Tag Archives: agent effeciency

Agent Efficiency, Analytics, Cloud, Customer Engagement, Omnichannel Desktop

5 Pillars of Success for the Modern Contact Center

As we’ve come to know that understanding our customers and meeting their needs is one of the key building blocks for this new decade, it has also become one of the most competitive areas in business. Two-thirds of businesses surveyed report that they compete mainly on customer experience.

The global call center market is predicted to grow to $481 billion by 2024, propelled by the need for businesses to deliver customer-focused services.

We also know that tech changes fast. With ever-growing competition, staying one step ahead of competitors can be difficult. Companies that want to stay competitive are evolving to better equip their support teams and improve service for their customers.

It can be a little overwhelming for companies that are launching tech or trying to update the tech they already have. It is difficult to know where to start.

The 5 Pillars of the Modern Contact Center

To help organizations understand where to start, we defined the 5 pillars a modern contact center should have to deliver the type of experience customers want.

1. Omnichannel Capabilities that Makes Customer Service Seamless

Today’s customers communicate across channels and platforms. Being able to facilitate conversations across channels is no longer an option. Also, it’s not enough to be able to connect with customers on these channels, you need to have a unified customer engagement solution.

Here’s why: Google research shows that more than 90% of people in the U.S. switch between devices every day. Customers may start a conversation on social media, move to text, and then switch to live chat. Being able to seamlessly follow the conversation as customers switch between channels is crucial.

Phone support, email support, social media all need to work cohesively into a comprehensive customer experience that empowers employees to be more effective and allows self-service capabilities so your customers can quickly find answers to their questions.

For companies with legacy systems, they may face a variety of roadblocks that prevent this seamless interaction from taking place:

  • Siloed infrastructure
  • Lack of (or broken) processes for handling the entire customer journey
  • Inability to easily hand-off queries from one agent (or department) to another
  • Inability to forecast volume across channels or departments
  • Stumbling blocks with hardware or software talking to each other

You need an omnichannel solution that allows for an integrated solution to get past these roadblocks.

2. On-Demand Self-Service Model for Customers

One of the best things you can do for your customers and your support team is to beef up your self-service tools. When customers are seeking information, they want answers and they want them quickly. Providing a self-service option for queries gets them the info they need fast while taking the burden off your support teams.

Some common self-service options include:

Chatbots

AI-fueled Chatbots can do much more than just answer routine questions. Advances in Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Machine Learning (ML) have moved interactions from pre-programmed commands to more human-like conversations. Contact centers are using Chatbots to provide instant answers to common questions, direct queries to the right agents, and reduce call volume.

Customer-Facing Knowledge Base

Whether it’s an FAQ, an in-depth library of How-Tos, or video tutorials, customers are more interested in getting answers than talking to a person.

Callback Request

For your customers, it’s all about speed and ease-of-use. The modern contact center allows customers to request callbacks rather than sit on hold while waiting for available agents.

24/7 Access

All of these items above allow for 24/7 access by customers. Investing in this technology and resources provides a better customer experience.

3. Advanced Tools for Agents to Provide Better Support

For most companies, a major concern in providing exceptional customer support are agent burnout and turnover. Dealing with difficult customers and having to handle the same routine inquiry over and over will wear down even the best teams.

Anything you can do to relieve these burdens will improve the environment for your team. The right software and infrastructure can lessen the burden and lead to significant improvements in productivity.

The modern customer contact center employs advanced tools, including:

  • Cloud-based CX solutions for seamless integration across departments and support channels (which helps remove silos between teams)
  • Single screen dashboards focused on relevant customer information provide a full view of customer history and any prior interactions regardless of the support channel
  • A seamless customer experience from start to finish across channels, hand-offs, and escalations
  • Automation technology to reduce or eliminate repetitive tasks
  • Support tools to manage, monitor, and coach support teams

4. AI & Predictive Analytics

Artificial Intelligence is enabling significant changes in the way modern contact centers operate. In addition to driving Chatbot interactions, AI is infused in all parts of the contact center. Large amounts of data can be processed to detect patterns while Predictive Analytics can guide agents and surface support materials before they are needed.

Seamless cloud integration allows AI to have access to data across systems for improved reporting and analytics. An AI-integrated system can accurately make customer predictions for more efficient workforce forecasting and scheduling, as well as how to guide agents through interactions with customers. It allows for a more tailored approach for support teams.

This leads to enhanced employee performance, a better customer experience, and improved operational cost control.

5. Scalable Infrastructure

When volume increases or operations grow, it’s important to be able to move quickly to scale. Cloud infrastructure allows for the rapid scaling of solutions across growing teams, departments, and locations.

As customer behavior and technology changes, a cloud infrastructure allows you to adapt to quickly and maintain your business agility. Legacy systems may require a significant overhaul across multiple teams, departments, and locations, which can be slow and costly. A cloud solution lets you leverage existing technology and integrate emerging technology based on your needs.

It also provides multiple points of access for employees regardless of location. Work can be handled in-house or remotely. Cloud infrastructure and automated routing can direct customer contacts to the right agent at your location or to specialists working anywhere.

Employing the 5 Pillars of the Modern Contact Center

Employing these 5 pillars of the modern contact center will provide long-lasting benefits including:

  1. Reduced operational costs
  2. Streamlined processes
  3. Improved employee performance and satisfaction
  4. Improve customers satisfaction and CSAT scores
  5. Faster contact resolution

By empowering your employees and your customers, the modern contact center simply provides for more efficient operations. These areas of opportunity translate to a better customer experience, higher retention rates, and more loyal customers.

