The fuTure of The conTacT cenTre - Exertis GO Connect · Contact Centre experience. Genesys, Global Consumer Survey, 2007. Believe in your contact centre, ... 2009 customer experience

The fuTure of The conTacT cenTre

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far from its traditional ‘factory farm’ image, the modern contact centre is now a model

of advanced hr practice. People are its means and also its product. Delivering human

empathy along with effective service calls for new ways of working and different styles

of leadership.

Motivation of people through greater trust and empowerment.

Liberation in the workplace.

harnessing modern technology to improve productivity and standards.

for a loyal and effective workforce

The opportunity to deliver is now. engage your contact centre talent in the most rewarding

ways – and transform the customer experience.

embrace changeIn an ever more competitive world, the importance of delivering an

exceptional customer experience is greater than ever. how your

customers feel about you is crucially important – a key part of

your overall contact centre business offering.

• at the heart of business strategy,

• driven by contemporary management thinking,

• focused on offering ever more valuable expertise,

• delivering maximum business advantage.

75% of consumers say they would do

business with a company based on a great

Contact Centre experience.

Genesys, Global Consumer Survey, 2007.

Believe in your contact centre, it will fulfil its promise

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So what exactly makes for that ‘great’ experience?

Delivering on your promises is an essential first step.

But a truly great experience is about exceeding expectations.

acting on customers’ enquiries withc a sense of shared

ownership – ‘we’re in this together’ – and delivering

solutions with real urgency.

‘People who can’...

• quickly understand and identify with the issue,

• offer knowledgeable advice, and are highly skilled,

• operate and communicate effectively,

• make the human connection and convey empathy, …are essential to success

Your people

Delivering highly visible, co-ordinated programmes for personal skills development and career management is vital. Being seen to be investing in customer advisors’ futures can inspire great loyalty. and more knowledgeable and highly motivated people also perform more effectively.

Contact Centres are using customer advisor training to

maximise the value of their expertise.

80% of companies believe they

deliver a superior customer

experience, but only 8% of

their customers agree.

Bain & Company

People define the

Over 40% of business leaders now

see delivering customer satisfaction

as the most important way for them

to contribute to the success

of their organisations.

Fujitsu, Dynamic Infrastructures and the

Future of IT, 2009

customer experience

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Channels with new potential

Social media has created a wide array of new communications channels, and modern contact centres are increasingly engaging with them. and it’s a one-to-many relationship, where customer advisor words and actions are highly visible, creating strong potential for positive and negative brand influence. This creates great opportunity – but also depends on consistent behaviour by customer advisors with the right approach to communication.

Motivating your people 06

75% of companies introducing flexible work

practices said they had a more committed

and motivated workforce.

DTI Work Life Balance Survey

Flexibility

Trust

Empowerment

The opportunities for flexible working hours make contact centres a highly attractive choice for many demographic groups and as their life changes, employer flexibility ensures retention of skilled staff.

Modern technology and new working models are enabling people to employ their skills and expertise from remote locations. That means that contact centres can recruit from a much wider pool of talent, and even target highly specialised skill-sets. new services can be launched, and different markets explored, much more easily and cost-effectively. and these customer advisors are much more loyal – turnover can be as high as 60% in centralised contact centres, but it’s typically less than 5% for home workers.

People management is also changing fundamentally – with a much greater emphasis on trust. The effective use of technology, promoting strong teamwork, and creating a common culture are also vitally important.

Giving your people the freedom to discover new ways of being productive – with the latest technology and different workplaces – can boost their motivation, improve their effectiveness and transform the customer experience.

The number one challenge facing Contact Centres is customer advisor turnover.

and when people leave, they take valuable knowledge, skills and experience with them. recruitment

and retention of experienced customer advisors is now a key performance indicator for all contact

centres – and crucial to delivering a great customer experience.

motivating your people

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If the customer experience is defined by your people, then the workplace has a major impact too.

Peoples’ attitudes – their sense of community and common culture, and their motivation and desire to succeed – are all shaped by the nature of their workplace. The personality of a contact centre is truly the sum of its constituent parts.

and the workplace itself is changing. new technology is creating opportunities for greater freedom at work – and also to go beyond the conventional contact centre environment altogether.

Different workplaces

Locating everybody under the same roof in a Centralised

Contact Centre is a highly effective way to create consistent customer experiences. It’s easy to deliver impactful training, supply identical systems, and also motivate people with shared values and similar company goals.

