Call Center Predictive Dialers

An evolved form of automated dialer are called predictive dialers. In addition to automatically dialing a list of phone numbers for customers or prospective customers, as traditional dialers do, the predictive dialers execute two sets of activities, which increase enormously the productivity of the dialing process: 

1) Screens out no-answers, busy signals, standard information tones (SITs), and fax/answering machines, only sending calls that reach a live person to a sales agent. Here it is interesting to note that to be able to screen such things it is necessary to have a fine tuning between the public network signalling and the device. That means lengthy installation times and a very high level of sensitivity in any shift of trunks and operators. 

2) Using intelligent algorithms, these devices can detect when an agent is wrapping up a call; they’ll then begin dialing the next number and send the call to that agent as soon as a dialer reaches a live voice on the other end. These algorithms are also capable of detecting the number of available telephone lines, available operators, and average length of each call. Therefore, these devices predict the dialing rate in order to match it with the number of available agents. 

While the basic autodialer merely automatically dials telephone numbers for call-center agents who are idle or waiting for a call, the predictive dialer uses a variety of algorithms to predict both the availability of agents and called-party answers, adjusting the calling rate to the number of agents it predicts will be available when the calls it places are expected to be answered.  

By using a dialer to filter out these unproductive calls and to spare the agent from having to wait (adjusting the dial rate), call centers can improve productivity enormously. Agents can now spend on average around 80 percent of their time talking to customers and only about 20 percent of their time waiting for the next call.  

Compared with the conventional dialer (known in some countries as autodialer or power-dialer), predictive dialers have shown increases in talk time from twenty minutes in the hour to almost fifty (25 percent to 85 percent). However, predictive dialers are more suitable for low-quality mailings and large numbers of agents, and we should be aware that an unexpectedly high contact rate can overwhelm the system, leading to a high rate of call abandonment. We should be aware that the ability to identify bad numbers, answering machines, and fax machines isn’t what defines a predictive dialer—sophisticated power-dialers may do those things also—but rather it is the ability to use this information, plus the average duration and available agents, to adjust the dial rate.  

In operational terms, we have to understand that before running a campaign, the call list data (this is usually called a mailing or campaign), is loaded into the dialer. Then, the dialing process starts, and statistics are kept about what is happening. Most predictive dialers generate reports that indicate call attempts and unsuccessful calls by type. Unsuccessful calls are often analyzed to determine if the number called needs to be called back later or needs special treatment, such as a manual or autodialed call by an agent to listen to an answering-machine message.  Some companies adopt the practice of what is called “cleaning the mailing,” which consists of using dedicated dialers to call the numbers very quickly. The call duration is just enough to check if the number is valid (whatever the reason) and separate it from the mailing. Only after performing this cleaning are the separated numbers loaded in production dialers. Usually, the devices used for cleaning the mailing lists are connected to service providers whose charging granularity doesn’t exceed 18s as the minimum time charged per call, regardless of the real duration of the call. This practice maximizes the productivity because it allows the separation of the different kinds of situations in a more dedicated form. As examples, fax machines may receive a predefined fax message, and answering machines may receive a prerecorded message. Of course, it could be done by the same dialer in the first place, but very often infrastructures are not uniformly built and, depending on the situation, this strategy may be very useful

Call Center Dialers

The outbound operations usually are extremely challenging for telecom managers. These are the kind of operations in which just keeping the lights on is not enough, and usually the difference between a good installation and a bad one can make a huge difference in terms of productivity and influence directly the company’s bottom line.  

The deployment of devices called diallers (British English) or dialers (American English) designed to automatically dial telephone numbers, can generate significative productivity gains. However, you should not have the delusion that just buying the devices generates the productivity gains by default. The telecom manager has to understand that the productivity gains come from a well-balanced combination of three factors:  

• Well-chosen equipment 

• A good installation and proper configuration 

• A good management of the tool in the day-by-day operations  

Dialers are crucial tools for outbound call centers, because they free the agents of the work of dialing and make it possible for them to concentrate their effort in actually talking with the clients. If badly implemented, dialers may produce lackluster results and increase operational costs.  

In addition to the basic function of dialing and transferring the call for an human attendant, the dialer device can also perform several other tasks, such as announce verbal messages (called a robocall in the United States) or transmit digital data (like SMS messages).  

