The report, Unlocking Business Intelligence in the Contact Center reveals opportunities for your organization to improve performance by leveraging business intelligence mined from data collected via contact center and CRM software.

As your partner in success, we’re excited to offer you a complimentary copy of this new report. Download it now to learn how best-in-class organizations were able to achieve:

• Cost savings of 45% per call,
• 27% higher first call resolution (FCR) rates, and
• Daily closure rate improvements nearly double the industry average.

» Access Your Complimentary Copy of the Report Now

» Learn How CallCopy Can Help You Achieve Best-in-Class Results

Please note that this $399 value expires 12/3/2010.

As you enjoy the week and take part in a host of agent-appreciation events, remember to celebrate people skills with these six simple tips from customer services guru and people-skills coach Kate Nasser:

1) An authentic smile changes everything. On the phone, in person, and even the words you use in text, chat, emails, and your website design should smile at the customer.

Studies show that a physical smile can actually change the way you sound on the phone.  Use this technique to your advantage.

2) Treat people the way they want to be treated — not the way you want to be treated.

This is important to keep in mind as every customer is different!

3) Be the sun, not a thorn. Even with thorny difficult customers, be the sun.  Shine light on the problem to be solved and fix it.

There will always be difficult customers; remember to not take it personally and to shine on!

4) A plane flies well on auto-pilot mode. Customer service doesn’t! Adapt to each customer — personalize and localize including personality type, culture, geographic differences, and generational differences.

Not only is every customer unique, but every contact is unique is well.  Use all information at your disposal to create the best customer service experience possible – every time.

5) Empathize before you analyze! Show customers you care and they will care enough to help you help them.

In most cases, customers are more than willing to tell you what they want or need.  Listen to their suggestions and be considerate of any emotional responses.

6) Kindness transcends constraints. (Tristan Bishop) There are obstacles and challenges in customer service and technical support. Kindness to the customer ensures a continued bond while you work to overcome the challenges.

Kindness is key.  In customer service, in life.

For years, Americans have had their phone calls about credit card bills and broken cell phones handled by people in the Philippines or India. But American firms are starting to bring call centers back to the U.S. — and this time around, they are hiring more people to work in their own homes.

Home workers [...] represent one of the cheapest models for customer service. There are an estimated 60,000 people doing call center work from home.

[...] Industry watchers say so-called home sourcing will continue to grow as companies look for quality that used to be harder to afford.

We’ve seen many of our customers make this transition from brick-and-mortar call centers with higher overhead costs to work-at-home agents who are granted a sense of autonomy and independence.  It’s really a win-win situation for both the organization and the employee.

In fact, this shift in the market inspired our latest whitepaper, Building a Work-at-Home Program: What You Need to Know About the New Agent Spectrum.  This resource provides best practices for using workforce optimization applications to meet the demands of a shifting work environment, and empowers decision makers to deploy effective solutions.

• Download our Building a Work-at-Home Program: What You Need to Know About the New Agent Spectrum whitepaper.

Whether your organization performs manual or automated quality assurance (QA), call center coaching forms are an integral component of an overall QA program.

Developing Call Center Coaching Forms

There are several components you’ll want to consider when developing call center coaching forms for your organization.  For example, your call center coaching forms and the weighting of different sections should mirror your organization’s customer service goals and priorities.  In addition, ensure that all requirements are met by involving staff from different areas and levels of the organization.  Regardless of these special considerations, there are certain components that all call center coaching forms should include, such as:

• A section analyzing the opening and closing of the call.
• Space to define strengths and weaknesses associated with system knowledge, resolution skills, product knowledge and familiarity with business processes.
• A section reviewing the overall communication skills of the agent.
• An area to identify applicable best practices and up-training opportunities.

Because these requirements overlap from industry to industry, many companies choose to base their call center coaching forms on a pre-existing or sample form (CallCopy provides several sample forms in our Contact Center QA Guide).

Once a form is completed, review the results with the agent, either by scheduling time with the agent for a coaching session, or by using a tool like CallCopy to share the evaluation with the agent.  Follow up with the agent directly, or use our tracking tools to ensure that the agent has reviewed the content.

Why Use Call Center Coaching Forms

Ultimately, the end goal of any QA program should be to facilitate increased customer satisfaction.  In addition, call center coaching forms can help improve agent productivity, ensure better transaction quality and reduce enterprise risk.

