CRM - February 2008 - (Page insert7)

Sponsored Content February 2008 7 and ensure better customer satisfaction and loyalty. • Cost Savings and Sustainable Growth: Investing in your agents will result in an optimal business outcome by making your contact center your best branding vehicle, and by saving costs and driving company profitability. GETTING THE MOST FROM YOUR AGENTS blending and policies that reduce agent stress and inactive periods. Self-service, call backs, multi-contact center load balancing, and outsourcing should also be utilized to handle peak call volumes. Empowerment Your policies should strive to create an enjoyable work environment and foster agent satisfaction. Agent suggestions and feedback should be encouraged and acknowledged, agents should be continually trained, and they should be recognized and rewarded for their performance. They should also have a variety of tasks to perform and some freedom in choosing how and when to accomplish tasks, take breaks or schedule shifts. NINE WINNING STRATEGIES handles all customer interactions, regardless of media, and intelligently routes them to suitable agents based on business rules that take into account such factors as urgency, agent availability, customer history and queue length. 3) Utilize self-service applications: Agents generally experience the greatest job satisfaction when they can help customers resolve complex queries, rather than when they have to repeatedly answer the same simple questions over and over again. Well-designed self-service applications are an efficient way to make agents feel both productive and happy, because they’re ideal for handling the simple, repetitive tasks that can quickly lead to boredom, dissatisfaction and increased agent churn rates. In addition, when the self-service application is integrated with the routing engine for your contact center interactions, you can better assist the customer if they decide that they actually do want to speak with an agent. 4) Build a virtual contact center: Before the rise of IP telephony, contact centers with multiple locations often worked in geographical silos. IP telephony adoption makes it easier and cheaper for companies to route interactions to the optimal location and agent. With a contact center solution that can ‘oversee’ the complete state of each location in real time, a per transaction decision can be made to send the interaction to an idle agent in any location, resulting in better load distribution. 5) Choose the appropriate agent for each customer: With skills-based routing, the system will know, for example, what languages every agent speaks, which products they have been trained to handle, and even the types of media they can manage—and the skills-based routing engine will then find the most appropriate (highest skilled) available agent. With customer-centric routing, new or high-value customers can be handled with special care, while customers that have a history of late or non-payment can be routed to your Your success in reaping the value of increased agent productivity and satisfaction depends on attention to four key areas: Automation, Measurement, Effectiveness, and Empowerment. Automation Your call center should make the most of technology to assist agents in their work. Basic caller information should be collected by an automated system, and calls intelligently routed to self-service or a skills-matched agent. On each call agents should have access to all appropriate customer data and history, as well as tools to process the customer request, guarantee an efficient customer experience, and ensure first contact resolution. Measurement Your contact center should measure quality, efficiency, productivity and business metrics. Top-line business and performance goals for the organization should transparently cascade down through recognized group and individual key performance indicators (KPIs). Individual agents should be able to view their performance against KPIs in real time at their desktops, while you track progress across all measures, benchmark against the competition and track customer satisfaction ratings down to individual agents with real time post-call surveys. Effectiveness You should manage customer interactions according to segmentation rules aligned with your business goals, route them to appropriate agents or self-service channels, and manage varying traffic conditions with flexible call-handling, automated task Genesys has developed proven, actionable strategies that you can implement to help to increase Agent Productivity and Satisfaction – and your bottom line. 1) Effectively utilize customer data: Before a word is even spoken by an agent, it is possible to identify the customer calling, check the products and services the customer has previously purchased, determine the value of the customer to the business and look up details of recent interactions. All of this information—taken together—helps inform decisions on how best to handle the call. By applying different methods intelligently, you can maximize the number of customers you recognize, route calls to the most appropriate agent, and increase first contact resolution—all while saving time and increasing agent productivity. 2) Implement interaction blending: The goal of interaction blending is to implement a much greater level of consistency and efficiency in how interactions are distributed to, and handled by, your staff. Call blending provides contact centers with a way to make use of resources that would otherwise remain idle when traffic slows down. With Multimedia blending the key is to create a universal queue that

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of CRM - February 2008

CRM - February 2008 Contents Front Office Reality Check Customer Centricity The Tipping Point The Loyalty Riddle CRM Drives Down-Market Out of the Gate: Marketers Rate ’08 Traits The Pulse Consultants Adapt to CRM’s Changing Landscape Required Reading Cover Story: CRM Gets Serious Contact Center Solutions Always On Rumble in the Office The Smallest Slice Tying Up Cable’s Loose Ends Burning Up the Paper Trail Sunny Skies for Knology No More Bumps for BlueRoads Secret of My Success Re:Tooling Scouting Report Pint of View

CRM - February 2008

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