Center Piece

24 Jun, 2004 in art pottery by admin

Center Piece

Enhancing Contact Center Intelligence

By Jose Allan Tan

Peter F. Drucker once said that a company which owns 30 percent market share knows only 30 percent of the market. That company has no clue about the other 70 percent of the market.

Having been in the IT industry for 20 years I can tell you, with certainty, that Drucker is even wrong about that 30 percent (at least in Asia anyway). For years, I worked for IT vendors and every day business managers complain that they don't know enough about their customer to guarantee security for themselves and the company.

How to win new business from existing customers as well as potential ones is every company's call-to-arms each day. The most common approach for touching those opportunities is the contact center. Whether it's an in-house operation or outsourced, there is a growing dependency on these entities to bring in the dough.

What irks me about this is that contact centers are becoming the single largest repository of data for which little is being mined beyond the campaign. For example, if an agent receives a call asking for helpdesk support, the agent's task is to clear the support call as quickly as possible. For an outbound campaign such as telemarketing, the goal is to make as many calls as possible from a prospect list. In either case the communication that happens during the period when the customer is engaged with the agent is just as important as the final outcome.

Contact center agents do this day in and day out.

One caveat though is that with the proliferation of contact centers throughout the region, you can expect a growing disparity in the level and quality of service delivered by each. For sure the larger providers are able to leverage best practices, tools and experience. The mom-and-pop type contact centers, however, offer flexibility in campaigns and willingness to work the extra mile.

Added extras

Roger Woolley, senior vice president of Marketing and CMO at Autonomy Etalk, believes that organizations need a combination of traditional performance tools and intelligence-based functions to get the most from their contact centers. "While delivering quality service within the contact center is certainly a key to success, it is critical that the organization be able to analyze and understand their customers on a deeper level based upon daily communication," says Woolley.

This level of analysis enables the responsibility of customer service improvement to be expanded to the rest of the organization, making back-office operations, product development, sales initiatives, promotions, and marketing a key part of the service initiative.

Jaehoon Wee, vice president of ASEAN and Korea for Genesys Telecommunications Labs, notes that many call centers in Asia operate as processing centers, where customer requests and queries are processed and day-to-day questions are answered.

The issue here is that as the quality of customer handling falls, this may well impact the company's ability to sell products or services in the long run.

A research study of consumer attitudes and how Asia-Pacific Contact Centers are managing self-service titled "Contact Centre Realities" reported that 85 percent of consumers said they would stop using a company's product or service based on a bad call center experience. Conversely, 76 percent of consumers stated that they would buy from a company again based on a good call center experience.

"Customer service strategies must be adapted to meet the needs of this increasingly sophisticated customer base, one that can easily defect to the competition," adds Wee.

Contact center technologies like CTI, vXML-based IVR systems, advanced call-routing, virtual call centers and workforce management have enabled customer service executives to consistently enhance service for customers while simultaneously reducing costs. However, the most profound improvements have come from those, which have provided unprecedented opportunities to serve customers at greatly reduced cost, and make organizations more readily accessible to the general public.

Wee advices that "no matter what the size of the business, companies need to implement more business-driven customer service strategies. These strategies allow you to automatically identify callers and incorporate customer segmentation to deliver business value across both inbound and outbound communications to your customers, creating revenue-generating opportunities."

Woolley concurs and adds, "Most organizations have not been able to track, manage, or access most of their unstructured data. This includes web pages, audio files, emails, chats, and documents that are scattered throughout the enterprise. And for businesses that record customer interactions, the amount of unstructured data is constantly increasing. Without a way to process and share this data, businesses are missing out on critical sales, marketing, and service opportunities."

Adding intelligence to deepen experience

How would you like it if the person on the other end of the line is able to quickly answer your queries and respond to you in a manner befitting a long-time acquaintance?

Some contact centers now incorporate business intelligence (BI) tools and processes into the arsenal of technologies to deepen the information derived from the contact center database. BI tools help to improve the management of contact centers, and provide deeper insight into how these complex systems work (or sometimes don't work!). However, Wee warns that BI tools are only as useful as the level of expertise in the domain-specific metrics that are available. Unless one is measuring and analyzing the most relevant metrics, BI tools will yield little useful insight (this is true in any industry).

"BI technologies combined with information from an Intelligent Contact Center helps provide a multi-dimensional view of the customer that allows the examination of purchasing, sales, or preference trends with valuable qualitative data directly from the customer," says Woolley.

Another aspiring strategy has to do with understanding the context of the data and arriving at relevant information that can be used to make business decisions.

Meaning Based Computing enables users to search and access information across the organization, no matter where it is located or what format it is in. This technology is unique because it searches for data based on its inherent meaning, not just by a key word or phrase that exists in the file. This allows users to not only find more relevant data, but also to access information they didn't even know existed.

Woolley notes that MBC provides a competitive advantage because "it processes data in real-time, it delivers actionable information that can be applied to decision-making processes, product and service development, and creative business strategies."

Genesys' Wee concurs. "Meaning Based Computing allows computers to understand the relationships that exist between disparate pieces of information and perform sophisticated analysis operations with real business value, automatically and in real-time," he says.

Properly understood and executed, meaning based computing provides call center agents or business managers with valuable supporting material and even richer customer intelligence to apply to their business and customer-service objectives.

Whichever technology or processes you want to adopt, benefits can only be realized if the whole organization understands what the problems are, what the customers want, what the technology or process change is meant to achieve, and why it is important for the whole operation to take the change seriously.

Failing that, you may start looking for something better to do.

About the Author

Jose Allan Tan is a technologist-market observer based in Asia. A former marketing director for a storage vendor, he is today director of web strategy and content director for Questex Asia Ltd. He also served as senior industry analyst for Dataquest/Gartner and was at one time an account director for a regional PR agency.

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