Contact Management Issue 4 2015

THE CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE MAGAZINE ISSUE 4 • 2015

The Technology Issue Software and solutions to improve contact centre performance Also in this issue: ❯❯ Leveraging technology to improve sales results

❯❯ Tips for working with your IT department

❯❯ How analytics enhance operations

❯❯ Using cloud-based technology to deliver omnichannel service

❯❯ Masking solutions for protecting customer data

The Technology Issue

Leveraging technology to improve sales results

By Mike Aoki

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ho am I talking to? What do I say? What do I offer as a sale? Those are some of the questions I asked when I was a new inbound contact centre agent many years ago. Back then, there were no automated systems producing screen pop ups or suggested scripting. Instead, agents manually reviewed the caller’s account. They have to search to find clues regarding which product to offer, while simultaneously trying to solve the customer’s initial inquiry. It was manual labour: time consuming and inefficient.

Now, contact centres make use of technology to produce better, faster sales results. The following list does not focus on a particular vendor’s products. Rather, it shows the most commonly used software features for improving sales.

1

Automated call routing Customers buy from people they like and trust.

Nothing ruins trust faster than failing to resolve a client’s initial problem. It is vital to match an agent’s skill set with the customer’s inquiry. Automated call routing uses the customer’s IVR input and matches them with an agent who is equipped to help. That increases the odds of answering the customer’s initial inquiry and earning the right to up-sell.

2

Web-to-lead capture How do you convert website inquiries into sales?

One of the most obvious tactics is to call people who fill out the “For more information” or “Contact us” form on your website. To increase the likelihood of a sale, webto-lead capture software identifies which pages a prospect viewed before they filled out the “Contact us” form. That gives the agent a better understanding of the product(s) the customer viewed. For example, if a prospect stopped at the “Shipping and handling” page, then perhaps the shipping and handling fee or the delivery timeline, caused the prospect not to buy online. The agent can then focus upon those issues to close the sale over the phone.

3

Suggested product screen pop This feature analyzes the customer’s account and produces a pop up screen with suggested products to up-sell. A good system not only suggests the product but also shows HOW the customer would benefit. For example, “Based upon the past three month’s usage, the customer could save $20 a month by upgrading to the Unlimited Issue 4 • 2015

Canadian Long Distance Plan.”

4

Real-time chat coaching Team managers can have a text-based live chat with their agent during a call. Imagine a team manager listening to an agent’s call. They notice something on the customer’s account that was missed by the agent. So, they send a text to their agent, alerting them to look at that key piece of information to help them close the sale.

One important tip: ensure team managers are properly trained to use this function. That goes beyond knowing how to use the technology. It means knowing how to phrase their writing to avoid overwhelming their agent with information.

5

Automated post-call email Some software packages enable agents to send post-call emails to customers. For instance, if the customer asked for written details of an offer, an agent can automatically email it to the customer. Think of the work involved to do that task manually: looking up and copying the customer’s email address into Outlook, creating the email text and searching a hard drive/ shared drive for the right brochure to attach. Now imagine pressing one button to bring up the customer’s email address in your CRM system, with pre-written phrases and the proper attachment already in place.

That’s a huge time savings.

6

Sales tracking If you ever had to manually track a contact centre sales campaign, you know the headaches involved in dealing with too much raw information. Good sales tracking software, integrated into your CRM system, allows you save time and

coach to key sales metrics. For example, it shows if an agent has a high number of cancellations.

As a result, you can coach them to set realistic expectations with the customer. Sales tracking software also makes it much easier to run a sales spiff (reward) campaign by identifying top performers by product, region and shift.

These six technologies can help both new hires and veteran agents.

For new hires, be sure to include these features as part of your initial training. New agents need to practice incorporating screen pop ups and suggestive scripting as part of their call. They also need coaching after graduation to become “smooth” at using these tools.

One last piece of advice: all the technology in the world is useless if your agents lack the soft skills training to use these tools effectively.

Invest in the proper sales and customer service workshops so your inbound agents can resolve their caller’s initial request and leverage the resulting goodwill to up-sell the appropriate product.

This combination of technology and people skills will boost your team’s sales results and net promoter scores.