Aria Solutions Can Help

Over the past 22 years we have empowered 550,000 agents and completed over 1,200 successful projects, collaborating with our customers to help them achieve their business goals and find better ways to serve their customers. Our customers don’t just see us as contact center experts or vendors. They see us as a part of their internal team responsible for building strategies and direction, recommending technology and providing direction on how the solution should be implemented.

If you are looking to replace, update, or improve your customer contact center, Contact Aria Solutions today for help. We can help you achieve your business and customer service goals.

Agent Efficiency, Customer Engagement

How to Enable Customer Service Agents in the Omnichannel Era

Change is the only constant in the contact center. It’s a landscape in constant flux. Interactions once conducted on traditional channels like voice, email and standard IVR are moving to more manageable, lower-cost alternatives like chatbots, VPA (Alexa) and WhatsApp.

But with rapid technological advancement, the pace of change is accelerating.

It’s predicted by Gartner that organizations will have to address no fewer than 12 emerging and immature channels by 2022 compared to typically three or four today.

Managing multiple channels is already a top contact center challenge — so how can organizations enable their agents to move easily from one channel to another when there are eight or twelve instead of two or three? 

Perhaps the more important, broader question this: 

Has your organization prepared your agents for the new normal of customer service work, when bots and AI have siphoned off the easiest interactions and left agents handling only the most complex?

More channels means agents will need more help, and if your methodology is poorly thought out, the benefits of newly implemented technology will always be offset by the cost of unintended consequences. 

To help your organization better enable customer service agents, I wanted to share two recent webinars I led with Contact Center Network Group (CCNG). Both will help you future-proof your processes and arm your agents with the right tools to provide great customer engagements even as the nature of customer service work changes. 

Enabling Your Agents in the Age of the Customer

In this webinar you will learn how to:

  • Match the customer to the right agent
  • Centralize data and reduce the overwhelming number of screens
  • Automate mundane, repeatable tasks

                        Listen to the webinar

 

Helping Your Agents Manage the Expansion of Customer Channels

In this webinar you will learn how to:

  • Help agents deal with multiple channels
  • Ensure seamless transition from failed bot to agent 
  • Overcome silos                     

                        Listen to the webinar

 

About Aria Solutions

Aria Solutions is a customer engagement center solutions company that helps some of the world’s biggest organizations achieve unified customer engagement centers free of silos.

Over the past 22 years we have empowered 550,000 agents and completed over 1,200 successful projects, collaborating with our customers to help them achieve their business goals and find better ways to serve their customers.

Visit our about page to learn more about Aria Solutions or contact us today if you’d like guidance on how your organization can overcome your contact center challenges.

Thanks for reading!

Customer Experience, System Integration

4 Common Contact Center Challenges and How to Solve Them

In previous years, the contact center was seen as an operational necessity, an important but non-strategic wing of an organization. That has changed.

Customer experience (CX) is now understood to be among the most powerful differentiators for businesses today. Contact centers, and the technologies enabling them, now feature prominently in strategic decision making.

Many organizations know their current system for engaging with customers could be improved, but with new technologies, new vendors and new jargon seeming to appear every day, it’s difficult to determine the best place to start.

This blog will introduce four common contact center challenges you may be facing and show how four organizations overcame them.

Siloed Technologies

Silos are one of the great challenges facing contact centers today. A “silo” refers to a technology that is disconnected from the others.

Different departments acquire technology (billing system, dispatch system, WFM, etc.) based vendor strength, but they are not tied together, which hinders the ability to create smooth transitions between departments to support an end-to-end process. Data becomes siloed as the customer view is carved up between these systems. There is no master customer “system of record.”

The impact on the enterprise? Agents are forced to play the role of integrator, using multiple screens and numerous applications to resolve customer requests. Customer metrics sink due to the complexity of support. Agent turnover increases. Management lacks actionable insights into contact center events and trends. Maintenance costs rise, and rise, over time.

If technology silos are hurting your CX, the need for change is clear. The best course forward may not be.

Technology silos and process silos — you can have one, but you usually have both. Technology silos often lead to process silos.

See how SMART Technologies successfully overcame siloed systems and achieved a flawless customer experience without impacting their day-to-day operations.

Inflexible Infrastructure

Another common challenge facing contact centers is the use of inflexible, on-premise systems. Often requiring continual hardware upgrades and “quick fixes” to remain functional, these systems are the underlying cause of many of the silos mentioned above.

They also cause a heavy drain on the IT department’s resources, as more time is spent managing complexity than thinking strategically about where technology can create an advantage.

Many organizations dealing with inflexible infrastructure understand the benefits of migrating to a modern cloud contact center: minimum required investment to deploy, maintain and support; ease of managing multichannel communications; improved employee performance and CX; and the ability to adapt to changing business needs.

But there’s a natural resistance to change that stems from the fear of disrupting day-to-day operations.

See how a medical technology company with strict parameters seamlessly transitioned from an an end-of-life system to Salesforce to reduce maintenance and support costs, achieve unprecedented agent visibility and experience a 5X increase in order processing.

Introducing & Managing Multiple Channels

Customers demand more connected experiences than ever before. They expect to be able to communicate with you digitally, and expect you to provide a consistent journey across all touchpoints, whether they’re engaging in a web chat, texting or speaking to a representative by phone.

Many contact centers avoid adding digital channels because their legacy infrastructure won’t support it, and they don’t want to add new siloes to an already complex system. Others add digital channels, but struggle to integrate their data into the agent desktop so agents lack context and information on prior interactions.

Another difficulty related to managing multiple channels is integrating it properly with WFM systems, which makes it difficult to effectively forecast, plan and schedule agents across channels.

