Direct Marketing Magazine March 2016

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vol. 29 • No. 3 • march 2016

The Authority on Data-Driven Engagement & Operations

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How FUSE retooled for the tech, digital, social and XM era

From left to right: FUSE President Stephen Brown, CEO Garo Keresteci and Chair Mike Preston.

2016 marketing data now available

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Vol. 29 | No. 3 | March 2016

How FUSE retooled for the tech, digital, social and XM era

EDITOR Sarah O’Connor - sarah@dmn.ca PRESIDENT Steve Lloyd - steve@dmn.ca DESIGN / PRODUCTION Jennifer O’Neill - jennifer@dmn.ca Advertising Sales Mark Henry - mark@dmn.ca CONTRIBUTING WRITERS Gavin Gustafson Peter Baker Andrew McNair Sangeeta Bhatnagar Emily Nielsen Rachel Brink Stephen Shaw Stephen Brown Paul Van Dam Leigh-Ann Clarke LLOYDMEDIA INC. HEAD OFFICE / SUBSCRIPTIONS / PRODUCTION:

Targeting & Acquisition 302-137 Main Street North

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Four reasons to consider speech analytics

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High-value direct mail generates Six customer trends impacting huge response for unlikely products contact centres in 2016

Engagement & Analytics

Canada Post Canadian Publications Mail Sales Product Agreement No. 40050803

How Great Wolf Resorts increased customer satisfaction while reducing labour costs

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STARS: Soaring to new heights with direct mail

Twitter: @DMNewsCanada

Marketing Automation

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Automating the ecosystem march 2016

Improving customer satisfaction through WFM

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POSTMASTER: Please send all address changes and return all undeliverable copies to: Lloydmedia Inc. 302-137 Main Street North Markham ON L3P 1Y2 Canada

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Privacy and social engineering in the contact centre

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TD Bank introduces customer service through Facebook Messenger DMN.ca ❰

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Targeting & Acquisition

High-value direct mail generates huge response for unlikely products Spray foam insulation gets a sexy makeover; moving big rigs with postcards

By Leigh-Ann Clarke

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f you were to ask Betsy Cosper, vice president marketing at Icynene, if direct mail generates excitement for her business, she would say “absolutely. And, who knew this could happen to spray foam?” ❱ DMN.ca

Cosper, an experienced marketing authority from working at Mars brands, Scotts and Novopharm, is the first person to acknowledge that her product category may not be the sexiest. But people need to properly insulate their commercial and residential buildings; so promoting

Icynene’s effective solution is of strong interest to certain buyers and buyerinfluencers. One such influencer group is the commercial architects who specify insulation in their projects.

Joe Amaral, creative director at Icynene’s advertising agency Clever Samurai, was tasked with the

challenge of creating a connection between Icynene and commercial architects from leading firms in the United States. In looking at spray foam insulation and considering its major competitor being rigid board products from companies like Owens Corning versus other spray foam companies, March 2016

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Targeting & Acquisition

“Demand generation campaigns in any category have many things in common. The most important of these is to ensure that each component of the campaign has a specific purpose and that purpose is not compromised by asking too much of the specific media.”

Amaral believed that spray foam gives architects the option to create buildings with fluid curved lines, thereby allowing for more ingenuity in building design.

The insight resulted in a highly personalized campaign released in January 2016, where a hand drawn illustration was created of a building designed by the targeted architect. The illustration was then printed on a subtly branded Icynene t-shirt, accompanied by a letter and packaged in a beautiful tube. The plan was for the Icynene sales team to follow-up the package with a sales call to arrange a time to discuss the benefits of spray foam in commercial building construction. But the plan slightly changed.

Cosper has been receiving inbound requests from architectural firms march 2016

asking for more branded t-shirts, with one firm wanting 25. Meantime, the sales team is running through its list of targets and Cosper is now evaluating running a similar program in Canada.

“Direct mail can form an effective part of the media mix, despite the ever-changing channel landscape.

Digital and social channels, access to more data and more specialized publications all provide leverage to improve direct mail results”, says Clever Samurai Account Director Joanna Carbajal, who has a Masters degree in management analytics and works on the Icynene business.

“Nothing works in isolation,” she adds.

Beyond the insight-based creative developed to attract the attention of the architects, Amaral comments that “demand generation campaigns in any category have many things in common. The most important of these is to ensure that each component of the campaign has a specific purpose and that purpose is not compromised by asking too much of the specific media. In the case of Icynene, the purpose of the direct mail was to get past the gatekeeper, hold the attention of our target and make them receptive to an inbound call from sales. It worked.”

DM won’t die When it comes to direct mail, there are no shortage of companies that pepper potential buyers with coupons, special offers and ‘act now’ deals that promise everything from quick delivery pizza, office products or a home kitchen renovation. Buyers and marketers alike are becoming increasingly fickle

regarding the efficacy of the media, yet they continue to spend in the billions.

The Direct Marketing Association in the United States estimates $46B was spent on direct mail in 2014, up $1.2B from the previous year. Fifty-one per cent of American consumers find postcards the most useful type of direct mail, when sifting through the 19.1 pieces their household receives each week.

Postcards aren’t only successful for consumer campaigns but they also are impactful in the B2B space, promoting everything from computers, to lighting control systems and even long-haul trailers. Each of those campaigns has something in common.

“The sales forces of these companies have a hard time keeping up with the sales leads, with campaigns needing to be paused due to too much market response,” says Amaral, who regularly works on campaigns for clients across a diverse range of verticals.

The power of postcards George Cobham Jr. is vice president sales and marketing at Glasvan Great Dane, the world’s largest Great Dane dealership, and a client of Clever Samurai and its sister company, 360 Leads. And he wants to grow his family-owned company even bigger.

His long-haul trailers are some of the best built and most expensive that one can purchase. As Cobham puts it, “We were unable to reach the number of prospects we needed to grow our company.” So he embarked on a demand generation campaign that included postcards.

“As soon as we started, we were inundated with sales leads. As many

as four or five per day. These were bonafide prospects that we hadn’t been able to connect with in the past.

We actually had to pause the campaign to catch up with the number of prospective customers who wanted to talk with us,” says the affable Cobham.

But how can a simple postcard sell a 30 to 50 thousand dollar trailer?

“The postcard doesn’t sell the trailer.

The postcard sells the meeting with the sales professional and their job is to sell the trailer,” reveals Amaral.

“The key is to build a process where you have a set of media that carries the sales prospect along the buying cycle to make them sales-ready. For Glasvan, a flight of postcards had the role of piquing the curiosity of the sales prospect and warming them up for a phone call from one of our sales appointment-booking agents. Without the postcards, Glasvan would have obtained a much lesser number of sales meetings.”

Glasvan is far along its growth plan and has written business with a myriad of new customers because of its direct marketing initiatives. Icynene’s business results remain unknown. But one thing is for certain—architects in leading firms in the United States know exactly who they are, and that bodes well for educating them on the merits of specifying spray foam in their most advanced commercial building designs.

T-shirts, anyone?

Leigh-Ann Clarke is director of sales, North America for 360 Leads. The company provides qualified sales opportunities through digital, direct, inbound and outbound services. LeighAnn has been with 360 Leads since 2014.

DMN.ca ❰

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Engagement & Analytics

Photos Courtesy of STARS

STARS: Soaring to new heights with direct mail

By Peter Baker

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hen critically ill and injured patients in Western Canada need emergency care and transport to a hospital, many turn to STARS—the Shock Trauma Air Rescue Society. Operating a fleet of 11 helicopters, STARS has flown more than 30,000 missions in Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba since its founding in 1985. With less than half the population of Western Canada living in major urban centres, getting

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access to an air medical crew and stateof-the-art diagnostic and life-support equipment can mean the difference between life and death.

But it takes money to support STARS’ air ambulances—nicknamed “ICUs in the sky”—and the not-forprofit relies on donors to help fund its services. And in Alberta, only 25% of STARS’ budget comes from government sources. The remaining 75% is raised through fundraising

activities like the STARS lottery, which annually brings in over $11 million.