Hub Contact Centres – which are typically smaller, satellite offices – share many of these benefits. But they also offer greater choice of location, with temporary, specialised hubs often set-up in different kinds of locations, close to the workforce, to support short-term campaigns.

connecting together a network of remote workers – in a Virtual Contact Centre – can improve the customer experience by increasing service availability, and also by delivering specialist knowledge and expertise.

Liberation

People are increasingly free to work in new, more flexible workplaces. That means contact centres can recruit from their immediate communities, through local hubs or direct from home.

fixed contact centres have high set-up costs, and operating overheads that remain constant over time. By contrast, Virtual contact centres can be set-up quickly and easily, at minimal cost, and in direct response to surges in customer demand.

Liberating people to choose their ideal workplace helps modern contact centres control costs more easily, better satisfy demand, and improve the customer experience.

The best place to perform well

You probably already know who your top performers are. But do you know why?

Wouldn’t it be great if there was a tool that showed how happy your customer advisors are with their workplace, and enabled you to link that back to their performance?

The Leesman Index does exactly that. Visit www.leesman.co.uk for more information.

liberate your workplace

The workplace revolution

Liberate your workplace 0807 Liberate your workplace

The evolution of the Contact Centre may be driven by a desire to deliver great customer experiences – but it is powered by new technology. and as well as creating new opportunities for people to work in different ways, technology is also improving the customer experience in its own right.

• fully-hosted customer relationship Management (crM) systems allow customers the flexibility to use multiple devices – from traditional Pcs, thin clients, and the next generation of tablets to access the data whilst retaining a standardised interface and process.

• Pc-based softphones help to de-clutter customer advisor desks, and enable all actions – voice or data based – to be controlled through a single screen, decreasing the time that an advisor spends ‘switching’ between screens.

• open-standards such as Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) are allowing a next generation of devices to be used in the contact centre. Whether it is in the ‘server room’ or on the advisor desktop, you can now choose a best of breed solution for voice without sacrificing reliability or availability.

Believe in transformation

unified communications (uc) is saving customers’ time by making it easier for contact centre customer advisors to identify the best colleagues to provide assistance. uc is transforming the contact centre – it provides a simple, secure interface for messaging, along with a real-time window on everybody’s presence.

unified communications is offering real benefits by…

• creating a single gateway for traditional deskphone voice and Pc-based voice,

• delivering three-way conversations between front-line customer advisors, their expert colleagues and customers,

• driving faster resolution of customer problems so the caller can ask an expert directly.

86% of companies are planning Unified

Communications in the Contact Centre.

Nemertes Research annual benchmark survey, 2010

Believe in first call resolution

You know when you’re asked a really tricky question? Well your contact centre customer advisors get them every day. But now they can ask a colleague for the answer while keeping the caller on line. Plantronics’ wireless Savi headsets enable three people to talk to each other at the same time, so the caller can ask an expert directly.

By involving all three parties together, the customer gets the answer they need immediately, the customer advisor gets to track the call through to closure (ensuring you are correctly reporting your successes) and they also get to hear the answer. Thus increasing their knowledge to guarantee long term loyalty and ensuring they can answer the question themselves the next time it is asked.

Expert Incoming customer call

Customer service representativeCustomer advisor

Expert Customer call

Believe in technology

power of technologyBelieve in technology 1009 Believe in technology

How well are your customers’ needs fulfilled? Is your organisation focussed on customer centricity (corraling the entire organisation behind the Contact Centre customer advisor to the benefit of the customer)?

customer experience Management (ceM) is the process of strategically managing a customer’s entire experience with a product, service or company. It asks, “how can a business better fulfil its customers’ needs and make them even happier to buy from it?” ceM is fast becoming the primary way of measuring and driving contact centre improvement.

crM scores can provide part of the overall ceM picture. But where that considers only how well a business has managed to sell to its potential customers, ceM seeks also to measure how happy those customers are.

first call resolution (fcr) can also be included in ceM. according to research by SQM Group, each percentage increase in fcr will improve customer satisfaction by an identical 1%. fcr is therefore a crucially important objective for today’s contact centres – and unified communications is leading the drive.

power of technology

Better training

Training is increasingly being delivered via multimedia presentations on customer advisors’ desktops. This is a much more cost-effective way to deliver training, and enables more frequent skills updates, which leads to improved customer experiences. headsets that enable customer advisors to both engage with training and also take phone calls, improves customer advisors’ time management and also simplifies contact centre asset management.

a measure of the customer experience

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To make a genuine, human connection and deliver great customer experiences, it is essential that customer advisors can hear and be easily understood, loud and clear.