The end result of all these challenges — whether it’s a lack of channels or channels being poorly stitched together — is that you run the risk of customers churning to competitors that offer more consistent and personalized experiences.

See how a publicly traded financial services company with limited customer care channels and disconnected legacy technology turned their customer experience into an asset by introducing digital channels, modernizing their systems and optimizing the agent desktop.

Lack of Contact Center Visibility

Another harmful side effect of complex, siloed contact centers is that they hinder an organization’s ability to spot and resolve problems. Delivering consistent CX is a challenge; it’s near impossible if you can’t identify areas that need improvement.

Lacking a modern infrastructure, many organizations necessarily turn to the IT department to identify and fix problems with agents or operations, as they are the only ones with the technical know-how to navigate the system and manually analyze the log files. But dedicating IT resources to solve non-IT issues isn’t a sustainable solution.

See how a Fortune 500 transportation logistics company with the challenges above leveraged an operational analytics application to sift through massive amounts of data in minutes to identify and resolve issues, improve agent performance and achieve unprecedented visibility into their contact center operations.

About Aria Solutions

Aria Solutions is a customer engagement center solutions company that helps some of the world’s biggest organizations achieve unified customer engagement centers free of silos.

Over the past 22 years we have empowered 550,000 agents and completed over 1,200 successful projects, collaborating with our customers to help them achieve their business goals and find better ways to serve their customers.

Visit our about page to learn more about Aria Solutions or contact us today if you’d like guidance on how your organization can overcome your contact center challenges.

Thanks for reading!

Agent Efficiency, Customer Engagement

10 Ways to Fix Your Agent Turnover Rate

Unless you have an awesome employee experience program in place, your contact center probably experiences high agent turnover – a real issue affecting most contact centers.  

[easy-tweet tweet=”In fact, increases in agent turnover have been shown to reduce workforce productivity by 40% and your organization’s financial performance by 26%” usehashtags=”no” template=”light”]

Not only are your productivity levels and financials being damaged, but your recruiting and training costs will only continue to rise.  

Why is agent turnover often high?

There are many reasons why agent turnover is probably higher than you like. Believe it or not, most of these reasons are in the control of customer service and operations management. 

From talking to some of our customers and learning about various contact center environments, we see these as top reasons why so many customer service reps don’t want to stick around and quit: 

  • Monotonous, repetitive tasks  
  • Frustrations with the agent technology and tools
  • Stress dealing with customers
  • Mismatch of tasks and skills
  • Lack of career advancement and training
  • Strict work environment 

That’s not the whole picture, but enough for employees to be less engaged, enthusiastic, and committed to their job.  

Interestingly, I came across a report called “The Worldwide Employee Engagement Crisis” which states that employee engagement levels in the US haven’t improved in the past 17 years. And in fact, only 32% of employees are engaged in their job.  

This is about employee engagement across all types of jobs. But it gets so much worse when we discuss the engagement levels of contact center employees. 

If your business objectives are to improve customer experiences through better customer engagements and to reduce operation costs, directors and managers of customer service and contact center operations should invest in ways to improve employee experiences: 

1. Set job expectations & motivate your agents right from the get-go

During the hiring process, make sure that the job descriptions are comprehensive enough that there are no surprises when your agents arrive for their first day of work.  

A day-in-the-life outline of everything that may happen is a helpful way to show agents that their job is so much more than simply responding to customers via phone, email, chat, etc. Now, this might sound fluffy, but explaining to new agents the importance of their job is crucial.

Your agents not only represent your brand, but they are hubs of valuable information about customers that can benefit many business areas, including marketing, customer insights, and sales. The more your employees feel that they can help a customer and the business overall, the more important they will feel within their roles. 

Takeaways:

  • Comprehensive job descriptions
  • Day-in-the-life outline
  • Customer service employee roles are beneficial to many business units

2. Match the right customer to the right agent

When agents feel like they can be valuable to customers and can handle customer calls, their satisfaction skyrockets.  

If your agents are being connected to customers who have questions or issues out of their realm, they can feel stressed and helpless.  

Don’t forget that as you update your routing, whether you focus on efficiency or improving customer experiences, you will improve the agent’s experience too.  

When customers feel they’ve been sent to the right agent the first time, through intelligent routing, and that person can help them without being handed off to someone else, they will have a more positive experience and are more likely to be pleasant for the agent to deal with. 

Generally, customers are willing to wait a little longer to reach the right person, but only a little. Today the expectation is that the person I reach should be able to handle my request. Transferring customer calls can be seen as a strike against a company, although it still happens often. 

The general challenge with routing is collecting enough information about the customer and any context/personalization. For example, the customer may have indicated in an Interactive Voice Response (IVR) or online chat that they want to talk about their bill. That’s a broad category, which could include resending a bill, questions about an item on their bill, paying their bill, negotiating a payment plan for their bill, or more. The agent needs to be skilled in all those actions to be successful.  

So, the key point is not about the routing rules themselves, but to have broad categories that match a list of actions that agents are trained for. If there are gaps (e.g. agent can’t setup a payment plan), then reaching the “right agent” starts to break down. 

Takeaways:

  • Make sure your customer is routed to an agent who has the right data to solve the problem
  • Create broad categories and train the agent to solve all queries in that category 

3. Centralize data & reduce the overwhelming number of screens  

Having agents waste time searching for customer information over a variety of systems and screens is extremely unproductive.  

A maze of legacy systems makes the process of handling customer requests quite painful. To respond to customer inquiries the average agent spends 15% of their time searching for the information across these disparate systems:  

  • CRM systems
  • Billing systems
  • Payment systems
  • Fulfillment systems
  • Knowledge-Base
  • Dispatch systems

All the frustration from trying to navigate all these systems efficiently leads to agent turnover. This converts to dozens if not hundreds of clicks to handle one customer interaction (Focus On Employees’ Daily Journeys To Improve Employee Experience, Forrester Research, Inc., April 20, 2018).