A history of DM success One of the primary ways that STARS sells lottery tickets is through direct mail, which gives buyers an easy way to support the organization. Over the years, STARS has built up a sizable list of lottery ticket buyers. However, each year STARS uses unaddressed mailing to penetrate new markets,

find new buyers and add to its ticket buyer list. In the past, the organization sent unaddressed mail to almost every household in Alberta—a total of 1.4 million pieces of mail.

But STARS administrators wondered if their mailings could be more targeted and cost effective. While the STARS Lottery had sold out for 21 straight years, reducing the lottery’s overall marketing costs would allow it to devote even more funds to its missioncritical work. Increasing response rates, reducing the time spent in market and implementing a lower cost direct mail strategy would eliminate the need for additional advertising and promotion to sell out the lottery. STARS’ approach, still novel to many fundraisers, sought to better understand its strongest ticket buyers using segmentation and marketing analytics, and then develop an unaddressed direct mail campaign targeting similar prospects.

“STARS has generally been successful because people love the brand and the mission,” says Moses March 2016

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Engagement & Analytics Gabriel, executive director of community giving & operations at STARS. “But as the lottery program reaches maturity, we want to reduce expenses and capitalize on efficiencies.”

Introducing smarter direct mail In early 2014, STARS contacted Environics Analytics (EA), the marketing services and data analytics company, about developing a more targeted direct mail strategy. EA analysts began by categorizing loyal STARS lottery ticket buyers from the previous three years using the PRIZM segmentation system, which classifies Canadians into 68 lifestyle types. They then combined the best performing segments into four target groups and, after mapping their locations on the ground, they profiled these groups using demographics, social values, media tastes, donation and lottery purchase behaviour. Research showed that the Albertans most likely to buy lottery tickets were middle-class families in exurban segments like New Homesteaders (rural, midscale couples and families), Fields of Dreams (midscale farmers and blue-collar workers) and Big Sky Families (middleaged, midscale Prairie farmers).

The high concentration of ticket buyers in far-flung communities made sense to Gabriel and his team. “When the red helicopter lands on a farm or in a rural community, the impact is felt throughout the entire community because they’re likely familiar with the patient,” he explains. “In an urban setting, however, the incident can go unnoticed unless it is covered in the news.”

Using insights gained from profiling its loyal ticket buyers, STARS launched its unaddressed direct mail campaign in 2014, targeting the neighbourhoods with the highest concentration of top-performing segments. But rather than mail to all 1.4 million households in Alberta, STARS reduced the mailing by over 110,000 pieces.

For the direct mail piece, the STARS Lottery produced a colourful, 21-page brochure showcasing some of the lottery’s 3,217 prizes, including homes, cars and exotic vacations. Given Alberta’s wide-ranging households, the messaging was designed to appeal to broad values: community involvement, social responsibility, fulfillment through service. As one headline proclaimed: “YOUR SUPPORT WILL MAKE A DIFFERENCE IN MANY LIVES.” To prove that point, the mailer march 2016

also included testimonials from people saved by STARS—men and women who could be the recipients’ neighbours, friends or family members.

Reaping the rewards The campaign proved a resounding success. The response increased 127%—from 6.7% the previous year to 15.2%. Total sales rose by $1,205,000, even though the mailing volume had been reduced considerably.

“In previous experiences, unaddressed mail has usually been a moderate but less cost-effective means of acquiring new supporters,” says Gabriel. “So it speaks highly of the brand and the targeting when you can see such immediate results. To jump from a six per cent to a 15% response rate is something to write home about.”

The new marketing strategy also helped to reduce the time needed to sell out the lottery tickets by two weeks, which saved the cost of additional media buys. Overall, the campaign decreased marketing costs by 27.9%.

But the impressive results didn’t end with the 2014 campaign. In the follow-up response analysis, analysts identified ways that STARS could enhance its targeting and further reduce the number of mailed pieces.

Through the refinement process, STARS re-classified ticket buyers into different target groups for subsequent direct mail efforts. For instance, the analysis indicated that STARS’ top rural segment was very responsive to direct mail; its weaker urban

segment preferred online media. “The characteristics and motivations of its findings shows that, to reach these major and monthly donors. And the urban donors, we need to employ new additional insight will give STARS media like online and shift from more an opportunity to test and refine traditional channels like television, messaging in future promotions to print or radio,” says Gabriel. The group increase ROI—allowing it to devote could also use this additional insight more funds to its life-saving work. to better align its prizes with the “Data lets you inform decisions target segments: an ATV promoted to across your organization,” says a rural group and a ski getaway to an Gabriel. “It’s great to have intuition urban one. and experience, but when you have The insights gained through the data to support and validate your lottery campaign analysis have assumptions and beliefs, you can also proved transferable to STARS’ sustain your growth and performance donation programs. Last October, the with greater certainty.” And when the group mailed 100,000 fundraising objective is saving lives, there’s no pieces as part of an unaddressed substitute for data-driven decision mailing campaign. STARS selected making. its best direct mail donors—in terms of value and response—and profiled Peter Baker is vice president and practice them according to EA’s PRIZM leader at Environics Analytics, overseeing the segments. EA then identified postal fundraising, municipal government, university walks where they were likely to find advancement and library sectors. more donors like them. The initiative yielded nearly a one per cent response rate in one market and about a $72 average gift overall, resulting in a positive financial return. “It’s rare to break even with unaddressed mail,” says Gabriel, “but we’ve made unaddressed acquisition a relevant option for STARS.” 111,000 fewer DM pieces mailed

Campaign highlights

Looking ahead With the success of these campaigns, STARS is now exploring other data-driven marketing strategies. The group has begun using behavioral and geo-demographic segmentation to better understand the

313% increase in first day sales $1.2 million increase in fundraising 127% increase in response Two weeks of reduced media costs DMN.ca ❰

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Operations & Logistics

How FUSE retooled for the tech, digital, social and XM era

From left to right: FUSE President Stephen Brown, CEO Garo Keresteci and Chair Mike Preston.

By Stephen Brown

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USE is not the agency we were when we started out 13 years ago. Today we’re all about data and insights that drive both conversation and conversion for top Canadian brands. And while we work in any medium, our love of technology and innovations leads us to focus in digital, content, social, XM and CRM. Yet this isn’t how we got started.

When we opened our doors, if we’d had the time in that crazy first month to mount a sign on our temporary office door, the descriptor under FUSE would have read “Direct Marketing (DM), Promotion and Interactive”… but the “Interactive” would have been more of a stretch versus a reality as we weren’t very strong in that discipline at that time. Fortunately we had the foresight to invest in digital early on in our evolution as a brand. Not that this foresight was a special gift… the fact that the industry was digitizing was written everywhere. Thankfully ❱ DMN.ca

we did evolve as it’s a key reason we’re a strong force today (one of the larger independents left in Canada).

Becoming digital required us to pivot, retool and invest in the spaces of current marketing demand—not just once, but a few times as the digital world has evolved. If we had remained only in direct marketing and promo, today we’d be either a small boutique or dead (I know this from what happened to my peers and competitors from back then).

No pain, no gain However smart these decisions have been in hindsight, they came at a cost: Remaining current and relevant required a) a lot of planning, b) new people with new skills, c) frayed nerves due to cultural shifts, d) accepting significant mistakes along the way, and e) technology investments. You can’t retool in midstream after you’ve won the “it” account, we had to build it first to change our brand perception and attract new clients in the digital

and then later XM spaces.

The planning phase required us to look at both ourselves and our industry while dissecting our progress as a business. As a perfectly demented mix of agency people and entrepreneurs (a rough mix), my partners and I had frank planning sessions where you look at your baby’s development and say “we’re not going to get bigger and better in our current form” (not an easy path to navigate).

Our first few years were so profitable that it was difficult to shift our spending patterns into investment mode in order to alter the company.

