Author Archives: Chris

Fonolo sponsoring next week’s Call Center Summit

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Call Center Week LogoOne of the industry’s biggest events is taking place next week and Fonolo is proud to be a sponsor. The Call Center Summit kicks off in Orlando, Florida on Monday. You can follow news from the event via the twitter account CallCenterEvent.

I will be there representing Fonolo along with our CEO, Shai Berger. If you are attending the show and would like to talk, we would be delighted to meet with you! Just send me a note at chris@fonolo.com.

Oh, one last thing: You should definitely plan on  attending the Tuesday morning keynote. Not only is the speaker top-notch (Tracy Wright, the Director of Customer Care for Avon) but you will also find a tasty treat on your chair from us!

 

Travel Planners Adds Virtual Queuing and Visual Dialing to its Call Center

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Travel Planners International (TPI) is an agency that supports travel agents by giving them direct access to air, car, hotel, cruise and tour products. At the core of their offering is a web service (TPICENTRAL) that travel agents use to search and book trips. When matters get complicated, there is also a call center that agents can dial for help.

As a consumer, you would never interact with TPI. But if you’ve ever used an independent travel agent, they were able to do their job because of TPI, or a service like it.

Several months ago, TPI embarked on a major redesign of that agent-facing web platform and became convinced that adding Fonolo would help agents immediately become more productive.

We are constantly looking for ways to help our agents do their work more effectively. Losing incoming calls from agents not willing to wait on hold is unacceptable and we recognized that there was an opportunity to improve the process of connecting callers to the call center.

– TPI General Manager Erwing Hernandez

TPICENTRAL now features Fonolo’s visual dialing interface (see below). Agents who need to contact the call center can now request a call with one click, avoiding phone menus and hold time. Because Fonolo’s cloud-based service can integrate seamlessly and automatically with any call center, TPI did not have to change any of its infrastructure or business processes.

“The most impressive feature of Fonolo was the setup. It was seamless and very easy,” said Hernandez. “Fonolo is a key to the success of our new platform. We are now providing a better phone experience for our agents.”

This is another great example of how Fonolo’s visual dialing interface and virtual queuing system can improve the calling experience and make call center agents more efficient.

 

Quantifying the return on customer experience investments

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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!

Misnavigation in your call center is a double whammy

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What is misnavigation?

Quick review: A call is considered misnavigated if a caller connects to the wrong agent to handle the request. This can be the result of the user misunderstanding the IVR or simply “zeroing-out” for some other reason. Either way, the first agent has to assess the call, inform the caller that he needs a different agent, perform the internal transfer, log the call and then rejoin the queue. These extra steps add significantly to the overall handle time.

It costs you twice

The first cost is the direct increase in agent cost. See my post “The hidden cost of…”. The second cost comes from decreased customer satisfaction. Frustrated customers have decreased loyalty and lower Net Promoter Scores.

A study conducted by Kingston Communications, shows the level of frustration with phone menu navigation. Respondents were asked what annoyed them most when calling customer service lines: First place (54%), was “overseas staff”. Second place (22%) was “the need to navigate automated responses”.

Great customer service leads to customer satisfaction

Here’s a quote worth remembering:

Great customer service leads to customer satisfaction, which leads to customer loyalty, which leads to company profitability.

– Stephen Brown, Professor, Center for Services Leadership at
Arizona State University’s W.P. Carey School of Business.

 Can you afford not to give your callers a better alternative?

Banks love Fonolo. Here’s why.

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Fonolo has always received a tremendous amount of interest from banks, insurance companies and other financial industries. (I think my first phone call on my first day at Fonolo was to a bank.) There are several reasons why this is the case.

Expensive agents means reductions in handle time are golden

Companies in the financial sector place extremely high demands on their call center. The complicated and sensitive nature of the calls handled requires an agent who is highly trained and experienced.  This, in turn, leads to a high cost-per-call. At the same time, customer relationships are long-lasting, meaning that sacrificing caller satisfaction in the short term is not an option.

This creates a tough challenge:  How do you decrease the cost-per-call, while improving the customer experience?  Banking, insurance and credit card companies have discovered that Fonolo is the perfect solution to this exact challenge.

Learn more

For more on this, check out our whitepaper called “Fonolo for the Financial Industry”. You can download it here (form fill-in required).

Can you correlate customer experience to a revenue boost? This report says yes

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Most people would agree that improving the customer experience yields a positive impact on your bottom line. That’s part of every presentation I make to prospective users of Fonolo. But assigning a quantitative value to that is always difficult.

