CRM and ERP News

-- Pushpa Sathish, Staff Writer

It can either be good or bad news – depending on whether you’re a call center manager or an agent. While the former will welcome the launch of Virtual Observer (VO), a nanny camera of sorts from Coordinated Systems, the latter will certainly treat the product with a jaundiced eye. Come on, let’s face it – would you work well if you knew that someone was monitoring your every move? Call center agents who lived for those moments when their supervisors took bathroom breaks will rue this solution that “gives supervisors and managers the ability to reach out and interact with agents instantaneously as well as control desktops.”

There’s been enough and more said about the poor service provided by contact centers, so managers will justify the use of VO as a tool to enhance productivity and help improve agent performance. The VO Live options also allow them access to any number of agents’ desktops, to monitor and guide them as they provide service. They can also add comments and notes within interactions and also generate reports of agent performance that are automatically mailed to the concerned executives.

It’s a robust solution, I’m sure – but will it improve agent productivity and performance? Maybe, for those who work well under constant supervision; but for those who are stifled by the eagle eye that’s monitoring them without pause, it’s only going to add to the stress of dealing with irate customers. 

-- By Pushpa Sathish, Staff Writer

Amidst all the backlash of contact centers being outsourced to the Far East and beyond, here’s news that’s bound to be received with joy, especially by the local folks of Colorado Springs. A new contact center is set to come up in the city courtesy PRC, with 550 jobs at all levels up for grabs.

PRC, with its 14,000 strong international team, handles the customer relations aspect for various companies all over the world. It splits its operations between two teams, one that focuses on Business-to-Consumer solutions for consumers and the other that takes care of Business-to-Business solutions that boost marketing and sales.

And if you’re interested in working for them, and feel that your qualifications are adequate, there’s a job fair that opens Jan 9 and runs till Jan 13. You can either call 800-950-9600 for more information or email your resumes to springsjobs@prcnet.com.

-- By Pushpa Sathish, Staff Writer

No more annoying music while you’re on hold, no more waiting for a day or two for a reply to your email, and no endless conversations with machines before you get someone human on the line. Instant messaging windows and online chat are moving from the realms of social networking sites into the business world, and from the look of things, emerging a success. Microsoft, HP, Cingular, Verizon Communications, Comcast – these are a just a few companies that are turning to live chat to address customer needs more effectively.

Regional support manager at Comcast, Ricky Frazier Jr., uses the words “instant gratification” to describe in a nutshell the positive aspects of customer chats, a description that made me smile, not because I found it funny, but because I know people (including myself) who would like to replace the gratification with frustration.
While I am not denying the pros of live chat, there are a few drawbacks to this method of providing customer service:

• Agents are sometimes taught to use a pre-written script, as a result of which they are sometimes clueless to the answers to your questions. I once had the (dis)pleasure of talking to one who insisted I downgrade to IE 6 from IE 7 for the trouble-shooting procedure to work, without offering any explanations as to why the downgrade was necessary. I finally figured out that he was reading from and sticking to an ironclad script.
• Some agents multi-task, i.e., they talk to more than one customer at the same time. While this may seem like a good thing from the company’s, and the agent’s points of view, customers are often short-changed in the service they receive. The flow in conversations is often lost in the switching between different windows, with the focus not staying on one customer alone.
• The level of customer satisfaction from the interaction depends on the efficiency of the agent you get on line. Writing down instructions takes more skill than talking a customer through a problem.
• And last but certainly not the least, God help you if your connection is reset in the middle of a conversation - you cannot continue the session with the same agent; another takes over, and it’s back to square one.

-- By Pushpa Sathish, Staff Writer

Once in a while, I come across some news item that warms my heart and reinforces my faith in mankind. This article did just that – American veterans wounded in wars and left disabled are being given a new lease of life, thanks to the proliferation of call centers. Soldiers spread as far and wide across as North America, Philippines, Africa, Europe and Central America are being equipped with skills that will allow them to handle duties in a call center. The 15-week, 600-hour course, is sponsored by Plantronics, and combines both online and classroom lessons.

Graduates have been hired by various companies, according to the program’s manager Ken Smith. They no longer have to cope with the ravages of war and turn to a life of alcoholism and despair. Instead, firms that need to retain the services of home agents are hiring these once-able and strong men as market researchers, data managers, hotline responders, website order processors, help desk managers, customer care and customer service coordinators, virtual administration and billing clerks and data management service providers, and offering them an opportunity to earn enough to support and take care of themselves.

I read a post by Dr Catriona Wallace speaking of her experience when she visited a call center in Changi Women’s Prison, Singapore.  Having to learn of a nation called Bhutan was something to rejoice about; realizing that we expanded to other countries, but this is a first for me. It was to much my surprise that there was even one that existed.

I admit that negativity set in as soon as I finished reading.  This explains the questions that lingered in my thoughts.  How is it being managed?  What are the precautions?  What calls are they handling?  What type of recruitment or assessment does each candidate go through?  Are they being monitored like any other center?  How are they being trained?

-- By Pushpa Sathish, Staff Writer

Another study on the trends in the contact center industry, and the difference here is that it does not address the issue of outsourcing as is generally the case with issues relating to contact centers. The subject deals with the industry status Down Under, and the good news is that contact centers are expected to grow, both in terms of personnel and technology, according to Aspect Software, Inc.

The company’s report, Aspect Software Australian Contact Center Index, covering the third quarter of 2006, estimates that more than AU$385 will go towards staffing and improving technology at Australian contact centers by the end of this year. Dr. Catriona Wallace, director of ACA Research, the independent market research consultancy that developed the Aspect Software Index in tandem with Aspect, says that the industry has grown by 8 percent since 2005, with the critical factors for growth being customer satisfaction, agent satisfaction, and enabling technology.