Hiring a VP of digital, a director of technology and project managers (PMs) was both expensive as well as unsettling as they questioned most of the things we had been doing since our inception (just like our more recent hires of digital strategist, community managers and creative technologists do today). The unique ways of thinking and processes of digital people caused us internal strife—Why did we now

have two processes for managing a project? Why are PMs so anal retentive?

Why are they taking the budget and timeline role away from me? It’s this retooling that allowed us to build one of the most trafficked websites in recent Canadian history—the site for the Pan Am Games—a three-year build, full digital ecosystem planning, UX design, the list goes on.

Our first mistake There were mistakes made along the way. The two biggest would be around a) the concept of integrating skillsets and b) the technology and development. Let me explain.

Regarding integrating skillsets, and this is my mistake, I believed that a direct mail production manager could become digital and reversely a digital PM could produce print. In my thinking, while the mediums are different, the actual process and marketing goals are similar enough that people should be able to do both.

This was naive of me. Ten years ago, the March 2016

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Operations & Logistics mental and emotional divide between the two mediums was vast. Many print people didn’t want to admit print was starting to take a back seat to digital and digital purists wanted nothing to do with the old world (and made this pretty clear). And let’s be realistic—the knowledge required to merge massive amounts of customer data into a direct mail project is distinctly different from building a user-generated content site.

Yes, both manage databases, but not at all in a similar fashion.

From an agency management perspective, if I could have merged two groups I would have been running a much leaner and more efficient shop.

Yeah, that didn’t happen. Surprisingly this is actually happening more and more now (thanks Katherine Frech).

While not fully integrated, many of the new entrants into the PM/ production world today focus more on the PMP approach to project management and just think of the project more than the medium.

Our second mistake Second mistake (or lesson learned): Technology and development. Again, I think I should have done better here. This was a huge fractious point for FUSE. We started with the team in-house and they were great, but their skills were limited to the abilities of two to three people when the needs of our clients were vast, especially as our digital business started to grow.

To broaden this skillset out, we then invested in a separate development company. Our abilities and skills went through the roof—we literally could build anything at any scale, but the cultural divide between a creative agency and pure dev shop was terrible.

There was constant fighting and I don’t like fighting (call it my WASP-y hangover). We eventually took a lesson from how we ran the “build” portion in our print projects to find a harmonious solution—we outsourced it. Yes, we lost the revenue (just like we do every time we hire a printing and data company) but we gained the power, brains and skills of the entire vendor tech/dev community and this has allowed us to build better, keep our clients happier and truly calmed the nerves of everyone internally (thanks for the push Lane Buie).

Getting the culture right When looking back, I’d have to say the biggest underestimation in shifting our agency from a classic direct marketing/promo agency to a march 2016

digital and now XM integrated shop was the time for us to shift culturally.

It doesn’t happen overnight… or in one year. It happened only when all people embraced the power of why we were shifting… and why it was important for both FUSE and each staff member’s individual career advancement. To help push this shift along, we had to keep spending (maybe spending is the theme of this article).

Hiring leading digital people (like a creative technologist and VP digital strategy) helped push us further into the mindset. Sending people to key conferences was required. Retooling our people with iPads, iPhones, etc. was needed to play the part. And finally prodding, literally prodding, some of the senior team to become vocal and competent in social media and, unfortunately, removing those who weren’t ready to make this transition was the final frontier of shifting our culture.

This all happened a while ago for FUSE. We don’t have conversations today about “are we digital enough” or “how do we become more digital”— those questions left us a time back.

Now the cultural shift is around remaining current in the always changing landscape of digital and this is just as tough. But our lessons from this shift have helped us as we’ve been growing and investing in XM over the past couple of years. Learning from our digital mistakes (not to mention listening to the guidance of Nicole Gallucci and Aleena Mazhar) has allowed us to open our minds to how we structure, invest and shift

perceptions about XM within our company… making this transition much quicker.

The digital shift was a strong functional plan… and it worked.

What’s interesting is what had equal impact on our brand’s success were the three oldschool ingredients of running a great agency: finding the right people, strong account service and amazing creative [thanks Bernadette Lonergan (HR), Brie Taylor (accounts) and Pat Weir (creative), respectively]. Without providing solid strategic guidance and building strong trust among our client base, our clients probably would not have ventured along for the ride with us as we transformed. And creatively, our challenges are greater today than ever—clients expect the fundamentals (of course), but also the unimaginable and unexpected. This is what makes agency life amazing, but also pretty nerve wracking when you realize you’re always on the lookout for the new and never-been-done innovations. We aren’t just marketers today… now we have to be makers too.

Fortunately for FUSE, our investments in the functional additions of digital, social and XM haven’t detracted from also investing in our client managers and creative thinkers.

Our direct marketing and promo roots haven’t been thrown out with the proverbial bathwater. Instead, they’ve simply been fused into FUSE. We still have a solid direct mail and CRM business and, more importantly, hold true to our test, learn and modify

approach to all marketing programs regardless of the channel. And promotion has simply become a key element to many of our programs as a strong consumer engagement device.

Today, the power of our brand and business success lies a ton in strategy, creativity and technology. This is where we focus our energy to develop memorable connected experiences that brands can share with consumers.

It seems to be working really well as we’re enjoying some really exciting business successes. The path to get here wasn’t seamless and easy but the war stories, shared laughter and excitement of trying new and unique things has made the journey as much fun as the destination.

Stephen Brown is president and partner, FUSE

Marketing Group. With extensive experience in all marketing channels, Stephen has the learning needed to create, strengthen and grow brands across a wide range of categories (including CIBC, Canadian Tire, Cashmere and TO 2015 Pan Am Games). Stephen’s leadership, vision and forward thinking have proven to be key to pushing FUSE to new, innovative heights. Stephen was recently Board Chair of the Canadian Marketing Association.

DMN.ca ❰

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Marketing Automation

Automating The Ecosystem Half a century ago IBM revolutionized the computing business by separating programs from hardware. Today a comparable revolution is underway: the shift to browser-based applications in the cloud. But that poses a dilemma for marketers: how do they combine multiple standalone applications to form a unified marketing ecosystem?

By Stephen Shaw

A

t the time it cost two million dollars to buy. It was kept on a raised floor in a climate-controlled room. Emblazoned across the front of it was a sign with a single word: Think.

The IBM System/360 was introduced to the world in April 1964 with the promise: “Now one new computer fills all your data processing needs.” For the first time a mainframe computer could be used for multiple purposes. Any program that worked on one IBM model could work on others, meaning it was easy for businesses to upgrade. And that modularity and scalability not only revolutionized the computer industry, it helped IBM rule the mainframe world for the next three decades.

Those same principles are behind the latest computing revolution: the shift of applications from licensed software systems to hosted solutions in the “cloud,” known as “software-asa-service” (SaaS, for short). Just as the IBM System/360 decoupled programs from hardware, these standalone applications operate independently ❱ DMN.ca

of big monolithic systems (like SAP).

Performing specialized business functions, they can be connected to form a single ecosystem. And it is that development, more than any other computing revolution preceding it, which promises to transform the practice of marketing.

What makes SaaS so appealing is the “pay as you go” subscription model. No need to involve IT. No software or hardware to install. No perpetual licensing commitments or support fees. Salesforce was the first technology company to prove the model works and since then a deluge of sales and marketing applications has flooded the market, with new startups springing up all the time.

Fixing the plumbing To truly appreciate the impact on marketing of this new epoch you only have to think back to the mainframe era. Computing time was so precious marketers could rarely justify its use for much more than sales reporting and the generation of mailing lists.

Companies that could not afford the price tag of their own “big iron”

used computer service bureaus to do their bidding. But after PCs entered the scene in the mid-1980s, many marketers turned to more affordable desktop marketing systems to run their campaigns, using customer data pulled out of mainframes.

The arrival of CRM systems in the mid-1990s to support sales and service introduced new data siloes, complicating the picture for marketers desperate for a single view of the customer. But at least it forced technology departments to confront the problem of data fragmentation. Soon most large businesses were drawing up battle plans for “enterprise data warehouses” of which a consolidated customer database was intended to play a lead role. Often those projects collapsed under their own weight, mainly due to the complexity of reconciling so many disparate sources of internal data, not to mention the task of pleasing many different levels of information users, of which marketing was almost always the least influential.

