Ask the expert How to: improve customer contact

Most customer contact executives are targeting three (often conflicting) objectives: higher customer satisfaction ratings, cost reduction and revenue growth through automated channels. The highest priority strategies are those rare ones that can achieve all three; overall, leading financial companies are seeing themselves as a contact business – putting the customer at the center, with the entire organization supporting the relationship.

We fully acknowledge that CRM is ultimately about relationships, and not technology; however, the prudent use of some of the newest innovations will dramatically enhance the automated customer relationship! The traditional tradeoff in customer contact between cost and caller experience meant reducing the quality of the user experience – yet, the best operations can now enhance the customer experience while significantly reducing costs.

The new contact center metrics: customer satisfaction, first call resolution, service consistency, and revenue generation, create an interrelated – again, often conflicting – set of challenges that must be managed through technical innovation. For example, customer contact silos are going to be converged in the next 18-24 months, as shareholders and customers demand that their companies implement technology that improves profitability while actually increasing customer satisfaction.

New technologies, such as IP telephony, natural language speech recognition and virtualized operations (including outsourced/offshore/home-based agents), are creating both opportunities and challenges. The primary advantage of IP appears to be its lower cost structure – not as simple cost reduction, but because it enables strategies such as resource sharing to increase revenue and improve service levels. Natural speech recognition offers potential for increasing customer self-service rates for existing and new automated applications. The costs of natural speech recognition, while still quite high, are coming down, and accuracy rates are improving. Outsourcing continues to grow, and although many companies are downplaying their use of offshoring the market trend continues up.

There are benefits and tradeoffs for each of these. IVR self-service systems and offshoring are getting a great deal of public attention, very little of it positive. IVR works very well for highly repetitive applications such as routine balance inquiries, and the financial services industry has had great success in getting high utilization rates for routine applications. The problems with user acceptance of IVR applications surface with infrequent callers, or when the IVR is used to front-end a wide range of service options, or the systems are just poorly designed. Callers become trapped in IVR purgatory – poorly designed user interfaces, confusing prompt menus, repeating information at different steps, low speech recognition accuracy causing ongoing reprompts (“Did you say No? Please answer Yes or No”) or no easy access to live agents – so, the experience becomes an unprofitable, customer service nightmare.

So how can the tradeoffs between efficiency and customer satisfaction, new technology and risk, be managed? The key is in optimizing existing infrastructure, and determining where and how to deploy new technologies while minimizing risks. One new approach that blends self-service and agents into a collaborative solution appears to offer the best possible immediate and long-term results. We call it ‘smart self-care’ – and there is one other company offering a similar design methodology – which leverages agent expertise with speech-enabled IVR to achieve higher self-service rates, increased customer satisfaction, more efficient segmentation of agent skills and continuous process optimization.

The foundation for smart self-care is its ability to bring a call control agent into an IVR interaction, without the caller being aware, to direct the automated process as needed. Dialogue with the customer is presented via recorded phrases and text-to-speech. The agent can guide the application, clarifying the customer’s needs in case of a speech recognition error, direct the application flow, speak directly to the caller or transfer the call when appropriate. This presents the customer with a consistent interface, quick and easy access to information, a low call handling time and elegant error handling that hides technical details – a user friendly, ‘smart’, high-quality experience. Equally important, smart self-care implementations can work cooperatively with existing contact center infrastructures for rapid implementation and ROI.

The smart self-care concept enables you to leverage contact center agents more efficiently, blending offshore and domestic, skilled and entry level, without the usual drawbacks. It also provides continuous process improvement, since contact data (voice and application) is captured and recycled to identify and optimize call flows and troublespots. The data can also be mined to identify customer buying and call patterns, enabling customized treatment for returning or profiled callers. Contact centers can finally combine technology to realize its full promise: the lower costs of automated systems, higher caller satisfaction ratings rivaling calls handled by skilled agents, agent accent neutralization and data mining for both optimizing the user interface and for providing personalized treatment for profiled callers.

The role and structure of today’s contact center is shifting from a speed/cost approach to a customer-centric, value-add model. Innovative organizations will scrutinize their service process – keeping the customer at the front – to create the strategy, applications and technology needed for the transition. The successful ones will place a premium on balancing organizational goals with realistic measurements of performance and the investment and return on new technologies.

Once the strategic direction is set, best-of-class companies will optimize returns and customer satisfaction by testing and deploying ‘agent-directed automation’ as part of their contact centers. Companies with these customer-centric, automated solutions will nurture the customer relationship, improve the client experience and generate substantial savings and revenue improvements.

For more information, please visit www.aumtech.com or contact Mr Porter at tporter@aumtech.com.