[easy-tweet tweet=”The Australian Post’s CX team observed employees change a customer’s address and only then discovered that the process took a shocking 160 clicks to complete.” usehashtags=”no” template=”light”]

This is obviously inefficient. Optimizing and fully integrating agent desktop and softphone technology in your contact center is critical.  

Giving agents easy-to-use, unified technology helps them be more effective and efficient, which then improves their morale and employee experience. Implementing a unified agent desktop solution brings together all your information and data from every-day multiple systems into one view or screen. This can give agents a complete picture of the customer and makes navigation between different applications unnecessary. 

Takeaways:

  • Consolidate systems to make it easier for agents to find data
  • Invest in easy-to-use agent technology

4. Automate mundane, repeatable tasks

High levels of monotony lead to high levels of attrition. It’s as simple as that. That’s why the most powerful driver of loyalty to the organization is empowerment. Therefore, it makes sense that some companies are starting to use automation to free workers to take on more fulfilling work.  

Artificial intelligence (AI) and machines can handle more and more of the routine business processes, increasing efficiency and speeding up resolution times.  

By reducing routine calls, data entry, report preparation, transaction details, system navigation, logs, and documentation, agents can focus on tasks that deliver personalized experiences for customers (AI is Ready for Employees, Not Just Customers, Forrester Research Inc., March 27, 2018). 

How many of you say a top priority in your contact center is to digitalize it? Well, the same report states that 55% of technology decision-makers are in the same boat as you. But there seems to be a gap in who wants this change and how many are doing it. The truth is only 32% are doing something about it. 

Personally, I’d make this a top priority if you want to free up your agents’ time and make customer experiences better.  

Takeaways: 

  • AI can do repetitive tasks faster and with more accuracy than agents
  • Automate tasks and processes to give agents the freedom to work on meaningful issues

5. Empower agents to collaborate to get the job done

I think it’s impossible to expect each individual agent to have all the answers to resolve customer issues.  

There’s nothing wrong with your agents collaborating with one another to provide the most helpful information to your customer. This can be enabled with technologies such as Skype for Business, Slack, Hipchat from Atlassian, or any number of communication tools. 

Invest in platforms that focus on simplifying and integrating the work environment, by bringing together processes, tasks, work management, and social collaboration seamlessly. 

Takeaways: 

  • Empower agents with collaboration tools to solve problems
  • Help create a sense of camaraderie and fulfillment

6. Provide more work-life balance and flexibility

Let’s be honest here – how many of you give your employees the flexibility to plan and create their own shifts for a better work-life balance?  

Just like you, your agents have families, obligations, and lives outside of their headset.  

Giving them the freedom to pick and choose their schedules, having small breaks throughout the day, or the ability to work from home will be a game-changer for their productivity and their stress levels. Sometimes, we can forget how stressful this job can be while we’re sitting in the back office.  

By giving this freedom to employees, you’re showing that you trust them, which helps drive long-term agent productivity and job satisfaction, both of which reduce agent turnover.

Dealing with agent turnover in the contact center

Takeaways: 

  • Trust begets trust; give agents flexibility to live their life 

7. Mentor your agents and provide opportunities for growth

If you saw no long-term vision for yourself at a company, would you leave? Of course, you would. The same goes for your customer service agents.

Helping them on the road to a strong career path will increase their job handling abilities, knowledge and overall satisfaction with their job. This, of course, does not come without any effort on your end. Create all-inclusive training guides or programs and spend time with your agents to understand what their goals, motivations, dreams, and ambitions are within their role.

It goes without saying: agents who feel valued and cared for by their employer are less likely to leave than those who feel like they are invisible.

Don’t just give your agents the tools to do their current job; have open conversations with them about where they see themselves going within the company, offer advice on what it takes to move up, and provide opportunities to advance within their role in the contact center.

Takeaways:

  • Create career pathways so your agents see this as their career, not just a job
  • Buddy new agents with successful agents who can act as mentors

8. Value your employees instead of cracking the whip

Worse is when contact center managers are not only lacking in mentorship and helping agents be successful, but also creating a workplace culture of fear. Unfortunately, from what I’ve seen and experienced, it’s not uncommon.

If you really want your team to perform effectively, it’s true that it starts from the top. It’s up to management to establish a safe environment with open communication where employees feel valued.

Employees who feel they are valued will, in turn, make decisions that positively impact the company and the customers. If you are attempting to motivate your agents with discipline, it likely has opposite the intended effect, and agents will withdraw from their role.

Takeaways:

  • Your staff are adults; respect and treat them as such
  • Your job is to provide support, not discipline

9. Recognize and reward your high-performing agents

It seems intuitive that your agents would want to be recognized, but it is far less common in contact centers than you would think.

The Cicero Group recently asked people all over the world about how their current employer could help them improve their performance. The common thread across their answers was clear: “recognize me!” (The Employee Experience Imperative, Forrester Research, Inc., December, 15 2017).

There is nothing new here. As part of any employee experience, recognition is a requirement.

The ways that you recognize your agents do not have to be extravagant. For example, “Hey David! Great job last month. Your new Ferrari is waiting out front!”.  That would be great, but you can recognize your contact center agents in a much more simplistic (and more affordable) way through:

  • Top achiever awards
  • Experiences, like tickets to a sporting event or concert
  • Lunches outside the office with top-performing individuals or teams
  • Simple conversations with employees to say thank you

In general, stay away from numbers-based awards. This sounds strange, but they tend to impact the quality of call resolution because agents rush through calls to hit targets and not effectively resolve inquiries.

