1to1 Magazine - November/December 2008 - (Page 30) Brazil’s Decree Ignites Passion for Service Brazilians are so enraged about receiving subpar customer service that President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva issued a decree this past August stating that companies must fix customers’ issues or pay fines. Complaints to Brazil’s contact centers have risen in recent years, with long hold times and transfers happening all too often. “Consumers asked for this law. It’s not something that happened overnight,” says Weslyeh Mohriak, president, Peppers & Rogers Group Latin America and Iberia. Under the new decree, calls can only be transferred once and companies can’t keep customers on hold more than two minutes. Also, any company that handles complaints and cancellations must record its agents 24/7, and IVR systems have to include an agent choice in the first-tier menu. If the IVR asks a caller for numerical identification, the agent cannot ask for the number again, and if a customer asks to cancel a service, the agent must cancel it without trying to retain the customer or sell him something else. The decree also states that agents must be well trained and courteous at all times and if a company has had previous dealings with a customer, his last transactions must be presented on the agent’s screen. Companies had 120 days from September 1 to prepare their agents and call centers to comply with the decree. Mohriak says that even though companies didn’t budget for these deployments and “The result is this will getting their centers up to be a better country speed by the end of the year and everyone will have will be challenging, he believes better service.” that ultimately it will benefit everyone. “Overall, this is very good,” Mohriak says. “The result is this will be a better country and everyone will have better service.” keep costs down and increases call deflection so agents can concentrate on more complex queries. “Clearly, more service is also moving toward email and chat,” says Jacada Senior Vice President of Global Marketing David Holmes. Yet, from a call center perspective, he says, it will be a challenge to maintain the same quality of customer service via email and chat that is typically offered via the phone. Holmes explains that the multichannel trend is driving a dramatic increase in the percentage of complex interactions for call centers as the easier transactions (change of address, account balance checks) are the ones being performed online. As a result, contact centers must equip a higher percentage of their call center agents to handle more complex interactions. For customers who prefer contacting an agent, regardless of channel, many companies are working to keep interaction time down and increase first contact resolution by investing in a knowledge base to ensure agents can access information seamlessly. “It’s a very competitive environment right now,” says Sandy Erickson, director of application product management at RightNow Technologies. “We’re seeing companies take a hard look at the investments they can make to improve cost savings while also improving the experience.” What U.S. companies have improved upon is managing calls in a holistic fashion by using VoIP. For example, a company might seamlessly route calls to a center in, say, Singapore or India to balance agent workloads. “They’re blending the call volume and call types in a more dynamic way and they’re using the same software tools across all touchpoints,” Enkata’s Stamm says, adding that this allows managers to make adjustments in how they flow call types. “Performance management tools become much more critical in this environment, as each agent’s skill set must be more carefully managed.” As some U.S. businesses wrestle with these technology-related issues, many others also face a more people-focused challenge: adding multilingual capabilities in a cost-effective manner. Lorne Zalesin, CEO, of Myinsuranceexpert.com faces that dilemma as the numbers of Spanish- and Korean-speaking consumers contacting the company continue to grow. The company just hired its first Spanish-speaking agent, but the Korean prospects represent a lost revenue opportunity because their contact with the company results in a complete “no-touch” sale. “They apply online and we send an appropriate plan based on our best guess,” Zalesin says. “We can’t advise them because we can’t communicate.” As for the growing Spanish-speaking population, Zalesin says he plans to eventually add more Spanish-speaking agents. He is also considering opening a Spanish-speaking call center, possibly in Belize, if the demand is high enough. Some companies in the U.S. are reaching out to universities with foreign language centers to try to combat their language barriers. “Students need the income, and contact centers get their hands on foreign language speakers,” says Bill Durr, principal global solutions consultant at Verint. IP adoption is high in Europe and Africa With European contact centers sharing many of the economic challenges that those in the United States face, many European companies are hiring homebased agents, and using IP tools to link them to their primary contact center. Dimension Data’s Sainsbury says that Europe and the U.K. employ more than twice as many home-based agents as any other region in the world. RightNow Technologies’ Erickson adds that many factors contribute to this trend, including 30 1to1 magazine www.1to1media.com http://www.1to1media.com
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