Creating Customer Contact Solutions
The call center market, or contact center market as it is currently referred to, is an
area where much interest is being generated.The reason for this is that IP is able
to bring much more to the table than traditional solutions ever could because of
its widespread deployment and robust features. Customers can now define how
they want to interact with a company, as opposed to previous solutions where
organizations had certain channels customers could use.
With new world contact centers, channels such as voice, e-mail, fax, and Web
collaboration are now all possible. In traditional solutions, data (e-mail and Web
traffic as well), voice, and video are carried on separate infrastructures, involving
the purchase, installation, and management of multiple networks. A voice solution
in the majority of the cases has no view or understanding of the data network
and vice versa,Video solutions were traditionally room-based, and had NO integration
into any other business processes. In addition, there is no unified view of
the user from a contact center perspective, requiring that business rules be configured
in multiple places.
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Using Cisco AVVID, it is possible to use IP as an enabler to let customers
define how they want to do business with you and not vice versa. As the old
saying goes, “The customer is king”, and if the customer would like to send you
an e-mail, as opposed to giving the call center a ring, they should still receive the
same type of service regardless of the contact means.You need to be able to cater
for this in a way that is both transparent to the customer yet provides a painless
integration for the company.
Normally, the e-mail queue is serviced separately from the voice queue, so
you either have a dedicated agent or multiple agents who deal with e-mail solely,
or when agents get a free moment, they look in the e-mail queue to see if anything
has arrived in the contact center mailbox that needs servicing immediately.
The problem here is that if you have a person dealing with the e-mail queue,
chances are they are only skilled in a certain area, and, based on this, will only be
able to service queries in that specific area; anything else will have to be passed
on to a particular agent, who will service this once they have a chance. During
busy times, this could take awhile, which means you may be dealing with five
calls worth say $10,000 while there is a $100,000 order waiting in the e-mail
queue. In an ideal world, agents need to be notified that there is a large order
waiting in the e-mail queue, and that they should work on that as opposed to
servicing smaller orders. In other words, work smarter, not harder.With some of
the solutions available today, it is possible for an e-mail to receive the same treatment
as a voice call. An example follows.
A person from Company XYZ sends an e-mail asking for a large order to be
shipped to a site. At precisely the same time, a person dials into the contact center
and needs to find out the balance of his account. In this scenario, we could do
several things:
1. Company A could be set up to answer voice calls, so they can give the
customer an answer.When this action is completed, and if time is available,
they can have a look at the e-mail queue, and answer any queries
there.
2. Company B may have an IVR in place. In this instance, the customer
who wanted to receive a balance could be serviced via the IVR and his
balance given to him without any intervention from the agent.
However, the agent still needs to go to the e-mail queue and service it.
The most ideal situation is that we receive both the voice calls and e-mail
simultaneously; the e-mail is scanned, based on predefined rules, so you can see
who it is from, make a decision that this is from one of our major customers and
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answer the e-mail immediately. Because the agent is dealing with an e-mail, a
higher application will realize the agent is busy and not send a call through until
the agent has finished with the e-mail. In the meantime, the customer who calls
in can enter his account number and pin code into an IVR, choose to see their
balance, and the IVR will prompt the balance back to the customer without any
agent intervention, thereby greatly enhancing customer satisfaction by dealing
with multiple contact channels.This action will also cut down on the time necessary
to service incoming requests. In addition, you can provide the voice caller
with the option to speak to an agent if all his needs are not serviced via the IVR.