Mike Aoki is the president of Reflective Keynotes Inc. (www.reflectivekeynotes. com ), a Canadian training company that helps contact centres improve their sales, customer service and management results. A call centre expert, Mike has been interviewed by the Customer Experience Show and the Globe and Mail. He also serves on the Advisory Council of GTACC (www. gtacc.ca) and was Master of Ceremonies for their 2012, 2013 and 2014 Annual Conferences.

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The Technology Issue

How analytics enhance operations

By Michael Pawlak and Craig Carothers

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he customer’s demands upon and expectations of contact centres are changing, but not as quickly as a company’s ability to efficiently respond to the impact of these changes within its operations.

Contact centres typically provide service to customers during both the sales and service phases of the relationship. These operations are tasked with helping customers resolve questions or issues with their products, services, billing and other activities. This model is often a reactive one and is designed to minimize service costs while maintaining a certain level of customer satisfaction; however, these often can be opposing strategies.

Service is emerging as a more consistent differentiator.

Organizations that typically competed on product features and functions are now edging ahead of competitors with premium offerings and other value-added services. The difference between a good contact centre operation and a great one typically lies in a company’s ability to efficiently monitor and respond to key activities within its operations, predict future demand and optimize service elements to achieve the best outcomes. Small improvements will have material impact on costs, as well as revenue.

In the context of that overarching environment, analytics technology can drive value by optimizing a variety of business process, from better staffing management to more efficient contact distribution to more effective upselling. And it can provide insight into questions that other technologies cannot.

Today’s challenges In today’s highly competitive business environment, where a company’s reputation can be dramatically affected by a few keystrokes anywhere in the world, recognizing the value of providing superior customer service is critical to a company’s profitability and long-term viability. Adding to these challenges, contact centre operations rely on a multitude of transactional systems, each generating large volumes of disparate data, usually stored independently.

We’re collecting more and more information every day about our customers, both personally and in aggregate.

Analytics offers the ability to perform behavioural analysis of customers based on that data. Consider a mobile phone carrier: There’s a wealth of data to draw from: billing information, applications, patterns of use, etc. When do our customers primarily use SMS? When do they use social media? When do they use their phones as phones?

Analytics provide insights in near-real-time that can help solve the problems of proper staffing, queuing and contact distribution by helping understand why a customer is making contact.

At the same time customers are demanding new channels for support, including social media, short messaging service and email. The contact centre 4 | contact management

operations rate of investment in information technology (IT) to drive operational efficiencies and effectiveness are much lower than demand growth rates, so managing the volume of customer contact is a challenge.

This is where integrated contact centre analytics can offer high value to contact centre operations. To ensure the customer experience is positive, leading organizations are moving from a reactive contact centre operation to one that is proactive, transitioning from a simple receiveand-respond mindset to one designed to monitor, alert, predict and optimize customer interactions. Topperforming contact centres typically have more satisfied customers, lower operating costs and higher revenue per customer.

queuing and contact distribution processes can also add to the time to resolution and, in a contact centre environment, time literally is money.

Analytics offers a more granular approach to the volume of data collected and in near-real-time.

Transaction-based, spreadsheetdriven tools can’t manage the same levels of granularity—the specificity of queries. More granular analysis means better demand prediction, which in turn leads to more efficient staffing decisions.

Accurately predicting service volume provides contact centre executives and managers with the critical information needed to effectively support strategic and tactical planning activities. One of the most elusive targets in any contact centre operation is the ability

Contact centre operations need a powerful forecasting engine combined with robust optimization technology Strategically, analytics can offer value in three areas: demand planning and resource optimization, performance assessment and enriching the customer experience.

Demand planning and resource optimization The most pressing challenge for contact centre management today—and the one with the highest potential savings—is staffing and resource management. Most staffing management technology is spreadsheet based—a valuable technology, but one that isn’t predictive. Thus, we often end up with contact centre staff that are idle, expensive (for obvious reasons) or swamped, with delays to resolution that frustrate customers. Complex

to accurately predict demand. With the erratic nature of consumer demand and the ever-growing list of internal and external influencers, it is a daily struggle for contact centre operations to accurately identify the service in order to schedule staffing.

Another elusive target for contact centres is the ability to identify the right amount of staffing needed to meet predicted demand.