In addition, these devices usually can verify the dialed numbers and change them to seamlessly provide services that otherwise require lengthy access codes to be dialed.  Typically, a dialer can automatically insert and modify the numbers depending on the time of day, country, or area code dialed, allowing also the selection of the service providers who offer the best rates.

For example, a dialer could be programmed to use one service provider for international calls and another for mobile calls. These processes are known as prefix insertion and least-cost routing.  

Although most dialers can execute the least-cost routing, it is interesting to note that in large installations it may not be ideal to do so because that usually means the number of trunks (T1/E1) supported by each dialer box may not be enough for all dialing circumstances.

For example, if in a particular moment you have lots of fix-to-mobile calls, the number of mobile trunks available in each box may not be enough. This is the reason why it usually makes more sense to pool the trunks groups in a large voice switch and do the routing from there.  

Dialer systems are commonly used by telemarketing organizations involved in B2C (business-to-consumer) calling, because it allows their sales representatives to have much more customer contact time. Market-survey companies and debt-collection services that need to contact and personally speak to a lot of people by telephone may also use dialers.  

More commonly, dialers are now being used as a quick and easy way to automate all types of calls that would otherwise be made manually by a call center, such as welcome calls for new customers, customer service call backs, appointment confirmations/reminders, or even for the automation of large numbers of ad hoc calls that might need to take place (such as by a taxi company or a parcel-delivery service). The basic idea behind the device is that if a person were to sit down and manually dial one thousand people, a large percentage of these calls will not result in contact with someone at the other end. 

Out of one thousand calls made, typically only about 25 to 35 percent would actually connect to a live person. Of the rest, a large number (often 40 to 60 percent) won’t be answered at all, around 10 percent might be answering machines, faxes, modems, or other electronic devices, around 5 percent of numbers would be busy, and the rest will result in network errors or be identified as invalid numbers. For call centers that need to make large numbers of outbound calls, this represents a big problem. Typically, in manual-dialing environments, any given agent will spend around 90 percent of his or her time listening to the phone ring, waiting to talk to someone, or dealing with invalid numbers, or answering machines, and only about 10 percent of the time actually doing what they are really there to do.  

The benefit of dialers in general is that they can make many more calls in a much shorter period of time than an agent manually dialing each phone number. If the dialer encounters a busy signal or no answer, it will schedule itself to dial the number again later without human intervention. The system can also keep track of an entire campaign’s progress in real time—which would be nearly impossible if attempted manually. 

Call Center Billing Auditing

Billing auditing is the process of verifying carefully in the bill if what was charged by the service provider was what was agreed to in the contract. This verification includes the recalculation of each call and the verification of every item charged in the bill.  

Typically, most organizations don’t do the complete recalculation of all calls every month; usually they do that only for the ones in which big discrepancies between what was identified by the billing system and what was actually charged were spotted.  

Nevertheless, verifying the bills is a necessity in a large call center. Verification identifies charge discrepancies and enables the organization to get the due reimbursement for overcharging from the PTT providers. Experience shows that savings between 5 percent and 12 percent are usually attainable through regular auditing of the bills. Considering the expenditures with telecom of large call centers, 5 percent can mean an enormous amount of money, and therefore auditing the bills usually is worth the effort.  

Here it is interesting to mention that when we say verify the bills most people think about re-calculating the value charged for the calls. Although this is no doubt an important part of the verification, there are several other things that should be checked:  

• Verification whether the charges are associated to trunks that actually belong to the organization 

• Verification if there are undue charges for installation or trunk subscription 

• Verification if there are penalties for late payment unduly charged 

• Verification if there are charges for not achieving the minimum-committed volume  

Whether the charges are associated to trunks that actually belong to the organization should be verified. Although it may seem a bit obvious, the first and basic verification (very often not executed) is to check if the bill belongs to the organization, and the resource is actually being used. It is not uncommon to receive bills that don’t belong to the organization or previously belonged but the resource was cancelled or deactivated. In large operations with several sites (sometimes in different countries), just to be able to check if the bills belong to the organization and verify if the amount charged is compatible with the historical value is in itself a difficult task.  

Verification if there are undue charges for installation or trunk subscription is a very common problem. That includes all sorts of charges ranging from installations fees to trunks subscriptions and special services. Those charges sometimes are a large percentage of the bill and their verification is far from easy.  

