Call Center Week – Reviews and Interviews – Part II

One of the key measurements of success in any contact center environment is achieving a higher level of customer satisfaction. Businesses are increasing their use of sophisticated knowledge management tools, behavioral analytics, and contact center technologies to better engage their customers while improving agent performance and productivity.  Companies are seeking solutions that offer ease of implementation, flexibility and the potential for rapid ROI.  In this report on emerging innovations presented at Call Center Week, CRMXchange provides a look at some of the strategies of solution providers in the customer satisfaction and knowledge management space.

What do you consider the most important tools to enable contact centers to improve customer satisfaction?

Barry Givens, Director, Product Management, CRM, Avanade   We believe that the key to improving customer satisfaction for agent-assisted interactions is providing deep customer insight through integration of systems. Customers have many ways to interact with an organization today. Contact center agents need to have visibility in these channels and to insights that can be derived from this pattern of interactions.

Brad Sellors, Managing Director, InfiniteKM   The most important asset for improving customer satisfaction is a company’s team. Beneath the team are the tools and technology to enable the team to be engaged and have the ability to quickly remedy service issues and provide cross-sell / upsell opportunities.

Jerry Adriano, Executive VP, SATMAP   The use of analytics/big data to pair callers and agents based on personality that eliminates the randomness of traditional call allocation is an innovative, and non-disruptive way to improve customer experience and optimize all key call center metrics. 

Human personality is an important tool that enhances the quality of interactions between callers and agents. SATMAP leverages the power of personality to drive enterprise wide benefits.

We offer solutions to meet the four challenges faced by all contact center operators:

• Creating a great employee experience
• Delivering a consistently great customer experience
• Continually improving metrics
• Managing and reducing costs

How can companies use your solution to increase both the engagement and effectiveness of their contact center agents?

Barry Givens, Avanade  The Avanade Contact Center Solution combines insight into customers from multiple systems to enable agents to effectively service customers. It also leverages collaboration and gamification techniques to keep agents informed about emerging issues in the contact center and to provide real-time performance feedback. When combined with our Experience Design solutions, the Avanade Contact Center Solution provides an agent desktop that is highly tailored to their work patterns.

Brad Sellors, InfiniteKM   Employees are motivated to succeed when they share common goals with the organization. Our platform fosters this ideal through applied collective intelligence. Our communications modules –such as News Flash, Daily Summary Updates, chat, feedback tools and system messaging tools– ensure all agents are encouraged to share their perspectives. At the same time, management has the opportunity to clearly communicate corporate objectives. Through communication and collaboration, agents feel both valued and engaged.

InfiniteKM improves agent effectiveness by employing search systems to ensure agents are equipped with the right knowledge to provide consistent and reliable support to their callers. According to IDC, employees spend 18.5% of their time searching for information but these searches are successful less than 50% of the time. This means an employee is spending almost a whole day each week being ineffective and frustrated. This is problematic in a contact center environment where a low AHT and high FCR is paramount to providing great customer experience. Our natural language search algorithm and document library system ensures only the relevant answers are delivered to the agent. These systems ensure consistent responses, faster response times and increased first-time resolution.

Additionally, our modules for customers improve contact center efficiency by reducing repetitive and redundant inquiries. Our platform easily integrates with a public website and offers web self-service modules to allow customers to search through a support library for the answers to their questions. Customers also have the ability to request a call back from the contact center or chat/email directly with the agent.

Jerry Adriano, SATMAP   Our solution generates a customer-agent rapport that results in more issues resolved on the first call. Conversion, retention and collection rates rise. Agent performance improves across the board.

SATMAP raises agent performance by better pairing callers and agents. Better call outcomes increase agent satisfaction. As satisfaction increases, agent retention improves and higher productivity per agent is generated. Furthermore, recruitment and onboarding costs are reduced. A stable and motivated workforce helps drive contact center effectiveness.

How easy it is to implement your system; in what ways do its capabilities grow over time; and how can it be customized to meet the specific needs of diverse organizations?

Barry Givens, Avanade  The Avanade Contact Center Solution is built on a flexible development platform, the Unified Service Desk, from Microsoft. It can be implemented with a minimal amount of customization and can then be configured, over time, to integrate a wider set of agent tools and customer insights. Avanade often implements projects in phases – making sure the technology fits with key systems like CTI and then expanding the solution reach to legacy systems.

Brad Sellors, InfiniteKM   Ours is a scalable, modular system that can be deployed within weeks. We offer over 40 modules, which can be configured individually, over time, or purchased in one of our packages: InfiniteKM Essentials and InfiniteKM Enterprise.  You can see a full list of our modules on our website.

We can also customize the platform to meet specific requirements. Our Professional Services team is responsible for the implementation, development, configuration and training of the platform. Our team provides custom digital marketing and learning (service, sales and leadership modules).

Jerry Adriano, SATMAP   It’s a rapid and easy deployment. SATMAP deploys its solution in 60  to 90 days and maintains all incumbent operational processes such as agent management, recruitment, training, skill assignment and compensation.

SATMAP is non-disruptive to the call center environment and works in real time within a client’s existing call center software, routing and telephony. No call is delayed as SATMAP pairs within 50 milliseconds, and agents and callers are never aware that SATMAP has paired them.