A combination of limitations in forecasting accuracy, disparate data sources, antiquated methodologies and cumbersome manual processes result in inefficient, inaccurate staffing decisions being made.

Poor staffing decisions have a direct impact on operational costs (whether by overscheduling or under scheduling) and an indirect impact Issue 4 • 2015

The Technology Issue on customer satisfaction. With staff costs being the largest operations expense in any organization, it is critical to optimize staff supply to meet service volume demand.

Ultimately, contact centre leaders want to be able to see where they are headed and then contemplate various scenarios of what could happen in order to determine the best course of action to take. They will have to make decisions that will impact the business which require fact-based information, not hunches or guesswork. Contact centre operations need a powerful forecasting engine combined with robust optimization technology that moves far beyond current Erlang-C-driven models. This enables organizations to harness impacts of changes in customer demand to ensure the right mix of skilled resources that are needed at the lowest cost all while exceeding service level expectations.

These technologies enable contact centre operations to significantly improve strategic and tactical planning, dramatically reduce or eliminate manual data gathering processes, lower operational costs and improve operational efficiency.

Also, using analytics to measure the impact of variances enables contact centre management to estimate the impact on operations instantaneously, increasing the speed- to- value with significantly less effort. Analysts and planners can finally shift from spending 80% of their time on data gathering and manipulation to spending 80% of their time on adding value to the business.

Performance assessment Performance assessment has two major areas of focus: root cause analysis and impact evaluation.

Root cause analysis Why do support contacts fluctuate? What events lead to spikes in contact volume? Analytics platforms—especially visual analytics platforms with an interface aimed at the business user rather than the IT department—allow management to explore the relationships among these variables and, again, improve the ability to predict demand Improved staff planning from the insights of root cause analysis reduces overtime and over-staffing—as well as understaffing, which leads to longer handling times.

Consider that a poorly planned staffing environment can have a variance of 200% full-time equivalents (FTEs) at an average of $50,000 in wages, benefits and overhead. The impact is material.

First contact resolution rate has a huge impact on the bottom line. Considering the cost of each customer contact (for example, in many contact centres, this ranges between five and six dollars per contact), contact centres strive to achieve a 70% to 75% FCR rate. Analytics can provide rich data insight that helps to automate the routing of a customer contact to the resource most likely to provide that resolution. By better aligning resources to customer needs, significant improvements in FCR rate can be achieved. It can also provide an analysis of where training for specific customer needs is required. Analytics can also help strip the complexity out of queuing system design by predicting the likely paths of IVR contacts.

For an enterprise contact centre, an average reduction of one second in handle time over the volume it receives in a year could save tens of millions of dollars. Having a backend analytical platform that has a context to map contact routing more efficiently can reduce time on virtually every contact, saving millions of dollars.

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Analytics in any customer contact situation… is about delivering the right offer to the right customer at the right time.

Impact evaluation Analytics can be applied to isolate the impact of changes to the contact handling process, discovering what works and what doesn’t for the customer. Impact evaluation can improve contact centre performance in a number of ways: • Improving self-serve capabilities; • Assessing the drivers of net promoter scoring, customer churn and upselling opportunities; • Improving next best action recommendation by customer segment; and • Isolating efficiencies, incremental revenue opportunities and cost saving opportunities.

Enriching customer experience The contact centre is a component within a customer experience ecosystem, and analytics can help solidify an organization’s ability to enrich the customer experience.

The vast volumes of customer, transaction and unstructured data can help an enterprise better understand demand and leverage the contact centre to execute more effectively.

Analytics in any customer contact situation, whether it’s point of sale, online shopping or in a contact centre environment, is about delivering the right offer to the right customer at the right time. In a contact centre, that’s also about directing the contact to the right resource who has the right information. Analytics can match the client to the right resource. And since, as we noted above, the data can predict the need for certain resources, we can plan training to make sure we have the right mix of expertise.

This enriched customer service environment can encourage clients to cross-sell or upsell themselves.

By delivering a next best offer to the contact centre agent, the agent has a better opportunity to drive incremental revenue and improve

customer retention. Next best offer takes into account multiple factors and predicts the basis for interaction, based on customer interests, behaviour, previous interactions and product holdings.