Verification is necessary if there are penalties or interest for late payment unduly charged. Such charges very often are wrongly calculated and don’t correspond to what was defined in the contract. The bill verifier has to check if the penalties and interest are due and if they were rightly calculated as defined in the contract.  

Verification if there are charges for not achieving the minimum-committed volume is important to verify if there are charges for not achieving the minimum-committed volume and if these charges were properly calculated as defined in the contract. Usually, the difference between what was committed and what was actually used has to be paid in full.  

These kinds of problems very often provoke more overcharges than the mistakes in the calculation of the calls. Besides the direct financial gains, auditing the bills enables the evaluation of many other important aspects linked with the management of a large call-center operation: 

• Identifying the delicate balancing act between the minimum volume commitment and tariffs 

• Identifying volume and duration of the calls, which is crucial to negotiate charging granularity 

• Identifying the point at which least-cost route configuration in the PBXs needs adjustment due to changes in tariffs 

• Knowing when it becomes feasible to have a private-voice network (interest of traffic concentrated in some specific area code) 

• Accurately calculating the number of trunks and circuits (capacity planning)  

Analyzing the voice bills enables accurate answers to all these questions, and the telecom manager should be aware that the analysis of a telecom bill is much more than just checking the tariffs. It is also about verifying the traffic and comparing the current prices against available alternatives.  

The process of verifying the bill usually follows these steps:  

• Verify if the bill and the resources belong to the organization. 

• Verify if the value charged is compatible with the historical value. 

• Verify if the minimum-committed volume was achieved (if not, recalculate the penalty and check if it was rightly charged). 

• Verify if there is any penalty and interest for late payment being charged. 

• Verify if the charging period is correct and if there is any additional fee being charged for unsolicited services, such as installation or subscription. 

• Identify resources not in use, such as trunks without any calls.  

After verifying these basic items, you should check the calls, recalculating the value and checking the traffic interest:  

• Verify from and to where each call was made. 

• Identify the area codes from and to each call. 

• Verify how much each call is supposed to cost, based on the organization’s specific contract, and identify the discrepancies. 

• Identify if the taxes were properly applied. 

• Verify if there are calls charged outside of the admissible charging period.  

When auditing telephone bills, it is important to consider that this procedure is effective only when there is a process in place to define how and when the organization will be reimbursed. Contracts must have dispute clauses, and, ideally, the contracts in place should foresee that. If errors were spotted in the bills before the payment due date, the organization can notify the service provider and pay only what was considered due. The values over which there is disagreement must be discussed jointly. If the charges prove to be right, the organization pays the service provider without penalties for delaying the payment (interest is due).  

The organization musts define a formal process through which all invoice disputes are treated. The process needs a definition of time frames for each party involved and should mirror the dispute resolution clauses of individual contracts or master agreements. Typically, the whole process of disputing a bill from identification to solution should not exceed three months.  

The SLA must consider that the invoice payment doesn’t imply acceptance of the charged values. Ideally, the organization should have at least one year to audit the values charged, and the SLA should foresee that. If the errors identified exceed 5 percent of the total value of the bills, the service providers must reimburse the organization for the costs involved in auditing the bills. This is a considerable cost and a good mechanism for keeping service providers accurate.  

The organization must define clearly the time after which charges are not acceptable (in some countries it is defined by law). For example, services provided more than six months ago should not be charged.  

The organization must schedule regular meetings with the service provider invoice team. Such meetings should be forums to discuss problems with the invoices and items added, changed, and cancelled.  

The organization should try to define standardized invoice cycles and guarantee that all invoices are due on the same day; this simplifies the billing and payment process.  

Of course, all these recommendations depend on negotiation at the contract stage and arguably these points belong in the negotiations chapter. However, these clauses only become meaningful if actual billing verification is done; without it you will have no recourse or knowledge of billing errors. 

DRIVERS OF LEARNING AND DEVELOPMENT

The purpose of training within an organization is to improve knowledge, skills, attitudes and ultimately financial performance. Learning at individual and organizational levels is not a goal in itself but a major foundation in providing a successful interaction with the customer and ensuring that the organization prospers and survives into the future. There are a number of primary drivers for call centre training.

Business opportunities

Commercial organizations are frequently looking to expand provision and increase market size and share. Thus, each contact with the customer is o en used as an opportunity to sell new or upgraded products and this may result in wider and more complex demands on CSRs, requiring different knowledge and skill sets.