Learn more:

• cc: Quality | Quality Management
• cc: Agent | Agent Coaching & Training
• Download our Contact Center QA Guide
• Download our Improving the Customer Experience with Peer-based QM Whitepaper

With this in mind, CallCopy has partnered with Dick Bucci of Pelorus Associates to bring you 10 Secrets to Boosting First Call Resolution, a new eBook loaded with best practices on how to improve satisfaction and cut costs through increased FCR.

“First call resolution is an essential metric for any best-in-class contact center for two simple reasons: it drives customer satisfaction and reduces operating costs.”

This eBook provides an inside look at the many benefits associated with increased FCR, alongside real-world techniques on how to do so, including steps you can take to measure FCR, ways to identify the causes of repeat calls, insight on how FCR relates to customer satisfaction, and, of course, the 10 secrets to boosting FCR.

So, whether your focus is on the bottom line, keeping customers happy, or striking a balance between the two, chances are your organization can benefit from improving FCR.  Download the eBook now to get started.

» Download 10 Secrets to Boosting First Call Resolution

When the brunt of the storms rendered other Columbus, Ohio offices (and offices across the country, for that matter), non-operational, we were able to work from home thanks to our communications infrastructure and our own CallCopy software.  As the Avaya Insights blog points out, snow days don’t mean what they used to….

For many organizations, hazardous weather conditions have historically meant that when school districts close, parents are forced to either try to find a babysitter at the last minute or take the day off to watch their kids. Inclement weather also traditionally means longer, more dangerous commutes for employees, shorter work days, and above all else, lost productivity.

But that was then, and this is now: our software can record our work-at-home IP phones, and our tools can be accessed remotely via VPN. To ensure our continued operations, we utilize the same technologies that our customers rely upon.

One customer leveraging this functionality is Mohawk Flooring. Using CallCopy software alongside their Avaya Unified Communications infrastructure, Mohawk was able to ensure business continuity despite a crippling ice storm impacting their Dallas, Texas facility several months ago. Agents were able to work from home during the ordeal, eliminating risky commutes and decreased productivity.

To remain competitive, businesses need to be well-equipped to handle inclement weather or even more extreme scenarios such as a pandemic, flu outbreak or natural disaster.

Fortunately, CallCopy’s solutions allow businesses to rest easy knowing that their employees can maintain productivity regardless of the situation. Our contact recording and screen capture technology allows organizations to manage the performance of remote workers – so they remain both safe and productive.

Many organizations understand that there is value in implementing a speech analytics solution, but struggle with defining best practices and objectives associated with an effective program.

Speech Analytics Best Practices:

1. Identify key words and phrases that matter.
   Your organization is unique.  Make sure you define the key words and phrases that make the most sense for your organization and align with your business goals.  Remember to include names of competitors, phrases indicative of decreased customer satisfaction (such as “I want to cancel,” “speak to your supervisor” or “frustrated”) and other service-level KPIs.  If needed, fine-tune the software to recognize non-standard words such as jargon, slang and foreign words.  Also, be sure to include other departments in the process, as they will be able to provide additional insight into the words and phrases important to other areas of the organization.
2. Share the knowledge.
   One of the benefits of speech analytics is that it allows you to extend the business intelligence gathered within your contact center throughout the entire organization.  In effect, this means tearing down the virtual wall between the call center and other areas of the organization, and allowing the knowledge gained during customer contacts to be shared cross-departmentally (think sales, marketing, collections, fraud and other departments).  Historically, this information may have been lost or communicated less effectively as agents are pressured to move on to the next call in queue.
3. Coach and train your agents.
   Use the key word/phrase mining and silence detection capabilities in your speech analytics software to improve processes and identify agent coaching or up-training opportunities by understanding trends and underlying issues. For example, extended pauses by the agent could indicate a need for additional product training.
4. Mine all of your calls, not just some of them.
   By mining 100 percent of your calls, you will be able to pinpoint the occurrence of those critical key words and phrases to give you a better (and more accurate) frame of reference while enabling a full view of corporate insight. This is particularly important when monitoring for uncommon, yet critically important phrases that may be missed when only a subset of calls is mined.
5. Listen to your customers.
   Your customers give you information with every call.  An effective speech analytics solution allows your organization to zero in on the critical pieces of information, and extract meaningful data without wasting time or resources on the less significant segments.  Analyzing and understanding this data allows you to makes actionable business decisions based on the wants and needs of your customer base.

