Survey Validates Value of UC in the Contact Center
Aspect Software recently commissioned a study to look at opportunities to improve customer service through unified communications (UC). Aspect retained Leo J. Shapiro and Associates LLC of Chicago to conduct the survey of 50 contact center supervisors and 50 contact center agents at the end of 2007. The findings of the study clearly identify customer service stumbling blocks that could be overcome by the deployment of UC in the contact center.
The Aspect study found that, according to the supervisors and agents interviewed, 10.3 percent of all telephone inquiries handled on a daily basis required assistance from knowledge workers outside of the contact center. When these calls requiring outside help occur, the study reports that one of two things generally happen:
- Contact center personnel place the customer on hold while they seek the expertise required, then relay that information to the customer secondhand; or
- Contact center personnel attempt to resolve the customer issue to the point that outside expertise is needed, and then the customer call is transferred to the knowledge worker for resolution.
I submit that a third scenario is also possible - that the customer service rep takes the information from the customer and promises a call-back once the answer can be gleaned from the appropriate resources. In any case, these scenarios negatively impact two important contact center performance metrics; average call handle time, also known as average handle time (AHT), and first call resolution (FCR). An increase in AHT or a decrease in FCR can both be detrimental to the operational performance and customer service levels of the typical customer care center.
The Aspect-sponsored Shapiro study found that the average call was increased by approximately 2.5 minutes each time a knowledge worker outside the contact center was required to in order to resolve a customer inquiry. Although the study didn’t pinpoint how much of that 2.5 minutes was spent searching for the knowledge worker and how much was spent on the phone with the customer, we can reasonably assume that a good percentage of that time, perhaps as high as half of that time, was spent searching for and connecting to the knowledge worker outside of the contact center.
If that one-to-1.5 minutes spent searching for a resource could be reduced or eliminated through the use of such UC-enabled solutions as Presence, the cost savings and increased productivity could be significant. Think of the number of calls your own call center handles each day and what might be saved by shaving a minute or more off of ten percent of those calls. Although this is conjecture, it still serves to illustrate a point: UC in the contact center comes with a built-in return on investment (ROI) that is not only demonstrable; it is enough to make even the most hard-hearted CFO take notice.
Full details of the Aspect Software survey are available at www.aspect.com.
I’m not sure I buy it…. presence is only a small component of successfully finding the required expertise. The contact center employee needs to know whom to contact, or find out whom to contact froma mutual third party, and then re-expain the issue and hopefully discover that they found the right person.
Presence alone is not going to help this, it will contribute to not wasting time hunting down someone who is not even in the office. Presence will not solve the problem of finding the right person to ask though. At this point that is still the hardest part of the equation….
I think there is a more fundamental benefit that UC brings to the traditional call center, and that is to relieve the real-time pressure that telephony and voice conversations bring to customer assistance. The problem that a customer may have may not be time critical, but it is exacerbated by the need to answer the phone call as soon as possible to minimize waiting in a queue, usually unable to do anything else. The time penalty of handling a phone call has also led to ahother call center metric that the customer should not have a make a second, time-consuming call, i.e., First Call Resolution.
Looking at UC from the perspective of the customer as the contact initiator, it should offer them the choice of immediate voice conversation as well as various forms of message exchange. That fits in nicely with your “third scenario” for an ASAP response. (That response doesn’t have to be a callback to a location, especially, as customers become more mobile, increasingly using personalized, multimodal “smart phones,” and can get the information asynchronously in text or speech message output, not just through a voice callback.
That kind of response can then be escalated, if necessary, by the customer to get further live assistance in any of the contact modalities that UC supports (email, IM, “Click-to-call” and even video).
These options will also all benefit from the contextual intelligence, tradtionally known as “CRM,” that will be captured from any previous contact activity. Coupled with federated presence information from the customer, the response can be properly targeted to the device and modality that the recipient has available.
I think it is time that we rethink the role of the voice telephone as the only way that a customer can effectively make contact with customer facing staff to get information. Instead, we should be thinking of devices like the iPhone that the individual customer will be using personally, instead of just a shared, location-based, desktop, voice-only, wired telephone.
[...] UC Strategies has a good post on how Unified Communications helps with customer support. [...]
Unified Communications can help immensely in the Contact Center to reduce the time necessary to respond to a customer service call with expert resources. The survey contends that a significant amount of time could be saved using UC-enabled presence to ensure reach ability, but there are other components of UC, such as IM, web chat and web-conferencing that can ensure a CSR quickly enlists the right resources to solve the customer service question.
If a CSR could click to conference from their PC or initiate conference services on an IP phone or a smart phone to collaborate with a group of engineers or developers, rather than just finding the right single resource, you could dramatically impact average handle time and first call resolution.
Another significant UC tool in the contact center is the ability to synchronize Phone ACD and Web ACD, which could significantly impact call center operations. Now a days customers want a choice as to how they get their customer service questions answered. Some use a phone and others use email or web chat.
Contact Centers use Phone ACD systems for routing a variety of requests from customers, such as: phone calls, e-mails and chat requests. They also use Web ACD for co-browsing and chat requests. These tools enable contact centers to seamlessly coordinate Remote Support sessions, such as co-browsing, with Phone ACD sessions. The result is improved response time to customers and optimized CSR utilization.
Unified Communications will help to provide choice to the customer when they want problems resolved, either through traditional voice communication or new web based collaboration. Whichever method they choose, UC will help to ensure that call center agents quickly respond to their customer’s issues by using all of their UC communications and collaboration applications.