This month’s blog is again quite long, but we think the subject deserves it!
A ‘meme’, as coined by the evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, is an idea that
- gets reproduced, and
- has survival value.
As we see in the world of the Internet and the 24-hour news cycle, memes don’t have to be good ideas, or have any basis in fact. They just need survival value.
Many Sytel projects involve migrating legacy customers to cloud-based outbound, delivered by our service provider partners. When we engage with discovery exercises with customers through our partners we uncover ideas that survive through reproduction; ideas from a time before agents could work on multiple sessions at once, before inbound/ outbound blending, before VoIP.
These memes are often couched in terms of:
‘What do you mean you don’t do X? X is in the RFP as a mandatory requirement.’
But they don’t make a great deal of sense in terms of what a modern contact center needs to do.
Thankfully our commercial team are skilled at navigating their way through these sorts of issues.
As we move into 2021 and the contact center world gets to grip with the realities of a home-based workforce and the changing nature of customer contact, here are a few ideas that should be thought of as belonging to the same era as the cassette tape and the Motorola Carphone/brick:
Meme #1
Agents have to work in siloed fashion to get productivity or be managed effectively.
Why is this outdated?
With the need to process all types of text media (email, chat, social, etc) as well as voice, a siloed operation (where an email system, for example, is entirely separate from a chat system) will be far less effective and require significantly more people to achieve the same level of service as one that is managed holistically.
What’s the solution?
Many agents have the skills to manage several live text sessions at the same time. With intelligent and automatic distribution of all types of sessions across agents, they can be more fully engaged and productive, spending less time waiting for work, especially if they are able to switch instantly between media channels, instead of logging in and out of different systems. And the increased variety can increase job satisfaction, making them more likely to stay.
Meme #2
You use a WFM solution to manage SLA adherence.
Why is this outdated?
The challenge of multisession and multichannel agents makes SLA adherence a multi-dimensional problem that can only be solved by the ACD in real-time.
What’s the solution?
The ACD can and should consolidate resource and skill requirements and report this in a form that makes it easy to do workforce planning.
Meme #3
For outbound, you dial everything and then recycle. And do the same for chat and email outreach!
Why is this outdated?
This idea is just bad inventory management, as it ends up yielding very low connect rates and poor performance.
What’s the solution?
The only way to overcome this is by mixing recycled numbers with fresh, and educating both the contact center delivering the outbound (which is often outsourced) and the end customer (who will often dictate terms that are counter-productive because they don’t know any better). This becomes even more important for chat and email outreach, where takeup rates are far lower than for voice. Without an effective inventory strategy you can burn huge numbers of chat and email contacts for little return.
Meme #4
Supervisors can manage and motivate remote agents using the same tools and techniques as if they were all together in one place.
Why is this outdated?
Over the past year, we’ve all had to grapple with how to motivate, measure and monitor remote workers. Physical distance brings its challenges.
Homeworking agents don’t have a supervisor walking past them regularly, which leaves opportunities for misbehaviour and underperformance, and can discourage agents from asking for help. Supervisors must be able to monitor all activity and make their (virtual) presence known to agents just as if they were in the same physical space.
What’s the solution?
Apart from getting homeworker technology right, as part of the regular agent dialog the agent environment needs to deliver…
- real-time feedback – agents and supervisors must be able to communicate effectively both during and after customer conversations, asking for and offering help and advice where required.
- metrics and peer stats – these can lose their effectiveness as a management/ motivation tool if agents always see the same ones and become blind to them. It helps to rotate through maybe a dozen key metrics from week to week.
And supervisors need the right tools, too. To respond quickly to potential issues, they need alerts sent both in their desktop UI and to mobile, and they need to be able to engage fully with agents in the same way.
Want to know more? Then just talk to us.
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
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Contact Center as a Service (CCaaS)
CCaaS for subscribers – global service, with no upfront costs
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Contact Center Platform – CCaaS Partners
Build your own CCaaS business using the power and flexibility of Sytel software
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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
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Market Research
Best-of-breed predictive dialing with CATI integration
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Automated inbound/ outbound blending integrated with any debt management app
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