It’s the holiday season in the Northern Hemisphere, but life is busy enough that, like President Hollande and his cabinet in France, we are working through. Even so we are taking a little time out to reflect on call center practices that are past their ‘sell by’ date, or, if you like, where there is room for improvement over the coming year.
- Supervisor at the helm
The first one is a bit hard to believe – but it seems that there are still call centers who rely upon “trained” supervisors to control the dialing rate on their predictive dialers. Spend a fortune on the “best” predictive dialer then ask a human to step in because the dialer doesn’t know what to do!? A really stupid idea and long past its ‘sell by’ date. - Nobody home (still)
Another oddity from the outbound world. Ring No Answer (RNA) is the length of time that an outbound call rings for before the predictive dialer hangs up. If you are looking for a live person then over 95% will have answered by 17-18 secs. Any RNA time over 20 secs makes no sense and will actually reduce performance, and/or send your telco costs up. - But I just gave you my details!
You ring up to order something. You give all your details and then get transferred to another agent – who then demands all the same information from you – and if you are unlucky you may have to repeat this with another agent. Well, we can understand the need sometimes to transfer calls in search of the “right agent” but call center operators should get more demanding and ask for systems that keep customer data handy and provide it to follow on agents. Any time we query why this doesn’t happen, we get told it is because of security. Rubbish! - IVR with no exit
So you call up your call center and get stuck in an IVR system from which there is no escape (without hanging up). Well, if call centers actually answered all inbound calls, some might well go bust, because they can’t afford the numbers of agents required. There’s surely a germ of truth in this, but a lot more use can be made of voice, text messages and email to allow contact to be made. - Blending between media queues?
And while on the subject of multimedia, how many call centers can live up to the challenge of blending different media queues? You all know about call blending. What about blending agents from an outbound email queue to handle a spike in an inbound voice queue? Some day it will be commonplace and a ‘tick in the box’ item on all RFIs.
Disagree with any of our blog? We’d love to hear from you.
What We Offer
Sytel Limited develops and supplies Softdial Contact Center® (SCC) – multimedia, multichannel, fully blended cloud contact center solutions.
Available by subscription as CCaaS, fully managed and supported by Sytel, or for quick and easy deployment by partners and enterprise users.
All Sytel cloud components are secure, resilient and scale seamlessly from 10 agents to 10,000+, whether local, mobile or remote.
Flexible Contact Center Software
Softdial Contact Center™ – rich functionality, all-in-one, designed to deliver at scale
-
Contact Center as a Service (CCaaS)
CCaaS for subscribers – global service, with no upfront costs
-
Contact Center Platform – CCaaS Partners
Build your own CCaaS business using the power and flexibility of Sytel software
-
Contact Center Platform – Enterprise
High performance platform to drive contact center productivity – cloud, on-premise or hybrid
Blended Media Desktop
Fully customisable, multi-channel, multi-session workspace
Work Anywhere
Browser-based tools, no software installation required
Customise, Localise, White Label
Design all user interfaces to individual requirements
Integration via APIs
‘Swap out’ components and integrate with 3rd party apps
World Class Development
Continuous evolution pushing technical boundaries
Capabilities
Softdial Contact Center™ (SCC) is designed to be flexible, extensible and scalable, integrating with any legacy equipment, and meeting the most complex of requirements.
All Media Channels
Voice, chat, email, social, etc – fully integrated and blended
Agent Multi-Tasking
Work with multiple live contact sessions of any media channel
Dynamic Workforce Management
Optimise agent usage and balance workloads in real-time without human intervention, across all media channels
Predictive Dialing
Best-of-breed performance under compliance
Optimised Inbound Routing
Smart rules and ‘best-available’ decisions to drive great customer service
Agent Scripts
Help agents achieve and maintain excellence
Voice and Screen Recording
See and hear exactly how agents are interacting
Analytics and Data Feeds
Measure and evaluate performance at every level
IVR, Bots & Conversational AI
Design effective automated flows or integrate with 3rd party providers
Customer Journey Tracking
Stored customer contact history, to aid routing and add context to conversations
Modules
Drive operational efficiency, increase customer satisfaction & improve agent performance
Softdial One™
Highly flexible unified web UI for agents, supervisors and administrators
Softdial Scripter™
Create complex process flow scripts for agents, IVR, chatbots and other applications
Sytel AI Dialer™
Maximum predictive dialing performance, under any compliance rules
Softdial Pathfinder™
Precise routing rules for ‘best available’ connection
Softdial Media Server™
Core telephony functions to manage all inbound/outbound SIP calls
Softdial Reporter™ 5
Fully customisable performance stats, charts and reports, across all channels
Softdial Publisher™
Comprehensive data output to build your own reports
Softdial Recording Monitor™
Audio and screen recording of agent activity to ensure the highest standards
Softdial Campaign Manager™
Automation to optimise any outreach strategy
Softdial Repository™
Central storage and configuration of common resources
Sytel Global Compliance™
Flexible ‘no contact’ rules to protect contact center and consumer
Solutions
Performance and efficiency for a wide range of business applications
By Business Type
Enterprise
A full featured contact center software solution, designed for optimum performance at scale
Small/ Medium Business
Options for SMBs to subscribe to our full-featured cloud service managed and hosted by either one of our partners or by Sytel themselves
By Industry
Customer Service
Connect quickly to well equipped agents
Market Research
Best-of-breed predictive dialing with CATI integration
Debt Collection
Automated inbound/ outbound blending integrated with any debt management app
Sales & Telemarketing
Maximise agent productivity with best-of-breed predictive dialing
Healthcare
Secure, highly-configurable multichannel communications for excellence in patient care