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Contact Centres and Media Blending

Once you decided that you want to operate and handle more business more efficiently there are few stages to be aware of.

Stage One
Costs - This time, don’t consider it. To some companies taking on another member of staff is not given a second thought, especially when someone leaves or if you want to generate more business. This time concentrate on how much you can increase revenues. Consider, if you let a member of staff “go”, their salary would pay for any new capital purchase in the first year.

By the second year you're already in front financially. If you lease any equipment it is all considered a revenue expense and therefore can offset on your balance sheet (but you knew that anyway) plus you get to keep the cash in the bank.

Stage Two
Based upon your ROI analysis, if you need to change your phone system – do it. You’re only adding components to your moneymaking entity. These are one-off purchases.

Stage Three
Establish your business process; read our book Profit from Technology, and put in place a technology team to map out exactly how the equipment is to be structured and what your staff are supposed to do.

Stage Four
Marketing; KIS - keep it simple. Start with deciding what you want to focus on first; outbound or inbound contact? Set your goals and targets accordingly.

Reporting - WYSIWYG!

As the saying goes, if you can't monitor it, you can't manage it!

Click on the above screen to see how Callview segment the activity of a business. How do you manage now?

Inbound Phone Calls

However the telephone call arrives at your telephone system, the speed and efficiency as to how 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 call to sales 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 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 rooted to the next best person.

Outbound calls

If your business depends on making outbound calls, dialling from the screen is crucial to ensure the highest productivity;

Manual dialling = 100 calls per day, dial by screen, clicking on a telephone number = 150 calls per day. Progressive automated dialling = 200 calls per day.

It is easy to calculate that a company with the right tools can be twice as effective.

If productivity is increased by 100% is your profitability?

Media Blending

In today’s modern multi-medium communications age the ability to measure and manage all forms of interaction is known as media blending. Here, voice calls, emails, text messages, and even web call-backs and chat enquiries are received at a single point and distributed to the right people capable of handling the enquiry.

Benefits: Forecasting inbound calls and messages is not an easy task. Customers call and email when they want to … not when you want them too. This inevitably leads to fluctuating workloads and organisations then have to decide how to have enough people to deal with the peaks - which means that in troughs you have people sitting idle - or accept that at peak times you will keep customers waiting.

Blending lets you automatically manage the work. If you mix inbound calls, outbound calls, emails, SMS text, call-backs and chats you can keep everyone busy all of the time and still meet all your service levels.

Medial Blending in Action:

Increasingly as their customers turned more to the Internet, a leading metal processing firm got more and more customer enquiries through e-mail or other media, than just through normal voice calls. It was becoming obvious that although their agents were still busy on calls, e-mails were being left unattended in the Sales Team mailbox, and customers were not getting dealt with promptly. The day they lost a new customer because of this, they knew they had to do something fast.

The answer was to blend together the phone calls and e-mails, so that e-mails were dealt with promptly, while not keeping callers waiting. When customers call the Sales Team they don’t want to be kept waiting, so it was decided that e-mails would only be distributed to agents when the number of calls fell below an agreed number.

The results were dramatic. Because agents were now automatically routed emails when e-mails were available, response times improved, and the Sales Team became more efficient as they had a more consistent workload. Additionally, when a customer sent an e-mail to the Sales Team mailbox, an auto response would be sent to the customer straight away to let them know that their message had been received, and would be dealt with shortly. This overall change in customer contact handling increased productivity, customer satisfaction and most importantly sales.