Problems

Problems within the organization are o en addressed through focused training, which can provide a quick solution to unanticipated situations. This form of reactive training may reduce resources and limit the potential for delivering ongoing development training. Furthermore, it can be stressful for trainers because of the need for rapid responses to the sudden challenges.

Management planning

Managers have responsibility for the smooth operational running of centres and for this reason need specific knowledge and skills as well as generic management skills. In particular they need training in the specific technologies, systems, so ware, planning, queuing principles, industry developments, etc.

Changes in technology

One of the main reasons for the growth of the contact centre industry has been the advancement of technology and this continuing development means that employees need to regularly update their knowledge and be able to use the various systems and technologies. In addition, as the number of communication channels increase, eg e-mail and text chat, agents will need to develop new skills in written communication. Furthermore, the so er skills of selling and customer service may alter when provided with different contact media.

Changing customer requirements

Customer expectations of quality of service are continually increasing, o en as a result of competition. For this reason increased knowledge, skills and rapport need to be developed to attract new customers and prevent existing ones from defecting to alternative providers.

Political/regulatory changes

As the main point of contact for the organization with the customer, CSAs (customer service agents) must be up to date in order not to put the organization at risk of negative publicity or legal action. New legislation, product recalls, etc need to be conducted accurately.

Labour issues

Training is o en used to address agent attrition and when the labour market is tight good quality training is used to attract potential advisers. The delivery of induction training has been found to retain new recruits for longer if the induction programme is provided at intervals rather than in one intensive block. Staff who receive ongoing training feel that their skills are progressing and recognize that this may then enable them to advance within the organization.

Reward

Training is also provided as a form of reward rather than being essential. It can be motivating in its own terms without being directed at specific issues. In one organization it was reported, ‘The mentality of training used to be that it was a reward not a necessity’.

High involvement work practices

In high performance work organizations  that have integrated human resource functions, productivity and profits tend to be higher. Also, in high involvement work practices ‘unions are likely to spend less time in workplace grievances and more time on initiatives such as joint training programmes’.

THE DEVELOPMENT OF CALL/CONTACT CENTRES

Although there have been switchboards and telephone operators since the early days of telephone systems the contact centre industry in its present form is relatively new. It plays an increasingly important strategic role within the organization and its rapid expansion has occurred for three main reasons.

Firstly, the starting point for the growth of call centres was the development of information and communication technologies combined with reduced telecommunication costs. The second factor driving the development of the industry was that organizations could achieve large-scale economies through the increased systematization and consolidation of office functions. 

Traditional back-office functions have increasingly become front-of-house operations as organizations have a empted to build closer communications with the customer. Knowledge management and customer management systems have created an environment in which the call centre is moving from being a peripheral, and o en geographically distant operation, to one that is now pivotal and central to the organization.

The third major factor is that expectations of service among customers have risen and contact centres have enabled swi er and cheaper contact with organizations. The greater efficiency of organizations has meant reduced prices for customers, but this has o en been achieved through transferring labour costs onto the customer through self-service. Furthermore, mechanized delivery systems have tended to restrict customer options.

Scientific management and contact centres

The scientific management approach of F W Taylor has been highly influential in the development of contact centres. Indeed, it has been suggested that call centres represent a return to Taylorism with ‘an assembly line in the head’. In a similar vein, ‘Tayloristic work organization minimizes skill requirements, discretion and job cycle time. Learning is limited to repetition of simple rationalized tasks (“practice makes perfect”).’

There is little doubt that mechanistic principles have influenced the design and operations of contact centres from the choice of technology and building design through to the greetings delivered by the CSRs (customer service representatives). If savings can be made without unduly influencing performance they will most likely be introduced, eg a one-second reduction in call time for directory enquiries in the UK could translate into a saving of £2 million. Similarly, replacing ‘Good morning’ and ‘Goodbye’ with ‘Hi’ and ‘Bye’ in a US centre was believed to save the equivalent of $22 million.

Market segmentation and differentiation

Yet, this Taylorist approach to contact centres does not present the whole picture. A consideration of expenditure is important and according to Dimension Data (2005) the main purpose of the call centre is cost reduction. But competing on cost alone implies a commodity market where all the offerings are indistinguishable. In reality, there are significant differences between providing a telephone number and giving detailed advice and guidance to someone contemplating buying a pension plan. Essentially, it is the combination of cost and quality that are the main mechanisms by which service provision can be differentiated.

