Go BackSo what are the technologies that can really make a difference for your business during 2008?
Sabio is an innovative contact centre services company focused on delivering exceptional customer contact strategies and solutions. Sabio offers business consulting, systems integration and managed services and has worked with many major organisations including egg, Enterprise Rent-a-car, ING Lease, Newport City Council, Leeds City Council, Pitney Bowes, Scottish Widows, Sky, Student Loans, Travelex and Yorkshire Building Society.
Visit www.sabio.co.uk for more information
Sabio's Founding Director Adam Faulkner reflects on this week's events at Call Centre Expo 2007 in Birmingham, and focuses on three technology areas that he believes can deliver real value for organisations during the coming year.
Visitors to Call Centre Expo 2007 this week could again be excused if they left the NEC feeling a little confused. Leaving aside the usual distractions (this year's big attraction were the world's greatest living explorer, Sir Ranulph Fiennes, and Michelle Dewberry, winner of the BBC's The Apprentice) there were still hundreds of different products and services on offer. Most of them claim to be major innovations, and many of them promised to help solve today's key business challenges by increasing your first call resolution rates, improving your levels of customer satisfaction, and helping you to retain even more of your customers.
So it's hardly surprising that some contact centre operators are a little cynical about bold technology promises - which is a shame as some of the key technologies on show at Call Centre Expo seemed to confirm to me that our industry really is now positioned for a significant period of technology-enabled transformation. As ever, the trick for contact centre management is to work out which of the many different technologies on offer will be the ones that can help their centre succeed.
From Sabio's perspective, we believe three technologies that can make a real difference over the coming year are the effective deployment and optimisation of multiple channels, leveraging the potential of correctly-designed and implemented self-service solutions, and the roll-out of streamlined agent desktops. We've now seen these technologies individually deliver a significant return on investment for organisations, and believe they are all areas that should be high on a contact centre's hit-list of technology priorities.
Enabling a joined-up channel approach
It's probably fair to say that most companies' multi-channel service capabilities haven't kept pace with the growing consumer requirement to contact organisations when and how they want to. Almost half of the UK's consumers now have an expectation of near instant response, irrespective of the channel they're using.
So there's an increasingly important requirement for organisations to not only support multiple customer contact channels but also to provide consistency across them, whether it's voice, e-mail, IVR, speech, web or SMS. However, it's not enough just to offer a multi-channel capability. To really benefit you have to do it well by offering a quality and consistent customer experience across all channels. Technology is obviously an enabler for this, but it's also essential that you get all your people and processes in place to make multi-channel customer interactions really work for both your customers and your own organisation.
If you can get your multi-channel approach right, then there are benefits for both your business and for your customers. Using multi-channel can reduce the cost of customer transactions, particularly with self-service and automation, and multi-channels also help them to cover more of the available market giving an extended platform for revenue gains and growth. From the customer perspective, more channels means more choice and flexibility, offering them the convenience of dealing with an organisation when and how they want to.
It's time for self-service solutions that work
Evidence suggests that consumers generally have a negative impression of traditional touchtone IVR systems, but at Sabio we're convinced that the fault doesn't lie solely with the technology or indeed with the latest generation of speech-enabled self-service systems. At Call Centre Expo this year there was a broad range of self-service solutions on offer, but to really deliver they need to be aligned with some serious thought about who your customers are, how they contact you, and why and when they are contacting you. Only then can you really start to think about the right automation approach to deliver an appropriate and personal customer service.
A distinctive characteristic of successful voice self-service applications is that they are always designed around caller needs. Design should be user-centric, providing easy to use access to supported functionality. The most successful applications demonstrate clear user benefits, often in terms of security, privacy, convenience or cost of service. Along with delivering caller benefits, self-service solutions can also support corporate objectives around providing consistent customer interaction and the projection of a corporate image.
We're now finding that the latest natural language-based speech technology is already making it possible for organisations to replace frustrating touch-tone systems with intelligent speech front-ends. These can speed up the customer authentication process, as well as provide a rapid and comfortable solution for transactional customer enquiries.
Optimising the agent interface
Getting the customer experience right is always challenging for contact centres, however it's all very well having the right systems and applications in place, but if your agents have to spend all their time on login-logout, alt-tabbing and cut n' pasting their way through those applications, then service levels can quickly deteriorate. We believe that a third key area that can deliver immediate benefit for contact centre managers this year is the deployment of technologies to streamline the agent desktop.
Using some of the latest user interface and SOA technologies, organisations can reduce the number of physical applications that contact centre agents have to work with, optimising the agent's user interface, and implementing best practice templates to speed up operational processes. Unlike other optimisation initiatives that can help to shave seconds off average call handling times, the optimised desktop can deliver major improvements in agent performance - and that translates directly into a better experience for the customer.
By aligning different contact centre processes around customer requirements, we've now seen some organisations succeed in cutting their call times in half, freeing agents to spend more time with customers. This contributes to a more positive user experience, delivering improvements in customer satisfaction, and a far better environment for both callers and agents alike. An additional benefit is that a streamlined desktop approach can also significantly reduce the amount of time agents need to spend on initial IT training, speeding their time to competency.
We believe that multi-channel programmes, correctly focused self-service initiatives and streamlined agent desktops are all extremely positive quick-win technology opportunities. Hopefully Call Centre Expo will have helped to focus the industry's mind on the real process and performance benefits that technologies like these can unlock, and encourage individual organisations to make these projects a priority for 2008 deployment.