Seek feedback from your employees as well about how they would like to be recognized.

Again, listening to your agents is a sure-fire way to increase engagement and job satisfaction, both help reduce agent turnover.

Takeaways:

  • Recognize good work and reward staff accordingly
  • Making agents feel appreciated makes them more likely to stay

10. Ask your agents directly about their work experiences

It’s impossible to guess what agents are struggling with unless you are on the floor with them. Sometimes, the best way to understand how to improve employee experience and help them succeed is simply ask them directly or through an anonymous survey. Your agents are more likely to be honest about their experiences when it is not face-to-face.

Let’s look at this scenario: One of your agents is having a tough time resolving customer calls because their computer equipment is out-of-date, and their software is running slowly and inefficiently. The survey would identify this, and your team can look into systems that are more modern.

Improving the work environment and engaging your workforce is a continuous process, not just a one-time thing. And doing this will increase overall employee satisfaction.

Another example is finding out that sitting for long hours is hard, or the headset the agent is using is not comfortable enough. You can easily fix this by untethering agents from their desks with wireless headsets that are more comfortable. Headsets generally support productivity, so you should always consider comfort when investing in new audio devices, specifically investing in a headset that has been designed for all-day use. For an idea, here is one of the top-scoring headsets for agents.

Takeaways:

  • Talk to your staff, get feedback, and implement the changes you can to improve their work environment and job experiences

To summarize, here are 10 ways to fix your contact center agent turnover rate and improve their work experience:

  1.  Set job expectations & motivate your agents right from the get-go
  2. Match the right customer to the right agent
  3. Centralize data & reduce the overwhelming number of screens
  4. Automate mundane, repeatable tasks
  5. Empower agents to collaborate to get the job done
  6. Provide more work-life balance and flexibility
  7. Mentor your agents and provide opportunities for growth
  8. Value your employees instead of cracking the whip
  9. Recognize and reward your high-performing agents
  10. Ask your agents directly about their work experiences

I hope I’ve been able to shed some light on the practices that you can begin to implement in your own contact centers to reduce agent turnover. I know these may seem like a lot to take in all at once, but start small and work your way up. Your agents (and your customers!) will thank you for it.

 

Analytics, Customer Experience

Stop Poor CX! A New Way of Analyzing Operational Issues on PureEngage

It’s common for issues to pop up during day-to-day contact center operations and with a lot of customer interaction and agent activity within your PureEngage platform, many of those issues may be hard to find.

Contact centers continuously monitor metrics to:

  • Analyze data that affects customer experience (CX)
  • Ensure that performance goals are met
  • Catch issues

The tools they use often only show summarized data and don’t help much when the “devil is in the details”. When issues fall within what those tools look for and capture, they are easy to spot and solving them is usually straightforward. For example, if the call volume is unexpectedly high, the contact center will make more agent time available (e.g. bringing on more agents or canceling off-queue time).

However, for issues lurking beneath the surface, evidence may show up in the CX metrics, but standard tools don’t offer an easy way to pinpoint the detailed contact center activities behind the issue. Worse still, is that there are likely activities causing issues that companies don’t even know about.

For example, there could be agent behavioral issues occurring, such as this issue (happened to one of our clients), where some agents were placing customers on hold immediately after greeting them and increasing customer frustration. While this issue was caught by accident (by the VP of Customer Service’s office assistant!), the contact center didn’t have the tools to know who was doing this, how long it had been happening, nor how widespread this hidden issue was.

These more complex issues take time to identify and figure out, causing a lot of time to pass before a resolution is found and put in place. For contact center directors and customer experience executives, this means that their key customer experience metrics (like NPS and CSAT) are affected.

Wouldn’t it be great if contact centers could find those hidden and complex issues much faster, and reduce the impact on customer experience? This is possible but requires contact centers to shift from traditional methods.

Making do with traditional methods and tools

Contact centers use many tools to measure customer experience and identify customer experience problems when they arise. They look at contact center operational metrics (often aggregated data), analyze conversations, or pick up issues directly reported by customers and agents.

Reports, analytics (such as customer journey analytics), WFM, and QA, are tools that contact center professionals use to see how customer experience is impacted (such as higher call volumes, or agents adhering to their schedules), but these tools barely offer a glimpse into those harder to find day-to-day operational problems.

Basically, contact centers are “making do” with the tools they have.

New methods and technology to detect poor customer experience in real-time

To understand those hard to find or unknown issues affecting CX, without spending tons of time sifting through low-level system details, contact centers need to adopt a new way and new technology.

There are new and emerging ways to more quickly, accurately and proactively examine the contact center activity for issues and problematic agent behavior that can affect the customer experience. These methods and technology also help monitor these issues to keep them at bay.

For example, Aria’s Visualizer for Genesys that works on PureEngage helps contact centers:

  • Identify agent behavior and compliance automatically by listening to ALL calls instead of just spot checking a small sample of calls.
  • Analyze calls by learning and improving what is defined as a problem call.
  • See detailed analysis in real-time that captures all the low-level activity in a contact center. This will provide a visual picture of the customer experience, making it easier to spot issues you didn’t even know you had and that are beyond the reach of listening to calls.

Contact centers now have options for resolving issues that happen in day-to-day operations and can reduce the effect on customer experience. Visualizer provides the detailed insights that find the issues quickly so they can be actioned immediately, and affect a smaller number of customers.