Research into the interplay between cost and quality of service provision has indicated that there are, in general, three main types of business model which organizations tend to use in their interactions with customers; see Figure 1.

Figure 1: Types of service and efficiency

 

1. Mass production model – transactions

Some organizational strategies are based on minimizing costs and providing a very limited no-frills service. These transactional operations maximize call volumes and limit costs, creating a mass production model. Where there are low-value customers and a simple service, the process is highly scripted and there is little discretion for employees, eg telephone directory enquiries.

2. Professional service model – solutions

At the opposite end of the scale is the professional service or relational model which is frequently directed at high-value customers and where detailed interactions occur. In these circumstances there is o en more discretion and empowerment for the agent to find specific solutions for the customer, eg customized personal insurance.

3. Mass customization model – sales

Between the two extremes of the mass production and professional service models lies a hybrid version that a empts to balance the competing demands of cost and quality. This is the mass customization or pseudo-relational model which offers a medium-service, medium-efficiency interaction with the customer, eg simple holiday bookings.

This differentiation within the market has implications for the role of training and development. Tayloristic job designs enable the employment of less skilled and cheaper labour, which requires less investment in recruitment, training and development. Alternatively, with organizations competing on quality, contact centre employees require skills which will enable them to provide a customized service and this requires detailed and specific training.

There is an increased emphasis for organizations to encourage customers to go down the self-service route on the internet because it is so much cheaper. The use of automation, interactive voice recognition, internet and other channels represents a movement to reduce costs and increase accessibility. Thus, customers seeking to make simple and low value transactions will be encouraged to use the internet, eg most budget airline bookings are undertaken on the internet.

Figure 2: The provision of service in contact centres 

 

Yet there are limitations to the types of interactions that can be conducted electronically, ‘For complex interactions where a high speed of response is required, a real-time human touch is required’. However, employing people to operate like machines is self-defeating: ‘No sane business today would want a workforce of automatons: after all, anything an automaton can do, we can automate’.

Interacting with a customer builds the relationship, which benefits the customer and the organization. So, for this reason it ‘ensures that the human operator will never be entirely superseded by a machine’.

Real estate | Call Center Case Studies

Company: Oxford Properties Group

Profile

Oxford Properties operates an extensive building maintenance organization that services over 25 million square feet of premium office space across Canada.

Challenge

Good tenant relations is a key to success in the real estate business. The extent of Oxford's real estate holdings required its maintenance staff to respond to building maintenance requests quickly and efficiently. A recent tenant satisfaction survey indicated there was room for improvement in the following areas: ease of contact, response times, and satisfaction with problem resolutions.

Solution

To provide the best possible service experience for their tenants, Oxford's management team identified three primary objectives:

§  Eliminate confusion by consolidating three regional centers into a single, multichannel center

§  Adopt a service level commitment for the contact center to answer 90% of calls within 10 seconds.

§  Establish a target of having a service person on site within 30 minutes 95% of the time.

To realize these goals—and to ensure that their building maintenance group was a positive asset that would strengthen tenant loyalty—Oxford selected Bell Canada's call center project management resources to assist its internal team in designing an innovative program, called 310-MAXX, to manage the 30-minute service mandate on orders coming into its building maintenance organization.

With the 310-MAXX program, Oxford tenants simply make a service request call to 310-MAXX from anywhere in Canada or log on to Oxford's building maintenance Website. To turn their vision into reality, Oxford Properties also partnered with Bell Contact Centre Solutions to assist in the start-up and management of the contact center.

The first phase focused on preparing the new, centralized, multichannel facility to handle the increased traffic. This included adding or upgrading the following elements:

§  Megalink Access Services

§  PBX

§  310 service

§  In-house cabling

§  A Symposium server and Symposium set installation

It also involved providing extensive professional services to help with the hiring of CSRs and supervisors, initial CSR training, metrics to measure and manage advances in the center, change management to involve contact center staff in implementing "best practices." This major corporate effort was supported by having all of the key ingredients in place, including top-down sponsorship from the president and CEO, a dedicated team of over 45 people who implemented the changes, the involvement of every telephone agent, and training to close any gaps in knowledge and skills.

Benefits

The modified call center and enhanced communication resources were up and running in seven weeks and provided the following benefits:

§  Customers can now submit service requests directly, 24 hours a day, via phone or Web and can track the status of their service request online or by calling 310-MAXX.