No new security risks are introduced and customer data is fully protected. SATMAP is fully PCI-compliant and has been certified to pair calls seamlessly with all major PBX systems including Avaya, Genesys and Cisco.The solution also learns over time. The system reviews its results to improve its algorithm every day, delivering sustained improvement over time.

How does Avanade’s technology enable high-volume, multi-site contact centers to optimize performance and operating efficiency?

Barry Givens   We place an emphasis on agent productivity through integration, gamification and customer insight. The solution also provides contact center employees with deep insights into agent behaviors that can be used to identify coaching opportunities and find star players.

The Avanade Contact Center Solution tracks detailed agent behaviors including the amount of time it takes to find a knowledge-based article, or to file notes on a case. While many agent performance management tools are provided solely to managers, we believe that providing these types of metrics directly to teams of agents aids greatly in peer coaching and bottom-up improvement for operational efficiency.

What else would you like CRMXchange readers to know about Avanade?

We help customers realize results in a digital world through business technology solutions and managed services that combine insight, innovation and expertise focused on Microsoft technologies. Our people have helped thousands of organizations in all industries improve business agility, employee productivity and customer loyalty. Avanade combines the collective business, technical and industry expertise of its worldwide network of experts with the rigor of an industrialized delivery model to provide high quality solutions using proven and emerging technologies with flexible deployment models–on premises, cloud-based or outsourced.

What makes InfiniteKM’s cloud-based knowledge management a transformative technology that changes the way companies interact with their customers?

Brad Sellors    Corporate objectives, leadership and channel activities are aligned and successful. Our platform transforms company performance by minimizing communication and workflow inefficiencies and allowing organizations to focus on delivering business value. We do this in three ways:

• InfiniteKM connects disparate departments, people, devices and systems, enabling organizations to embrace and achieve omni-channel initiatives. Many organizations have adopted a multi-channel approach but omni-channel does more than simply establish a range of outreach capabilities to cover different media outlets. With multi-channel, channels remain disconnected. Customers see multiple channels (i.e. in-store experience vs. Twitter experience) but each channel functions independently and each channel’s knowledge of the customer remains separate and hidden from the others. With comprehensive knowledge management tools, channels are connected and knowledge can be shared. According to Forrester, companies with an omni-channel approach report improvements of 10% or more in customer satisfaction and 10% or more increase in campaign feedback. When omni-channel is achieved, customers receive consistent brand experiences, driving brand loyalty and customer satisfaction.
   
• Our easy-to-use communications and learning management system make it easy for leaders to effectively communicate corporate objectives. Using the built in video and presentation tools for communication consumes 80% less time than reading the equivalent ‘All Staff’ emails. According to Watson Wyatt, companies with effective internal communications have a 15.7% higher market value and deliver 29% higher shareholder return.
   
• Our solution not only provides answers, it tracks performance, measures results, and reports findings in a form that is efficient, comprehensive and customizable. Our superior sharing and dashboard analytics analyze customer behavioral trends, contact center performance and sales team success, driving agility and insight to ensure effective and successful decision-making.

What else would you like CRMXchange’s readers to know about InfiniteKM?

InfiniteKM does not compete with CRM solutions; our software greatly enhances CRM and seamlessly integrates with a wide range of solutions. We are a Microsoft Developer Network partner and we offer standalone SaaS or simple integration into Salesforce, Oracle Siebel, SharePoint, Microsoft Dynamics, Microsoft Office and Active Directory.

How does SATMAP’s technology enable organizations to optimize call outcomes by matching customers and agents on the basis of personality?

Jerry Adriano   On a daily basis, SATMAP identifies patterns of successful communication within publicly available consumer data, surveyed agent behavioral information and historical call outcome records. After calls have been processed by incumbent telephony, it dynamically assigns callers and agents based upon these evolving patterns

This process of harnessing customer and agent personality data works because it recognizes successful contact center outcomes and ensures they occur more frequently than traditional “first-in first-out” call allocation strategies allow.

SATMAP typically delivers a 4-6% performance improvement relative to traditional time based call distribution. SATMAP’s patented and transparent benchmarking process provides accurate and unbiased on-going measurement of incremental SATMAP benefit.

SATMAP delivers incremental benefits to a call center, whether it is struggling with delivering its current metrics, or it has best-in-class results. Notably, whatever the optimization objective, SATMAP can help. Whether increasing sales conversion, optimizing collections, reducing handle time, improving customer retention and satisfaction, or enhancing tech support, SATMAP delivers precisely measurable results.

What else would you like CRMXchange’s readers to know about SATMAP?

Our patented solution pairs callers and agents in real time based on personality. SATMAP improves customer experience resulting in measurably increased revenues and reduced costs. We don’t segment callers or agents. We don’t rank agents hierarchically based on performance. We deliver real-time, measurable results through:

— Unique  patented solution
— Works in agent surplus and caller surplus situations
— Enterprise scale deployments with references
— Zero disruption to incumbent processes; zero cost to client for installation
— Profit-sharing business model based on precisely measurable results
— Global capabilities.

We have customers across all verticals, with telecom being the sector with the most early adopters.Since SATMAP based on a pay-per-performance model, the risks of implementing it are limited.