Seeing an unserved gap in the market, software vendors pounced on

the opportunity to build “enterprise marketing suites” with their own proprietary data models which could automate cross-channel campaign management. Marketers had been struggling to manage multi-channel campaigns, and these new licensed software suites were like Swiss army knives, promising to do it all—from list segmentation to response reporting. But once installed they were fiendishly complex to operate, often stumbled on the same data management issues befuddling internal systems architects and failed to gain much of a foothold outside of companies with large addressable customer databases (like banks, retailers and mail order companies).

Many of the so-called “best in class” solutions (notably: Neolane, Aprimo, Unica, Responsys, Silverpop and ExactTarget) have since been gobbled up by the current oligopoly of computer vendors (mainly IBM, Oracle, Adobe and Salesforce) which have been on a feverish multi-billion dollar buying spree, rushing to build an “all in one” platform referred to as “marketing in the cloud.” Each is March 2016

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Marketing Automation

Plug and pay As the “marketing cloud” vendors race each other to a finish line which keeps moving, companies everywhere are feeling the heat from digital disruption. Customers are increasingly demanding realtime support and service and that has put immense pressure on IT departments to upgrade their aging infrastructure. But IT is unable to move fast enough, held back by a culture of risk aversion. They see themselves as custodians, not change agents.

Frustrated with the glacial pace of IT procurement, marketers have begun to search for answers on their own, carving money out of their budgets for technology acquisition.

But with so many web-based solutions to choose from (see sidebar), marketers are faced with the formidable task of selecting, assembling and connecting a mishmash of applications into some kind of “marketing stack,” something they would ordinarily expect IT to look after.

Just for starters, marketers need marketing automation tools to support outbound targeting and response tracking; operational applications to help with resource management and content production; voice of the customer and social listening platforms to conduct surveys and monitor customer feedback; lead march 2016

management software to nurture prospects through the sales funnel; and of course an analytical workbench encompassing data visualization and data mining tools. Beyond those core applications, there are all kinds of other niche technologies to think about, ranging from word-ofmouth applications to loyalty management solutions to video ad platforms.

Mapping out the ecosystem components is just the first step.

The tough job is integrating these various applications and connecting them to the existing infrastructure. But unifying these many different applications is the major challenge since they do not share a common information backbone. Most enterprises already own an alphabet soup of established platforms which form the technology foundation of their business (ERP, CRM, WCM, DAM, CCM, DDP, EDW, BI and the list goes on). They are usually connected by middleware which orchestrates the cross-platform movement of data, usually through “application programming interfaces” or an “enterprise service bus” that lets applications talk to each other by shuttling messages back and forth. But when additional point solutions are layered on top of this environment, the platform architecture starts to resemble a shaky scaffolding (more “frankenstack” than “marketing stack”). Getting these applications to work in harmony is like conducting an orchestra of deaf musicians. And when you factor in data privacy and security protocols, the idea of “plug and play” becomes more like “plug and pray.”

Centre of excellence As much trouble as integration may seem, it is worth the effort.

Companies that have created a unified “marketing stack” are experiencing success delivering more connected experiences for their customers. However, they usually have to take an unorthodox route to get there, bypassing IT by setting up “centres of excellence” staffed by marketing technologists and data analysts. The use and governance of marketing technology demands a different set of skills

than designing communication programs. Someone has to make sure the systems are running properly. Someone has to oversee the configuration of applications.

Someone has to be constantly on the lookout for the “next best thing.” Someone has to negotiate the subscription contracts. On top of all that, marketing users have to be trained on the different applications.

Freed from relying on IT to evaluate, install and maintain software (never a fun process), this specialized marketing team is given an operating budget to source their own technology.

At the same time, it serves as a bridge between IT and marketing, reporting to the CMO but with a dotted line to the CIO. That way they can avoid straying too far from the enterprise technology strategy and can call upon the technical cavalry when needed.

Ideally, the team’s mandate extends beyond technology evaluation and support, because the fuel to run the marketing engine is customer data. So that group must also take ownership of the collection and aggregation of knowledge to drive customer insight; the creation of rules to guide customer treatment; and measurement of the interaction experience.

All of the various systems of engagement—email, social, mobile, point-of-sale, web—must be connected to a single pooled repository of interaction data so that marketers can deliver more contextual experiences through the triggered application of business rules.

As the universe of niche marketing applications continues to expand and connected customers apply greater pressure on businesses to serve them relevant information, it will be more critical than ever for companies to build integrated marketing ecosystems. Half a century may have passed since the advent of the IBM System/360, but the need for modularity and scalability are greater than ever.

The origins of cloud-based computing

In 1993 the Mosaic web browser made the Internet easily accessible to people for the first time. To compete Microsoft launched Internet Explorer and by 2002 owned the browser market. PC users everywhere were now connected to the World Wide Web. Taking advantage of the swelling online population, Google rose from the ashes of the dotcom bust in 2001 to win dominion over the search business. Several years later the social media craze took off and a “river” of “big data” began to flow across the Internet onto remotely hosted server farms, now known as “the cloud.” Software technology companies capitalized on this trend to develop browser-based applications that could be hosted remotely in thirdparty data centres, emulating the computer service bureaus of the mainframe era which offered shared computing resources to businesses through a time-sharing model.

The marketing technology landscape

on exactly the same mission, to make the claim: “Now one solution to meet all of your marketing automation needs” (where have we heard this before?).

Of course, the idea of a single unified platform remains a chimera, since all of these vendors are now faced with integrating the various applications they’ve bought. But given the size of the market, which is projected to grow at a 12% compound annual growth rate to $32 billion by 2018, they are throwing as much money at the problem as they can, knowing the payoff could be huge. Forrester Analyst Corey Munchback explains, “The plumbing needs to be in place to knit together the different applications which are data, content, workflows and business rules. Without that plumbing in place, these suites are not really a thing. They’re a portfolio of capabilities.”

CUSTOMER ENGAGEMENT ❯❯ ❯❯ ❯❯ ❯❯ ❯❯ ❯❯ ❯❯ ❯❯ ❯❯

Cross-channel campaign management Customer relationship management Email marketing Lead management Loyalty program management Mobile messaging Offer optimization Real-time interaction management Sales enablement

MARKETING OPERATIONS ❯❯ ❯❯ ❯❯ ❯❯

Content marketing management Customer communication management Digital asset management Marketing resource management

DIGITAL EXPERIENCE ❯❯ ❯❯ ❯❯ ❯❯ ❯❯ ❯❯ ❯❯ ❯❯

Community management Data management platform Digital experience delivery Identity management Tag management Video ad platforms Web content management Word-of-mouth platforms

INSIGHT AND ANALYTICS ❯❯ ❯❯ ❯❯

Stephen Shaw is the chief strategy officer

❯❯

of Kenna Communications, a marketing solutions agency specializing in customer experience management. He can be reached via email at sshaw@kenna.ca.

❯❯ ❯❯ ❯❯ ❯❯

Cross-channel attribution Data visualization Feedback management Market mix modelling Performance measurement Predictive analysis Social media listening Web analytics DMN.ca ❰

THE CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE MAGAZINE ISSUE 1 • 2016

The Innovation Issue New tools, techniques and solutions for your business

Also in this issue: ❯❯ Four reasons to consider speech analytics ❯❯ Top customer engagement trends for 2016 ❯❯ Increasing CSAT while reducing labour costs ❯❯ Privacy and social engineering in the contact centre ❯❯ TD Bank introduces service through Facebook Messenger

The Innovation Issue

Four reasons to consider speech analytics

By Emily Nielsen and Paul Van Dam

T

oday’s contact centre plays a critical role in communicating a company’s brand to its customers; therefore, it is vital to ensure that the customer experience is consistently maintained and that you are addressing all of the customer’s needs. The challenge is how do you adequately collect customer requirements and provide a consistent customer experience? You need to leverage speech analytics.

