Author Archives: Jason
About Jason Bigue
Jason was co-founder and Vice President of Operations at Streamcheck where he led the effort to build a global network for real-time measurement of streaming media (the first of its kind).After Streamcheck was acquired by Keynote Systems, Jason coordinated the technical integration with Keynote's network of 2400 measurement computers in 160 cities. He took over management of the streaming group in 2005 and oversaw 30% revenue growth over the subsequent year.
Jason was a founding member and consultant for the ISIS Technology Research Center (part of the Canadian "Centres of Excellence"), where he oversaw the commercialization of several research projects in the field of fiber optics. Subsequently, he worked on some of the earliest optical networking devices at ElectroPhotonics (acquired by JDS Uniphase).
Jason has a degree in Engineering Physics from Queen's University and a Master's degree in Applied Science from the University of Toronto.
Linked-In: www.linkedin.com/in/jasonbigue
There’s nothing quite like getting great feedback from customers! Here’s what Jeb Brilliant had to say about Fonolo in a recent Phone.com blog post:
I’ve written about fonolo before but I wanted to remind everyone about it. It’s a service that holds your place in line until we have an operator ready to talk with you, leaving you to do whatever you want.
You just head our to our Customer Support page and take a look on the right side for the fonolo box titled Talk to us! Select what you’re calling for, Sales or Customer Service, fill in your Phone.com number (if you have one, if not don’t put anything in there) and the number you want us to call you back on. Click Start Call and the then go about your business. Once it’s your turn in our phone queue you’ll get a call from us and one of our operators will be on the other end of the call waiting to help you.
Jeb goes on to say:
We know you’re busy and don’t want to make you wait for us, we’ll wait for you.
Couldn’t have said that better myself. And with Fonolo’s cloud-based virtual queuing services available for businesses of all sizes, nobody should ever have to wait on hold again.
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.
Multi-channel call centers are getting more and more common.
Today’s customer wants to reach you through multiple channels: phone, web, email are the minimum. Mobile applications are becoming a “must-have” in some segments (airlines, banks). Twitter, Facebook and some form of real-time chat are gaining popularity. If your job is running a call center, things are not going to get any easier. (See “Getting Multichannel right is hard”.)
The hand-off challenge
A key challenge is transferring people between channels at the right moments to make the most of each channel’s ability. Online self-serve interactions are by far the lowest cost to your company, but you certainly don’t want to lose a sale by locking someone into that channel or not providing an alternative when there is a hiccup. The “hiccup scenario” is one of the major drivers of click-to-call and click-to-chat implementations. For example, they allow you to rescue purchases from becoming abandoned shopping carts. But only if the implementation is done right.
Fonolo’s approach to providing a mobile- and web-friendly interface for your call center is the easiest and most flexible way to achieve that smooth hand-off. We can handle hand-off between email and calls, and even between live chat and calls. (Contact me if you want to learn more.)
Fonolo CEO, Shai Berger, will be presenting at the Emerging Communication Conference next week in San Francisco. His talk is at 11:30am (PT) on Monday. If you are attending, it is definitely worth checking out.
The title is “When Click-to-Call becomes Tap-to-Call: Two Powerful Forces Reshape Consumer-to-Business Communication”.
From the session description:
For decades, the process of calling a large company was the same: You dial their number, navigate the phone menu, wait on hold and then connect with an agent. Technology has made some incremental improvements, such as replacing the tone-based menu with voice recognition (which most people dislike just as much). But the basic process has stayed the same, as has the public’s general distaste for it.
Thankfully, a major change in this process is happening. It’s a change that will benefit consumers by removing the long-dreaded annoyances of navigating phone menus, waiting on hold, and repeating information needlessly to agents. It’s a change that will also benefit the companies by making agents more efficient and lowering the substantial costs of running a call center. The new process will allow the consumer to navigate the phone menu visually, provide key information in advance, and then request a call when the next relevant agent is available.