 

Agent Efficiency, CRM/Salesforce, System Integration

3 Tech Trends & Factors That Impact Employee Experience

Who does not love a nice dinner out on a Friday night? It’s a great way to start the weekend and relax after long days at work. But then a server—clearly unmotivated—shows up, does not answer my questions, and gets my order wrong. What was supposed to be a relaxing evening turns out to be a stressful disappointment. Even if the food ends up being good, or even delicious, the moment is ruined. And if it was my first time at this restaurant, I would not come back, ever. 

Sounds familiar? I am sure many of you can relate. 

Well, the experience in a contact center is no different than the one in the restaurant. At a time when all products are similar and switching services happens seamlessly, the customer experience can make it or break it. This means the people on the front line of your company are key to your success, whether you like it or not. Consequently, it is in your best interest to motivate them, so that they represent your business in the best way possible. 

In other words, satisfaction of your employees has a direct impact on your customers’ loyalty, and therefore on your revenue and profits. While leadership, employee engagement, and other HR related measures obviously play a big role, the importance of technology in the workplace is steadily increasing. The primary reason is a steady increase of demands, and technology helps employees work more efficiently to meet their goals. It’s as simple as that. 

What are the key technological factors and influences that improve the employee experience (EX) and as a result make a company more successful? 

1. Automation

Automation is still one of the most important factors. Unfortunately, many companies are not fully leveraging it.  

Painful, repetitive tasks such as copying and pasting data between multiple systems are the result of these shortcomings. It is one of those common productivity roadblocks that is increasingly frustrating in an environment where performance is rigorously measured.  

Building integrations between multiple systems allows automation and is essential to improving the EX.  

For instance, a common scenario is the handling of an order or return between Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software and an Order Management system (OMS). If agents have to create an order by copying all customer details and product line items between the two systems, they can become extremely frustrated over time. Adding a button that does all that work with one click, where the agents only have to validate the order before booking it, makes a big difference. 

2. User Experience

“It’s all about saving clicks” is what people say when talking about automation. But automation is not the only means to save “clicks” for the user. An often overseen factor is the user experience (UX).  

With the high level of configurability and customizability of today’s applications, such as a CRM software, it matters what agents see on the screen. This is all about showing the right information in the right place at the right time. Button locations, dialogs, and wizards are just some of the tools that can improve system usability, and consequently employees’ satisfaction. Even the look and feel plays an important role, since the users are spending several hours a day looking at the software.  

UX has been crucial for product development, but it is often neglected when building systems for internal users. For example, screen pops are a common feature utilized in any contact center. If an agent only sees the service record for the customer’s current incident, it is certainly helpful. But, if the system is configured to show key customer information (besides just the name), for example, recent history and other related information (such as the products the customer owns) – all on one screen, the agent can operate much faster and provide better service, leading therefore to reduced handle time. 

3. Artificial Intelligence

Last but not least, the power of artificial intelligence (AI) offers a huge potential to improve EX. This is a real game changer because AI is not meant to improve how users do things, but what they are doing.  

This is significant because every employee can now be a rockstar sales person or a customer service champion. In an environment that thrives on success metrics, such as sales numbers and service level agreements (SLA), this can help each individual meet or even exceed their goals.  

Lead scoring is a great example. If a sales representative handles 50 leads a day out of a pool of several hundred, success depends on converting those leads into real opportunities. Based on historical data, lead scoring algorithms will help choose leads that have a higher chance of converting into a sale. This will not change the number of leads the agent will call, but it will improve the number of sales during a day.  

It will make the agent successful, and there is no better motivator than success. If people feel empowered and effective, they are more willing to face obstacles in their way. 

But keep in mind that AI is still an emerging technology. It needs to gain trust from business users and technology experts alike. Rolling out features to smaller groups first can be helpful in collecting valuable data, thus proving the positive impact of AI. Building a success story is key to getting acceptance. 

Evaluate and Apply Technology Properly

From my experience working with contact centers, I know that a great employee experience is driven by productivity. A productive and rewarding day can boost your employees’ happiness and engagement, leading to an even better performance in the future.  

Technology is a key ingredient in nurturing this successful experience, and it is crucial to make it a standard, not an exception. However, it is important to understand that there is no silver bullet. There should be an evaluation first – to understand the greatest weaknesses and how the technology can help resolve them. 

Technology can only reach its full potential when applied properly. Often, business users describe their needs by providing a solution to the problem. Unfortunately, their solution does not include a full understanding of features and dependencies within the systems they are using. So in short, IT and business users should work closely together to come up with the best implementation. 

With technology evolving so quickly, the journey is the reward. 

If you need help with business challenges, choosing the right solution for your pain points, or evaluating specific technology – Aria is here to help!

We offer expert services on the Salesforce platform and can help you customize your crm to fit your needs. We also have many omni-channel desktop products, including our newest product Legato which includes a robust softphone and integrates Salesforce with Amazon Connect Voice so your agents can see everything on one screen. Contact us today to learn more or visit us at booth 2226 during Enterprise Connect Orlando.

Analytics, Contact Center Optimization

Top 3 Reasons Why You Need Customer Interaction Analytics

Businesses are losing $62 billion per year through poor customer service (Serial switchers strikes again, NewVoiceMedia, Jan. 2016). This means the new goal must be getting every interaction right.

Forrester Research predicts that by 2020, insights-driven businesses, like Baidu and Netflix will quadruple their revenue from $333 billion to $1.2 trillion, growing eight times faster than global GDP (Top Five Imperatives To Win In The Age Of The Customer, May 23, 2017).

Customer-centric companies like these are a real threat to a lot of businesses who choose to prioritize areas like manufacturing and distribution, instead of better understanding their customer needs and wants and delivering personalized experiences.

