Clearvoice Consulting

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Known as media blending, 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.

Forecasting inbound calls and messages is not an easy task. Customers call and email when they want to, not when you want them to. This inevitably leads to fluctuating workloads and organisations then have to decide whether 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.

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Blended Operations

The reality is that most businesses must create this balance of blending voicemail, e-mail, SMS text messaging and phone calls and ensure that staff are deployed in the correct measure for both the inbound and outbound activity.

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Media 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 being 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 called the Sales Team they didn’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.

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A five star hotel reservation team were receiving 500+ emails a day and were having problems using Microsoft Outlook as they had difficulty in tracking service levels. It was hard to find messages and impossible to track user productivity. The Reservations Manager wanted to find a new way to increase customer service. The hotel decided to change their business process so that they blended telephone and email work as well as dinner and room reservations being confirmed by SMS.

The result was that time taken to respond to customer emails reduced by 50%; the centralisation of messages made it easier to handle customer complaints and user productivity increased by 100%. Additionally, management information has lead to better resource planning and confirmation by SMS has increased customer satisfaction.

What does it mean for a business?

In the same way that any type of work is prioritised, the same applies to the way in which your customers contact you. This also needs to be prioritised.

Applying Contact Centre methodologies is of paramount importance, as it ensures a fair distribution of work and a focused method of answering and dealing with your customers. Implementing a contact centre however can only be justified if the number of calls and customer interaction warrants it. In the first instance it may be prudent to install a Call Management system first and analyze the telephone activity data before determining the best course of action.

Action

If you are unsure about how to ascertain your needs please contact us on 0800 970 9751 or email us at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it