While it seems like common sense to assume that overall audio quality on phone calls must have improved over time, that’s actually not the case. The widespread use of mobile phones and the extensive variety of networks that calls typically travel across, mean that audio quality has actually deteriorated in recent years.

When you add in environmental factors – increases in home working for example, noisy shared workspaces, or the open-plan design of many contact centres – voice intelligibility can suffer still further. That can lead to poor acoustic conditions, more distractions and lower quality conversations.

Plantronics headsets give you Acoustic Intelligence.

Believe in acoustic Intelligence

human speech skills are fundamentally important within the contact centre. Training, dedicated to developing

telephony speech abilities, is becoming ever more vital – particularly for technical experts who are being drafted into the front-line. creating the right first impression, with clear speech that builds an easy rapport with customers is crucial.

Voice intelligibility

In calls from mobiles and VoIP phones, it is easy to lose critical high-frequency signals. The latest Plantronics headsets have a frequency response curve that compensates by boosting the ‘lost’ high-

frequency signals to produce a clearer voice call. They also feature noise-cancelling microphones which, placed close to the mouth with a highly adjustable boom, help to eliminate the intrusive background noises that can affect customer advisors.

Audio ergonomics

acoustic shock caused by fax tones, feedback and other sudden loud noises on the phone can be uncomfortable and disconcerting. audio Processors can instantly reduce loud noises to a more comfortable level, leaving human speech unchanged and conversations uninterrupted.

Plantronics’ designers have also perfected the weight and comfort to make the headsets more comfortable over long time periods. research has shown that getting the design right can improve productivity by 23%*. even with all

the opportunities created by people, new workplaces and technology, it is the power of voice that is essential in creating great customer experiences.

SPEECHIMPACT

THE RIGHT CONVERSATION

THE RIGHT TECHNOLOGY

THE RIGHT DESIGN

VOICEINTELLIGIBILITY

AUDIOERGONOMICS

Factors influencing acoustic intelligence

13 Believe in acoustic intelligence

HD VOICE

HD VOICE

*University of Surrey.

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In the future people will engage with businesses in different ways. They will take for granted the technology that we currently consider revolutionary – and they will have vastly different expectations about what the workplace should be like. The Contact Centre of tomorrow will be a very different place indeed.

But a great customer experience – no matter how it is achieved – will always influence purchasing behaviour.

To nurture the skills and resources to deliver on this, contact centres must embrace change. They have to invest in their people, and trust and empower them to be more productive. and they should relentlessly explore flexible ways of working, new styles of leadership and advanced technology.

contact centres must always remember that it is the power of voice that is crucial in making a genuine human connection. It is essential that customer advisors can hear and be easily understood.

The Plantronics headset has always been at the heart of the contact centre, helping transform the customer experience and deliver success.

Believe in change and the Contact Centre will fulfil its promise.

Believe in the contact centre

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IP40™

contact centres implementing an IP PBX or SIP to the desktop.

The IP40 audio processor is a dedicated SIP device that eliminates the need for contact centres to implement an IP phone and audio processor. By combining the devices, it offers all the advantages of an IP phone or soft client but none of their disadvantages.

EncorePro®

Premium audio, comfort and styling for high quality customer conversations.

The Plantronics encorePro is designed to bring out the best in customer advisor performance. The noise-cancelling microphone is perfectly positioned for great audio clarity, with a low slung design meaning that it’s invisible to the wearer. Slim speakers with wideband frequency response lead to clearer conversations while leatherette earpads provide all-day comfort.

Savi™ Over-the-Head

next generation of wireless headset for contact centre managers to maximise collaboration through multiple audio devices, Pc and telephone based calls.

Savi oTh is the wireless headset system to unify voice communications. This enterprise-grade headset system connects to both your desk phone and Pc.

VistaPlus™ DM15E

complete protection against acoustic incidents.

The VistaPlus DM15e audio processor uses Digital Signal Processing (DSP) to deliver unsurpassed acoustic protection. SoundGuard™ Digital technology reduces sudden, loud sounds and monitors and controls daily personal noise exposure to maximise comfort and safety – helping businesses comply with the latest ‘eu noise at work’ legislation.

Plantronics solutions

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© 2010 Plantronics, Inc. All rights reserved. Plantronics, the logo design,EncorePro, IP40, Savi, SoundGuard, VistaPlus and Sound Innovation are trademarks or registered trademarks of Plantronics, Inc.

All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.

www.mycontactcentre.com

The fuTure of The conTacT cenTre

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