Here’s a great report that I just found by Forrester’s Bruce Temkin making just that case. It’s called Customer Experience Boosts Revenue. Temkin analyzed consumer data to figure out how a change in customer experience affects loyalty and how that can affect revenues.

Here are some of the key findings:

  • The revenue change from a 10 point increase in a firm’s Customer Experience Index. It results in a $284 million change for every $10 billion in revenue (average across 12 industries).
  • Some of the industry-specific data:
    • Five largest revenue changes: Hotels ($311 million), credit card providers ($308 million), banks ($305 million),wireless carriers ($305 million), and TV service providers ($302 million).
    • Most change in additional purchases and reduction in churn: Hotels and banks.
    • Most increase from word of mouth: Airlines and wireless carriers.

The bottom line: Customer experience is a great investment.

Are you asking your customers to repeat information that the IVR has already asked?

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One of the great benefits to using Fonolo is that you can fix 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. More info on this in Jason’s post “Fonolo fixes the dreaded…”

Why is still happening?

You’ve probably thought to yourself “surely, we have the technology to make this work! What’s going on here?” Call center commentator Greg Levin writes:

What’s universally aggravating to callers is – after providing the IVR with their name, account number…  having to repeat the very same information to the agent to whom their call is transferred… To avoid [this] .. leading contact centers incorporate CTI (computer telephony integration) technology into their IVR system [which] … deliver that information directly to the desktop of the agent handling the call. With today’s technologies, it’s really quite simple (though, granted, not always cheap), and the impact on the customer experience is immense.

Ultimately, a technology problem

So, this thing called CTI should solve the problem. So what’s the hold-up?

Although CTI has been around for a long time, it is often broken in modern call centers because of the multi-site problem. In short, most companies with significant call volume use multiple call centers (their own, or outsourced). Since call centers all run on proprietary technology and there are no standards to exchange data, data pass-through doesn’t work. Read more here: “The ubiquity of multi-site call centers”.

Do customers enjoy calling your company?

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Ask yourself a simple question: “Do customers enjoy calling my company?”

The frustrations are all too familiar: aggravating phone menus, waiting on hold, being transferred between agents, unnecessarily repeating information. Odds are that your call center is guilty of some of these flaws. They cost your company in two ways: the expense of longer calls, and the loss of goodwill from your customers.

In a survey by Purdue University, 63% of consumers said they would stop using a company’s products based upon a negative call center experience. But that number was 100% for consumers aged 18 to 25. That statistic should be doubly alarming to companies due to of the propensity of younger consumers to share their negative experiences through social media.

Lower costs and happier callers with no infrastructure changes?

Yes! Fonolo’s cloud-based service adds a new visual dialing interface to your call center that lives on your website or mobile app.

Our approach

Our approach is a radical departure from anything you’ve seen before:

  • No changes are required to your existing phone system.
  • Delivers bottom-line results to your business in the form of cost reductions and gains in customer goodwill.
  • Easy to set up a trial within days.
  • Creates an improved experience and high level of satisfaction for customers via a browser or smartphone.

 

Multi-site call centers make multi-channel communication even harder

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The challenges faced today by the executive in charge of customer service are very different from what they were ten years ago. Since I spend most of my days talking to these executives I have a front-row seat to the dramatic change that is happening in the industry.

The success of the call center used to be measurable with a few key metrics: Average hold time, average handle time, cost per call, first call resolution, etc.  But today the dominant challenge is how to manage the different communication channels: Web, phone call, email, chat and social media. In particular, it can be very tricky to keep the experience consistent across those various channels.

Consistency is a big challenge

What makes those challenges even tougher is that, for a company with large call volume (>10m calls per year), it’s a good bet that the call center is multi-site to some extent.  Being multi-sited makes it harder to achieve consistency because it impedes both innovation and optimization. Read Shai’s recent post on this for a great overview.

In [multi-site operations] one of the biggest challenges … is providing a consistent experience across all locations…  A hosted contact center environment provides a centralized platform from which to do that, and is more flexible than premise-based solutions that can be difficult to manage across multiple sites, regions, time zones, broadband reliability, communications protocols, etc.

– Jon Arnold, Industry Analyst

Fonolo can help

One of our goals at Fonolo is help provide a consistent interface. Behind the scenes, our system automatically stays in sync with your IVR, so all the business rules that are tied to that system are propagated to the visual interface on your website (click-to-call) and your mobile app (tap-to-call). If you want to find out more, drop me a note.

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