Monthly Archives: August 2011
The kids these days are demanding
We all know that poor customer experience will send your customers packing. If your target demographic is the 18-25 year olds, then you have an especially tough challenge. A recent study from Purdue looked at 18-25 years olds. It found:
100 percent of customers who were unsatisfied with their call center experience said they would refrain from purchasing from the company again. For all other age groups the number dropped to 63 percent…. Call centers should consider this a call to arms. Gen Y’ers expect their customer service encounters to mirror the speed, agility and simplicity of their smart phones, iPods and flat screens. But so far the call center industry has failed to do so.
- From CustomerManagementIQ
And they share opinions with their peers … a lot!
Combine that with a recent study which found that,
… at least once a week, 33% of active Twitter users share opinions about companies or products, while 32% make recommendations and 30% ask for them.
The April 2010 study by ROI Research was commissioned by Performics and is available here.
Potential customers are researching your company online
Here’s a fun experiment: go to http://search.twitter.com and type “on hold with”. The results that you will see aren’t exactly “hard data” but you can quickly get a sense of which companies are doing well by their customers and which are not. This is a real-time always-on scoreboard for your company’s efforts.
Nearly half of consumers report always or often using an online posting or blog to get others’ opinions about a company’s customer service reputation. But when consumers go online they’re looking for “watch outs,” saying they put greater credence in negative reviews on blogs and social networking sites than on positive ones (57% and 48%, respectively).
- American Express study called the
Global Customer Service Barometer
What it all means
Twitter, and social media in general, allows awareness of your customer service quality to propagate quickly through a community or the public at large. On the plus side, the benefits of providing good service can be felt more quickly and more strongly. On the downside, stories of bad service propagate even more quickly.
The financial industry has always been keenly interested in our product. As Chris mentioned here, the main reason is that they have relatively expensive agents. Therefore, Fonolo’s ability to reduce average handle time makes for a very compelling proposition.
The challenge
Recently we’ve been working on some projects that are focused on reducing the burden of authentication for callers and agents while maintaining sufficient security for the transaction at hand. What we’re learning is that, when properly implemented, a solution that pre-authenticates callers can have enormous cost savings.
Some background
caller authentication is a common aspect of call center transactions throughout the financial industry. This authentication process often has an automated component though the IVR as well as a live challenge-and-response component with an agent. Both components tend to increase the frustration of the caller. The latter can add significantly to call handle time and thus increase costs. (In some cases, the authentication process can take even longer than the “meat” of the call.)
Our solution
Fonolo’s visual interface allows callers to provide identifying information, or respond to challenge questions, before the call begins. This works both on the web and on the mobile phone. Net result: reduced costs and improved call center experience.
Multi-site call centers
Many companies operating large call centers today have multi-site deployments; usually some mix of company-owned sites and outsourced 3rd party providers. This situation is, in fact, a key reason for many of the missed opportunities in improving the call center experience. And it makes any solution that requires on-premise installation and integration even more cumbersome. See Shai’s post from last year: “The ubiquity of multi-site…”
However, setting up Fonolo is the same regardless of the number of call centers you operate, the technology behind them, and their location.
Deep Dialing
The reason Fonolo is able to connect callers directly into your phone system is its revolutionary technology called Deep Dialing. Fonolo creates a map of your phone menu through automated calling and speech recognition. It then uses this map to interact and navigate with your phone system on behalf of your callers.
Don’t replace the IVR, build on it
Regardless of its flaws, the traditional IVR will be handling calls for many years to come.
Furthermore, you have a deep investment in your IVR. It is not just a tree of options, it is the front-end to key business processes your company has developed over the years.
Advantages of Deep Dialing
Deep Dialing makes Fonolo completely agnostic to your call center equipment. And because the service is delivered from the cloud, interacting with multi-site call centers is no problem at all. If Fonolo can call your number, it can map your phone system.
Here’s a fascinating study from Watermark Consulting: Return on Customer Experience Investments.
Here’s how they describe the approach:
[we watched] … stock market performance for customer experience leaders and laggards over the past three years… To identify the leaders and laggards, we used Forrester Research’s 2007 Customer Experience Index study, picking the top ten and bottom ten… From 2007 through 2009… the customer experience Leader portfolio outperformed the broader stock market, generating cumulative total returns that were 41% better than the S&P 500 Index and 145% better than the customer experience Laggard portfolio.
They conclude:
Companies that successfully bring great, end-to-end customer experiences to the marketplace are rewarded—by consumers and investors. Their operational excellence and attention to detail, their simple and straightforward communication, their well-equipped and genuinely helpful front-line staff—the sum of these parts pays off in the end, even if the precise impact of individual components is uncertain at best.
Well, if you want “simple and straightforward communication” as well as “well-equipped front-line staff” then I can think of no better option that implementing Fonolo. Delight your callers without making any changes to your call center!
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Popular Posts
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