December 12, 2006 |
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Retail Customers: 70% Say Poor Service -- Not Price -- Made Them
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Consumers today know the quality of service that is possible. A CRM Guru
survey shows most will leave if service expectations are not met. With a
well-planned and managed customer contact center, retailers can exceed
support expectations while driving sales. Learn
how! Download our free white paper.
Convergys -- Outthinking. Outdoing.
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
This issue of Contact Center Advisor is sponsored by UCN
Being held hostage by your outsource provider? Take control. Manage the
routing of your own calls to multiple outsource sites. Get real-time
reports on customer satisfaction with unique survey feature on your
inbound callers. Gain control. Get better results.
Click
here for more information.
NCOF Fast Approaching
It's never too early to begin planning for the 2007 National
Conference on Operations & Fulfillment (NCOF), the only conference
dedicated to direct-to-customer fulfillment and operations management.
This year's conference will be held in Schaumburg, IL, from April 29 to
May 2.
Like the Contact Center Advisor, NCOF strives to deliver the smartest
methods and best practices to boost efficiencies, raise productivity,
streamline operations, exceed customer expectations, manage costs,
resolve operating challenges, and deliver the goods better, faster, and
more cost-effectively.
Learn from the industry's best and brightest how you can transform your
operation into a best-in-class facility. To register for NCOF, visit www.NCOF.com
See you there!
Mark Del Franco
Managing editor
Back to Top ^
Five
Essentials of the Integrated Contact Center
By Greg Anderson
Businesses that want to get closer to their customers are
transforming their conventional call centers into multichannel contact
centers that support telephone, e-mail, and the Web. Multiple
technologies must be integrated with a single goal: to improve the way a
company does business by enhancing the customer relationship through
enriching the quality of the contact. Among the key technologies:
1) Open-systems foundation. Solutions today must be based on an
open-systems (standards-based) communications platform. This increases
the ability to easily integrate voice and data management. Stepping away
from complex, expensive, proprietary telephony systems and eliminating
the need for proprietary network components and gateways will greatly
simplify application integration and infrastructure management and
reduce operational costs while laying the foundation for a better
customer experience.
2) Self-service applications. Modern Internet protocol (IP)
contact center software gives you sophisticated automation and
integration options that help cut the costs of staffing and running your
contact center. They also allow customers to do business with you when
and how they want. Typical self-service applications enable customers to
complete transactions, initiate requests, and check account balances
without having to speak with an agent.
For the rest of the tips,
click here.
Back to Top ^
Sponsored by:
This issue of Contact Center Advisor is sponsored by NCOF.
The Conference for Direct-to-Customer Operations & Fulfillment
Management
Registration is Now Open
Mingle with hundreds of industry colleagues and take away ideas and best
practices to: exceed customers' expectations, get the most from your
workforce, boost efficiencies, streamline operations, resolve operating
challenges, and more.
Visit www.ncof.com. Use SOURCE CODE
OF2 when registering.
Co-Presented by Operations + Fulfillment and The DMA
Investing
in Gaps Vs. Wasting an Investment
By Kathryn Jackson, Ph.D
All of us want to be fiscally responsible. That means we have to
invest our resources where they count. Sometimes we invest in addressing
problems that are easy to solve but don't gain much by doing so. Other
times we invest in areas that we think are important, but we can't
really back up our thoughts with hard data.
I was in a meeting with an executive who thought that no caller on any
day or during any time of day should wait longer than 20 seconds for an
agent. So we told him we would put together a financial model to help
him understand his initial investment. Guess what. When we ran the model
for his 50-seat contact center, we found that he needed an initial
investment of more than $5 million. We told him, "The difference between
your peak-hour and your average-hour call volume indicates that we would
need to triple capacity to make certain we got close to making this
happen."
After he recovered, we asked him why he wanted to do this. He said he
thought it would look good in a marketing brochure.
We talked about what was important to his customers. He didn't know
whether the current wait time was an issue. We conducted a customer
survey and discovered that 20% of his orders were shipped with missing
or incorrect items. The customers really wanted him to invest in fixing
the shipping problems.
Interested in learning more?
Click here.
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Is
Your Website Talking to Your Call Center?
By John Federman
Most multichannel merchants do a fine job of branding across
channels. But few are leveraging the information gathered across
business units to enhance their multichannel strategy. For too long,
companies have separated their online channels from their contact
centers without realizing that the two units can work in unison to boost
overall sales and improve customer experience.
For many online marketers, in an ideal world every transaction would be
completed online, which is why they equip their Websites with a number
of self-service tools to prevent customers abandoning their shopping
carts or going to a competitor's site. Still, despite their best
efforts, studies have shown that online stores experience huge
abandonment rates, with nearly six out of 10 online shoppers terminating
a transaction before completion.
The reality is that many consumers are still not comfortable transacting
online, or they reach a point during the online sales process where they
are stuck or need assistance. In these cases, few online tools can
replace the level of attention that a live agent can provide. This is
why when customers reach the point of no return and are forced to leave
the online channel, they tend to opt for the phone channel. But nothing
is more frustrating to a consumer than having spent all that time and
effort online only to have to start all over again when they call to
speak with an agent.
To learn more, visit
MULTICHANNEL MERCHANT.
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The
Benefits and Perils of Team Scheduling
By Penny Reynolds
Over the past 10 years, more and more organizations have moved toward
self-directed work teams. The result has been better productivity,
increased employee motivation, reduced bureaucracy, and continuous
improvement in the work product being delivered.
Although these self-directed work teams are most often implemented in
manufacturing environments to turn out a better-quality product more
efficiently, many customer service organizations have also embraced this
concept. But while some of the concepts of work teams have resulted in
delivery of better, more efficient service to the customer, other
components have created service problems.
For more on the benefits and perils of team scheduling, visit
MULTICHANNEL MERCHANT.
Back to Top ^
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