By Mike Bergelson, Director of Business Development, Contact Center Solutions, Cisco Systems, Inc.
In industries such as financial services, telecommunications, utilities and travel, whose core products are increasingly commoditized, customer service is quickly becoming the new battleground. Leaders in these bellwether verticals realize that each customer interaction, even for routine service, presents an opportunity to differentiate themselves from their competition on the dimension that matters most to customers. For call center managers, on the front lines of customer service, this often means maintaining or increasing the quality of service while keeping costs low.
Self-service over the telephone represents a largely untapped opportunity for organizations. Companies that can meet or exceed customers’ expectations for easy, intuitive service by phone will reap long-term benefits in profitable market share. To respond to customer service needs, CIOs are investing heavily in technology to standardize data access and enterprise applications. Until recently, contact centers and, specifically, the self-service interactive voice response (IVR) systems have been unable to benefit from these investments. However, with the advent of VoiceXML, self-service systems can take advantage of recent investments in the enterprise software infrastructure to provide advanced functions.
With the help of four key technology trends, as well as dynamic scripting and speech-recognition capabilities, a converged IVR can provide a customer experience that is responsive, personalized, and convenient, at a lower total cost of ownership to the contact center. Contact center managers should pay attention to the following enterprise software initiatives that can help reduce the cost of ownership and increase customer satisfaction:
- Application Development. CIOs understand that each business has some unique needs, so software should be created, tested and deployed using a consistent set of criteria to make the entire effort more efficient and replicable.
- The contact center should reuse the code assets and skills of the company’s other enterprise developers instead of writing hooks into proprietary platforms.
- Application Infrastructure. CIOs have been investing in common infrastructures to promote the reuse of assets and to share systems management, often using Web-oriented systems with common business interfaces.
- The contact center should use applications and Web services offered in the middle tier via application servers.
- Business Intelligence. Companies are investing heavily in standardizing systems to provide a unified view of corporate data for reporting and analysis.
- The contact center should use this data to support customer segmentation for callers and to take a 360-degree view of the customer across interaction channels so that the contact center interaction can be more relevant and personalized.
- Business Application Integration. CIOs are investing in integrating business applications to support changing business processes. This means that applications and customer data are becoming more open and more normalized.
- The contact center should reduce the customer’s time spent directly interfacing with host systems and should deploy links to business processes quickly.
To support these initiatives, businesses are investing heavily in enterprise software infrastructure and, specifically, application servers such as IBM WebSphere or BEA WebLogic, which support service-quality objectives through personalization and consistent messaging across channels. These systems increase business flexibility through the careful management of resources and the use of modular, reusable components.
For example, a contact center responding to a marketing campaign may link to multiple applications in order to up-sell the customer when contact is established. A new offer or better pricing might be available, but only to customers who link to another system when prompted by the business scenario. It is no longer necessary to create specialized interfaces or rewrite business rules. Instead, integrated Web services can be quickly leveraged to promote a new offer. When this feature is used in conjunction with a standards-based IVR, businesses can provide service over the phone that truly meets customer expectations.
In this way, solutions such as Cisco Unified Contact Center, can integrate personalized applications to deliver targeted information efficiently. Instead of working in isolation, the converged IVR can access enterprisewide technology initiatives to drive dynamic interactions with callers and pass information to agents to create a seamless conversation. The converged IVR uses application logic from enterprise application servers, dynamically generating call prompts vias the W3C VoiceXML standard.
By taking advantage of software resources that already exist within the enterprise, the contact center reduces the cost of ownership for its operations while increasing revenue through more effective cross- and up-selling and retaining more profitable customers. While there are dozens of areas where enterprises are investing in software infrastructure, these four key trends of extending the enterprise infrastructure into the contact center stand to benefit the contact center and customers the most.