All posts tagged Communication

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!

All Disasters are not Created Equal

by Jeff Delaney on November 7, 2011 in Business Continuity, Industry News, Jeff Delaney with No comments
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Make Sure You’re Prepared for Anticipated and Unanticipated Events

The recent East Coast crises of the Virginia earthquake and Hurricane Irene demonstrate the real need for automated communications solutions that enable businesses to communicate vital information to customers and employees during any kind of business disruption. However, these solutions have to work when business continuity professionals need them to, no matter what. Providers in this space face a definitive test on whether they can perform at mass scale, in burst mode, and for long durations of time during a crisis. Disasters that span significant regions put notification solutions to the ultimate test in that all customers in the region are executing the system at the same time.

While the Virginia Earthquake and Hurricane Irene share many characteristics of regional crisis management, they differ significantly when it comes to the dynamics of automated communications.

Hurricane Irene came with advanced notice in the form of long range weather forecasts, which allowed business continuity personnel to solidify their continuity and communication strategy days in advance. In fact, the precision of the predicted hurricane trajectory led to a more precise communication strategy—giving crisis managers a window of opportunity to leverage advanced notification techniques to their employees, customers, students, residence and constituents. Disasters such as Hurricane Irene typically result in lower messaging volumes since the communication strategies are protracted and targeted using GIS technology or specific regional call lists. In addition, in these scenarios, recipients are ready for the messaging and expect the flurry of communications and can respond appropriately. This leads to streamlined communication efforts, ultimately allowing for more precise and accurate responses.

Contrast that to the Virginia earthquake, which struck with no notice. Message volumes were widespread, non-targeted, came in burst fashion, and resulted in much higher volumes. The messaging volume was 100 percent crisis-based vs. preparation-based.

Modern notification systems allow crisis managers to focus more on the crisis at hand and rely heavily on advanced automated techniques to manage the communication piece of the incident. The ability to automate helps not just with an initial widespread communication to a targeted set of recipients, but allows companies to build and automate all successive follow-up notifications. By having a notification system holistically and automatically carry out business and notification rules based on recipient responses, a crisis manager can channel more of their attention to the crisis.

For example, successful crisis teams can automatically re-communicate with recipients who are unresponsive, or who have answered “Yes” to needing assistance, or who have responded positively that they arrived at the alternate crisis facility. All of these communications can be scripted, tested, drilled and automated during a crisis leading to the highest potential of recipient accountability.

The recent events of Hurricane Irene and the Virginia earthquake demonstrates not only the need of a comprehensive advanced notification system, but one that has the maturity that lets administrators pre-define and automate follow-up communications to re-contact recipients without manual intervention during an unplanned event.

Why Mobile is Not Just Another Channel

by Mary Cook on October 11, 2011 in Call Centers, Mary Cook, Varolii News with 6 Comments
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Mobile devices have come a long way. However, mobile is not just another channel through which to reach potential customers. Mobile communications can be used as a way of enhancing your multi-channel strategies to gain maximum benefits for your business. That gave me an idea: write about how the unique attributes of smartphones can be leveraged to generate more personal and profitable customer interactions. The inspiration came from a February 2011 Forrester Research, Inc. report, Mobile is Not just Another Channel.

A multi-channel customer experience should be a seamless, unified and connected experience between communication channels. Mobility is a channel that delivers new audiences that may not be found in print, online or in other channels. Mobile communications reach customers in unique ways and deliver unique experiences and they extend existing business services (website, online ordering, in store, etc.). The mobile channel is, in essence, where the “Multi-Channel” customer is headed.

Many companies are using mobile as a way of reaching online shoppers or providing customer service. However, there are other ways to use the mobile channel, especially when you add this channel into your customer experience and multi-channel strategies.

For example, your mobile communication strategy could be a combination of print, online, and mobile communications. In this scenario, mobility can help acquire customers and business that perhaps neither channel is currently capturing alone. I still love reading my Sunday advertisements from my Sunday paper. And of course, I also enjoy shopping on Sunday afternoons on my iPad while watching NFL. A paper advertisement doesn’t drive me to purchase anymore. However, a QR code that I can scan from a paper ad that delivers me a link to more products, information or offering does. So in this example, the QR code helps bring together print and online channels—and all of this is capable by introducing the mobile phone into the mix. You merely create a QR code to be printed in a location. Consumers then scan the QR code and are either directed to your website, a mobile app, or perhaps a special discount is sent to them. So in this example, the mobile channel helps execute your communication strategy more effectively.

Delivering communications to these new mobile audiences can increase revenues because you are giving customers an easy, and in many cases preferred way and reason to access your company.

