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New Customer and Contact Center Technology at Call Centre Expo
October 15, 2011 in Business Mobility, Cloud Computing, Customer Performance Management (CPM), Operational Performance Management (OPM), Social Media, Workforce Performance Management (WPM) | Tags: 360-degree view of the Customer, Agent Performance Management, Altitude Software, and Verint, Attensity, Aurix, Call Center, CallCopy, Cisco, Cloud Computing, Contact Center, Contact Center Analytics, CRM, cTalk Ltd, Customer Analytics, Customer Data Management, Customer Experience Management, Customer Feedback Management, Customer Service, Desktop Analytics, Enghouse interactive, Enkata, Genesys, Interactive Intelligence, mplsystems, NewVoicemedia, Nexidia, Noble Systems, Predictive Analytics, SAP, ShoreTel, Social CRM, Speech Analytics, sword-ciboodle, Text Analytics, Unified Communications, Voice of the Customer, Workforce Management | by Richard Snow | 1 comment
I have spent the last two days at the U.K.’s largest contact center trade show, which this year moved to London Olympia from the NEC in Birmingham. While the overall number of visitors seemed to be down, some exhibitors told me there were more high-level attendees with serious intent to purchase.
At the show I detected three major themes: support for managing multichannel (including social media) customer interactions, “the contact center in the cloud” and analytics. Regarding the first, Ventana Research’s benchmark research into the use of technology in contact centers shows that companies must support multiple channels through which customers can interact with them or risk that certain segments of customers won’t do business with them. A colleague recently summed it up nicely: A multichannel customer service strategy is not an “or” strategy but an “and” strategy; that is, no one channel, even social media, will replace any other channel, and therefore you need them all. Supporting this viewpoint were a number of vendors whose integrated products support multiple channels; these includeAltitude Software, cTalk Ltd, Enghouse interactive, Genesys, mplsystems,NobleSystems and ShoreTel.
One of the challenges in handling multiple forms of customer interactions is that it adds to the complexity of the desktop agents use. This is already complex because of the number and variety of applications agents need to access to resolve interactions. The combination of multiple interaction types and multiple applications is increasing the need for a “smart” agent desktop. Altitude and mplsystems include that as a component of their products, while others have specialist products, such as sword-ciboodle and (although the company won’t thank me for describing it this way) Salesforce.com.
As for the contact center in the cloud, Salesforce would claim it provides this, and as I noted it does provide a key part in the smart desktop that brings together all customer information so agents can handle customer interactions more efficiently. But Salesforce doesn’t provide a technology platform to manage inbound interactions and route them to the most appropriate person to handle them. This capability is provided in the cloud by some of the multichannel management vendors whose systems can be based on-premises or on a hosted (in the cloud) basis. Three vendors at the show that specialize in this are Interactive Intelligence, NewVoiceMedia and SAP – the last might surprise people as it is better known as an ERP and CRM provider.
Interactive Intelligence’s CIC provides a technology platform and interaction management, plus other applications to support multichannel customer interaction management in the cloud. NewVoiceMedia’s main product,ContactWorld, also provides interaction management in the cloud and can route interactions to the most qualified person regardless of location. It also launched its Trust site which takes performance monitoring to a new level. Whereas most cloud vendors provide availability and reliability statistics, NewVoiceMedia automates tasks agents carry out, runs these tasks every five minutes, measures the results and publishes the outcomes, thereby allowing managers to see the level of performance their agents receive from the product. This monitoring also allows NewVoiceMedia to spot issues before users see any impact and take corrective action. Possibly the most surprising vendor in this space is SAP, with its BCM products, which include a cloud-based service that supports management of multiple communication channels. All three of these vendors support the growing trend to distribute interaction-handling to dispersed “agents” who can be in different physical centers, home-based, mobile, working in other business units or even working for a third-party outsourcing company.
The other major theme running through the show and in presentations was analytics. Ventana Research advocates wider adoption of analytics in the contact center and elsewhere, so it was interesting to see a variety of analytic products. Most of the vendors have some form of analytics built in to their systems, but a number of specialist vendors offer particular types of analytics: Attensity was featuring its customer-focused analytics; Aurix was featuring its speech analytics; CallCopy was featuring its process and speech analytics products which work with its other products to support improved agent performance; Enkata was featuring a range of products that support operational and agent-focused performance analysis; and Nexidia was featuring its customer-focused analytics that can analyze interactions from multiple channels. I didn’t hear as much as I expected about social media analytics, so it may be that vendors are still evaluating how social media is impacting business.
I describe the adoption of analytics as moving beyond the early-adopter stage and approaching the mainstream. I believe the main issue holding back adoption, which was highlighted in our benchmark research into the use of analytics, is that companies have difficulty interpreting the outputs from analytics and thus getting real business benefits. Our research shows that business units such as Finance are supported by business analysts who essentially interpret the results and show management the impact of different decisions and activities. In the contact center, such responsibility sits with the operational team so they need more support before they can realize the full benefits of speech, text and social media analytics.
