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Real Time Access To Information Critical To Contact Centre Success
27 Mar 2006
Empowering users delivers enhanced customer service
To win over an increasingly sceptical public contact centres need to empower agents and the business with up to date information in real time. This is the view of Exony, the leader in Interaction Intelligence software, who today released a Top 10 best practice guide. This pinpoints steps contact centres can take to improve performance and enhance the customer experience.
Despite contact centres continuing to expand, with a UK growth of five per cent in 2005 (ContactBabel http://services.silicon.com/offshoring/0,3800004877,39156435,00.htm) information sharing has not always kept pace with expanded agent numbers. Issues such as out of date customer information, poor management access to reporting, agents having to access disparate IT systems to answer a single query and difficulties in managing information flows have led to an increase in customer complaints of poor service.
“Increasingly contact centres are the main point of interaction between the business and the consumer in a large number of industries and consequently have a major effect on retaining and winning customers,” commented Ian Ashby, CEO, Exony. “Ensuring the right information is in the right place at the right time and is therefore crucial to contact centre success. Organisations need to empower both business managers and frontline agents if they are to reap maximum benefit from their contact centres.”
Exony’s guidelines are the fruit of over 20 years work in the contact centre marketplace, helping major organisations deliver improved customer service by empowering users with a complete, timely picture of performance and access to up to date, complete information.
Exony’s Top 10 Best Practice guidelines are:
1. Empower your business users – speed up decision-making and improve business agility by ensuring that access to critical performance information and the tools to make required operational changes.
2. Virtualise your organisation – be able to link multiple physical sites and both internal and outsourced resources into a single virtual customer service infrastructure.
3. Be flexible – be able to deliver different service levels and overall service experience to different brands, customer segments or parts of the business.
4. Make creating business performance reports simple and fast – enable managers to create their own reports rather than needing to go via IT, business analysts or third party providers.
5. Make technology easy to use – integrate different agent-facing systems into one easy-to-use interface to avoid the need to flip between systems while talking to customers.
6. Use customer intelligence – agents are on the frontline of customer interaction, collecting valuable information on what your customers are looking for, so integrate this data into your product roadmap and marketing planning.
7. Enhance customer service – ensure contact centre agents have access to the latest and most relevant information in real time.
8. Involve the business – provide both real-time and historical performance information to senior managers and let them question and query the data.
9. Set clear performance policies – be clear what you expect your agents to achieve and provide the training to enable them to do it.
10. Provide self-service options – automate, providing basic information to enable agents to concentrate on more complex, value-add queries.
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