THE CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE MAGAZINE ISSUE 4 • 2016
The
Technology Issue
❯❯ The 2016 GTACC Achievement Awards
❯❯ What time is it where you are?
❯❯ Contact centre trends that make or break customer experience
❯❯ Emerging technology vs. public sector processes
The Technology Issue
Contact centre trends that make or break customer experience
By Mark Basinger
Y
our customer’s experience may be one the most influential factors affecting the health and ultimate wealth of your organization. A stellar experience can quickly turn a onetime visitor into a raving fan, while a single misstep—long hold time, multiple call transfers, an ill-equipped agent— could lead to missed sales opportunities and frustration for customers. As organizations look to the future, continually enhancing the customer experience to meet their rapidly evolving wants and needs will be key to staying ahead of competition. According to Deloitte, 62% of companies view the customer experience delivered by contact centres as a competitive differentiator. So, it’s time to invest—Gartner predicts that organizations are already planning their moves, with more than 50% predicted to redirect their investments to customer experience innovations by 2018. Whether your organization is looking to maximize its current contact centre investment or take the first step, consider the following trends. 2 | contact management
The modernization of contact centre technology Is your contact centre seen as a cost centre or a revenue driver? At Mediu, we’ve found that the answer to this question is often an accurate indicator of the state of an organization’s current technology and the likelihood of making future investments. While younger businesses can be more inclined to embrace new technologies, established corporations tend to move at a slower rate—especially those in historically conservative industries such as banking and insurance. Over the last several years, our consultants at Mediu have worked closely with current clients to help them move into the modern era of the customer experience. While it may be seen by some as more cost effective to continue to operate on legacy platforms, these outdated contact
centre systems provide only basic telephony and aren’t equipped with abilities like routing context which provide valuable insights to agents. Migrating off of legacy platforms to updated environments creates a more flexible, powerful and insightful contact centre. For example, we have seen great success with the Genesys SIP Solution as a replacement for the legacy PBX. It provides more features and functionality at a lower cost of ownership and, when combined with other Genesys components, enables the addition of more media channels and self-service into our clients’ environments. Additionally, moving contact centres onto SIP technology and web-based agent desktop applications allows contact centres to be truly virtual so agents can be located anywhere.
Issue 4 • 2016
The Technology Issue needed to manage the contact centre effectively. When implemented successfully, companies with the strongest omnichannel customer engagement strategies retain an average of 89% of their customers, as compared to 33% for companies with weak omnichannel strategies (according to Aberdeen Group).
Self-service Self-service continues to be a strong trend as contact centres are working to allow their customers to accomplish more on their own without the need for assisted service from agents. When done right, selfservice can provide a better customer experience than forcing callers to wait in queue and run the risk of being transferred if the agent they reached is not able to service their needs. When self-service is extended across multiple contact channels, the customer experience is improved even further.
Contact centre trends in action: A case study
Omnichannel customer experience Today’s technology-savvy customers have come to expect omnichannel service capabilities from any company with which they do business. Even if an organization supports multiple channels such as voice, email, social media and chat, they may not be able to share context across channels, making it difficult to manage the lifecycle of the customer journey and provide a personalized experience. A new study from Aberdeen Group says companies that excel in engaging customers across channels retain more than twice as many customers as companies without effective cross-channel customer care strategies. This means contact centres need a modern platform to support the growing needs and expectations of their customers and agents. As the industry continues to mature the omnichannel customer experience, contact centre managers must realize the importance of utilizing a unified platform that can allow new channels to be added without creating silos of agents and operations. Both customers and agents benefit from a single platform where the agent can see all interactions of the customer journey, while operations managers and executives benefit from a single platform that supports the reporting and analytics Issue 4 • 2016
By developing a strategy that aligns with your organization’s goals and then implementing it successfully, these trends can make a significant impact and lead to cost savings. For example, when a global technology services provider and conglomerate of web hosting companies was looking to create a more effective and efficient network of contact centres, Mediu’s integration and Genesys solutions resulted in more than $1 million in savings in just one year. Each time the company acquires a new web hosting company, it inherits a new set of technologies, including contact centre technology. The technology services company sought to replace its current system with one that would provide their brands with unique functionality specific to the way they do business, while still providing a single platform. Mediu recommended the Genesys CX Platform to provide an integrated enterprise-wide pure SIP environment that seamlessly routes blended multiple interaction types for both inbound and outbound communications. Globally located remote contact centres for new brands can be added to the platform without investing in more infrastructure. Additionally, Mediu consultants implemented a new standardized routing application, Mediu Extensible
Routing Framework (MERF). This application allows Mediu to support virtually any call flow—including auto-attendant menus and prompts, skill based routing and many other features—through configuration, without the need to develop any new actual routing code. Mediu consultants have applied this solution to multiple organizations and business units, helping clients achieve substantial savings in time and resources versus traditional routing application development. These innovative solutions have improved the company’s contact centre efficiency by allowing agents to handle intelligently routed interactions of all types from a single integrated unified agent desktop (Workspace Web Edition) without having to switch between multiple applications. Mediu’s Genesys implementation has also led to a significant decrease in high priority level incidents at the company (from 49 to nine in one year) and outage length (from 98 hours to just over eight hours).