To deliver such experiences, you need insights; but to get insights, you need to start using all your data the right way. Once you get to a phase when you no longer have data silos across business systems, it is important to start looking for a good operational, employee, and customer interaction analytics application. And here are the top three reasons why:

1. Customer retention

No one would argue that customer retention is critical for survival. Your brand and company Net Promoter Score (NPS) is constantly being reevaluated with every interaction handled and socially-shared commentary by your customer base.

Back in the day, a negative customer experience would simply make interesting conversation over coffee. But with the advent of social media, customers that are not able to resolve issues, can blast their complaints to a global audience that will hear about any shortcomings your business may have.

A lot of companies out there focus more on customer acquisition than on customer retention. But did you know that it costs five times as much to attract a new customer than to keep the existing one, and if you only increased your customer retention rates by 5% your profits could increase by 25% to 90% (Customer Acquisition Vs. Retention Costs, Invesp, Dec. 2015).

The best way to increase your customer retention rate is to improve customer experience.

2. Agent behaviors

Your front-line agents are also a crucial element to your customer experience. By gaining visibility into your agent interactions you can make better decisions.

But do you really know what is going on? Are you able to easily see the whole picture when it comes to your agent performance?

Traditionally, agent behavior analysis has been based on a set of standardized aggregated metrics that were supposed to summarize good agent performance. But to provide good customer service, aggregated metrics just don’t cut it and so you need to look at customer interaction analytics.

Granularity and automation are needed to look for negative behavioral patterns (placing customers immediately on hold, flashing Not Ready while Ready, etc.) in your agent performance and flag them immediately.

The ROI in this case can be simple. As an example, let’s assume a fully loaded agent cost of $65K. That translates to $280/day/agent. If we manage to identify 15 mins of lost time for every agent day and assume a 300-agent contact center. It translates to $2700/day which over the course of 220 work days in a year is just under $600K!

And that is not even considering the impact a negative behavior may have on the customer experience or revenue opportunities.

3. The “hidden” costs of support

Most firms are swimming in data, but they’re only using about a third of it. Worse, only 29% say they are good at translating the result of data and analytics into measurable business outcomes (Top Five Imperatives To Win In The Age Of The Customer, May 23, 2017).

As a matter of fact, the top two challenges preventing organizations from making use of analytics are “ensuring data quality from a variety of sources” and “accessing data from a variety of sources” (Pick A Powerful Pilot To Propagate Customer Analytics, July 19, 2017).

Speed of issue resolution carries a significant impact. The quicker issues can be resolved, the less chance there would be of repeating poor customer experiences, thus minimizing the impacts to your brand. Outages that critically impact service delivery are a ticking money bomb. Financial impacts increase exponentially the longer you are unable to service customers. One of the largest banks in Canada implemented Aria’s Visualizer (business and support analytics) and improved support response times by 75%. Such customer interaction analytics applications cannot be underestimated.

Systems that deliver customer interaction analytics in an efficient and accessible manner empower lower tiered or less senior support staff to extract necessary system information required for issue resolution. This can help focus the energy of senior technical staff on critical and future facing initiatives.

Business analytics resources can also leverage data on agent and system behaviors to make better operating decisions.

Lack of proper visibility into these three areas: customer experience and retention, employee behavior, and support issues – translates into a significant financial impact. Analytics applications like Aria’s Visualizer allow for an improved unified approach to visualizing interactions level data, strategic support approach and behavioral performance analysis which can help you provide top rated customer service.

To sign up for a demo of Aria’s Visualizer visit the Genesys AppFoundry or the Aria’s Visualizer product page.

Agent Efficiency, Analytics, Contact Center Optimization

Measuring Agent Productivity in an Omnichannel World

As customer call centers have evolved into customer care centers, managers have had to adapt with new strategies for going beyond solving customers’ problems to finding ways to delight them at every touch point. The rewards can be great — customer loyalty and brand advocates — but only if customer care is done right.

Making sure that happens involves a complex melding of best practices in technology, process, and agent performance. One element that brings all three of these factors together is an omnichannel approach.

Ensuring a smooth and consistent experience between channels — phone, email, text, and chat — is the key to success in omnichannel customer care delivery. But to ensure that success, you need to know what’s working, especially in terms of agent efficiency.

In the old voice world you measured the length of phone calls, how many calls per hour, and the percentage of issues resolved during the first call, pretty straightforward, but with agents using multiple channels in a given shift, those measurements no longer tell the whole story. Let’s look at the challenges of measuring agent activity and productivity in an omnichannel world and how you can overcome them:

Challenge #1 – Blending

Within the omnichannel world you might have each agent assigned to just one channel, which keeps measuring their performance simple. However, another approach is having any given agent assigned to multiple channels simultaneously. For example, an agent might take calls, but respond to emails or chats when call volume is slow.

While this approach serves to increase overall efficiency for the care center, a single agent may not be as productive as they would be using just one channel at a time, especially when asked to handle too many channels.

The first step to optimal performance is appropriate performance measurement. For example, let’s say you have two pools of agents handling inbound phone calls:

  • Pool #1 handling only calls[su_spacer size=”10″]
  • Pool #2 responding to emails in between calls[su_spacer size=”10″]
  • Expectations for Pool #2 handle times should be adjusted accordingly, given that these agents need time to shift between channels and tools.[su_spacer]

This scenario becomes increasingly complex as you add more channel types and combinations, and you must determine the level of granularity needed to be effective at managing your workforce according to contact load. The best approach is to be as granular as possible on initial setup, and then aggregate metrics as you choose to ignore certain levels of differentiation to simplify ongoing management.

Challenge #2 – Simultaneous Interactions

Simultaneous interaction handling is not recommended. Agents juggling more than one customer at a time are more likely to exhibit lapsed concentration, mistakes in execution, and accidental sharing of private information.