Despite its use by financial institutions and other large businesses for many years now, many organizations still view speech analytics as an out-of-reach technology. The truth is, in the last few years speech analytics has become 2 | contact management

readily available as part of many existing product suites or as a thirdparty add-on.

If you’ve not looked into the powerful capabilities and benefits of the product, it is well worth investigating. Here are just some of reasons why you might want to use it:

1) Big Data Traditionally, most data collected about a client through the call centre consisted of client wait times, average handle time and agent wrap up codes. Information about the call was either not captured or was stored as a wav file on a server. The only way to access the data was to play back each recording. Given that a typical organization may have hundreds

of thousands of calls per year, it was impractical to access the data available in the call recordings.

Enter speech analytics. By recording every single call and translating all of the data into text, the information that was previously inaccessible can now be included as a subset of data in your overall datamart. The result is that the information contained in these recordings can now be included in a business intelligence analysis.

2) True agent performance A big challenge that most contact centres face is the inability to effectively review and evaluate agent performance. A typical contact centre may only evaluate an agent six times Issue 1 • 2016

The Innovation Issue The system could then track key positive words being used during the conversation such as the agent using upsell opportunities. Also, it can track negative words linked to customer frustration and identify when a caller asks for a supervisor.

The resulting data can be used to score the agent’s performance and the overall outcome of the call.

Other identifiable attributes include long periods of silence, instances of callers and agents talking over each other and some platforms can even register the emotions of the caller and agent.

These attributes, in combination with key phrases and words, can be used to generate real-time triggers for supervisors when the caller or agent becomes upset.

3) Identify trends

per month. When an agent can answer 1,500–3,000 calls per month, a typical call centre only samples 0.2–0.4% of an agent’s calls. The likelihood of identifying issues or uncovering behavioural patterns is like finding a needle in a haystack.

But, when speech analytics are used, 100% of the calls in the centre can be monitored and evaluated for basic conditions. Every call can be evaluated, categorized, linked with call outcomes and a quality assurance (QA) score can be completed using criteria based on specific wording used by agents and callers.

Using speech analytic tools, supervisors looking for calls to evaluate can identify high value calls like those that have potential sales associated with them, simply by searching on key meta-data.

What’s more, compliance-related elements can be enforced on every call. If agents are required to read a disclaimer and get consent from the caller, the system can be programmed to verify that the agent spoke the disclaimer and the caller accepted the terms.

Issue 1 • 2016

Another powerful benefit of speech analytic tools is to understand why calls are occurring. Traditionally, supervisors would only have access to inbound queue volumes, but not have any real insight into the nature of the calls.

For example, the department may be receiving calls about a promotion that was accidentally released early.

Traditionally, these trends would only be identified by agents entering disposition codes or by notifying the supervisors, or by supervisors directly observing agents.

However, when using a speech analytics tool each call is analyzed and common words and phrases are trended real-time on the supervisor’s desktop. Seeing a specific trend, supervisors can proactively address the issue in a way that improves the customer experience. In this example, a possible solution could be to provide additional scripting to alert callers about the issue.

The benefits of mining the data go beyond the supervisor reacting to service-affecting trends. The data captured and converted from every conversation in the contact centre can be shared with and leveraged by other departments for increased customer insight.

An engineering department could monitor complaints regarding products. Sales could analyze calls where callers ask for a new product or the number of times a competitor is referenced. Marketing could analyze calls to determine what words and phrases are being used by the callers for their campaigns. Since the contact centre is often the focal

point of customer communication, the metrics available to the business through speech analytics are immense and valuable.

4) Increase productivity With a typical QA program, identifying trends in performance can be extremely time consuming and areas of improvement can easily be overlooked. By having access to the data from every call made, by every agent, supervisors and QA staff can perform root cause analysis on calls to identify actual trends in call performance.

For example, agents may be dealing with simple repetitive questions that could be better addressed with additional self-serve options in the interactive voice response (IVR). Without a clear understanding of the situation and the volume of calls that are impacted, it is difficult to determine if a change would be beneficial.

Final thoughts In today’s competitive marketplace it’s vital that organizations gain a better understanding of their client’s needs and drive the customer experience by using all of the data that is available. Speech analytics, which many have been unattainable in the past, are now readily available and within reach for most contact centres. This technology will help your operations teams hone their staff into highly efficient and effective agents and unlock a wealth of data for management teams throughout the organization.

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.

Paul Van Dam is a contact centre architect and unified communications expert with Nielsen IT Consulting Inc. With over 25 years experience in contact centre technologies Paul understands both the technical aspects of the contact centre and operational requirements, providing services from strategic design to implementation support for his clients on a wide range of platforms.

contact management | 3

The Innovation Issue

Six customer engagement trends impacting contact centres in 2016

4 | contact management

Issue 1 • 2016

The Innovation Issue

By Rachel Brink

T

he contact centre space has rapidly undergone a long list of overdue changes in recent years and the momentum is not expected to slow down as 2016 unfolds. From SaaS integration to cloud adoption and the expansion of digital channels, there are a number of communication trends confronting the industry that every contact centre should be aware of in order to stay ahead of customer needs and expectations in 2016.

Businesses will create stronger alignment between sales, marketing and customer service—and their corresponding technologies.

1

Stronger alignment between sales, marketing and customer service teams and their corresponding technologies will perhaps be one of the greatest opportunities for businesses to grow and monetize their existing relationships in the coming year. According to the Aberdeen Group, highly aligned organizations achieved an average of 32% year-over-year revenue growth, while their less aligned competitors saw a seven per cent decrease in revenue. But despite the astounding potential, only eight per cent of companies state they have tight alignment between sales and marketing and 76% willingly admit they do not have a single customer view. With a heavy focus on understanding the entire customer journey, businesses will likely integrate more aspects of their business, from departmental data to SaaS solutions (marketing automation, CRM, customer service management, contact centre software), to help ensure their employees are operating efficiently and are working with greater insight in 2016.

2

Businesses will expand and enhance digital channel offerings.

As adoption of Internet-connected devices continues to rapidly expand, digital forms of communication (email, chat, SMS, video) are quickly increasing in popularity, expected to surpass voice within the next two years. This noticeable shift will likely encourage businesses to enhance and expand upon their digital offerings in the coming months. As it stands, only 11% of consumers believe today’s organizations are effectively converging digital, mobile, social and traditional channels. To keep up with growing demand and expectations, businesses will need to ensure their infrastructure can support cross-channel customer journeys, permitting customers to seamlessly migrate from one channel to another while allowing client data to remain easily accessible to those agents servicing them.

3

Social media will be managed by the contact centre.

By 2020, an estimated 90% of customer service inquiries will be handled through social channels—but as it currently stands, over 41% of companies currently assign all social media responsibilities to their marketing Issue 1 • 2016

department, a group that is typically poorly suited to address product, service or customer-related inquiries. By treating social media as a customer service channel and routing all related posts and mentions directly to the contact centre, customer inquiries can be effectively addressed by the most qualified individual with access to all relevant account details. In the coming year, businesses will likely begin integrating this channel into the contact centre to ensure all customers are responded to within a reasonable timeframe by the most eligible individual.

The need for business flexibility will further fuel cloud and SaaS adoption.

4

According to Deloitte’s recent 2015 Global Contact Centre Survey, 96% of businesses expect growth within their contact centres over the next two years, primarily to support business growth and customer experience demands. Seventy-two per cent plan to transform their contact centre through consolidation, outsourcing, remote agents and/ or establishment of new contact centres. However, quickly and cost effectively making such changes will require a flexible and scalable contact centre platform—a requirement which heavily favours the continued adoption of cloud-based solutions.

While the majority of contact centres continue to rely on on-premise systems and software today, an astounding 70% have stated a desire to transition to a cloud alternative within the next three years. In 2016 and beyond, the need for greater flexibility and scalability will likely continue the already growing adoption of cloud and SaaS offerings.

