All posts tagged customer relationship management

Varolii 360 - The Best of Both Worlds

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!

Interactive Communications and the CRM Puzzle: The Last Mile of CRM

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In the 1990s and 2000s, as broadband networks proliferated, telecommunications service providers struggled with what the industry coined as “the last mile problem.” High bandwidth networks crisscrossed the country, yet mostly narrowband copper wire ran from the Telco central office to the customer’s home. The last mile problem was how to get the customer access to these new, bold, high-speed networks. For the consumer, the situation was like gazing through a store window and seeing the perfect gifts, yet the store was never open.

With customer relationship management (CRM), companies spend billions of dollars each year in CRM software, contact center infrastructure, websites, analytics, and customer service representatives to support customers. They also invest heavily in systems to capture, store and analyze customer data for support and selling activities. Yet, when it comes to customer service, too much of the burden is placed on customers to engage with the companies they do business with. They have to find the information they need, get support, and determine the appropriate course of action. In that sense, CRM has a “last mile” problem, too—how to get relevant, timely information to customers so they engage with the company to solve problems and build tight relationships.

To effectively manage their business relationships, customers must comb through information and support from websites, streams of email and postal mail, inbound contact centers, and retail centers. These customer communication tools are expensive for businesses and often don’t provide an easy way for customers to take action. That is, companies don’t have a way to fully leverage on the information and systems they have where it really matters: communicating with customers in a timely way via their preferred medium. Instead, organizations put the burden of managing the relationship on the customer.

The name of the game in this decade is customer engagement. Companies have to solve this “last mile” problem with smart, effective customer interaction. The great thing about our company is the power of Varolii Interact gives businesses the ability to better engage customers through multi-channel interactions. Not messages, not “blasts,” not spam, not information overload. Rather, highly personalized communications that inform customers and let them take action, including connecting them to an expert or support staff to engage at a different level.

Call Center Book Review

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If there’s anyone who knows a thing or two about contact center practices and strategies, it’s Greg Levin.  Voted “Most Likely to Write a Top Selling Ebook on Contact Center Best Practices”, he spent 16 years at ICMI witnessing and learning about the most effective practices with regard to workforce management, quality monitoring, customer satisfaction measurement, customer relationship management, agent hiring and retention, email/chat management, IVR and web self-service, outsourcing, home agents, and a lot more.  His popular ebook, Full Contact: Contact Center Practices and Strategies that Make an Impact, combines comedy with practicality.  His light-hearted approach to the topic has revolutionized the way that contact centers handle their business.

His 145 page book is broken down into seven different chapters and addresses best practices in metrics selection and measurement, agent recruiting and assessment, agent training and development, and agent motivation and retention. There’s also advice about workforce management and staffing, quality monitoring and customer satisfaction management, and e-support, self-service, and social media.  Sample questionnaires, forms, agreements, and articles finish out the ebook and give you the tools that you need to lead your contact center to success.

Easy to follow and written in a language that you can understand, Levin explains the importance of educating new hires and reminding existing agents about the meaning and importance of adherence, reducing burn-out by encouraging agents to take longer breaks, involving agents in the scheduling process so they get the time off that they deserve, and coming up with new and creative ways to make the job more enjoyable.  By making the contact center employee accountable, he explains that, “agents are human beings, at least in most contact centers, and thus need to be treated as such when it comes to measuring and 'enforcing' adherence to a schedule.”  He also notes that, “merely telling agents that they need to be in their seats at certain times 'or else' will do little to foster agent buy‐in and commitment, and a lot to foster agent graffiti and arson.”

Levin also talks about “taking hiring by the horns” by always being on the lookout for exceptional individuals who would shine in a contact center environment.  He states that, “typically, an agent hunt does not involve the use of any weapons or camouflaged clothing, but if that’s what it takes to build your frontline dream team, then so be it.  I’m not here to judge.”  The ebook helps identify your ideal agent and states that there are 8 Elements of a Successful Agent Recruiting Program.  Equally important is the “very long engagement” period that it takes to win over and retain agents.

A resource worth checking out, Levin’s Full Contact: Contact Center Practices and Strategies that Make an Impact is a must-have in all contact centers.  If you want to change the way that you do business, you’ll learn a few tips and tricks by reading this ebook.  I’ve gotten acquainted with it and I can’t recommend it highly enough.

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