Overall the show confirmed that there is an impressive variety of technology available to support companies in their efforts to improve the way they interact with customers. Two absences I noted this year were Cisco andVerint. More technology, applications and analytics are becoming available in the cloud, making it easier and more affordable to try. I have only been able to touch on a few vendors in this piece, so I urge you to take more time to find out what is available and let us know what issues you come across by collaborating with me.
Regards
Richard Snow – VP & Research Director
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Conference Highlights Social Media, Analytics and the Customer Experience
May 24, 2011 in Business Analytics, Business Collaboration, Business Intelligence (BI), Business Mobility, Cloud Computing, Customer Performance Management (CPM), Information Management (IM), Operational Performance Management (OPM), Sales Performance Management (SPM), Social Media | Tags: 360-degree view of the Customer, Agent Performance Management, Call Center, Cloud Computing, Contact Center, Contact Center Analytics, CRM, Customer Analytics, Customer Experience Management, Customer Feedback Management, Customer Service, Desktop Analytics, Interactive Intelligence, Nexidia, Predictive Analytics, Salesforce.com, Social CRM, Speech Analytics, SwordCiboodle, Text Analytics, Voice of the Customer, Workforce Management | by Richard Snow | 1 comment
The Directors Club of the U.K. recently held its inaugural National Customer Show in London. The event was well attended and attracted sponsorship from some of the biggest vendors in the contact center industry; among them were platinum sponsors Interactive Intelligence and salesforce.com, and session sponsors Nexidia and SwordCiboodle. I noticed three common themes, covering very different aspects of managing the customer, and I’ll hit the highlights of each.
Social Media
These days you can’t escape discussions about social media and the impact it is having on how companies interact with customers and prospects. As I recently wrote, social media is here, and millions of people are using it to communicate with friends, colleagues, businesses and even government. But all the hype, statistics and YouTube videos are masking the realities of business use. My research shows that as yet social media has had little impact on the contact center, and at the show I found confirmation of this point. I also heard more people than usual, even from salesforce.com, uttering cautionary words about social media. The reality is that business use outside of marketing and training videos is still low and consumer use is largely confined to complaining. Several people picked up the latter point; whereas in the past one complaint was heard by a few tens of people, now a single complaint may be heard by thousands (and potentially by millions) of people. Companies need to be aware of this; they need to monitor comments and take positive action about them and do whatever is possible to not let the things that generated the complaints happen again. So the message was monitor social media, have a process and people in place to take appropriate action and have a process to address the root cause of customer issues.
Contact Center Analytics
Throughout the show, and at one session I chaired, I heard conversations about the need for companies to review their existing metrics and add new metrics that reflect their business goals, rather than settle for efficiency metrics that just show how well things are or are not working. The general consensus seemed to be that no one metric is going to fit the bill for all companies. Yes, net promoter scores add insight to potential new business, and having good customer effort scores makes sense from an efficiency and customer perspective because making it easy for customers to interact with your company is likely to generate more business at lower costs. But companies need a balanced set of metrics from contact center analytics that I recently researched that reflect their business and priorities. I was pleased to find considerable support for my view that having “metrics for metrics’ sake” is pointless and that companies need to have in place processes that ensure action is taken based on their key performance metrics.
The Customer Experience
As a concept, customer experience management is going the same way as CRM, in that it means many things to different people. For me it is about proactively managing the experience customers receive at any touch point. So when it comes to the most popular channel – calls to the contact center – CEM is about how agents handle each and every customer call.
This theme was echoed during one session I attended that connected customer experience with agent empowerment. My benchmark research into CEM has shown that the major influence on the customer experience is the agent’s attitude. The discussion took up the theme that if agents are not empowered to handle calls effectively then customers are likely to go away unhappy. Empowerment seemed to come down to doing some basic things well: process (not doing dumb things), training and coaching, motivation, and setting rewards and performance metrics that positively encourage agents to do a good job and deliver to the company’s business requirements.
Personally I like the theme “take the dumb out of handling customer interactions.” Too many times companies do dumb things: asking customers to repeat information they have given before, having metrics that drive agents to do the wrong things (keep calls short rather than solve the problem), using IVR menus that don’t match what customers want to do, providing inconsistent information on different channels – the list goes on. If companies would stand back and examine objectively the dumb things they are doing and put them right, we would all get a better experience.
In this day of social media fixing broken processes is even more important. Dumb things will end up exposed in public. This begs the question of who should be responsible for social media, because one dumb response can cause more trouble than the original issues. As a result companies need to pay more attention to interaction-handling than ever before.
Are you ready to cope with this new environment? Can you be certain that interactions are being handled consistently and effectively across all channels? How is social media impacting customer experience and do you use analytics to gain better visibility to what you do not know. If so, I’d love to know how you do it.
Regards
Richard Snow – VP & Research Director
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