Agents crucial to e-services

The Radicati Group was quoted as saying: "E-mail volumes are expected to reach 82.3 billion per day by the end of 2007." The analysts at Radicati Group didn't say how many of those e-mails are expected to be business-related, but there's a good chance a few billion of them will flow in and out of contact centres.

Along with Web chats, call-back requests, escalations to live agents, FAQ auto responses and other online transactions, more consumers cosy up to their computers to contact and interact with businesses.

As popular as e-services have become, and for as much as automation can easily off-load tasks such as FAQs and customer inquiries historically reserved for agents, the fact is today's consumer nation still wants the telephone and fax machine to co-exist with Web and e-mail contact options.

This means the helpful agent on the other end of the phone must also now be able to type responses in a Web chat and author e-mails answering the ones customers send in. Moreover, supporting online and automated services in a multi-channel contact centre requires the right collaborative software and knowledge management tools, as well as business and process planning that doesn't just include agents, but highlights them, their skills, and the overall role they play in an e-services environment.

E-services can have a strong and powerful impact on most contact centres, but the effective use of a combined e-services agent model is the most likely success scenario for the foreseeable future. Call it the need for human interaction, or just the theory that no person will ever be fully replaced by technology, if a contact centre wants to be competitive in the e-services arena, remember that agents are still the most valuable asset.

Although they had the right idea in targeting a growing online market, most dot-coms lacked the business plans, marketing savvy and customer service know-how to sustain their initial momentum. The bigger problem, though, was that many dot-com start-ups somehow forgot about phones (and fax machines) still being viable customer interaction channels, and never thought twice about a call centre and things like knowledge management tools.

Turn your attention to traditional brick-and-mortar businesses and contact centres. Now with a much better grasp of online services and the customer experience, they've planned e-services strategies that align with their business and customer service initiatives as a whole.

If your contact centre wants to be competitive in the e-services arena, remember that agents are still the most valuable asset.

Dave Paulding, regional sales manager, UK and Africa for Interactive Intelligence

The successful ones have also enhanced Web capabilities or launched new ones to offer Web chats, call-back requests and escalations, in many cases supplementing other services like IVR and speech-enabled applications. They've also implemented e-mail and knowledge management systems to handle customer inquiries and automatically respond to FAQs, and tied everything together with CRM and interaction tracking systems.

Unfortunately, while many contact centres have maintained a focus on an agent's role within a combined multi-channel/e-services environment, many others have miscalculated where their agents actually fit in.

In its September 2003 report, "Contact Centre Investments Require Internal Modifications to Generate Savings", analysts at Forrester Research predicted automated customer self-service options could reduce a contact centre's operations costs up to 90% and increase revenue anywhere from 2% to 18% per transaction. Good news. Many contact centres that have implemented self-service automation as part of their e-services offerings are indeed seeing better numbers in earnings statements.

Still, self-service automation is only one component of the e-services environment. And e-services is only one component of the overall multi-channel approach to customer service. That is, full-service contact centres using a multi-channel communications platform must still queue and route phone calls and faxes along with e-mails and Web contacts. More than ever, they also need agents who are skilled and equally equipped to handle each interaction type.

Therefore, adding collaborative software and knowledge management tools to an agent's arsenal becomes more crucial in optimising the agent workforce as multi-channel gatekeepers.

Think of 'disconnected' as the operative word. Even when contact centres integrate e-services on the customer end, they don't always connect the dots at the agent end. Some agents are tasked with e-mails, some handle Web chats, others are relegated to the telephone and Web call-back requests, or maybe agents are simply segmented into workgroups to manage each specific type of interaction.

Depending on a contact centre's operational framework and process flows, such agent arrangements might well be effective.

But agents who work across channels to handle all media types, non-real-time as well as real-time, are better suited to provide service continuity and up-sell or cross-sell to a customer. For instance, a customer who sends an e-mail (non-real-time) then calls afterwards with a follow up question (real-time). Also with collaborative software and knowledge management tools at their fingertips, such as pre-authored response statements for Web chats and e-mails, agents can speed interaction times rather significantly. Doing so multiplies a contact centre's opportunities to handle more interactions and, in turn, generate more revenue.

Thousands of contact centres have already added e-services into the multi-channel agent equation... and are thriving because of it. Yet, because thousands of other contact centres are still trying to find the balance between phone calls, self-service automation, and positioning agents to manage e-services interactions like Web chats and call-back requests, they still have some homework to do.

Translated, they need to complete the multi-channel loop and put agents on centre stage to offer consistent, personalised customer service across all media channels.

Let's look at some of the most common issues that keep a contact centre from fully-utilising agents in e-services situations, along with the multi-channel processes and collaborative software and knowledge management tools that can take online options and customer service to world-class levels:

* 'Island' technologies and agent tools

Many contact centres simply aren't able to optimise agent talent in an e-services environment, because the technology they use forces them to segregate e-mail agents from Web site agents from phone service agents.

Many agents also aren't equipped to manage escalated interactions, or tie interactions to customer data for search-and-retrieval later. Even if agents do cross over and learn multiple systems, their tools are often separate, and leave no way to measure agent performance across all media types.

* Inconsistent service levels across media types

Whereas multi-channel options to call, send a fax, initiate a Web chat or get an FAQ auto response can endear customers to the contact centre, they can't reasonably expect to know where or how their interaction or inquiry was routed internally if agents don't have the collaboration tools they need to handle multiple media types.

For example, a customer requesting a Web chat wouldn't expect to get a call-back if an agent can't participate in chats. And if the agent can't pick up the chat or transfer the customer to an agent who can, that customer might easily get the impression they shouldn't expect a response on any media type they choose. So they give up on trying to contact the company, and never return.

The same thing goes for agent workgroups assigned to a particular media type. Again, a customer sends an e-mail and calls to follow up. An e-mail workgroup might or might not process the e-mail at the same time another agent is processing the customer's follow-up phone call regarding the e-mail. The result is a disconnection in service, and a customer experience that's far from satisfying.

For streamlined, consistent service, agents should have desktop access to tools for each media channel, along with the ability to hold, transfer, escalate and even re-queue all media types whenever necessary.

* No tracking for multiple interaction types from a single customer

Compounding the problem of the same customer leveraging multiple media types to interact is a lack of interaction tracking, or more specifically, tracking a customer's various interactions across channels back to their contact history, account information, CRM record, etc.

Go back to the customer who sends an e-mail and then calls regarding the inquiry they sent. Agents across a contact centre can't search for that customer's e-mail, retrieve it and resolve the problem appropriately while the customer is on the phone. Instead, the customer must start over and duplicate inputs or repeat details of the inquiry to a different agent.

* Insufficient supervisory monitoring, agent measurement and quality scoring

Along with tracking all interaction types, the ability to monitor more than just phone calls is critical in an e-services environment. For agents, that means being able to process e-mails and still view and track other interaction types from that same customer.

Supervisors also must be able to see all customer interactions, regardless of media type or the agent processing them, and must have the proper tools to score agents on quality and compliance. By scoring how an agent interacts on a Web chat as well as a phone call, supervisors can more accurately measure each agent's performance and assign media types that optimise that agent's skill set.

The Web-based and automated self-service options that make up e-services have introduced a whole new dynamic for contact centres, allowing them to more effectively attract and retain customers and raise revenue. However, with all the multi-channel contact options customers insist on, e-services require an even greater level of agent involvement across all channels to give customers the personalised service they deserve.

By combining collaborative software and knowledge management tools with the proper planning and a continued focus on 'one customer, one agent view', contact centres can successfully extend e-services to their customer base and prosper even more financially as a result.