With Australia’s high attrition rate and the dearth of skilled labor, contact centers are switching over to automated machines for the repetitive and voluminous routine work, while retaining their best agents to deal with higher-value interactions with customers. As Michael Woodham, country manager of Australia and New Zealand for Aspect Software, puts it, the emphasis is on the optimization of human resources and performance-enhancing technology, in order to swim with the tide in Australia’s tight labor market.

-- By Pushpa Sathish, Staff Writer

Move over India and the Philippines; countries in Central and Eastern Europe and in Africa are emerging as the new favorites of the outsourcing industry, says a new report from Frost & Sullivan. The EMEA contact center market as it is called, an acronym for Europe, Middle East and Africa, earned $11.2 billion this year, and is expected to touch $16 billion by the year 2012.

If India was in the spotlight for its large English-speaking population, then the Egyptians and Tunisians are being sought after for their French linguistic skills and the Europeans are wanted for their Spanish capabilities. The United Kingdom is happy to outsource to South Africa, while the Netherlands and other countries in Europe are finding favor for the provision of financial services, communications, and information technology.

From the looks of things, it’s not just the Asian countries that have a massive pool of low-cost, highly skilled workers. The EMEA countries are giving them a run for their money (workforce?) in this regard.

-- By Pushpa Sathish, Staff Writer

So you’ve just put in place a fancy CRM solution, but it doesn’t seem to be working the way you thought it would! As you sit there wondering what could have gone wrong, did it even occur to you that the problem may not lie in the software but in the people who use it? Yes, your weakest and strongest links to your CRM system are the service agents who leverage the solution in their interactions with customers.

Gartner analyst Michael Maoz offers a few tips to maximize the potential of your agents, and as a direct result of this, to gain the optimum benefits from your CRM system and enhance your customer service:

• Use real-world scenarios to introduce and train new representatives to get accustomed to the way your customers think, and to gauge their expectations. Besides speeding up the learning process, this increases agent efficiency.
• Hire the best, not the cheapest, agents you can find. Remember Garbage In, Garbage Out? That goes for service personnel too. Spend money and time in providing the best training to people you hire. Just because some of your reps work from home, it does not mean that they do not need the same amount of training and pay as those who work from your office. Bad service from home agents is equally bad, if not worse than poor service from the office.   
• Ease your agents into the process of providing service. With the plethora of communication methods incorporated into a CRM application, it makes sense that they don’t try to master phone calls, emails, instant messaging, and live chat all at once. Getting them started on one interaction form and moving on to the others when they are well-versed in the previous, is the best bet for effective service.
• The success of a CRM solution depends on the acceptance of the people who use it – your agents – which is why you should emphasize the easy-to-use features of the system first before adjusting it to their needs as time goes by.
• Finally, invest in a CRM solution that offers easy shortcuts for your agents – unified desktops that include electronic notepads that absorb information typed into backend databases, and electronic business cards that stay on a corner of the display even as screens change.

-- By Pushpa Sathish, Staff Writer

Concerned over the recent spate of outsourcing contact center operations to India and offshore locations? Don’t be, because, according to this study on the North American IP contact center market from Research and Markets, IP-based contact centers are entering a boom period. A few pertinent points from the report:

• Market-wide revenue has crossed 50 percent for the past few years, and this quick growth is expected to continue for at least the next two years.
• The adoption of IP telephony is slower at smaller contact centers than at their larger counterparts.
• More than 50 percent of contact center seat sales in North America are expected to be IP-based by 2008.
• The small-mid sector holds the greatest potential for the future, following the saturation of the large contact center market.
• The migration to IP is driven by the fact that consolidation of infrastructure for distributed enterprises and the associated consolidation for applications like quality monitoring, CRM, and interactive voice response (IVRs) result in a simplified architecture that supports changes and upgrades and also provides a centralized administrative view of all customer contacts.
• IP telephony also facilitates integration between IVRs and Web self service applications.
• IP environments are easy to maintain, operational costs are less, agents are more efficient, and customer experiences are improved.
• The success rate of migration depends on vendors who should promise and deliver effective distribution and channels strategies, and trouble-free migration paths that tap into the least number of customer IT resources.

It’s a well-known and not very popular fact that customer care operations are being outsourced to foreign shores in an effort to cut costs. Very often, these contact centers in India and other countries have no, or very little, integration to the parent company. When the operations of the head office and the contact center are disjoint, there are higher chances of disgruntled and unsatisfied customers.

One aspect of the contact center that could do with a lot of improvement is the efficiency of agents. The recent fiasco with Windows Live OneCare (WLOC) wrongly identifying Gmail as a virus brought to light the appalling attitude and insufficient knowledge of customer service personnel. One frustrated Gmail user was asked by an agent to delete emails saved for two years, and he did so, because all he wanted was to get the “virus” out of his system. 

Most users of WLOC were also unhappy about the lack of well-defined troubleshooting methods. Each time they approached customer service for help, they were met with trial and error routines to help them solve their problem. The problem was finally identified within WLOC – a false positive. The only purpose this issue served was to highlight the lack of proper communication and integration between customer care centers and the rest of the enterprise. 

Contact center solutions provider Amcat and research and analysis firm Datamonitor recently coordinated a study that revealed that more than 63 percent of contact center professionals felt that data sharing between the contact center and other parts of the organization was very important, and that it would benefit customers, agents, and the management.