However, there are care centers out there pushing those boundaries, so some agents will be handling multiple channels simultaneously. These agents may be engaged, for example, on a phone call and a chat at the same time.

So, in a five-minute window, if a given agent is talking on the phone to one customer and chatting with another, the appropriate measurement of time spent might be five minutes for each interaction, for a total of ten minutes.

This means that an agent could potentially have more interaction time (say six hours) than their actual shift time (four hours). Managers may need to adjust the processes and tools they use to accurately measure results.

Challenge #3 – Virtual Queuing

When no agents are available, virtual queuing allows customers to schedule a call back when call volume is low or hold their place in the queue and call back when it’s their turn. This method is more convenient for customers, but — to ensure it works most efficiently — care centers must properly attribute the queue time of the interaction even when there is no call physically waiting in the telephony environment.

With falsely short queue times, measurement systems may offer lower numbers than expected as there appear to be more calls handled within acceptable queuing thresholds. It’s also important to note that virtual queuing strategies (and the metrics used to measure their effectiveness) only work if there are down times during which agents can make return calls.

Invest in the Right Technology

The key to accurate measurement in the omnichannel environment is the right technology. Granularity is important because you must be able to group by agent skill set or interaction type combinations. Those base metrics can later be combined to achieve the desired level of reporting.

Therefore, it’s prudent to seek out tools, such as Aria’s Visualizer, that capture and display data at the distinct interaction level. The key is to get reports of all events (including interactions, routing, and meta data) within an environment, so you can later analyze that data in ways that are meaningful to your care center and your company.

You also need to be able to accurately capture presence data, and precisely attribute handle times to each channel method. The right tool for these tasks is one that seamlessly connects your customer relationship management (CRM) system, such as Salesforce, with your workforce management (WFM) system. This type of application can provide accurate metrics like the average queue wait time, or average interaction handle time (including all channels), which help with forecasting and staffing.

Finally, having all channels operating within one system can assist in measuring critical metrics. Commonly, an agent will be working within two or more channels, using a separate tool for each one. Because the systems are separate, so is the data gathering, meaning there could be inconsistencies in how performance is measured. Unified agent desktop technology helps in connecting all channels to one system in order to gather consistent, complete, and useful data.

Bottom line: the challenges of working within an omnichannel environment don’t have to outweigh the benefits. The investment you make in omnichannel operations may come back to you many times over, but only if you can optimize agent performance. The best way to do that is to recognize the challenges, and make sure you have the right tools to address them.

Agent Efficiency, Contact Center Optimization

Agent Desktop Optimization: How Many More Screens Can Your Agent Handle?

Successful contact centers have always relied on speed. It’s about getting more done, in less time. To better manage customer conversations and respond to their inquiries in a timely manner, contact center agents need access to the right information immediately. The trouble is – most contact centers face data silos and believe that expensive, custom integration for agent desktop optimization is their only alternative.

It all comes down to inefficient infrastructure. Agents are forced to work with disparate IT systems that don’t talk to each other, making access slow and labor-intensive.

Over the years, mergers and acquisitions have shoehorned incompatible technology or multiple data sources together, making the infrastructure even more complex.

Wasted time and unnecessary costs

The average agent spends 15% of their time searching for the information across disparate systems to respond to customer inquiries (the Aberdeen Group research). This results in a lost cost of productivity of $1.57 million each year for a 300-seat contact center.

It’s a daily battle, and it gets them down. They’re not as productive as they want to be. They can’t serve customers as well as they need to, and there’s nothing they can do about it.

The extra ongoing costs of managing and maintaining disparate and legacy systems mean your business is bleeding money where it doesn’t have to.

Improving agent efficiency with unified, omnichannel technology

Modern contact centers need to add channels like voice, email, chat, mobile, social media to serve their customers. And the number of channels and tools used by contact center agents is expected to increase. This, coupled with data silos, means organizations need to rethink priorities and find alternative solutions.

According to 2016 Aberdeen Research “Optimize your customer experience strategy, get data right”, delivering consistent omnichannel conversations depends on companies providing all relevant employees with a unified view of their customer journey. So, it’s important that contact centers integrate this omnichannel approach into their agent desktop technology.

By investing in an optimized agent desktop, agents no longer have to switch between several screens to find the information they need. It’s simply there when they need it. To achieve this, agent technology needs to be integrated with multiple data sources, such as CRM solutions like Salesforce, while also providing access to legacy databases, such as billing systems or custom in-house systems.

There are platforms and solutions available that make integration faster and more powerful than ever before. So, improving agent’s access to information through agent desktop optimization may not be nearly as costly as you think.

The faster an agent can access what they need, the happier they’ll be. The same goes for their customers. Optimizing agent technology to speed up customer service should be a priority. For example, Amazon patented its ‘OneClick’ purchase process to retain what it believes is an enormous business advantage in terms of customer service. Amazon achieves extremely high conversion from its existing customers. Since the customer’s payment and shipping information is already stored on Amazon’s servers, it creates a checkout process that is virtually friction-less.

It’s this “friction-less” transaction concept that is needed in your contact center. Whether answering a customer’s question, selling them a product, or providing a service, enabling your agents to perform friction-less transactions should be the goal. Creating an integrated solution is a big part of this process.

In fact, integrated solutions are already delivering. The majority of companies improving agent productivity and performance can access relevant customer data through a single screen, therefore, improving first contact resolution and customer retention rates. For any business concerned about employee retention, this is the way to ensure it.

Contact us today to learn how Aria can help your contact center maximize agent productivity and ensure customer satisfaction across multiple channels.