this theoretical "cloud".

Mobile Live Chat?

We're already used to seeing this - business workers, teenagers, and college students alike fiddling away with their mobile phones checking emails, playing games, text messaging, or just acting like they're busy! I see this everywhere too, on the the streets, public transit, airports, malls, etc. I'm guilty of most of these things.

Earlier this week, I saw the release of the new iPhone 3GS. There are so many applications the phone already has on top of some of the new features. You can do anything and practically everything on it. For Blackberry users, they can "pin" each other for free. These smart phones save people time, and almost become a remote for everything they need.

In North America, we're finally starting to see some of these 3G/4G technologies in action. Social media applications are compatible with mobiles. As we move closer to this being the norm, is it a far stretch to see a successful Live Chat application or gateway users can access on their phones? People already try to maximize their time while traveling, being able to communicate with stores, banks, companies, etc. on the go would definitely make things more convenient. At the same time, you do it without disturbing those around you.

I personally can see it easily. Next time you're on a train, airplane or even mall - look around and see how many people are casually fumbling around with their mobiles. Despite this, the obvious obstacle will always be consumer adoption. Theoretically though, it makes sense. Maybe a new feature for the next iPhone - you never know. 

Web 2.0 becomes 1,000,000th word in the English Dictionary

"Web 2.0" was announced yesterday as the millionth word in the English Dictionary, beating out Hinglish term "Jai Ho" and "Slumdog" from the popular oscar award winning Slumdog Millionaire movie.

Ironically, this comes at a time when actually using the word Web 2.0 has been common for some time. Mashable.com notes the trend in Google for the word began back in 2005 and now with social media descriptions becoming more the trend, Web 2.0 is a rare term.

What are your thoughts? What terms do you use to describe Web 2.0?