In order to capture your mobile audience, you also need to appeal to their senses on the mobile application itself. This could mean creating an application that gives them multiple ways to interact with your business. They may be able to buy your products online via their mobile phone. They may be able to make an appointment with you via a mobile application. However you incorporate mobility into your communication strategy will rely completely on you and what your business is all about.

When you use mobile communications as part of your customer experience strategy and you help to drive traffic to your other channels, you are increasing consumer “stickiness.” Mobile pages representing your website can increase shopping on your website as customers now have the opportunity to shop whenever and wherever they are, instead of waiting until they are in front of a computer. The same thing can be said about mobile coupons and other advertising methods. Delivering these things into consumers’ hands while they are out and about can create an immediate impact.

These unique mobile ways of reaching customers can help your company stand out from the crowd. Unique experiences are what will ultimately keep consumers coming back for more because you are giving them something that your competition is not. Mobile services and strategies will continue to evolve, and should be viewed as multi-channel, cross-channel or mobile-only communications, with their sophistication growing over the course of this evolution. As with any other channel, offering mobile services that have the ability to lift consumer satisfaction, loyalty and brand perception just makes good sense.

Communications are Converging

by Mary Cook on September 7, 2011 in Call Centers, Consumer Svcs, Mary Cook with No comments
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Where is customer communication headed? [1]

It is clearly becoming individualized. This isn't new.

We've talked about relevancy in one‐to‐one communication for years, but talking about it and making it real are two very different things.  Now it is not just becoming real; it is becoming an expectation. Companies that don’t segment their customers (or can't do so because they are siloed either by organizational structure, the way they have aligned their different communications channels, or even by just their beliefs or mindsets) consequently will have a fragmented view of the customer and will be unable to entertain a coherent conversation.

It is happening in Real Time.

The reality is that technology has fostered this need for instant gratification. But many of us have a batch mind set, and a batch process that we are still relying on, and when the expectation is that you are going to communicate with me in an individualized way, and you are going to do it right now, real time can become very difficult unless you know how to do real time mass personalization.

Interactivity and Multiple Channels

We now have the ability to engage in any dialogue, and we are engaging in that dialogue across multiple channels. This is also a challenge because of silos, and the ways we tend to silo our messaging channels:  e‐mail here, social there, SMS and still another place for everything else…

This is also, however, because customers' behaviors and expectations have changed. They expect to be known.  They expect to be treated as individuals, not an e‐mail address, not a phone number, and they expect that the interaction that the enterprise is going to have with them is going to be across their channel of choice.  And you know what? They are not staying in the channel you might have initiated that conversation in. They are moving to whatever channel suits them at that particular point in time, and those expectations and behaviors are changing constantly.

And what is next – or right here? Convergence.

Communications are coming together.  It's about the fusion of marketing and services, and it is about all your customer touch points.  The reality is that over time, the channel chosen is going to become very incidental to the message that you are trying to convey, as the consumer is going to be fluidly moving in and out of those channels. So we should all start looking to become more adept at how we manage that flow of communications as opposed to individual channels.

[1] In an effort to understand this, I first had to define communication. So, as a recent MBA student who was forbidden to accept Wikipedia as a reference source, I of course leapt this social free encyclopedia.  It is defined as the “activity of conveying meaningful information…communication requires a sender, a message, and an intended recipient, although the receiver need not be present or aware of the sender's intent to communicate at the time of communication; thus communication can occur across vast distances in time and space." (This, by the way, made me laugh and think about the Star Trek time and space continuum.)

Personalization pays off

by Brian Moore on August 26, 2011 in Brian Moore, Call Centers, Mobile/Telcom with 3 Comments
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Since all of us are consumers, at one time or another we’ve had to communicate with the companies with whom we do business about some opportunity or issue in our relationship.

Our satisfaction with that interaction often has as much to do with how, when or where the communication took place as it does with what was said.

We are most likely to feel valued as customers when the communication is to our liking in all these dimensions; in other words when we feel the companies we do business with treat us as individuals.

On the other hand, profit-driven companies who service customers numbering in the millions or even 10’s of millions typically think about customers in much broader terms. While we often talk about providing "1 to 1" service, in reality customers are more often dealt with as part of large segments aligned around some aspect of their prior or expected behavior such as potential value, loyalty or credit risk.