§  Once the job is complete, customers receive confirmation via e-mail.

§  Tenants and Oxford Properties alike can use the Web-enabled tracking system to monitor request patterns and predict future maintenance needs.

§  92% of customer calls are answered in 10 seconds, on a daily basis.

§  Productivity has increased by 106%.

§  Quality has increased by 100%.

§  Purdue University's Call Center Benchmarking Study ranked Oxford's improved system #4 in its industry group.

§  A national disaster contingency plan was implemented.

Communications | Call Center Case Studies

Company: Axtel

Profile

Axtel is a provider of integrated telecommunication solutions in the recently liberalized Mexican market; it has 300 CSRs in its Monterrey contact center and handles over 18,000 calls per day.

Challenge

Axtel's workforce management system is fed information about the operation's activity, including key data such as peak call times, call duration, and agent workload. The system can then predict what will happen when advertising campaigns run and how exceptions such as these will affect the day-to-day operation of the contact center. The aim is a fairly simple one: increase the volume of calls handled without employing more agents and maintain the service level at 80% of calls answered within 20 seconds.

Solution

Axtel will soon be turning its Monterrey call center into a multimedia contact center and will use workforce management to ensure that the center has current performance measurement tools to obtain high levels of productivity and customer service.

Benefits

Benefits achieved include

§  More efficient measurement of call center performance

§  Capability to operate a multimedia contact center

Company: CLEAR Communications

Profile

CLEAR Communications is a New Zealand telecommunications services provider, founded in 1990, with call centers in Auckland and Christchurch. Surveys have indicated that CLEAR customers are impressed with the company's service; however, as the company has discovered, when customer service is improved, customers quickly progress through four stages: They appreciate it, they get used to it, they expect it, and they demand it.

Challenge

With strong competition in its marketplace, CLEAR posed this question to a group of managers and supervisors participating in a series of workshops: How do we stay ahead of the competition and meet customer expectations?

Solution

The results of the workshop session pointed to the critical requirement to continually assess current and future customer expectations. Leveraging customer feedback was considered important as the company moved into service innovations and improvements. Modest improvements were made to ensure that the organization was continually moving forward and therefore staying one step ahead of customer expectations.

Benefits

CLEAR has achieved about 20% market share in the New Zealand telecommunications sector because of its high level of customer service and favorable word-of-mouth advertising.

Company: diAx

Profile

diAx is a rapidly growing European telecom provider based in Switzerland. With its four contact centers and 720 agents, it takes up to 35,000 calls per day from its 1.3-million customer base.

Challenge

Implementing a virtual contact center has meant that each of the 38 agent skillsets available (such as language and specialized knowledge) has increased, as these skill pools are no longer location dependent. In a country like Switzerland, where the population speaks Italian, French, German, or English, the ability to present customers with as large a pool of CSR language skills as possible is critical to the success of the business.

Solution

The company's four contact centers were integrated to form a single, virtual contact center. Customers are given one telephone number, which gets routed correctly in 95% of cases from the calling-line identity (CLI).

Benefits

The following benefits were achieved:

§  The solution implemented was supported by an open architecture.

§  ACDs from separate leading manufacturers were integrated seamlessly into the virtual contact center infrastructure.

Company: Group Telecom

Profile

Group Telecom is a Canadian local exchange carrier offering next-generation telecommunications solutions to Canadian businesses. The company specializes in data, Internet applications, and voice products and services designed to improve the reliability of communications and the productivity and profitability of its customer's businesses. Group Telecom's portfolio of products and services of advanced business communication tools is provided over the company's own national fiber network and switching equipment.

Challenge

Group Telecom focuses on providing efficient support and excellent customer service and building a reputation as a leader in the telecommunications industry. The company needed a powerful call-management solution that would enhance customer support capabilities and reduce call-handling and call-transfer times. The software solution had to be flexible and scalable to support existing contact centers in Calgary, Vancouver, Toronto, and Montreal, and it had to be able to handle future growth.

Solution

Group Telecom chose the LGS Interaction Management Solution (IMS), based on the Apropos Multimedia Interaction Management Solution, to facilitate the company's vision of ECARE for its customer service contact center. This vendor solution was selected for the following reasons:

§  Ease of use

§  Ease of integration with existing switches

§  Capacity for multimedia interactions (voice, e-mail, and Web inquiries)

§  Rapid deployment (six-week target)

Using the queuing and distribution capabilities of Apropos, Group Telecom quickly routes callers to the proper department and most suitable agent.