Final thoughts Analytics’ role in staff planning, performance assessment and enriching the customer experience staffing and execution compound: one plus one plus one equals five, not three: • Reduction in cost of service; • Increased revenue; • Service level improvements; • Planning processes improvement; and • Staff performance improvement.

Most importantly, analytics can help enrich the customer experience and increase long-term customer value by driving efficiencies and enhancing strategy to have an impact on the bottom line.

Michael Pawlak has over 25 years of customer interaction management experience across multiple industries. As a service operations domain principal specializing in the art of leveraging analytic technology to improve human interaction experiences, Michael works with SAS customers addressing challenges in harnessing vast amounts of disparate operational data to gain business insights and transform service operations.

Craig Carothers is the principal of forecasting, planning and optimization for SAS Canada with a cross-industry focus. He has over 25 years of diversified experience integrating systems and analytical applications to optimize performance by translating data related to product usage, customer interactions, operations and cost into actionable insights to drive efficiencies, increase customer value, enhance strategy, enrich the customer experience and have a direct impact on the bottom line.

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The Technology Issue

Protecting customer data with DTMF masking solutions

By Russell Pelham

C

riminals around the globe are on the hunt for consumers’ personal information and they know where to find it—stored within the processing environments of merchants everywhere.

They are also good at getting to it, as evidenced by a group of cyber thieves who posed as members of the internal IT staff and convinced call centre agents at Cox Communications in Washington D.C. to enter their username and password into a fake website they had created. Armed with the stolen credentials, the group of teenagers accessed 61 accounts and caused general mischief including changing passwords and posting personal information on social media. For this event Cox Communications was fined $595,000 by the Federal Communications Commission, which equates to an average of $10,000 per compromised account.

But the fines levied after a breach are just one part of the equation. Don’t forget the claims made by issuing banks if the event results in fraudulent transactions against their cardholders, and then there are the technical and trainingrelated costs to fix the inherent security flaws.

Of course, the impact of a breach goes far beyond the penalties and remediation costs mentioned above—it also comes with a loss of customer confidence that can hurt brand ratings and future revenue. So far, the court of public opinion has been clearly unsympathetic. In the weeks following the announcement that retailing giant Target experienced a data breach, their market cap dropped by $2 billion.

Add in the sizable investment in advertising and corporate communications to restore a positive image and rebuild confidence after an event and then you will begin to realize the true cost of exposing your consumer’s data.

To protect their own financial interests, the payment brands (Visa, MasterCard, American Express, JCB and Discover) have created a long list of requirements that merchants must follow to ensure that customer information is kept safe. These requirements make up the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS).

Merchants that do not meet these standards face higher processing costs, penalties from the issuing banks and increased liability in case of a breach.

What are the options available to merchants?

Although PCI DSS compliance sets a standard for security controls, it is not a solution to the systemic issue of having sensitive information processed through your environment.

In other words, you could be PCI DSS compliant but still be at risk of insider/employee fraud or a security breach that could result in customer data being stolen.

It’s not easy to secure contact centres—they are generally complex, systems-rich environments with large numbers of employees and high staff turnover.

Often merchants strive to enact a “clean-room” environment—which means that agents cannot have access to personal cell phones, paper/pens, email and internet connectivity or even wear jewellery (there have 6 | contact management

been documented examples of agents wearing earrings that had hidden transmitters to aid in the capture of the cardholder data). You can imagine the impact on employee morale when you enforce these draconian measures.

Transferring customers to an Interactive Voice Response system to complete the payment process removes the agent and desktop from the PCI scope, but results in lower consumer satisfaction and higher abandonment rates. Not something you want after working so hard to get the order.

If the merchant records the calls for any reason, these problems are intensified. Efforts to avoid the accidental capture of card details by recording equipment are not always successful; the practice of pausing the call recording during the exchange of cardholder data is not best practice and is subject to error. Encrypting or redacting the payment within the call recording is just another Band-Aid solution with its own inherent costs and issues.

So what should you do to address these issues? The smart strategy is to plan for the event. Instead of wondering what will happen if you have a breach, you should consider planning for when it happens. What will the thieves find when they get in?

Protecting the contact centre the right way One innovative method of securing voice payments has reached maturity. In this process, customers are instructed by the agent to enter their credit card details via their telephone keypad, instead of reading them out loud to the agent. A dedicated security device intercepts the incoming tones (known as DTMF signals) at the front edge of the network and replaces the variable tones with flat tones that all sound the same.