Businesses will embrace self-service and knowledge management.

5

As mobile device adoption continues to rapidly expand and consumers increasingly demand fast and effortless engagement with the businesses serving them, web self-

service has quickly become one of the most popular and sought-after customer service touch points. As a matter of fact, Forrester recently conducted a study that revealed web self-service to be the most commonly used communication channel for customer service—the first and only channel to exceed phone to date.

But despite the growing emphasis, 40% of customers still choose to contact a live representative after having looked for answers through a knowledge base, indicating that self-service still has its limitations. In 2016, expect businesses and contact centres to invest more time and resources into creating more robust knowledge bases for their customers to facilitate their ability to resolve their own needs while significantly reducing call volume and costs.

Voice may decrease in popularity, but its importance will increase.

6

While the use of voice-based service has steadily decreased as digital and self-service channels rise in popularity, its importance will likely increase in the coming year. In fact, Forrester predicts that while voice may no longer be consumers’ first choice, it will increasingly become an escalation channel used to handle more difficult inquiries that digital channels may be ill-suited to address.

And while voice is not the preferred channel for “simple inquiries,” it exceeds all other channels for more complex ones. In the coming year, expect to see a greater focus on enhancing the telephony experience through enhanced IVR menus, callback options, WebRTC and more— because voice-based service is here and it’s here to stay.

Rachel Brink is the marketing manager at 3CLogic, with over four years of experience in sales and customer service. In her role, she routinely shares best practices regarding how to streamline business communications and enhance the customer experience through innovative technologies and processes.

contact management | 5

The Innovation Issue

Improving customer satisfaction through WFM It’s time to learn from the telephone-centric legacy

By Andrew McNair

R

esource and skill levels are being stretched like never before and in new ways. The telephone-centric contact centre stereotype is no longer valid.

In some areas, digital interactions are starting to exceed voice contacts.

Just 57% of global contact centre agents are now limited to voice-only telephone support. While it still stands at 69% in Canada, it’s a number that’s predicted to drop further.

Globally over one third of companies are blending both voice and non-voice contacts.

Now in its 18th year, research from Dimension Data’s 2015 Global Contact Centre Benchmarking Report signifies an industry in transformation. How does this impact the domestic Canadian market and where should attentions be focused to ensure differentiating services can be provided at an affordable cost?

What’s clear is that a new age of modern contact centre has arrived. A typical engagement model will soon feature up to eight different forms of contact methods to accommodate a more demanding and tech-savvy customer base. Contact management 4.0 may be upon us, but there are clearly a lot of powerful lessons to be learned from the telephone legacies being inherited.

Slow to react Digital media has become a core component for most contact centres. It’s no longer a ‘bolt-on.’ The digital revolution is real and represents the most radical change in the contact centre business in the last 30 years. It has profound implications for the way in which organizations manage their resources and how they deploy technology to deliver and manage connected customer experiences.

Findings from Dimension Data’s annual benchmark report show that Canadian operators are lagging behind in some key areas. Many are not reacting quickly enough to optimize their working environments and expand the scope of basic operating systems to support customers in their new channels of choice.

Basic capabilities, in place as standard for telephone services, are not being introduced into the digital world.

This is impacting service consistency across channels and ultimately user uptakes levels, as digital solutions continue to be managed in silos.

Unleash performance outcomes Workforce management (WFM) has curiously been one of the most understated service-enabling components for 6 | contact management

contact centre operating models that are, and will continue to be, primarily formed around people (resource costs amount to nearly 78% of the entire operating budget of Canadian contact centres).

In fact, the misunderstandings around the correct application of workforce management systems have helped fuel widespread, if not entirely accurate, perceptions that WFM is part of a productivity-centric management approach. In reality the effective design and measurement of WFM systems can deliver so much more, but first the outcomes it can influence need to be more clearly understood.

customer experience.

Despite that, the cost centre mentality is never far away, and 42% of Canadian companies do not view or are unsure if customer care can provide a competitive differentiator. This figure is strangely out of line with the three quarters of organizations at a global level who do recognize the service differentiation offered by consumer and/or contact centre services.

There’s a lingering perception of the traditional call centre being a cost centre overhead which should have as much productivity squeezed out of it as possible. It’s this same paradox that’s hindered the

67% of Canadian companies can directly relate improving customer experience levels to revenue/profit growth.

Maturing approach to performance indicators Results from Canadian organizations participating in the 2015 benchmark report highlight that 82% of board level and executive management individuals acknowledge customer experience as the most important strategic performance indicator for their business success. Even allowing for those organizations lacking adequate analytics to measure it, 67% of Canadian companies can directly relate improving customer experience levels to revenue/profit growth. Another 78% can associate contact resolution rates to heightened

operational application, awareness and subsequent success of workforce management techniques. WFM is not a stick or something to be feared, it’s a powerful enabler, but first it may require a change of mindset and better appreciation of the chosen end outcomes it can accelerate when managed well, if it’s to be optimized.

Consider that more than four out of five (82%) Canadian contact centres vote ‘ease of resolution’ as the most important factor affecting customer satisfaction with the organization.

‘Wait time to speak’ to an agent is deemed the second most impactful issue but, at 46%, it is far less of a Issue 1 • 2016

The Innovation Issue

Workforce management effectiveness (targets and measurements)

Service level adherence

68.2

Volume forecast accuracy – voice interactions

68.2

Schedule adherence levels

63.6

Alignment of shift patterns to contact arrival pattern forecasts

54.5 31.8

Volume forecast accuracy – non-voice interactions 18.2

Management satisfaction with WFM process Agent satisfaction with WFM process

13.6

None of the above

13.6

Do you have targets in place to measure the effectiveness of the following workforce planning areas? (Canada) Source: Dimension Data’s 2015 Global Contatct Centre Benchmarking Report (c) Dimension Data 2015

concern in the customer’s view as is there is a higher want to engage with a suitably qualified agent, preferably on a channel of their choosing and, most crucially, have their inquiry resolved.

The point being that WFM is not purely about boosting productivity. Rather it’s about equipping your team with the tools, or rather the resources, to succeed. Through ensuring correct skill levels are available to effectively meet the demands across all consolidated contact channels, management can enable positive outcomes on contact resolution levels and create better capacity as forecasted traffic is aligned to shift patterns. It’s not about asking for more productivity from resources. It’s about managing resources for productivity requirements.

Increasing attention to digital channels Closer scrutiny of several basic aspects of WFM reveal some serious concerns, but also a significant opportunity for Canadian operations to apply the same attention to digital channels as is done to the telephone standard.

The 2015 benchmark report shows volume forecast accuracy targets to be missing in 32% of voice-based operations. That figure almost doubles to 68% when Issue 1 • 2016

we consider non-voice (digital) operations. Why such a discrepancy between the two?

Additionally, just 68% of contact centre managers are tracking schedule adherence levels, with little more than half (54%) taking steps to align shift patterns to contact arrival patterns. It all results in inefficiency.

The opportunities available through WFM are highlighted in other ways. Just 14% of centres include agent satisfaction as a measure of effectiveness in their planning. This implies that the majority are scheduling without any employee input. If the workforce understand and are included in the process, they’re more likely to support it, which also means they’re more likely to be offering a good service to customers.

Technology to support the contact

centre across all of the above has been around for many years. There are numerous tools available for planning and scheduling digital interactions, but as an example 64% of organizations have nothing in place for email—a long established service channel. The percentage of centres operating blindly increases dramatically when we examine the back office (73%), and relatively new digital channels such as social media, where less than 10% have any sort of automated WFM solution in place.

This creates wastefulness in non-voice departments to a level we just don’t see in telephone channels where the level of scrutiny, but also experience of management, is much greater.

WFM is one area in which the modern contact centre is clearly behind the curve… and losing efficiency. Without a consolidated approach, the desired performance outcomes can only be achieved by either over-pressurizing the work environment or through costly overstaffing. If left unaddressed both will cause consistently high absence levels and attrition across roles.

