By Barry Vasudevan, Product Marketing Manager, NICE Systems
Voice over IP (VoIP) is a hot issue today, but when speaking about VoIP most people talk about its ability to lower costs. Cost reduction is an important and very relevant benefit that many companies have found with VoIP. But there’s more to VoIP than cost reduction. The real power of VoIP is what it enables today’s businesses to do differently.
The Virtual Contact Center
VoIP allows companies to flatten their organizations. Instead of a traditional contact center where only agents in the center can handle customers, VoIP lets you create a “virtual contact center” where the best person, no matter where they are located, can interact with your customers. This helps eliminate geographical constraints and allows companies to centrally manage the entire organization’s skills. For example, a bank may want to send calls at peak times that were destined for their contact center to local bank branches where representatives are already accustomed to responding to customers. This improves the customer experience while utilizing the knowledgeable staff available at these remote branches.
But while VoIP makes possible this new virtual contact center, it also brings new challenges to the management processes of the organization. In the above example, the bank has essentially added more agents that must also be evaluated and coached to ensure that the customer experience remains positive. With all of these new persons able to interact with customers, it becomes imperative that the processes used to maintain excellent customer service are applied throughout the organization. But how can this be accomplished?
Managing the Extended Enterprise
Coupled with VoIP, interaction analytics has become the other key enabler for success in the virtual contact center. Interaction analytics helps move the organization from a reactive organization to a proactive one. In the proactive organization, issues such as marketing effectiveness and operational challenges are addressed by automatically identifying the relevant and interesting interactions that should be evaluated by the company. Interaction analytics is helping companies to proactively address their complex business issues, no matter where that interaction took place in the company, to ensure that the skills throughout the company are consistently maintained and improved.
Continuing our above example, a customer calling about a new service may have been routed to a remote branch. The person at the remote branch may have pitched the service, but the customer was not satisfied. Analytics is used to identify the interaction and ensure that the person responsible for the new service campaign understands what went wrong and why. By delivering this type of information directly to the appropriate person, the organization can take charge to constantly be aware of and improve the business.
Insights Drive Results
Today’s competitive businesses are able to extract and use the insights from their interactions no matter where that interaction was handled. Once extracted, the insight begins a virtuous cycle to create positive change in the company. With this critical feedback loop companies are able to impact their revenue and profitability. These benefits are only truly achievable when both enablers, VoIP and Interaction Analytics, are in place.