The captured card data is sent securely to the merchant’s payment processor/tokenization vendor in real time and the result of the transaction

(minus the sensitive information) is provided back to the agent’s user interface and the backend CRM system to allow the order process to continue as normal.

The agent and the customer are in constant contact during the payment process, eliminating the increase in abandonment rates associated with IVR systems. Of course, pausing the call recording and creating a call centre clean-room environment is no longer necessary.

Since the cardholder data is no longer propagated in its original format, all the components that support the agent-customer interaction are immediately removed from the scope of PCI compliance, including the internal network, the agent and desktop, the call routing systems (PBX & ACD), the CRM and the call recording media.

More importantly, the customer’s payment information no longer enters the merchant’s processing environment—if the thieves do get in, there is nothing to steal.

This solution can be applied to any numeric data, including social insurance numbers.

Protect your brand image You can’t underestimate the impact of a data breach from your processing environment that results in stolen credit card info or the impact that a rogue employee can have with access to cardholder data. The cost to remediate and recover from these events can be astronomical.

Eliminating the repository of sensitive data will keep your image from being tarnished and should be your first line of defence.

Russell Pelham is a pre-sales engineer at Semafone (www.semafone.com), a PADSS (PCI) certified payment application and the recognized global leader in delivering DTMF masking solutions, allowing merchants to reduce the scope of the PCI audit and creating a more secure call centre environment. To speak with Russell, you can email him at Russell.Pelham@semafone.com.

Issue 4 • 2015

The Technology Issue

Tips for working with your IT department to become an omnichannel champion

By Emily Nielsen

A

chieving great customer experience for any organization is a team effort, meaning everyone has to play their part in assisting the contact centre in achieving its objectives, and IT departments can help you achieve your goals!

Many contact centres have an “us and them” mindset between themselves and the IT department. This mindset can negatively impact an organization’s customer experience. Management commonly complains about how the technology does not support the needs of the contact centre. On the other hand, IT complains about the lack of direction provided by management regarding the call centre.

What can be done when the gap between both groups seems so wide?

Come together—like the Beetles’ song suggests, organizations and their people must come together to succeed in this extremely competitive world. For a variety of reasons, most organizations have structured themselves into silos, which prevents collaboration. However, and more than ever, in order to provide the experience customers expect there must be more collaboration from inside the organization.

Organizations have to think and act differently as call centres evolve into multichannel or omnichannel environments. This means marketing, contact centre, operations and IT staff need to come together as one to provide the customer with an experience that is effortless, pleasant and supporting of the organization’s brand.

Roll out the welcome mat For many business units, contacting the IT department is usually done when things aren’t working. As a result, Issue 4 • 2015

the relationship between IT and rest of the business is reactive rather than proactive and lacking in collaboration.

Also, IT departments are frequently left out of the business planning cycle and usually are only brought into the discussion at the end of the decision making process. Not including them early in the planning stage often creates a level of resentment which causes the business units to believe that IT departments are not responsive to their needs.

Engaging IT early in the planning discussions ensures that they include your project as part of their own planning cycle and they are able to adequately allocate the right resources with the right skill set to assist with your project. Depending on their own challenges they may need to outsource third-party support or hire additional staff in order to provide the expected level of support to the entire organization.

Moving to the cloud With the introduction of cloud services some organizations view this as an opportunity to get services delivered faster and without the need to consult with their own in-house IT department. When considering

an upgrade to your contact centre, especially to a cloud-managed solution, IT can play a significant role in assisting in scrutinizing features, functionality, and interoperability to other business systems. They are also subject experts in identifying the hidden cost of operating technology platforms which can include complex licensing agreements, differentiate between tier one and two support models, server requirements, etc.

Contact centre technology upgrades should always follow the same stringent procurement process similar to other investments.

Cloud contact agent services for the Canadian market are relatively new, therefore it is impossible to 100% validate core functionality and support when so few clients are actually using the technology. It will be difficult to check references considering the life cycle of the offering is in its earliest stage. It’s the obligation of the IT department that the business unit chooses wisely and does not get caught up in the sales hype. Choosing poorly hurts the entire corporation.