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. Strong WFM methodologies will help set the organization’s frontline teams up for success and ensure they are equipped to address customers’ issues, shape their experiences and enrich the engagement, creating greater value for both parties. Can your organization keep up? If not, customers will simply abandon channels that don’t work and follow those that do, for that is their fundamental and primary need.

Andrew McNair has been with Dimension Data for 14 years and 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.

contact management | 7

The Innovation Issue

How Great Wolf Resorts increased customer satisfaction while reducing labour costs

By Gavin Gustafson

A

s a premier family entertainment brand and an icon in the hospitality industry, Great Wolf Resorts is focused on “creating family traditions, one family at a time.” Its 12 resorts raise the industry standard by combining quality accommodations with the finest in family recreational activities, all under one roof. The themed vacation packages provide more than 2.5 million guests each year with the ability to customize their experience to enjoy specialty restaurants, several recreational activities, spas and their well-known indoor waterparks.

Proving it can be done For Great Wolf Resorts, the search for better technology started with the need for a progressive and integrated solution that allowed for seasonal fluctuations.

Historically, Great Wolf Resorts’ contact centre used a 8 | contact management

variety of legacy systems with no integration and insufficient features for supporting a call centre of the size it had become. This led to inefficiencies in labour management and ineffective customer experience tracking. The previous scheduling tool was substandard and timeintensive; and the customer survey tool could only capture feedback from converted sales. Survey results were skewed and not actionable.

A proponent of innovative technology, Jim LeMere, director of the customer contact centre at Great Wolf Resorts, knew they had to positively impact the customer experience and prove contact centre

value through metrics and reporting.

LeMere wanted “on-the-fly control” and found that the best way to demonstrate value and streamline procedures was with an integrated cloud-based solution that would scale for the quickly growing contact centre.

“My philosophy is to always stay cutting-edge and make sure you do it right the first time,” remarks LeMere.

He began by hand-picking a team that would make the business case for inContact’s solutions and act as internal champions for a move to the cloud. The plan was aggressive, but as LeMere states, “You need to push hard and prove it can be done.”

Issue 1 • 2016

The Innovation Issue Forecasting for success Through their partnership with inContact, Great Wolf Resorts successfully reduced agent labour costs and have also experienced a 10-second decrease in average handle time. In order to predict the impact of inContact and demonstrate future success with workforce management (WFM), LeMere’s team set up a WFM lab that acted as a mock contact centre.

In the lab, they applied a variety of scenarios and tested multiple full-time/part-time shift block combinations.

The Great Wolf Resorts team wanted to know how each decision would impact their agent labour costs, efficiency and revenue.

LeMere explains, “As we went through situation after situation, we were able to evaluate which model increased productivity and the corresponding agent labour impact.

We wanted to get up and running at a steady state, but we also needed to know what made the most sense for our business. It took time, but it was worth it. We were able to provide real examples to senior leadership and say, ‘In this scenario, we will save $5,000 per week.’ That’s pretty powerful.”

With inContact fully implemented, LeMere’s Workforce Manager Nick Cooper is able to test new ideas in the WFM lab. He examines how a newly developed staffing model runs in the lab for a week or two. Then, only when he is happy with the result and secure in its impact on the business does the team consider it for production. LeMere projects that Great Wolf Resorts can save upwards of 15% in agent labour costs with some of the workforce modeling.

Focusing on agent needs “When deciding on which WFM lab scenario we would implement, we also had to be acutely aware of the impact to our team. The change would not just influence revenue and cost, it was going to change the way our people work.

You can’t tell your agents that processes are changing and let it be. You have to prepare them,” states LeMere.

The number one priority at Great Wolf Resorts is creating an employee culture that “feels like coming home.” With an aggressive implementation plan, LeMere recognized the need to keep his employees empowered and informed.

The team re-wrote policies and procedures while setting agents up for success through one-on-one meetings and by providing enticing perks with the new system.

For months, agents had been asking for weekends off, but the previous system made it a painstakingly manual process. With inContact’s solutions, Great Wolf Resorts could deliver on that request in a timely manner. In order to engage employees in the switch to inContact, LeMere shared that the new solution could easily manage a program that provided rotating weekends off. “That gained a lot of buy-in right away. I wanted to let my Pack Members [LeMere’s term for his team] know that we listen and plan with their feedback in mind. Of course they were excited about having some weekends off, but more importantly, they knew we cared about them and that we were being transparent. That was worth a lot when it came time to roll out the new program,” says LeMere. inContact has proven valuable for employee and manager relationships well beyond implementation. With Quality Monitoring (QM), there is a heightened level of communication between team leads and agents. Rather than spending large amounts of time pulling reports out of the system, managers now spend 85% of their time proactively coaching. Two-way communication enabled by Issue 1 • 2016

“We were able to provide real examples to senior leadership and say, ‘In this scenario, we will save $5,000 per week.’ That’s pretty powerful.” integrated technology and processes supports active dialogue, allowing Team Leads to immediately correct issues as they arise.

am able to stand behind that rating and give our senior leadership clear insight into how our customers feel about us.”

Improving the customer experience

Gaining simplicity and flexibility

Prior to implementing inContact, collecting customer feedback at Great Wolf Resorts meant utilizing an inadequate online survey tool that could only be sent to converted customers. Responses provided little insight into the overall customer experience and people that did not make a purchase were never given an opportunity to share feedback.

All that changed when Great Wolf Resorts implemented ECHO, inContact’s customer satisfaction feedback survey.

“Before ECHO, our data was skewed and we were unable to coach our agents based on specific feedback.

With inContact, agent awareness is at an all-time high and we offer 100% of our customers the opportunity to provide commentary on their experience. Their voices are heard,” states Courtney Franklin, LeMere’s call centre manager.

With ECHO, Great Wolf Resorts’ agents have access to their individual results. The access takes the guesswork out of how customers are responding and provides realtime performance metrics. This allows them to modify behaviors and improve as they go rather than waiting on supervisor feedback.

Great Wolf Resorts also uses ECHO to reward agents for strong performance. The incentive program recognizes agents that have achieved a certain level of customer satisfaction (CSAT) in front of their peers. And, agents are partially compensated on score—the higher their score, the more money they make.

“Our CSAT score has gone up significantly since employing ECHO,” shares LeMere, “We currently sit around an 89%, and we are able to report it because we know exactly where that number comes from. I

The ease of managing the inContact platform and integrating its technology with business processes have yielded solid benefits to LeMere.

Being familiar with contact centre best practices and day-to-day management, LeMere and team can easily make changes using logical call flows and scripting tools.

LeMere’s team also uses the system to load balance for business continuity and service level management using the per cent allocation tool. “It’s easy to run and we don’t have to get IT involved in the basics. Our per cent allocation switch intelligently looks at our program flow and routes our calls to the right locations accordingly,” says LeMere.

With the success to date, LeMere is now exploring additional ways to help the Great Wolf Resorts’ contact centre achieve projected growth and reduced costs over the prior year.

The team continues to forecast the impact of potential changes with the WFM lab and utilizes customer feedback to direct the team. LaMere states, “By making inContact’s solutions a standard, we adapt quickly to changing customer needs and ultimately make better business decisions for our customers.”

Gavin Gustafson is communications manager at inContact and has been with the company since 2014. He is primarily responsible for maintaining, promoting and growing the inContact brand and public image as a leader and expert in cloud-platform contact centre solutions. Gavin has more than 11 years of experience in corporate communications, marketing and public relations within the software and contact centre industries. He holds a BS in Communications from Utah Valley University.

contact management | 9

The Innovation Issue

Privacy & social engineering in the contact centre “The emerging reality of the global economy is that our data and information is more at risk than ever. To address this, governments are tightening up on the requirements organizations must abide by as it relates to the collection, storage and security of personal information. This requires increased upfront authentication to ensure compliance which means more time ensuring the person on the phone is validated. This flies in the face of the traditional mandate of the contact centre which is to deliver superior customer service in a timely manner. We need to educate our customers as to why we are doing this and how important these steps are in ensuring their personal information stays secure.”