Preparing for the future As your organization looks toward the future, it’s important to assess the current state of your contact centre and make key investments in order to stay on top of trends affecting the customer experience. With a strategy that encompasses the integration of modern, up-to-date contact centre technology and a unified platform that allows for omnichannel interactions and self-service, your contact centre will be better equipped to stand out among competitors and win long-lasting customers. To learn more about the future of contact centres and what your organization can do to prepare, check out the webinars, case studies and other tools in the Mediu Resource Centre. Mark Basinger is the chief technology officer at Mediu. With more than 28 years in information technology, Mark has extensive hands-on experience across multiple technologies as a solutions architect, developer, analyst and leader in all stages of the software development life cycle. Since joining Mediu in 2007, Mark has worked as the director of solutions architecture, senior architect and software developer on the Mediu Professional Services Team.
contact management | 3
The 2016 GTACC Achievement Awards
GTACC Awards
4 | contact management
LoyaltyOne wins the Giving Back Award Accepted on behalf of LoyaltyOne by Jennifer Atkinson, manager, operations.
Gatestone & Co. Inc. wins the Service Consistency Award Accepted on behalf of Gatestone & Co. Inc. by John Stock, vice president operations Issue 4 • 2016
GTACC Awards
Moneris wins the Customer Centricity Award Accepted on behalf of Moneris by Richard Antosik, director, customer experience. By Sarah O’Connor
O
Representatives from the award-winning companies share their successful strategies in a panel discussion during the GTACC annual conference.
The crowd at the GTACC annual conference listens attentively during the panel discussion.
Issue 4 • 2016
n November 3rd the Greater Toronto Area Contact Centre Association hosted their annual conference and the GTACC Achievement Awards, celebrating and acknowledging the exceptional achievements of their members. Hosted by MCs Mike Aoki and Anu Aduvaka, the awards were open to contact centres of all sizes who demonstrated exceptional commitment and/or achievement in one of the three categories: Giving Back: The Giving Back category is just that—it recognizes contact centres that put their time, energy and heart into giving back to their communities. It can be as small as a bake sale in the cafeteria to organizing a centrewide CN Tower climb. Service Consistency: Service is defined differently by industry and no one does it perfectly. With the multichannel centre evolving to an omnichannel customer care model and the ever-increasing demand for faster, more accurate service delivery, providing a consistently highlevel customer experience is becoming more and more difficult. Customer Centricity: The customer is number one. We all know how important this is. But how do we ensure this is a core belief and cultural cornerstone in the contact centre? Becoming a customer-centric organization can help propel an organization to even greater success, but achieving a customer-centric culture can take significant planning, process redesign, and buy-in to achieve and sustain. Representatives of the winning organizations shared the secrets of their success in a panel discussion as part of the annual conference. Nominations for the 2017 awards will open in late Spring 2017. contact management | 5
The Technology Issue
What time is it where you are? To truly meet the needs of customers across multiple timezones, it’s time to give up the world clock for something smarter By Leah Hutcheon
I
