Archive for February, 2012

Varolii Interaction 2012 - Get in the Loop

by Mary Cook on February 28, 2012 in Call Centers, Industry News, Mary Cook, Varolii News with No comments
interaction2012

Varolii’s user conference, Interaction, is a week away. This is my third trip to Interaction, and I cannot tell you how excited I am to be heading to Las Vegas. Plus I needed an excuse to play the slots, and now I have one.

In addition to flirting with Lady Luck I fully intend to get ahold of every juicy morsel of information that is being presented this year. I am really looking forward to Closing the Loop — Varolii 360 and Let’s Make this Clear: The Power of Guided Speech to Transform the Customer Conversation. I’ve written a lot about the technology being used to change the customer’s call center experience and I can’t wait to share its magic with you in person.

Varolii Interaction 2012 is being held March 5th to 7th at Loews Lake Las Vegas.  The conference will be filled with valuable insight that can be used to facilitate better and more forward-thinking customer interaction management strategies.

Here are a few of the sessions that I can’t wait to attend:

  • Mobile Matters: Maximize Your SMS & Smartphone Investment.  Mobility is becoming ubiquitous in the minds of consumers. If you are still viewing SMS and Smartphone as alternative technologies, you’re missing huge opportunities to connect with your customers.
  • Peak Performance: Better Insight, More Control. You asked for it. You got it. Varolii’s dynamic duo, Performance Insight and Performance Manager, give you the campaign controls and analytics you need to monitor, manage and evaluate your customer interactions more effectively and efficiently. Learn more about the powerful controls, monitoring and custom reporting that PI and PM offer to help you drive greater value from your interactions and use this knowledge to shape a profitable engagement strategy.
  • Engaging Today’s Mobile Customer – Integrating Text & Smartphone into your Customer Interactions. You know that contacting customers through their mobile devices is critical to the success of your communication strategies, but how do you start? Learn why reaching consumers on their mobile device is critical to improving your communication performance, the legal hurdles you’ll need to overcome, and step-by-step instructions on setting up an opt-in consent program for contacting customers on their mobile devices.

I have some last minute packing to do before jet setting to Vegas. I hope that you’ll be able to join us at Varolii Interaction 2012. You will walk away from the conference with a greater understanding of how to deliver a better customer experience within your call center interactions.

Varolii 360 - The Best of Both Worlds

by Mary Cook on February 21, 2012 in Varolii News with No comments

As we know, many of our inbound call centers still have cumbersome automated IVR processes that lead many customers to hang up in frustration. In an inbound environment, 20% of customers scream “agent” or press zero within an IVR menu, while 30% choose the wrong direction within the IVR, either intentionally or unintentionally. Adding on top of this 50% IVR fall out, the typical automated speech recognition (ASR) engines don’t have the intelligence to personalize inbound calls to a particular customer, or auto-correct a customer’s verbal input if it is misunderstood. So the chance of your customer experiencing a “successful” customer effort or engagement score is already at odds.

So, Varolii came up with some ideas on how to fix this problem.

What started out as a drawing on a whiteboard nine months ago has turned into a customer interaction management system that makes you pause and take notice. In seventeen years in the call center and customer experience realm, this is one of the few pieces of call center technology that I see as a “game changer” for customer interaction management.

Our newest product, Varolli 360, offers customer interaction capabilities that can be leveraged to create a complete customer experience across both guided inbound and proactive outbound interactions.  This little gem revolutionizes the way that you do business by solving customer problems faster (i.e., reduced AHT), and in return upping the ante where overall satisfaction is concerned.

So – what is guided inbound?

Guided inbound allows speech recognition to become a truly valuable contact center technology. It allows you to enrich your customer interactions.

Varolii’s new inbound solutions leverage guided speech recognition and advanced personalization to assist the customer through their interactions with you, while delivering a more robust inbound experience. Rather than rely on old systems that are subject to failure, we’ve adopted a new approach.  With guided inbound capabilities, silent ‘Guides’ monitor up to 10 calls simultaneously and are able to jump in when speech recognition fails, or correct the customer’s utterance in order to help the customer to self-serve. These ‘Guides’ can direct the automation in real-time, correcting the misheard response or redirecting the speech recognition engine as needed.

With this conversational hybrid approach, your customer is offered more efficient and personalized self-service options, which subsequently reduces frustration and opt-outs. It also eliminates the customer repetition of answering a question twice and guarantees a smoother transfer to a call center agent when required.

For ten years, Varolii has proactively communicated with customers to meet their needs with our outbound communications applications through voice, text messages, emails, and smartphone applications.  We make ourselves available to assist your customers via the mode of communication that feels the most comfortable for them, which leads to a more personal and satisfactory solution to handling their interactions. Varolli knows that “interaction” and “customer experience” are not events, and therefore they shouldn’t be treated impersonally. So we have taken our magic and applied it now to inbound interactions, as well.

"Better engagement, better outcome" is Varolli’s mantra for Customer Interaction Management. Joining and coordinating technology and applying expertise to get results are what make us a success. Learn more about Varolli 360. To read more about product specifications, click here.  Feel free to email me directly at mary.cook@varolii.com for more information.  I’d love to hear from you!

Mortgage Delinquencies Down Slightly, But Remain Near Historic Highs

by Brian Moore on February 16, 2012 in Banks/Finance, Brian Moore, Mortgage, Varolii News with No comments

The Mortgage Bankers Association has released its National Delinquency Survey for the fourth quarter of 2011. It shows total delinquency has dipped below 12% for the first time since 2008, but that is still more than double the average rates before the meltdown in the mortgage market precipitated the recession.

Whether you view this as a cup half-full or half-empty depends on whether you like drinking from an apparently never ending stream of past due mortgages.

MBANDSQ42011 Mortgage Delinquencies Down Slightly, But Remain Near Historic Highs

Considered in the context of the additional borrower outreach required of the five largest mortgage banks in their widely publicized $25 billion settlement with 49 state attorneys general, the continued high volume of delinquent accounts means their servicing operations are going to be doing double duty for the foreseeable future.

When the industry gets together next week in Orlando for the MBA's National Mortgage Servicing Conference, we expect this increased workload to be a popular if not happy topic of conversation.

That's why Varolii will be at the conference (booth 1020) where we will be offering our viewpoint in a panel discussion entitled "Borrower Communication in a Post-SPOC World" (Thursday 2/23 at 1:45 p.m.) and demonstrating why 5 of the top 13 servicers are using Varolii to help them keep their cup from overflowing.