This breakthrough is the product of two forces: 1) The smartphone, with its flexibility, power and growing ubiquity. And 2) The long experiment that’s been quietly happening on the web with click-to-call technology…
More info here.
Without exception, the companies I talk to are devoting a lot of effort to their mobile strategy. Anyone with a call center is aware that their unprecedented rise in popularity is changing the game. (IDC predicts that smartphones and tables will together outsell traditional computers in the next 18 months.)
A visual interface is a powerful thing
I find many companies are driven to release a mobile app out of fear that they will lose customers to their competitors who do have an app (or a better one). What they’re missing is that this is also an opportunity to improve the calling experience and lower costs in the call center. That’s because the smart phone is an ideal platform for implementing a visual interface to your call center. We believe that “The future of the call center is a visual interface”.
That interface can then be used by callers to
- Steer their call to the right agent, thus reducing misnavigation.
- Trigger virtual queuing which can eliminate hold times.
- Enter information like a case number or account number, thus reducing call handle times.
- Provide post-call feedback.
The good news
The good news is that Fonolo makes it possible and, more importantly, easy for any company to do implement such an interface, both on your web site and on the smart phone.
As the multi-channel call center gets more and more common, implementations of click-to-chat get more common. Like click-to-call, the goal with chat is that you can raise the conversion rate of browsers into buyers and/or lower the abandonment rate.
Hand-off problems
Advantages over click-to-call is that (in theory at least) an agent can handle multiple chat conversations at the same time, thus making a chat cheaper than a phone call. The problem with the theory is that chat session often have to escalate to a phone call, either by user choice or because of policy reasons. This is a recurring challenge for multi-channel client care – hand-off between channels. For more, see the post “The Multi-channel challenge”.
Let’s talk
If your company has installed click-to-chat or is planning to, we’d love to talk to you about how you’re addressing this challenge. It’s possible that, without a smooth hand-off from chat to voice, the gains may all be wiped out. We have been working on a solution (still in beta) to this problem at Fonolo and we’d love to talk to you about it.
The rapid rise of the smartphone is hardly news anymore. But to refocus your attention on just how dramatic it is, here is a video illustrating Android activations over the last few years. (“Activation” is the first time an Android-powered smartphone contacts the network.)
Credits: Android Developer via Android Central.
For more academic view, consider the chart below. It was compiled from data presented by Morgan Stanley’s Mary Meeker in late 2009:
For Fonolo, this trend is continues to affirm our belief that smartphone will drive the evolution of the call center experience, and more specifically that “The future of the call center is a visual interface”.
Our mission at Fonolo is to fix common aggravations with the call center experience. One common aggravation is the “data pass-through” problem. You may not have heard this phrase before, but you have surely experienced it. Whenever you are asked for information by the IVR and then asked for the same information again by the agent, the culprit is broken data-pass-through.
Why is it so common?
Fixing this integration point seems like an obvious investment for companies to make. Clearly the time required for agents to collect account numbers (or other “call attached” data) has a real cost. As does the aggravation of customers that answer the agent’s request by saying: “I just punched in my number! Why don’t you have that information?”
The problem usually arises because 1) the company is running multiple call centers; 2) it is rare for any two call centers to be built on identical technology; and 3) there are no standards for interoperability between call center equipment. The result is incompatible proprietary systems which means that call centers have to fall back on the lowest common denominator functionality. The following quote says it all:
Most midsize to large contact centers are based on complex and unstable architectures that integrate many disparate technologies into distinct, unique and costly combinations of components … [even] acquiring an IVR system from vendors such as Avaya, Nortel Networks and Genesys does not ensure tight integration with those companies’ ACD or CTI products.
- Yankee Group, “VoIP and Lower TCO will Drive Adoption of Hosted On-Demand Contact Centers” Yankee Group, April 2006.
Fonolo to the rescue
Fonolo can fix this problem because it lives “outside” the realm of the call center equipment. With our visual interface the caller can enter information before the call and it gets delivered to the agent, regardless of the way the call center is built.
You can find out more here.
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