Companies have three core objectives with modern-day contact centres: to ensure a seamless customer service, increase efficiency and productivity, and generate revenue through cross-selling and up-selling opportunities that may arise. Yet these three objectives are constantly in competition with each other, making the strategies of the contact centre ever more complex to manage.
These IVRs are often a customer's first point of contact and act as the front door to an organisation's corporate brand.
Francis Bakos is manager of business solutions at Bytes Connect.
This conundrum lies at the very heart of today's contact centre strategy, and it needs to be resolved if customers are to enjoy an optimal experience.
One strategy that assists in achieving all three of these objectives is to create a seamless customer experience using unified platforms. After all, how satisfactorily a company provides a service has a direct effect on customer loyalty that can lead to greater client retention and more sales. These unified platforms allow communication between the various contact centre components, meaning that each component acts with full knowledge of the data stored in its counterparts.
Old systems
At the front of these “linked” components is the interactive voice response (IVR) system. Many IVRs are cumbersome, standalone operations that force-fit customer self-service in an organised structure, regardless of the nature of the customer request or their value to the bottom line.
These IVRs are often a customer's first point of contact and act as the front door to an organisation's corporate brand, and so they are evolving to become more intuitive, more personalised and, overall, more intelligent. They can intelligently determine who the caller is and provide instant access to call history and customer profiles to predict what the query relates to. This allows the system to push pertinent information, to provide the caller with personalised menus, to fast-track the path through self-service, and ultimately to route the call to the most suitable agent to ensure speedy resolution.
It also prevents the customer having to repeat himself every time he calls in, one of the greatest frustrations for any caller.
So how does an intelligent IVR work? At the back-end of the IVR platform, organisations have access to rich data about their customers and customer interaction histories that often lie unused. Now that IVRs have become Web server-based (using Voice-Extensible Mark-up Language or Voice XML, a standards-based programming language for voice and VOIP, the common protocol for convergence of voice and data), the data has become more accessible to the IVR. When this is combined with a unified contact centre platform, the IVR becomes increasingly powerful and intuitive.
Self-service rates increase due to the “intelligent experience” and personalisation that customers experience, which in turn frees up agents to focus on more in-depth queries and complex calls. And self-service is the name of the game today, as companies seek to have customers manage their own affairs, as this reduces costs, boosts productivity and ensures more accurate data and a less cumbersome customer interface.
The next level
Intelligent IVRs not only address the traditional shortfalls of IVR solutions, they take call centres to the next level of effectiveness by responding in a personalised manner to the caller's requirements. They take away many of the frustrations associated with typical call centres, which are the butt of many a stand-up comedian's jokes.
And the intelligence in the IVR is not restricted to just the voice channel. By interacting with e-mail platforms, social messaging, SMS servers and outbound diallers, the IVR becomes part of an integrated co-ordinated effort to create the ultimate customer experience.
Instead of focusing on containing costs in the call centre, this new approach not only drives customer satisfaction, but also delivers efficiency gains and improved selling opportunities, and ultimately, drives business growth. And this has to be the overall purpose of the contact centre.
Organisations ready to begin planning for an intelligent customer front door deployment should first identify where the solution would deliver the greatest benefit, evaluate the impacts and requirements, and determine the potential return on investment. It is ultimately an investment strategy and development plan that provides positive feedback to both companies and their customers.
The technology exists and has been around for at least two years. When deployed correctly, as it has at some of South Africa's largest corporations, it can lead to serious innovation, return on investment, enhanced market share and reduced customer churn. And every one of these activities is why management launched the contact centre in the first place.
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