f it weren’t for the complication of timezones, meeting the contact management needs of customers who work internationally, or even just from Pacific Time to East Coast Standard Time, would be much more straightforward. Technology has progressed to the point where it’s as easy to communicate with someone on the other side of the world as it is with someone in the next street. Except... it’s not, because communication only works if everyone involved is awake and, when you’ve got “timezone math” to contend with, there’s still no guarantee of success. But timezones pose a problem to any contact centre that deals with customers outside their timezone locality. And when you’re booking appointments for your customer’s remote team of hundreds across multiple locations, who are in turn dealing with clients all over the world, this can be a recipe for disaster. That’s the challenge many contact centres face and there’s a limited number of tools out there that can actually help in any significant way. There are some challenges with handling customers who work across timezones that are obvious. For example, coordinating with clients and colleagues overseas at a mutually convenient time without laborious “Is that 10AM my time or yours?” exchanges that still so often end in mix-ups. But there are others that are less obvious, perhaps because they seem so unresolvable. When your customer travels around a great deal, moving from one timezone to another or even skipping across several in the course of a day, how do you arrange telephone appointments for them? And then there are the challenges faced by organizations managing remote teams, or coordinating multiple branches, or simply dealing with clients in different timezones (or combinations of all three!). If you provide phone support, for example, how do you easily ensure that customers can speak to someone in their own timezone and avoid frustration as they get passed from operator to operator, re-explaining the issue every time, because their initial contact is unavailable? With such wildly different complications and inconveniences arising from timezones, it became obvious 6 | contact management
to me that the key to dealing with all of them at once lay in creating a tool that was, above all, flexible. When Appointedd started developing our multi-timezone booking and scheduling functionality, it was in direct response to the needs of an international company that had searched high and low for a time management tool that would actually manage their time, wherever they were. It’s one of those things that you’d assume someone must have come up with ages ago—like earphones that don’t end up as the Gordian Knot in your pocket, or shampoo that runs out at the same time as your conditioner—but then realize that no one has. It was with this in mind that we started developing our software (which is still unique in its abilities; even daylight saving time can’t confuse it!) allowing users to coordinate easily with every resource within a company when they work in a different timezone every day of the week if necessary. The aim was to allow users to operate seamlessly between timezones without disrupting working hours for their customers (so that they didn’t end up accidentally booking calls at four in the morning). Plus, we didn’t want anyone at either end of the booking process to have to count hours back or forward, so we made sure that everyone sees availability in their own timezone. The implications of this for contact centres is that it allows a customers to house all of their
resources, even those in different branches or different countries, on a single centralized system while still allowing the individuals to operate in any number of timezones. In this way, companies can offer “follow the sun support” on a global basis, safe in the knowledge that they’re not going to get tripped up by timezone math. Time is, of course, a tricky business, but we shouldn’t just accept that timezones are complicated and there’s nothing we can do about it. We need to think innovatively about how to make it as simple to work with a customer on a different continent as with one on the next floor down, and the benefits so far are proving to be more impressive than we could have hoped. Hey, maybe we should all just be grateful that the whole world agrees a minute is a minute, because if they didn’t that would really make conference calls an ordeal! If you want to know more about multi-timezone booking and scheduling, take a look at www. appointedd.com. Leah Hutcheon is the founder & CEO of Appointedd, an award-winning company revolutionizing the way businesses schedule appointments. From contact centres to serviced offices, independent businesses to large corporations, Appointedd enables online booking on any device in any timezone. Appointedd offers CRM, marketing and business management tools, and fits seamlessly with 25+ two-way integrations.
