7 Strategies to Upgrade Call-Center Performance, Part 1 of 2

The rise of electronic communications between businesses and customers over the past decade-plus, albeit a productive one, has resulted in at least one negative side effect: Call-center customer service has suffered. With that in mind, a recent whitepaper from the multichannel customer service and knowledge management software provider eGain, 7 Innovations to Reinvent Phone-Based Customer Service, offers seven fresh approaches to optimizing performance in the call center.

This week, in the first part of this two-part series, we’ll present the first four of these strategies. Then check back next week for the rest.

1. Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP). The benefits of implementing VoIP technology in your call center include the following, according to the whitepaper:

* cost savings from combining the phone and data infrastructure;

* the ability to leverage VoIP infrastructure and the ease of implementing virtual call centers across multiple sites and remote agents, including at-home and outsourced;

* improved infrastructure and agent use;

* ease of management; and

* an improved customer service experience.

2. End-to-end call process automation. With integrated call tracking, knowledge base and workflows, call-center reps can resolve customer inquiries and initiate follow-up fulfillment tasks, including escalations to subject matter experts, with service levels attached to them, the whitepaper says.

Once useful, call-logging systems have become outdated. They’re now disconnected data and process silos that don’t integrate with call resolution or case management systems; knowledge bases; service fulfillment work flows; and nonphone interaction channels such as e-mail, chat, SMS and Web self-service. This results in an increase in call handle time and repeat calls, increased escalations and call transfers, poor customer service experiences, noncompliance with interaction regulations and best practices, failure to deliver on promised service levels, and ultimately reduced customer loyalty.

3. Customer Interaction Hub (CIH). Provide your call-center reps a 360-degree view of customer interactions through nonphone channels, the whitepaper advises. Such integration with nonphone channels gives a complete view of customer interaction across all channels, allowing phone agents to start where customers left off in their previous interactions for optimal customer experiences and contact center efficiencies.

Channel unification also helps increase service consistency and agent use across channels by leveraging universal queuing and routing, and centralized multichannel knowledge bases and business rules. By implementing a CIH system to provide a unified cross-channel customer experience, you can drastically reduce customer interaction costs and total cost of ownership, while improving customer service consistency and quality by centralizing multichannel customer communications, knowledge management, business rules, work flow, administration and analytics in one platform.

4. Multidimensional knowledge base. This takes a holistic approach to knowledge management, enabling significant improvements in operational and strategic metrics such as first call resolution, call handle time, sales conversions, reduction of unwarranted product returns and site visits, customer satisfaction, interaction compliance, and brand loyalty to new levels, the whitepaper says.

The knowledge base management system should focus on the following three core areas, the whitepaper says.

* Content: Multidimensional knowledge bases provide adaptive, closed-loop content management and work flow capabilities for authoring, publishing, content performance-tracking and closed-loop content management. Adaptive content management ensures the content remains fresh and relevant by monitoring ongoing content performance (e.g., is the content being used; is it answering the questions; does the content base cover FAQs?) and by automatically triggering content creation and management tasks with service levels attached to them.

* Access: A multidimensional knowledge base provides multimodal access to content. For example, experienced users may prefer to quickly process search hits, while newer users may prefer guided help. A chatbot enables a branded self-service experience and can increase online conversions in presales situations, while answering less complex queries after the sale.

Guided help that leverages a reasoning engine is more appropriate for contextual cross-sell and upsell offers, as well as diagnosing and resolving queries of medium to high complexity. Multimodal access to content helps increase user adoption and the business value of the knowledge base.

* Process: Following the proper steps in your interaction with customers and prospects — providing information, solving problems, upselling or cross-selling, helping them execute transactions — is critical to delivering an exceptional customer experience. A multidimensional knowledge base leverages technologies such as a reasoning engine to capture best practice interaction expertise across various customer queries, and serves it to agents or end-customers step by step, leading them to the right content and/or the next best steps, including contextual cross-sell and upsell offers.

For more information, go to www.egain.com.