Multichannel Contact Center

Since the emergence of multi-channel self-service, there is a growing disconnect between the typical strategy employed in telephone self-service design and what many customers actually need. A new Nuance report details the results of a commissioned survey which attempts to uncover customer channel preferences for an array of banking tasks, including recommendations for optimizing the IVR to both accommodate those preferences and minimize the frustrations associated with today’s multi-channel...

The following are some more information on the vendors who attended the IQPC event.  

Analytics

For companies frustrated with isolated or disparate data sources, 360'CRM's latest advances in its InSight data analytics tool provides new levels of actionable information for the Call Center or Channel Management practitioner.  InSight not only automatically draws call center performance data in to a common, universally comparable dashboard and report analytics library, it also integrates internal...

Your customers are coming to you via an variety of   channels.  As a result, every employee is now customer facing — either directly or indirectly — and distinctions between the front
office and back office are blurring.  With many more channels coming to the multi channel contact center, and a much more dispersed workforce, organizations today are forced to manage a dizzying array of customer service systems, customer touch points and customer-related tasks.

The question is, how do you make sure...

Text analytics has been a recognized IT sector for more than 15 years, yet it remains one of technology’s best-kept secrets. With an estimated 3,500 text analytics implementations globally, there is a huge opportunity for vendors to better educate the market on the practical application of this technology in the marketing and business worlds. And end users have a real chance to utilize this application to gain a competitive advantage by knowing exactly what is being said about them, over what...

The operational planning process evolved to solve the core inbound contact center business question: given the seasonality of call volumes, the seasonality of agent attrition, the seasonality of agent sick time, vacation requests, and other shrinkage items, the seasonality of handle times, given that all of these items are different by center location and type of staff required, and given learning curves, training times, and other important and complicating characteristics, how does...

Your company’s brand and reputation depend on your team’s ability to deliver a superior customer experience. Yet, people, processes and technology often conspire to create headaches for management and unsatisfactory interactions for customers.

Do these problems sound familiar? You receive calls from management demanding answers about why a host went down or why customer complaints are up. You may be  off for the  weekend but you still worry that a problem will not be detected as quickly as it...

Customers communicate with agents through a variety of communication channels, and many centers have been transformed into multichannel contact centers. Customers have the choice of contacting companies by telephone, email, snail mail, and increasingly, using web-chat. From the company’s perspective, the move to new communication channels has benefits in terms of both differentiated customer service and cost reduction.

Research has shown that, on average, the cost of handling calls is five times...

The complexity of managing the customer experience has grown exponentially since the Netscape browser became available to all users in 1994.  With the internet, everything is connected and interacting with your brand and is simply a browser click away. Today, customer interaction can take place through a web browser, retail store, contact center and even through social media. As a result, capturing and sharing customer interaction data has never been easier the hard part is figuring out where to...

It is no surprise that a better customer experience provides enhanced revenue and profits. Customers that have good experiences with your company are not only more loyal, they will buy more. Unfortunately, companies are realizing that the experience they deliver fails to engage their customers in critically important ways.  In an era of multi-channel options, many customer service touchpoints are missing the mark. 

In most cases the highest recurring cost in a contact center is agent salaries. It...

In an era where contact centers are often undermanned and under funded, managers need to get the job done with fewer resources despite ever increasing demands on their time.  For the year 2010, there are quite a few practical as well as actionable contact center trends and technologies that are helping managers save money and time.

Some of these “hot trends” include: 

 -Contact Center Analytics-The value of speech analytics, desktop analytics and customer feedback to lower the time spent doing...

Unified Agent Desktop

A unified desktop seeks to condense required call processing information onto a single desktop application and organize the sequencing of screens to coincide with workflow. Demand is growing for these products primarily due to the importance of first contact resolution (FCR).

Prior to the use of unified agent desktops,  improving FCR often came at the expense of increased handing time, as agents needed to search through myriad data sources and/or consult with others...

Many are familiar with the idea of presence at the level of what we call “device presence.” Examples of device presence include the busy lamp field on a telephone or online status for Instant Messaging. Essentially these tools show a user’s availability and perhaps their readiness for communication. But device presence only monitors the user’s presence from the standpoint of a specific device without providing status information about the user, particularly if they have stepped away from the...