Clearvoice CMS

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Software solutions are now available which offer enhanced customer communication and management information tools to address major business needs. Whether you have a departmental workgroup with extensions or a contact centre with agents at a single location or dispersed locations, products are now available that offer a wide range of customer relationship tools that are suitable for any business type.

The objective is to empower staff with real-time and historical reporting tools, whilst using your existing databases to intelligently route calls and e-mails to specific departments. It is possible to verify transactions by recording or logging calls and visibly manage individual and team performance right from the desktop.

In this day and age, every business is a contact centre of one kind or another. We are forever fielding and managing e-mails, faxes, phone calls, and so on. Therefore, whether we like it or not we are running a contact centre already.

Whilst this may not come as a surprise, in order to determine which would be the most appropriate structure for a company to install, it is important to first understand the flow of traffic in and out of an office.

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If your company's focus is making outbound calls, then the technology previously described would possibly suit your company. This type of operation could be classified as an outbound call centre or contact center.

If on the other hand, you receive a significant number of inbound telephone calls or emails, then an alternative product would be required to assist staff (agents) receiving calls. This would be described as an inbound contact center.

Non-Call Centres

All businesses need to deal with calls, regardless of whether they use a call centre or not. Such businesses can benefit from using Call Management as well as historical call reporting. If more advanced features are required products can be upgraded when required.

Informal Call Centres

An informal call centre, where a dedicated team handles customer enquiries, would benefit equally from call management and reporting tools. Team members could apply the features as mentioned above to aid call handling, whilst managers could apply the advanced reporting capabilities to monitor call traffic.

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Formal Call & Contact Centres

A formal call or contact centre, where agents log in to one or more groups, would benefit from the advanced call reporting capabilities. Such an environment may also require a comprehensive multi-media routing mechanism, such as Web Chat and email routing as well as the ability to screen-pop and dial from bespoke or specialist applications such as GoldMine, Act! or Microsoft CRM.

Typically, the technology available includes wall boards, which indicate the number of calls waiting, calls answered, longest waiting call, and how many unreturned lost calls have been received and so on.

The contact centre's main objective is to facilitate the answering of customers’ enquiries and it is imperative that customers encounter a satisfactory experience when contacting your company.

Enquiries could be received in any of the following formats:

• SMS
• Telephone call
• e-mail
• Fax

There is also the aspect of self-service to consider. Could your organisation implement a structure whereby the caller can enter digits on their telephone handset in order to acquire new information, in a similar way to banks in the UK providing access to customer’s accounts through telephone banking services?

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It may transpire that speech-enabled products would be better suited to your type of business. That seems pretty elementary and straightforward, however, in reality it is difficult for businesses to determine the most appropriate structure to implement, simply because of their lack of knowledge of associated systems and software.

Again these questions can only be answered through discussion and by establishing the most effective solution to implement specifically relating to your business.

Inbound Phone Calls

However the telephone call arrives at your telephone system, the speed and efficiency with which it is handled is paramount.

Routing the call:

Only the speed to answer counts. There are four methods of inbound ringing; longest idle, hunting, group, and strict cycle order. You have to decide which method is most effective.

Skills based routing:

If numbers are structured to point to departments it is possible to create overflow groups to ensure that the correct personnel handle the call.

For example, if a call to the sales department goes unanswered, but a member of customer service is fully aware of the sales process, it makes sense to include this member of staff in an overflow group if the sales team are busy or not available.
The same principle applies to all departments. Simply because the department is busy does not mean that a call should go unanswered. In simple terms, the call is routed to the next best person.

Action

If you would like help in deciding the best option for your business please contact us...