Given this tension between an enterprise’s need to carefully manage their costs and a customer’s preference for personalized service, it’s no wonder our popular culture has produced numerous examples of the individual’s fight against anonymity:

  • Facebook & Twitter's popularity is driven in part by our often unfulfilled need to be recognized by others as a unique individual.
  • Robert DeNiro channeled everyone's inner "nobody" in the film Taxi Driver when his character Travis Bickle angrily asked "Are you talking to me?!?!"
  • Finally (and you may hate me for putting this tune in your head) Bob Seger and his Silver Bullet Band railed against it in their hit song “I Feel Like a Number”.

If these and other expressions of desire for personal acknowledgement represent a universal human need, doesn't it make sense for companies to make sure all the messages we send to customers communicate appreciation of their unique individual attributes?

Or at very least, shouldn't we at least call customers by their name?

In my next blog, I'll share a case study illustrating the tremendous impact one Varolii client found in that simple act, after which no one could accuse them of treating their customers "like a number".

In the meantime, tell me about your favorite expressions of individuality in popular culture. Just enter a comment below...consider it part of your own fight against anonymity!

Medical Therapy Should Include Treatment Adherence

by Mary Cook on July 19, 2011 in Healthcare, Mary Cook with 2 Comments

Being ill is hard. In order for a patient to feel better, he or she must follow the treatment suggested by his or her physician. This willingness to cooperate ensures that the patient is healthier, experiences a higher quality of life, has greater symptomatic relief, and requires less interventional care from unscheduled ER visits and nursing assistance.

What Does Effective Adherence Management Involve?
Effective adherence management involves educating and engaging the patient. By making them an active participant in the therapy process, physicians can help their patients improve their health as well as clinical outcomes. Although this may appear to be an easy task, it is not due to the sheer number of patients requiring care.

Sadly, it is difficult for healthcare providers to administer effective adherence management because they are either:

a) forced to scale back to efficiently deal with current workloads

b) hire additional care support specialists to meet needs, or

c) find a more effective way to generate reports than surveys administered by care support specialists or sent through the mail.

How Does It Benefit Organizations?
Improved and demonstrable patient adherence ensures better care and lower medical cost. Unnecessary hospitalizations, ER visits, nursing home admissions, and excess consumption of interventional treatments become fewer and less expensive.  This is good news for both patient and physician.

Enrollment and Maintenance, an Effective Approach
Engaging plan participants involves three steps. This is an effective way to promote compliance. Here they are:

  1. Awareness of programs - Patients should know that wellness and disease management programs exist. Without this knowledge, they are not able to take part of treatments.
  2. Enrollment of patients and members - Patients or members can be enrolled quickly and without the hassle of long forms or impatient call center employees.  This opens up the arena for questioning. Patients are at ease and can obtain the information that they are looking for.
  3. Ongoing engagement - Once the patient or member is engaged and adherent, the physician will want to keep them this way. They will want to continue to take an interest in their health and the maintenance of it.

Why Patients Fail to Take Their Prescribed Medications
Although it can be a variety of factors, here are a few of the reasons why patients state they do not take their prescribed medications:

patients medication1 Medical Therapy Should Include Treatment Adherence

  • Forgetfulness (30 percent)
  • Other priorities (16 percent)
  • Decision to omit doses (11 percent)
  • Lack of information (9 percent)
  • Emotional factors (7 percent)
  • No reason (27 percent)

Based on these answers, the four common areas to improve adherence include patient education, revised dosing schedules, increased hours when the clinic is open along with shorter waiting times, and improved communications between physicians and patients.

Three Secondary but Crucial Criteria
Three secondary but crucial criteria include:

  • Multi-lingual capabilities - Being able to effectively communication in a number of different languages is beneficial.
  • Multi-channel capabilities - Different channels such as cell phones, emails, and text messages improve communication because it appeals to other people.
  • Decisioning capabilities - Intervention strategy can be catered to the patient's needs as well as actual patient response data.

Treatment adherence results when patients and physicians feel comfortable in one another's presence. This allows them to forge a relationship that is built on trust. Once diagnosed with an illness, patients should be given the information that they need to maintain a healthier and happier lifestyle. Part of this education should include a lesson about how important treatments are and how adherence can improve the quality of their lives.

Varolii automates the patient outreach process, using any communication device, and personalizes messages that allow the patient to respond and take action. Our personalized messages to patients and members help efficiently monitor progress and manage care, effectively triage for intervention, and optimize care support resources. Keep in mind that the primary focus of all these efforts towards automating the engagement process are driving towards the goal of healthier patients, superior clinical outcomes, improved economic outcomes and better HEDIS scores. If you would like to learn more about of progressive engagement products, please visit our healthcare solutions.

You can also read the full whitepaper about Communications Therapy Improving Treatment Adherence.

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