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IVR, Agents & Business Rules = Customer Satisfaction
During internal meetings last week, we got side-tracked on the subject of “the customer satisfaction silver bullet.” As we all know, there is no such silver bullet. A lot of folks talk like they have the only answer. But at the end of the day, it takes a great deal of coordination, information and determination to manage and improve the technology, people and processes that influence customer satisfaction. Read More...
Hosted IVR: Letting Go Is Hard to Do
It seems so logical. IVR and other communications technologies evolve all the time. Each new advancement offers cost savings, efficiency and/or end-user benefits that can’t be ignored. And hosted IVR providers allow businesses to take advantage of these advancements without huge upfront investments.
In today's economy, if something isn’t part of your company’s core business, it is clearly a candidate for outsourcing or hosting – IVR is no exception. With hosted IVR offerings popping up on every corner, it can be hard to justify keeping IVR functionality in-house. Read More...
Poll Results & Filling the Gap between Internal Metrics & Customer Experience
Last week I had the opportunity to present a webinar called “Internal Monitoring Isn’t Enough.” It was an opportunity for me to educate attendees about a critical gap many companies haven’t bridged between internal performance stats and the true picture of how their contact center and communications solutions are performing – in other words, the customer experience. The simple method (or in our case, the cost-effective service) we discussed for filling this gap is Remote Availability & Performance Monitoring (RAPM)*. As you all know, polls in webinars are good, so we included several in our webinar to get a sense of the make-up and experiences of our audience. Not surprisingly, more than 60% of the attendees identified themselves as IT or service providers. Read More...
Monitoring! Monitoring! Monitoring!
Whenever we start talking about our remote availability and performance monitoring services (HeartBeat™), like I did just a few weeks ago during a monitoring webinar, there is invariably a little confusion at the outset about the differences between remote availability and performance monitoring, call recording/agent quality monitoring, and voice quality monitoring. So I thought it might be helpful and interesting to define these different monitoring methods in a blog post. And I promise to try to do it without talking like an engineer (too much). So here goes…Read More...
You’re Taking It Out of Context
Living with a writer for the last 36 years, one of my favorite books has become “Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation.”
The cover of the book shows two pandas, the vegetarian whiting out the comma, and the NRA member walking to the right brandishing a handgun.
The point is, of course, that punctuation matters. Why? Because punctuation establishes a context for words and thereby turns them into a thought & gives them meaning. Of course it’s not just about punctuation – content has to be coherent for there to be identifiable meaning – but context certainly matters. Read More...
You Are Here
Last week, we were talking with a few people from a well-known research institute. We were just introducing ourselves and one of the women started talking about quality and service assurance issues for the contact center. She talked about the value of bottoms up and top down metrics for the contact center. But she also talked about a lingering gap that still remains when it comes to the ability to associate this plethora of great information with what is really happening to customers at a given moment. How do you effectively and simply put all that info into context? There are so many cures out there like speech analytics and surveys. And yet the cures sometimes come with more obstacles to overcome like: high costs, information overload, disassociation from actual transactions, lack of real time data and the possibility that the cure could itself impact the customer experience (e.g., a survey).
Read More...
What’s on Your Roadmap this Week?
Just for fun, I thought it might be interesting to talk about some of the exciting trends we’re seeing in the industry. If you work for a company that owns, supports, services or sells to contact centers, you no doubt have a similar list of your own. You’ve probably got a roadmap that identifies the trends appropriate to your market and how you can best leverage and evolve your product or service to meet tomorrow’s customer requirements. Read More...
Being a Small Business: Part 3
A couple of weeks ago, Gregg Williams kicked off a blog series about “Being a Small Business.” He wrote about a question that many small businesses hear from their prospects.
Why should I do business with a small business?”
Gregg talked about some of the advantages of working with small businesses and posed the very interesting and amusing question “Given all the great stuff small businesses can do, why would you want to do business with one of those bigger guys?” Read More...
Test at the top of the stack™
Remember trays of Hollerith punchcards & clunk clunk clunk clunk card readers? Fortran?
Remember hearing (and saying) “…but I only changed one blessed card!?!”
Remember the lesson that came from that exercise?
You have to test the whole thing together, not just the pieces by themselves... that if the whole thing doesn’t work together, it doesn’t matter that the pieces individually are works of art. Read More...
Customer/Partner Team
A few weeks ago, I blogged about the “canoe approach” to serving customers. When it gets down to it, the crux of the canoe approach is as simple (and complex) as taking a team approach to working with customers. We’re fortunate at IQ Services because we really get to think of ourselves as a member of the customer team. Because our services fit a niche and many of our customers do not have anyone on staff to do what we do, we become their testing expert. Read More...
Groundhog Day
For me, one of the more interesting aspects of a typical performance and load testing engagement is how much bad news we deliver and how often we hear in response “OMG – that was horrible. Thank you! When can we do it again?”
As I think of it, the “can we do it again” sentiment describes the big picture when it comes to performance and load testing of a new contact center or communications solution. Proactive performance testing shouldn’t be thought of as a one-off activity. When most effectively applied it’s a process that allows you to try things out until you get them right. Kind of like Groundhog Day, but with you playing Phil Connor. Read More...
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