Using a visual queue for inbound calls, voice mails, and e-mails, CSRs can identify priority customers and the reason for their call. It also captures information on abandoned calls so that CSRs can call back.

Benefits

The advantages of the IMS solution are

§  One fully integrated solution residing on one platform with one central point of administration, reporting, and databasing

§  Visual queuing that allows CSRs to preview calls and always routes calls to the best available agent, increasing both CSR and customer satisfaction

§  Skill-based routing allowing agents multiple queues

§  The ability of supervisors to monitor the call center from their desktops in real time, including call load, call disposition, and the activity of individual CSRs, and to allocate CSRs among queues in real time

§  Analysis of calls to improve operations

§  Flexibility to utilize many different switching platforms in a number of different locations and customer transactions

§  Significant increase in CSR productivity

§  Simple administration—one server to handle incoming calls and e-mails

§  Insight into quantity and purpose of calls through robust reporting tools

§  Insight into the efficiency of its contact center

§  Increased customer satisfaction

Company: GTE Telecommunications Services (GTE TSI)

Profile

GTE Telecommunications Services, based in Tampa, Florida, is a global supplier of interoperability solutions for wireless paging and Internet service providers. In addition to operating the world's largest wireless data clearinghouse, GTE TSI's broad array of products includes interstandard wireless roaming solutions, intelligent network services, fraud management solutions, and other types of service bureau applications that simplify the complex technical and business relationships existing in today's competitive global telecommunications industry.

Challenge

GTE TSI needed to easily communicate through various media types, including e-mail, inbound and outbound calls, and voice mail. In addition, the company could only track and monitor calls but required a system that could easily interface with customers on a more personal, prioritized basis. Finally, the company was challenged with the inability to produce adequate reports or measure sufficient data from multiple interaction types, and it needed these business metrics and tools to further optimize the customer support hotline center.

Solution

GTE TSI selected and successfully implemented the Apropos Multimedia Interaction Management system. The Apropos system routes, tracks, and reports on all inbound and outbound interactions. In addition to Apropos, GTE TSI uses Remedy's CRM application to provide agents with "screen pops" containing customer information. To complement the Remedy system, Apropos prioritizes and escalates each interaction according to business rules, providing the capability of managing each interaction based on its value to the business. The Apropos system also includes a comprehensive reporting system that fully supports management's requirements and assists in delivering superior service to customers.

Benefits

§  Full caller data and prioritization—enhances the CSR's ability to deliver a quicker and more efficient response.

§  Reporting across all media types—enables the center to improve service levels and increase productivity

§  Fully integrated multimedia capabilities—allows customers to effectively communicate through various media types and increases the capability to satisfy customers as they contact the center

Company: Nokia

Profile

Nokia, headquartered in Irving, Texas, is a world leader in mobile communications. Backed by its experience, innovation, user-friendliness, and secure solutions, the company has become a major supplier of mobile phones and mobile fixed and IP networks.

Challenge

Nokia's Information Management Group realized the need to have better insight into the types of calls received by the contact center. Nokia needed a solution that would provide insight into all support center activities and easily create and generate reports. Improved call-routing capabilities and a system that could handle fax services were also required. The solution had to meet current needs and business challenges and be capable of integrating with existing systems.

Solution

The Apropos Multimedia Interaction Management Suite was chosen for five of Nokia's contact centers throughout the world because of its intelligent, skills-based routing feature that automatically directs customers to specific customer support representatives for personalized handling. The system also provides the capability to manage and monitor all customer interactions and includes comprehensive reporting.

The initial implementation included voice, voice mail, and fax-back features, which enabled CSRs to fax information from the desktop. Shortly afterwards, Nokia also implemented the e-mail application, an enterprise-class solution designed specifically for e-commerce, to provide a unified mechanism for blending, prioritizing, and escalating e-mail interactions in the flow of all customer interactions within their support center.

Benefits

The selected vendor solution provided the following benefits:

§  Intelligent, skills-based routing—assigns calls to the appropriate agent, delivering a more efficient and quicker response

§  Comprehensive report tolls—measures service and performance levels and enables management to make well-informed business decisions

§  Multichannel solution—allows customer support representatives to respond to and effectively serve their customers regardless of how they choose to communicate with the center.