—Katherine Thompson, chair, CATA cyber council

10 | contact management

By Sangeeta Bhatnagar

W

hy are hackers targeting contact centres? One of the easiest and most successful ways to breach privacy is to break through a company’s most vulnerable point—it’s people. Hackers use social engineering to influence, persuade and sometimes intimidate the agent into giving them information. And the fact is it’s not only working, it’s on the rise. Why? The main driver is the culture of the contact centre which caters to the skilled criminal because they know the person on the phone is encouraged, even incented, to ensure the customer is happy and satisfied with the transaction. Add to this the fact that currently agents are not trained to identify a social engineering attack nor are there systems in place to monitor and mediate, so the hacker is relatively unchallenged in carrying out their objective.

There are several kinds of social engineering currently being used to attack contact centres: • Impersonation: pretending to be someone else, giving partial information to gain more information.

• Emotions: pretending to be super friendly, crying or irate to manipulate the person into giving the information or completing the task that the social engineer would like.

• The overly helpful help desk: through a desire to help the customer, the agent discloses too much information to the social engineer without proper authentication.

• Third-party authorization: when the social engineer quotes someone of stature in the company, intimidating the agent to disclose private information and possibly skipping some authentication that would have normally been conducted.

• Tech Support: someone pretending to be from technical support, asking for passwords, access to your systems, etc.

Why are privacy practices essential to the contact centre?

There are varying factors motivating the implementation and enforcement of privacy and security policies. Changes to legislation both in Canada and abroad are certainly a driver. For contact centres currently operating outside of Canada, there will be requirements around reporting of privacy/data breaches in a timely manner. There are also fines associated with privacy breaches that could impact a company’s financial results, brand and consumer confidence. Along with government fines, organizations that fail to implement rigorous processes and procedures around the protection of personal information will find themselves facing potentially costly lawsuits from those whose information has been compromised.

In Canada, organizations should be aware of the upcoming obligations that PIPEDA will place on them with respect to breaches of their security safeguards. This Issue 1 • 2016

The Innovation Issue

aspect of the law will come into force once regulations have been finalized. Once the applicable provisions are proclaimed, PIPEDA will define “breach of security safeguards” as a loss or unauthorized access or disclosure of personal information that results from either the breach of an organization’s security safeguards or an organization’s failure to establish these safeguards. For outsourced contact centres that already face questions from clients around how data is managed and protected, a failure to comply and clearly demonstrate adherence to legislative requirements can result in a loss of revenue as many clients may deem the risk of sharing this information with a third-party provider too great.

Challenges around tightening privacy practices in a contact centre The biggest challenge for the contact centre without a doubt involves shifting the culture away from the speed and efficiency of the customer interaction. In an environment that is based on ensuring customers receive first call resolution in a timely and respective manner, implementing thorough privacy and security protocols is a shock to the contact centre and to the customer. But in reality, it is what will be required to ensure that risks are minimized for the organization and the customer’s privacy going forward.

Frontline training to teach agents to understand and flag when a social engineering call is taking place will be increasingly crucial to organizations. Monitoring suspicious calls will be essential to the security efforts Issue 1 • 2016

to ensure sensitive data of the organization’s remains secure.

Creating a culture of security The success of any initiative around privacy and security is contingent on the buy-in you get from your employees. To ensure buy-in, security should be part of your company’s culture. This begins with senior leadership taking an active role in communicating the importance of privacy policies to all team members so there is a wide and deep understanding of why policies are put in place and how important it is that these policies are followed. Without this, the likelihood of long-term success is minimal.

There must be a full cultural change from one focused on speed to one that values security and protection as part of delivering a great customer experience.

Protecting the customer should be the priority instead of getting them on and off the phone quickly.

With corporate privacy breaches a recurring theme on the nightly news, customers are increasingly

questioning how their personal information is managed. To get ahead of the curve and, more importantly, reassure your customers that you take the security of their personal information very seriously, forward thinking organizations need to embrace a “secure and satisfied” approach to customer experience.

Sangeeta Bhatnagar is principal at SB Global Human Capital Solutions, where she helps companies recruit, retain and develop top talent. Sangeeta is an instructor at Seneca College and chair of the Greater Toronto Area Contact Centre Association. She is passionate about both the current state as well as the future state of the contact centre industry. Sangeeta is recognized nationally as an innovative and engaged voice for the issues and opportunities facing the industry and is the first in the industry to recognize front-line security training as a requirement for the future. She can be reached at sangeeta@sbglobal.ca, @ sbhatnagar212 and www.sbglobal.ca.

contact management | 11

The Innovation Issue

TD Bank introduces customer service through Facebook Messenger Q&A with John Capozzolo, senior vice president, direct channels, TD Bank Group more about this innovative new offering.

By Sarah O’Connor

I

n December 2015, TD became the first bank in the world to offer customer service through Facebook Messenger.

“Whether it is in a branch, over the phone or on your mobile device, the core of what we do is about delivering legendary experiences for our customers and unparalleled convenience and service every single day,” said Theresa McLaughlin, incoming chief marketing officer, TD Bank Group. “We are excited to be able to extend our ability to engage with our customers in a convenient and timely way through Messenger. More than 16 million Canadians use Facebook every day, so it is an important communication platform for us to make a more personal, human connection with our customers.”

In 2011, TD was the first bank in Canada to offer customer service 17 hours a day, seven days a week through a dedicated North American Social Customer Service team on Twitter and Facebook. Earlier this year TD launched texting as part of Social Customer Service, TD Helps (the TD online advice community). The company has announced that it will soon launch live chat on tdcanadatrust.com.

“More than 700 million people use Messenger to stay connected to the people and now, businesses, they care about. We’re pleased that TD Bank Group is leading the way in the financial services sector, delivering their customers the best way to communicate quickly, conveniently and within context… all inside one of their favourite apps,” said Jordan Banks, managing director, Facebook Canada.

“We know Messenger is a popular and widely used platform and this demonstrates our belief in making sure we bring customer service to where our customers are,” added McLaughlin.

Direct Marketing interviewed TD Bank Group’s Senior Vice President, Direct Channels John Capozzolo to learn 12 | contact management

Q: How and when was Facebook Messenger identified as a key channel that TD wanted to engage with customers through?

A: Our customers are at the centre of everything we do and our mobile journey is no different. Facebook Messenger is one part of a larger mobile strategy at TD that includes a history of firsts when it comes to offering customers more ways to engage with us.

When Facebook approached us in 2015 to be a pilot partner in their new Messenger for Business program, it was a great opportunity for TD to again become early adopters for our customers. With more than 16 million Canadians using Facebook every day, we’re thrilled to offer our customers the choice to connect with us via the channel they prefer, when they prefer—in branch, on the phone, SMS, online, digitally or via social media.

Q: What security considerations initially stood in the way, and how were they overcome?

A: TD is committed to providing our customers with a safe and secure environment no matter when or where they connect with us. We use the latest security technology to ensure that customers can interact online with us safely and confidently.

Q: How did you prepare/train staff for interactions via this channel?

A: TD is committed to offering

comfortable and convenient customer service through each of our channels. We’re training our employees to be fluent in different types of technology to encourage them to be strong advocates. As our digital services evolve to meet the needs of our customers, we’re developing additional training as more capabilities are introduced through Messenger and other platforms.

Q: How has customer response been so far?

A: Customer response has been extremely positive. Since we launched the service in December 2015, we have interacted with thousands of longstanding and potential customers. We’re excited to extend our customer service support to a channel that is important to our customers.

Q: Have there been any unexpected challenges or benefits?

A: Canadians are continually becoming more mobile savvy and this recent launch is part of the journey to ensure we’re delivering comfortable and convenient experiences for our customers any way they choose to connect with us. We’re always challenging ourselves to deliver legendary customer service through new channels. We’ve done this by collaborating with start-ups and looking at market innovations to elevate the digital experience by creating more intuitive, personalized service that makes our customers’ lives simpler.

Issue 1 • 2016

// 25

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