Issue 4 • 2016
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Vertical focus: Public sector
Emerging technology vs. public sector processes By Emily Nielsen
E
very year Dimension Data conducts a Global Contact Centre Benchmarking Report where 1,320 participants from 81 countries are surveyed on key issues affecting customer management within today’s contact centres. Nine per cent of the 14 industries examined are public sector organizations. Of all participants, 50.2% rank analytics as the number one factor to reshape the industry in the next five years. What’s more, using analytics you can then capitalize on another emerging technology called omnichannel CX: a combination of technologies which allows you to personalize the customer journey leveraging customer data from multiple channels and interactions. These are the technologies emerging in the public sector and I’d love to tell you all about them. But in the best interests of the public sector, I can’t do that. Why can’t I? Based on the observations from this often-cited report, insights from various public servants and coupled with my contact centre experience in health care, education and municipalities, it seems to me that a discussion about emerging technology is like putting the cart before the horse. Why do I say that? Because many public sector organizations haven’t yet deployed or even considered yesterday’s technology. Therefore, a discussion about tomorrow’s technology is like showing up to a race and you want to hear how you can improve your lap time with the newest piece of technology… yet you’re not wearing running shoes because you haven’t invested in any. In this event, no gadget will help you run faster because you can’t run without shoes. What do I mean exactly? Well, according to Dimension Data, “Contact centres still struggle to achieve cross-channel integration or, as we now know it, omnichannel capability.” Specifically, many public, and private, contact centres are still telephone-centric contact centres with a few digital channels like email, chat and social media. And these channels are operating in isolation and are not tied together in omnichannel fashion, which isn’t considered an emerging technology today. In the 2015 report by Dimension Data it was said, “A worrying 78.7% of operations point out that their current, often telephone-centric systems won’t meet their future needs, and many are already failing.” So when the situation seems to be that most contact centres can’t provide a complete omnichannel experience, something akin to not having your shoes on for a race, who cares about emerging technologies like analytics or omnichannel CX. We must get back to the basics. So, why is it that way? And what can public sector organizations do to fix it? Well, let’s take a step back, momentarily forget about future technology, and focus on what needs to be done right now so that our public services can lay the foundation 10 | contact management
required to adopt emerging contact centre technology. There are three challenges to overcome to do this. First, drawing from my own experience working within the public sector, I’ve observed that they often don’t even know they’re operating a contact centre. Despite using contact centre tools, answering calls and responding to emails they don’t view themselves, for many reasons, as a contact centre. It’s this lack of self-awareness which means emerging tech won’t be adopted because they haven’t selfidentified themselves as a contact centre which should consider and use these tools. The solution? Admittedly, it isn’t an easy one. This requires a change champion from within the organization or an outsider with fresh eyes, such as a consultant, to make the administration aware that they are in fact a contact centre. Second, if a public service is aware it is running a contact centre, the next difficulty which prevents it from acquiring technology is due to the IT procurement process. Roy Wiseman, executive director of Municipal Information Systems Association Canada, addressed the issue of whether the procurement process works for IT projects in MISA Interface magazine (June 2016 issue). In it, Roy quoted the former Oregon CIO, Dugan Petty, capturing this situation reasonably well: “The alignment of technology and procurement has always had a lot of tension to it. Often it’s about whether the jurisdiction has met the procurement laws first—and, perhaps secondly, whether or not they actually achieved the outcomes they were looking for.” To jump this hurdle, a review of the entire procurement process must be conducted. For a very well done and detailed way of doing this I’d highly recommend reading Roy’s article which contains his approach to improving IT procurement. The third challenge to adoption is that cloud solutions, which provide the technology, are based on pay-
as-you-go pricing models which are incompatible with how government agencies prefer to consume services. Traditionally, public services acquire technology through capital projects where the cost of the solution and multi-year support are bundled into the initial sale. This “new” pricing model for cloud or software-as-a-service is difficult for current procurement templates, legal terms and conditions to adapt to. Until this is fixed, public services will be weary of how new technologies are quoted. Solution? Again, it isn’t easy but it can be done because the public service has overcome a similar challenge before—remember the days when the telecom industry shifted towards licensing agreements? This was when a licensing fee was attached to each piece of hardware or software to use it. At first this licensing model was incompatible with how government procured telecom services. However, today it is now the norm in this sector. The same discussions that happened when the licensing model appeared and was made accepted within public services needs to be conducted now with the adoption of pay-as-you-use cloud services. When public sector services make the changes recommended here, they’ll be able to more easily adopt new and disruptive contact centre technology. But, more importantly, they’ll be able to deploy the tools of yesterday—integrating all their channels—and then a discussion about emerging technology can follow. Emily Nielsen launched Nielsen IT Consulting Inc., one of Canada’s top unified communications (UC) and contact centre consulting firms, in 1999. Carrying an impressive portfolio of 100+ projects and having managed $65 million worth of UC and call centre solutions, she regularly acts as a trusted advisor to some of Canada’s largest organizations. Emily can be reached at enielsen@nielsenitconsulting.com or by calling 519-473-5373.
Issue 4 • 2016