Whitepapers
ARTICLES ON CONTACT CENTRE
Benchmarking Your Contact Center
By Avaya
Natalie Romano; Managing Principal, Strategic Consulting, Avaya Professional Services
Natalie Romano; Managing Principal, Strategic Consulting, Avaya Professional Services
To meet changing customer requirements and growing expectations, contact centers must be proactive and continuously improve their operational performance. However, shrinking budgets and other scarce resources make this task difficult.
One of the arrows in the contact center quiver is benchmarking: the process of improving performance by identifying, understanding, and adapting leading practices found both within and outside the organization. In the current environment of conflicting pressures—cost containment and growing customer demands—benchmarking can be the right tool for this difficult job.
One of the arrows in the contact center quiver is benchmarking: the process of improving performance by identifying, understanding, and adapting leading practices found both within and outside the organization. In the current environment of conflicting pressures—cost containment and growing customer demands—benchmarking can be the right tool for this difficult job.
Click to download WhitepaperAre Your Agents Following Your Scripts?
By Avaya
Lee Chong-Win; Managing Director, ASEAN, Avaya
Lee Chong-Win; Managing Director, ASEAN, Avaya
You’ve gone to great lengths to develop effective campaign scripts and you’ve invested in the technology to deliver them directly to agents as needed. But are your agents following them?
The cost of noncompliance can include everything from poor conversion rates and longer-than-expected talk times to dissatisfied customers. Agents who go off script can cause additional costly problems: longer talk times, incorrect information given to customers, and added administrative costs.
The cost of noncompliance can include everything from poor conversion rates and longer-than-expected talk times to dissatisfied customers. Agents who go off script can cause additional costly problems: longer talk times, incorrect information given to customers, and added administrative costs.
Bringing Social Media Interactions Into the Contact Center
By Avaya
Sheila McGee-Smith; Analyst and Founder, McGee-Smith Analytics
Sheila McGee-Smith; Analyst and Founder, McGee-Smith Analytics
Gone are the days of MySpace, when social media use was principally confined to high school students. Today, social media is used by consumers and businesspeople of all ages. It has become a distinct communications medium, one with unique strengths and weaknesses.
What Customers Hate About Contact Centers
By Avaya
Ajay Kapoor; Vice President, Professional Services: Strategy and Consulting, Avaya
Ajay Kapoor; Vice President, Professional Services: Strategy and Consulting, Avaya
Do you know what really bugs customers about calling in to a company’s contact center? Consumer Reports surveyed customers in July 2011 to find out, and here’s what topped its list of reported grievances concerning customer service over the phone:
The inability to reach a real person on the phone.
- Too many steps required.
- Long hold times.
- Unhelpful solutions.
- Extras being pitched.
- Lack of an apology for unsolved issues.
- Boring hold music or messages.
In a perfect world, you’d always have enough contact center agents available to handle the number of incoming calls. However, spikes in call volume can and do occur. Whether prompted by a new marketing campaign, a product recall, seasonal sales cycles, or even an unpredictable news event, managing these spikes is important. If you fail to do so, your customers have just two options: Wait or hang up!
The Role of Contact Centers in Compliance Management Systems (CMS)
By NICE Systems
According to the second Supervisory Highlights issued by the CFPB in August 2013, a CMS is how a supervised entity conducts the following six objectives:
1) establishes its compliance responsibilities;
2) communicates those responsibilities to employees;
3) ensures that responsibilities for meeting legal requirements and internal policies are incorporated into business processes;
4) reviews operations to ensure responsibilities are carried out and legal requirements are met;
5) takes corrective action, and 6) updates tools, systems and materials, as necessary.
Interaction Recording For Regulatory Compliance
By NICE Systems
Recording is an important tool to create and maintain a robust Compliance Management System (CMS) in a large or complex organization with contact centers that service customers across business lines and departments. Non-compliance within contact centers can severely impact the enterprise along all areas of its risk management structure with legal, reputational, operational and compliance risk. The contact center operations can be a crucial barometer for the overall posture of the consumer compliance risk that is inherent within the enterprise. The intelligence that can be gathered and analyzed from the contact center data can be a valuable tool to provide a 360 degree feedback loop to continually enhance and optimize your compliance management systems.
ARTICLES ON CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE
CX Mystery Shopper Awards 2017 *NEW*
By Activeo
This white paper highlights the performance and trends by the best teams in the industry who had participated in the 17th Contact Centre Association of Singapore (CCAS) International Annual Awards 2017for Voice, Email and Webchat channels. The 7 pillars of Me2B were used as the key assessment for all the participants who joined in the Awards regardless of Voice, Email or Webchat. The Social Media channel was opened for entries, however, there were no participation this year.
A total of 8 industries with various participation are primarily from the Airline, Banking, Energy Utilities, Enterprise Software, Express Logistics, Government, Hospitality and Transportation. Fieldwork was conducted from July to August 2017, Awards were presented on 6th October 2017 at the 17th CCAS International Annual Awards Gala Dinner. The list of winners was published on The Straits Times newspaper on 9th October 2017.
Digital Transformation 3.0: the Next Digital Wave in Customer Experience
By Activeo
Digital transformation is a complex process that is continuously evolving with many obstacles, challenges and pitfalls along the way. Companies who are aware of the challenges and are willing to take risks and develop agile processes to keep up with the pace of change are those that gain value from their digital transformation.