Don’t blame the technology As more new omnichannel Continued on page CM 10

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The Technology Issue

How cloud-based technology can help your organization deliver omnichannel service

By Andrew McNair

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s customer experience demands evolve, today’s consumers have progressed from first resisting technology-based service offerings to accepting them and they now frequently embrace digitally based solutions as their preferred communication channel.

Findings from the latest Global Contact Centre Benchmarking Report by Dimension Data highlight a dramatic evolution in the industry as digital interaction fuelled by mobility continues an explosive growth as a contact method. In some areas, digital interactions are starting to exceed voice contacts, and the Report forecasts it to emerge as the dominant interaction channel as early as the end of 2017. The consumer is leading a digital revolution and it is forcing service providers to adapt or die.

Ready for the digital future?

The frictionless switching between channels that defines what has been described as the omnichannel experience can provide a crucial competitive differentiator. It provides connected services across a variety of mediums, as customers hop between devices and technologies to progress inquiries and new business opportunities. And while it’s being demanded by consumers, the industry is still slow to catch up.

Worryingly, up to 88% of operations point out that their current, often telephone-centric systems won’t meet their future needs, and many are already failing against current requirements. Add new digital channels to the mix and a backdrop of consistent drops in customer experience scores and the picture could get much worse.

The omnichannel solution is the hot ticket in the market today: everybody wants one, everybody needs one, but few have been able to obtain it. It is forcing vendors and consumers alike to explore new buying options and design innovative technology frameworks.

Strategy, not technology The requirement for integrated technologies across multiple channels is causing organizations to review their strategic roadmap, accepting the increasing urgency to introduce digital channels. Servicing everyone at anytime, anywhere, in any medium is an ambitious vision.

8 | contact management

The biggest blockages to an organization’s advancement of their contact centres’ technology capabilities revolve around flexibility, the ability to integrate and the costs linked to creating the required architecture. In many cases, the capital expenditure associated with the early replacement of legacy hardware has been prohibitive.

There needs to be a balance between maximizing past investments and getting access to the new required technologies. This is forcing vendors and consumers alike to explore new buying options and design innovative technology frameworks. The emergence of cloud technology platforms offers new choices to contact centre providers.

We’re starting to notice significant changes in how organizations are both provisioning and maintaining their technology systems.

Into the cloud The contact centre has software at its core, so it’s no longer about infrastructure, it’s about architecture. Cloud-based, or as-aservice, technology offerings are presenting organizations with an opportunity to reassess how they provision outcomes-based solutions from the perspective of business, commercial, technical and operating architectures.

The opportunity to leverage flexible commercial models, combined with the ability to outsource increasingly specialized capability, is a growing interest.

Cloud solutions can offer seamless integration with current applications, instant scale and easier regulatory compliance. However, the risks of migrating from an owned and/ or rented model to a completely hosted/cloud solution has been a task too large and risky for many organizations.

Hybrid solutions, as a mixture of legacy infrastructure and cloud, can be the catalyst that will help organizations to leverage existing infrastructure better and accelerate change.

The industry is starting to notice.

In the last 12 months, contact centres choosing pure ownership models have reduced by 22.6%. Of contact centres that aren’t using hosted/cloud solutions yet, 34.2% are considering a hosted technology model in the near future. Add this to the existing user base, and it is apparent that hybrid solutions blending cloud architectures with legacy technologies are gaining popularity across the industry, particularly as case study evidence validates the significant benefits enabled by cloud solutions.

Current users of hosted/cloud technologies are reporting a powerful impact on their businesses. Of users with an opinion, 88.8% agree that they have reduced costs, which are partially linked to the 85.7% saying it allows them to pay for only what they use. As many as 90.8% confirm that it offers improved flexibility, while 84.2% report that it increases agility and speed-to-market. The Issue 4 • 2015

The Technology Issue most common challenges for hosted cloud solutions are reliability and technology uptime, but concerns and negative experiences fall far short of positive feedback.

Of all users, just 4.5% have decided that pay-as-you-use services aren’t for them.

Don’t get left behind The speed at which the digital revolution is affecting contact centres can no longer be ignored. Complexity levels are intensifying as contact centres evolve into channel resolution hubs. Customer experience levels are cited as key, yet satisfaction levels are dropping year on year.