Ultimately, speech analytics best practices can help your organization improve customer satisfaction through agent coaching and up-training opportunities, improved process adherence, trend and key word /phrase identification and extendible business information.  Applying speech analytics best practices to your organization will allow you to better understand your customers by providing you with valuable insight, and the tools needed to turn that insight into critical business intelligence.

» Learn more about CallCopy’s speech analytics solution.

Because PCI compliance is such an important issue for contact centers, CallCopy recently sponsored DMG Consulting’s whitepaper, Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) Guide for Contact Center Managers. This guide provides critical details about PCI DSS, how it affects call recording applications and what you can do to ensure your contact center operates in compliance with the PCI DSS.

Some of the topics include:

• What is PCI DSS? The PCI DSS is a security standard that includes requirements for security management, policies, procedures, and other critical protective measures and is intended to help organizations proactively protect customer account data.
• The Implications of PCI DSS for Contact Centers – Contact centers are responsible for ensuring that all data transmission systems, network segments and data storage solutions comply with the data security standards.
• Which Standards Apply to Contact Centers? While all 12 requirements may be applicable to some degree, requirements three (protect stored cardholder data), four (encrypt transmission of cardholder data across open, public networks) and 12 (maintain a policy that addresses information security) are especially relevant to contact centers.
• How Should Contact Centers Protect Cardholder Information? There are many steps you can take to protect customer data. For example, you’ll want to ensure that all employees are properly trained about all security policies and procedures. You’re also required to make sure that the data is encrypted using strong encryption protocols.
• PCI and At-Home Agents and Supervisors – At-home agents can present additional risks to PCI compliance, but certain precautions, like ensuring that agent screen and voice conversations are recorded, can help lower the overall risk.

Download the whitepaper now or visit our PCI compliance page for more info.

The article focuses on the many benefits of IVR surveys as well as web-based surveys in collecting customer feedback.  The paradigm shift relates to the ability to focus the data toward multiple goals, providing valuable data to marketing and HR as well as the contact center.  Surveys are evolving from simple data collection to advanced analysis of employee and customer opinions for true enterprise feedback management.

cc: Survey is offered as a hosted application, taking advantage of Software as a Service (SaaS) to make it cost effective as well as easy to use and manage.

The article is available at:

http://www.destinationcrm.com/Articles/CRM-News/Daily-News/Changing-the-Paradigm-of-the-Contact-Center-50219.aspx 

In most cases, station side recording is preferred.  One key factor is that with trunk recording you are not able to record PBX calls.  For example, if one employee calls another employee, that call does not cross your inbound / outbound trunks and cannot be recorded via trunk tap.  With station-side recording, all internal calls can be recorded as well as other general inbound/outbound traffic.  

With station-side recording it is also easier to segment the calls, especially if you do not have a computer-telephony integration (CTI) module active on your ACD/PBX (TSPAI, JTAPI, TAPI, etc.).  The advantage in splitting the calls out is that a customer may call one department, and get transferred to another department.  Since two agents are handling the call, and recordings are commonly used for quality monitoring on your agents, having two recordings is preferred so the agents can be evaluated independently, and so you can permission access to the recordings differently.  You may not want a billing department supervisor to hear a tech support call and vice versa.

This kind of segmentation can be accommodated through a trunk-tap, but without CTI data this is done using SMDR information, which is not available until after the call has torn down and may not always be available in enough time for accurate use.  This is especially true if SMDR is being used to trigger a recording start or stop and not just to update recordings with details like ANI, DNIS, agent extension, or queue description.  Also, different switches may have limitation on how trunk channels are tracked and reported, making it difficult to match SMDR and even CTI data to recordings when a call has been transferred several times.

Most CTI-driven active integrations, such as Avaya DMCC (CMAPI), Nortel DMS, and Cisco JTAPI will behave like a station-side recorder.  This is also the same with passive VoIP recording (packet sniffing).  One exception is the ShoreTel TAPI/WAV integration, which behaves like a trunk recorder in the sense that is does not deliver audio for PBX calls; however you do have the ability to effectively separate recordings for each agent leg of the call.

Perhaps the biggest downside to station side recording is the wiring.  Station side recording can be a passive tap /cross connect at the 110-or 66-block in your telecom wiring.  Depending on what stations are to be recorded, you may also be able to do a split on a full amphenol cable between the PBX and the punch down blocks, which can be a cleaner wiring job.