Today there are many ways to research, review and purchase products, as well as seek support and service once the initial sale takes place. How we opt to carry out those communications is ultimately our decision – and now, more than ever, the choices are plentiful. Traditional sales, support and service have taken place through the telephone – the medium that triggered the term “call center.” But with the advent and technological advances the Internet has brought to our personal and professional lives, many new channels for customer interactions are now available. With this surge in popularity comes the affordability and ease-of-use that Internet-based communications provide. As a result, many of us have turned to the web due to its efficiency and responsiveness in meeting our needs – whether we’re on an information gathering mission, making a purchase or investment, or simply reaching out for help. And while these Internet-based mediums offer great, new advantages, they also carry certain drawbacks – the largest being an assurance for timely, consistent quality service.

In delivering customer service through telephone-based communications, the vast majority of organizations have a workable model in place – one that focuses on such standards as length of call (ability to handle sales/service issues in a timely manner); one call resolution (ability to meet customer needs the first time around); knowledge (ability to service based on understanding of the offerings and customers’ need); and service delivery (ability to deliver top-notch service in a helpful, professional manner). All of these have close ties to a single goal – ensuring quality and meeting the customer need. It’s made the initial IVR welcome greeting that many centers use – “this call may be recorded for quality” – a standard nearly everyone has heard! Today’s challenge is to extend those same standards to Internet–based communications and truly optimize performance and quality across the board. Your competition is now only a click away!

Building a Multi-Media Contact Center – Ensuring Quality – Achieving Performance Optimization
Just because you’ve mastered quality for telephone service, does not necessarily mean you have the infrastructure or knowledge in place to mirror that success and replicate it for the web. Telephone customer service and support was the standard for as long as most consumers remember. You expected to have a person help answer your questions and place your order “real-time.” When compared to newer mediums, however, telephone-based service is costly. Often you are placed on hold in a “queue” waiting for the next available agent. Technology investments, training and customer sales/service representative (CSR) skill advancement has successfully countered many of those issues. Workforce management solutions help balance the workload. Skilled-based routing helps ensure the best-equipped CSR is servicing the most appropriate customer interaction based on the ACD’s ability to forward calls. Universal call routing ties multiple centers together, creating a unified front and the ability to fully maximize internal resources. And IVRs provide customers with the option to perform self-service for automated information, such as checking your bank account balance.

To ensure level of service along the way, quality monitoring applications came into play to enhance a center’s ability to meet (and exceed) the customer need. The recording of select telephone interactions can occur randomly by CSR for a cross-section of calls each month, or be set up to trigger recordings based on user-defined “business rules” for evaluating specific business practices – such as communications with key customers, effectiveness of a product launch, or success of a new campaign. This practice of business-driven recording, which has been deemed mission-critical by the analyst community, helps introduce a quality assurance standard for training design, scripting and screen flow effectiveness, as well as service delivery and performance optimization.

The fact that a growing portion of the population has embraced Internet communications vehicles to help meet their needs, has made a profound impact for many businesses – and for their call centers in particular. Internet-based customer touch points – which include electronic mail, collaborative web chat and web self-service – have challenged call centers and directly impacted their evolution into what we call “contact centers.” As Internet capabilities have matured, customers have many options – some of which have challenged contact centers to extend their capabilities, step-up their technology and introduce new processes and training programs. We, as consumers, have changed how they do business – and in response, they have impacted how we are serviced. While many sales/service centers have perfected quality service over the phone – they are now challenged to mirror that success and extend it to Internet-based communications – creating a real competitive differentiator!

With contact centers come a great need for industries across the board to revisit their service readiness from multiple vantage points. It raises important technological and human resource issues that previously were moot points. And it leads to many preparedness questions. Is your center technically equipped? Are you integrating your technologies to ensure quality? Do you have a performance optimization model in place? Have you developed your multimedia sales and service strategies? What is your CSRs’ readiness – are their skills sets up to par? Have you instated a method to deliver and measure quality, consistency of service, and customer loyalty moving forward?

A “yes” to each of these questions means you’re ready – your multimedia contact center is bound for success. Yet, while many work diligently to equip their contact centers for your next Email or instant message, their greatest challenge is how to achieve consistency across all mediums and service inquires in a timely manner. With quality service comes repeat business, customer loyalty and great word-of-mouth … creating new possibilities and great opportunity for your contact center to thrive! Industry analysts support this belief, stating that today’s customers will be demanding “next-generation” tools to improve the overall performance of their contact centers across many functions, including the monitoring of quality, agent training and evaluation, and call center performance analysis. On-line, written communication – as seen through Email, web chat and instant messaging – have created the need for new quality checkpoints. Today’s businesses cannot afford the inefficiencies multiple service channels can yield. The time to re-examine and fine-tune your CRM strategy is here!

