ICMI's Customer Management Insight - December 2007 - (Page 43) EXPERT’S ANGLE might include scheduling a medical diagnostic procedure or scheduling photo times for family portraits. 3. THIRD-PARTY HANDOFF. The call center serves as the coordination point between two organizations providing services to a single customer. An example of a third-party handoff would be an insurance company that subcontracts to a medical services firm to set up prequalifying health exams. The difference in models underscores the complex and vital role of the call center in representing the “voice of the business” to the customer. The goal for both in-house and outsourced centers is to ensure that all rules and conditions are satisfied — which can be challenging in cases where the center has limited involvement with the ultimate business transaction. SELECTING THE BEST TOOL TO HELP CLOSE THE GAP In evaluating technologies and how to best leverage them for your call center, consider the following four A’s of effective appointment scheduling — access, authority, accuracy and accountability. Access and Authority The first and most basic requirement for any call center that is scheduling customer interactions is access. To be effective, call center agents must have clear, real-time visibility into all appointment availabilities and conflicts, often across multiple locations and resources. Access must be coupled with the right level of authority to make, and confirm, the appointment for the customer on the spot. From a technology standpoint, this entails not only centralized access to, but integration with, an icmi’s insight organizational calendaring system and individual calendars. The realtime nature of this integration is critical to preempt any overbooking. In some cases, this may also require total visibility but with some mitigating controls. There may be cases in which approval is needed prior to accessing certain times for appointments. For example, a portrait studio with more than 1,000 locations and a volume that can reach 12,000 appointments an hour leveraged a Web-based solution to provide call center agents with an automated approach to seamlessly scheduling portrait sittings concurrently with those scheduled on site and via the Web. In another example, the Department of Defense (DoD) leveraged technology to schedule appointments for the 11 million military personnel, contractors and families who had to apply for a Common Access Card. Beyond the pure volume associated with such an endeavor, it involved scheduling appointments globally. The card types ranged from general identification to specific authentication to gain access to DoD facilities and networks based on the cardholder’s credentials. In this case, the complexity of the process required a different level of control. Accuracy The second critical consideration for call center appointment scheduling is accuracy. As previously noted, to effectively represent the voice of the business, the call center must understand the full scope of the engagement, including not just scheduling personnel, resources and equipment, but also identifying customer requirements early on, to optimize the interaction, whether it’s a meeting with a financial planner or a grooming appointment for a pet. From a technology standpoint, this level of accuracy requires integration on multiple fronts. At the very least, call center agents need to know what questions to ask to ensure that they have an accurate understanding of the customer’s needs. This could entail ties to dynamic scripting software, such as Siebel SmartScript. This is particularly pertinent in the case of thirdparty handoffs, where information flow could be occurring among four parties (customer, business, call center and the third-party vendor). It ensures that the right questions are asked and the information is accurately captured and shared. A rich, rules-based engine will be required to ensure that the appointment is set correctly. It may require integration with resource scheduling and enterprise resource planning systems. For example, a technology solution must be able to acknowledge and handle the differences between scheduling a photo portrait for one person or for a family of seven. For example, a leading provider of pet supplies and services deployed a technology solution for scheduling grooming appointments, which required the call center agent to secure extensive information about the pet’s age, breed, vaccination history, allergies, etc., while setting up the appointment. This information ensures that the right resources are available when the pet is brought to the kennel or grooming center. It also provides the pet retailer with a history and profile of the customer’s pet for future scheduling and opportunities. www.icmi.com | DECEMBER 2007 43 http://www.icmi.com
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