In this paper, we outline the key trends that are emerging in the digital revolution. We introduce the digital maturity levels that different organizations go through as they go digital, including the common barriers to digital transformation. Then we provide you with a holistic view of the five building blocks of digital transformation and a new customer centric model from which to understand customer needs.
This whitepaper details three simple ways to coach your teams and get real and sustained impact on your KPIs without additional coaching time. Effective communication coaching could be the key to unlocking your team’s potential. Download this insightful and easy-to-read resource to find out how!
The Best Customer Service Is Proactive Customer Service
By Avaya
Gregg Widdowson; Sales Engineering Manager, Public Sector and Ireland High Touch Sales Engineering, Avaya
Gregg Widdowson; Sales Engineering Manager, Public Sector and Ireland High Touch Sales Engineering, Avaya
Truth be told, a large percentage of the traffic into a contact center is “unwanted” traffic—unwanted either because it holds little revenue value or it detracts from the customer experience because it’s something like a service outage, incorrect bill, missed delivery date, or faulty product. When something goes wrong, the contact center is usually the first place to know about it.
Don’t Wait Around
Chances are, when customers call due to something caused by your organization, they’re probably not too happy about having to contact you! Customers would rather you alerted them to problems in advance, proactively reaching out to them when situations arise that could impact the service they receive and expect.
Why Multichannel Customer Service Is Important
By Avaya
David Lover; Vice President, Strategy and Technology, Arrow S3
David Lover; Vice President, Strategy and Technology, Arrow S3
Successfully integrating mobile apps into the organization’s customer experience strategy and processes translates to convenience, speed of service, and more first contact resolutions. Early adopters will stand out from the competition, and customers are sure to notice and share their positive experiences.
What's the state of the customer experience? 8 Key Findings
By Eptica
Delivering the best customer experience is crucial for organisations looking to win new business and retain existing customers. However, it has never been more difficult. Many companies are still struggling to deliver adequate customer service through the web, email, social media and web chat channels. So, what are the top 8 key findings of the customer experience study?
What are the 4 key attributes of successful customer engagement?
By Eptica
Creating an engaged customer community is therefore a key aim for brands and organisations across every sector. Engagement moves beyond transactional, potentially cost-based, interactions to build deeper ties between a brand and its customers. So what can organisations do to get closer to customers? To help, Gartner has identified the 4 key attributes that drive engagement...
Linguistics: The future of successful customer service
By Eptica
Applying techniques based on the scientific study of language will allow your customer service team to achieve operational excellence by understanding what customers are saying. Download our latest guide, to find more about linguistics today and its use with the customer service environment.
Knowledge Management for Customer Service Success
By Eptica
Organisations are under unprecedented pressure to deliver on customer expectations if they are to increase sales in highly competitive markets.
This white paper demonstrates the critical importance of knowledge management to your business moving forward and provides a start point for transforming your operations.
Breaking the CSAT Ceiling
Complimentary white paper from Future Perfect & Call Center
On average, a manager at a contact center spends 93 days coaching their teams each year. This is a significant time and resource commitment for both coaches and their agents. The return on this investment is often negligible, which raises the question: are we getting the most of what we put into coaching?
This whitepaper details three simple ways to coach your teams and get real and sustained impact on your KPIs without additional coaching time. Effective communication coaching could be the key to unlocking your team’s potential. Download this insightful and easy-to-read resource to find out how!
ARTICLES ON INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY
2016 Consumer Technology Trends and their Impact on the Contact Centre
By Sabio
Sabio's Study Tour has been instrumental in helping to take our Transforming Customer Contact vision forward – not only helping us to build a picture of what’s coming down the line, but also ensuring that our customers stay ahead of the curve as consumer service expectations accelerate.
The Best of Both Worlds: Delivering world-class contact centre technologies via the cloud
By Sabio
To date the contact centre industry has lagged behind other market sectors when it comes to the deployment of cloud technologies. Perhaps one of the key reasons for this - despite the many different contact centre cloud offerings that have been available - has been the lack of an approach that successfully combines the strength of a true enterprise contact centre platform with the flexibility and cost advantages of cloud deployment. With the introduction of its Sabio OnDemand powered by Avaya and powered by Verint solutions, Sabio offers the best of both worlds – enabling organisations to continue trusting their customer engagement to proven, best-in-class contact centre technologies, while enabling delivery via a more flexible hosted model.
Authentication In The Contact Center
By NICE Systems
Customer authentication is a critical process in protecting customers and the enterprise against the increasing threat of fraud that is targeting the contact center. However, this time-consuming process adversely affects operational efficiency, comprising more than 25% of average handle time (AHT). Customers also don’t appreciate being subjected to a barrage of security questions at the outset of each call. Moreover, current authentication methods, such as knowledge-based authentication and caller ID are proving inadequate against ever more sophisticated fraudsters.
To that end, enterprises are faced with the significant challenge of making the authentication process quick and easy, yet more secure.
This white paper discusses customer authentication and how voice biometrics presents a unique solution that addresses the business needs of all key stakeholders in the authentication environment – customers, customer service reps, risk managers, regulators and those measured on operational efficiency and customer experience.
NB: All Whitepapers posted here are republished with permission