Redefining CRM – Your people, processes and technologies, the key to your ongoing success
Industry experts agree that customer relationship management (CRM) is a business strategy that can help improve profitability, revenue and customer satisfaction. Developing and maintaining long-term customer relationships is critical to the success of businesses operating in the competitive global marketplace. The rapid growth of the Internet and e-commerce has increased the importance companies place on their customer relationships. Because the Internet enables consumers to easily evaluate products and prices from a wide range of geographically dispersed vendors and quickly change vendors at relatively low cost, it is becoming more difficult for businesses to develop long-term relationships with their customers. And as Internet usage expands, the need for personal contact will be increasingly important to ensure quality customer experiences.

Implementing recording and analysis software to help optimize your CRM strategy is one important way in which you can improve your center’s performance. Your customers are now using new technologies – like email and real-time web chat – to communicate for the same reasons they used to call over the telephone. Are your people, processes and technologies equipped to deliver the same level of service to which they’ve become accustomed?

Examining your infrastructure – a good first step
Technology is your first consideration. Look to the tools you have integrated and how they’re being maximized today. Then, consider those that you should invest in to ensure effective web-based communications. Many of us have felt the force of poor on-line customer care. The new danger is … your competition is now only a click away!

A technology investment that’s imperative is email response management. Consultants estimate that you should evaluate email solutions if your contact center receives 50 or more electronic messages per day. Email response management solutions allow you to manage the influx of electronic mail by automatically replying and/or suggesting responses to incoming messages based on the answers and information you set up. It manages and tracks electronic communications from arrival through response, routing messages to the most appropriate personnel along the way. Companies using this technology are doing so to track Email communications throughout their course; provide customers with alternate communications channels; and reduce contact costs by directing inquiries to the most profitable medium whenever possible.

With estimates that two-thirds of businesses will use instant messaging within the next five years, evaluating the quality of those interactions is quickly becoming essential as companies adopt this technology. For the growing number of web interactions, collaborative chat systems are another worthy investment. These applications enable CSRs to interact “live” with customers by passing instant messages, web pages, documents and scripts. Some can even take control of the customer’s browser to help direct them to information on the site. In communicating this way, companies can dramatically reduce the volume and talk time of calls to CSRs, as well as increase sales closure rates at the point of contact. Setting up an effective web and Email communications process is vital. If customer try to use these mediums to meet their needs and find they cannot get the information they need, invariably, they’ll revert to a phone call – making the interaction more costly for your center and frustrating for your customers.

Enhancing Performance through Process Engineering and Training
The second and third pieces of the CRM optimization puzzle include inspecting the processes your management teams have introduced and how well your people carry them out. Multimedia customer service has ushered in a brand new era and a need to examine your practices. CSRs who have mastered service over the telephone, may not carry the same consistency in their ability to service over the web. This challenges centers to adopt new practices in hiring and training. Should they focus on having specialized representatives that handle specific interactions only? Or should they move to a new model – the “universal agent” who can handle interactions from multiple communications media with proficiency? Is a universal agent even feasible? Both models will impact the type of job candidates you seek and the training programs and coaching initiatives you introduce.

Internet-based customer service (e-service) is an imperative for any enterprise wanting to compete effectively in the new millennium. And recording and evaluating customer interactions in multi-channel contact centers have become popular tools for quality assurance. It can do so across all mediums – voice and data, Email, collaborative chat and web self-service. A multimedia customer interaction recording technology allows you to impact your agents’ service capabilities, morale and motivation. It helps ensure consistency across customer touch points. It solidifies the effectiveness of your processes. And it ensures your customers receive seamless top-notch service regardless of how they choose to communicate with you.

Companies must ensure multimedia communications are responded to in a timely manner, that responses are consistent and that agents meet customer needs on first contact, in a professional manner. For this reason, especially now, monitoring is critical. Users of monitoring technology can trigger recording of voice/data telephone interactions, Email and web chat communications randomly or through user-defined business rules. For Internet communications, it can record based on specific “begin” and “end” commands – and then be analyzed to measure results against pre-defined goals and proactively explore opportunities for performance optimization. These advanced applications offer proven, integrated solutions with many compatible technologies, such as Email response management and collaborative web chat systems. By capturing entire interactions, recordings can be reviewed later in a “real time” manner to gauge the effectiveness of the processes, as well as CSRs’ knowledge level, ability to maximize and navigate tools at their disposal, and service customers effectively.

With the knowledge that your competition is only a click away in today’s multimedia sales and service environment, the stakes are high! But so are the benefits if you effectively optimize your people, processes and technologies by evaluating your CRM strategy, enhancing your quality assurance tactics, and ensuring your ability to deliver consistent quality service regardless of customer touch point each and every time!

*Special Note: This article was originally published in the April 2000 issue of C@ll Center CRM Solutions Magazine (now Customer Inter@ction Solutions Magazine).

©2000-2003, Witness Systems, Inc. All Rights Reserved Worldwide.