The combination of technology that is creating an omnichannel environment and the ability to analyze and act in real time provides powerful resources to create a productive, digital customer engagement model.

Big data and analytics tools are predicted to be the strongest trend to shape the contact centre industry over the next five years. Understanding the intricacies of individual transactions as well as the context of customer behavior over multiple contacts and channels is paramount. It will help the organization address customers’ issues, shape their experiences and enrich the engagement, creating greater value for both parties.

Tighter management controls, improved analytics and more active marketing of the digital capability to customers will quickly have positive results. The growth in digital has fallen below targets to date, but is set for significant acceleration. The cloud will enable the speed of transition.

Customers take centre stage Better analytics will create an ability to design channel management strategies that align every customer experience to the value it has for the organization. It will guarantee success for those whose competitive strategy is differentiation through service. Just as crucial is understanding how customers’ experience is shaped by their interactions across sales, marketing and service engagements.

So, should you explore a cloud strategy for your contact centre? Yes, but each organization must understand why it is investigating a cloud solution and ensure that there is a strategy in place. Cloud isn’t an all-or-nothing decision.

Companies need to know where, when, how and why to fully leverage its benefits.

The ability to source and manage information, to create insights and knowledge for experts or applications, is central to an effective strategy, particularly in today’s hypercompetitive markets. The isolated, traditional, telephone-based contact centre has run its course strategically. There will be some teething issues as organizations catch up, but the technology is there and accessible. The future is bright, for consumers and providers alike. Equally the future will not stand still, so neither must the contact centre.

Andrew McNair has been with Dimension Data for 14 years and has held the position of head of global benchmarking since 2010. With 18 years’ senior customer management experience across the UK, Europe, Australia, North America and South Africa, he possesses exceptional industry insight and a wealth of strategic vision. Andrew’s role encompasses responsibilities as head of solutions, allowing for continued practitioner involvement on the evolution of the industry.

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Continued from page CM 7

applications are deployed, often contact centres are the first to blame the technology when outcomes are not fully realized. In most incidents the disappointing results of any new application more often is the result of inadequate training and lack of attention to changing processes.

Often business units see the technology as a way of solving a problem, but they too have to understand that in today’s world of omnichannel delivery modes, people and processes are critical to success. Often call centres try to anticipate these changes but their staff may not be the best resources to identify the right skills required. When this happens it is a good time to bring in outside help to assist in your journey.

Customer journey mapping provides an honest perspective—too often organizations think they have a complete understanding of their customer needs, but sometimes they are too close to the situation. Customer journey mapping is perfect for providing your business with a reality check on what your customers feel about your organization. The primary point of this exercise is to identify the customer effort required to obtain products or services from your organization. If the effort is too high, then it is safe to assume that the level of customer satisfaction is low. Journey mapping of your customer touch points will identify areas of frustration and inefficiencies that could be caused from a combination of factors from all three areas of technology, people and process.

Demand the time As call centres evolve into multimedia or omnichannel environments, they become more complex with the increasing number of new applications. The increase in the number of applications and the complexity has a significant impact on both the time to install and adequately test the new services. IT needs a reasonable window in order to properly execute the project. In the meantime, new processes have to be developed, tested and adapted. Don’t be pushed by the fiscal year-end deadline; be armed to defend your expanded project timelines.

Companies which lead in outstanding customer experience have taken years in getting it right. An example is Telus Corporation, who started their journey six years ago and now have outpaced both Bell and Rogers in providing outstanding customer experience.

Demanding the time to properly scope out all of the related dependences of this changing environment will produce a better outcome.

If organizations want to embrace an outward facing omnichannel experience for their customers, they first must look inwardly to remove the walls that have built over time. Contact centre leaders need to work closely with their IT counterparts in order to ensure a successful omnichannel experience for both your clients and staff.

Having a team approach will increase your ability to achieving a highly effective customer experience which in turns contributes positivity to the organization’s brand.

Emily Nielsen is one of Canada’s leading communications strategists. As a business owner and entrepreneur, clients benefit from her strong business acumen and her ability to align technology projects to business needs that produce superior results. Her firm specializes in Contact Centre and Unified Communications (UC) strategies whose primary focus is on customer experience and business adoption.

Issue 4 • 2015