Archive for August, 2019

How Customer Service Automation Is Revolutionizing Contact Centers

Posted on: August 28th, 2019 by Dóra Rapcsák No Comments

In today’s CX-driven world, customers can choose from a number of platforms when they want to communicate with your customer service team. As a result, businesses receive inbound conversations on far more channels than they used to.

It’s clear that your agent team on its own would struggle to respond to all of these incoming conversations that your business receives. However, by automating some of your processes you’ll be able to handle thousands of conversations simultaneously across all channels while keeping customers satisfied.

Implementing customer service automation processes in the call center has many advantages. Here are the top benefits!

Increase your productivity

Just because your agents are on the phone all day long, it doesn’t mean they are making productive calls or being efficient. Many call centers still rely on manual dialers, with agents having to dial numbers themselves. And many of these calls end up lost on answering machines, or with agents waiting too long for a customer to pick up.

Customer service automation can greatly benefit your call center’s productivity. With a predictive dialer, for example, you can automate your dialing process and thus potentially double your efficiency by reaching as many customers as possible.

Indeed, one major advantage of predictive dialers is that they can greatly enhance agent efficiency. Firstly, by relying on a predictive dialer, agents save time as they no longer need to manually dial numbers. Secondly, when an agent finishes their current call, a predictive dialer already has the next call ringing and ready to handle.

Furthermore, you can also provide automated responses to the most recurring customer queries, and thus free up your agents from typing out the same response multiple times a day. In fact, automating some of your workflows can potentially add up to hours of saved time per day.

Deliver better customer experience

Let’s face it, customers rarely look forward to contacting customer service lines. Having to contact a company’s customer service several times, and then being put on hold for several minutes, is clearly a frustrating customer experience.

With proper customer service automation processes, however, customer issues can be easily resolved without them (and you!) having lengthy and inefficient phone calls with customers.

Amongst other things, skills-based routing is a technique being increasingly used to direct customers to an appropriate agent by routing incoming calls to specific agents based on the service requested. As a result, customer experience greatly improves as agents are not only actively talking to customers but are also resolving their issues at potentially the highest level of efficiency.

It is also worth considering that it is increasingly common for companies to use automation tools such as an IVR system to handle their customer service traffic more effectively. However, voice-based IVR systems often mean customers calls take longer than expected, and actually don’t bring the results customers are looking for. So, if you want to unlock the full potential of IVR systems then make sure you opt for a visual IVR. Visual IVRs allow customers to use touch-screen menus to find the answers they’re looking for, instead of waiting for traditional IVR systems as they read out every option.

Lower your costs

As we all know, lowering costs is the number one priority in any call center. Saving costs by reducing staff numbers, however, is a gamble that is not worth taking, as during peak times it may actually end up costing you more in terms of poor service.

In contrast, customer service automation will allow you to cut costs by reducing the amount of labor used on individual tasks, rather than your number of agents. By automating some of your processes, you’ll not only be able to free up your agents from repetitive, low-value activities but also reduce the number of customer calls your call center receives. And, most automation tools are available on a subscription basis, allowing you to only pay for what you use and also easily scale up based on your needs.

So, for example, if your call center receives a lot of repetitive questions, you can assess your calls and automate the repetitive ones, for example, using an IVR feature. The more calls your IVR system can handle the more money you can save on your workforce.

Reduce your agent workload

Handling low-value repetitive tasks, such as answering the most commonly-asked questions a company receives, is a nightmare for any call center agent, a soul-sucking activity which can easily result in them burning out. This is definitely one area where customer service automation can help.

Chatbots, for example, can carry out many kinds of repetitive tasks on behalf of call center agents. In recent years, chat solutions have become massively popular in the call center industry, allowing call centers to reduce agent workload and letting agents focus on higher-value activities.

A truly great customer service automation tool is customer self-service. The benefits of self-service are obvious: if your customers can resolve simple queries themselves, this will allow your customer service agents to use the resulting additional time to handle more complex issues. The result will be significantly-reduced customer service call volumes, and so substantially reduced agent workloads.

Voice ID can be a game changer

Another way of automating things in your call center is through using a voice identification solution. Callers who have accepted this method get a chance to record their voice samples in order to get recognized and have their queries handled a lot faster and more conveniently.

VCC Live have recently partnered with Biometrid, a Portuguese company specializing in remote identity verification. Together, we delivered a successful trial run with one of our clients who offered voice ID solution to their callers. Head over to Biometrid’s website to see how your contact center can benefit from a no code solution for verifying identity in multiple ways (voice, facial, or even contextual behavior) .

Customer service automation is more than just about offering customers a more convenient experience. It enhances productivity and quality, while also allowing you to better manage your resources. Make sure to leverage it in order to get the most out of your customer service interactions!

City Connect Chose VCC Live to Power Their Customer Experience Services

Posted on: August 26th, 2019 by Dóra Rapcsák No Comments

We are more than delighted to announce that City Connect decided to leverage VCC Live’s solution to power their customer experience services in Croatia to start with.

City Connect is an established business process and technology outsourcing (BPTO) provider with several offices in Europe (www.citycc.eu), specialized in omnichannel customer experience, sales and marketing services. Their mission is to deliver next-generation customer experiences and help companies connect with their customers and partners every day, around the world.

As a company aiming to deliver exceptional customer experience, City Connect needed a technology solution that allowed them to live up to its customers’ increasing expectations. As such, City Connect decided to leverage VCC Live’s professional package including advanced features, such as an intelligent predictive dialer, dashboard and real-time analytics.

As providing sales and marketing services amongst others, City Connect’s success greatly depends on the efficiency of services through outbound channels. With VCC Live’s intelligent predictive dialer, the company can now fine-tune their outbound campaigns by setting unique parameters.

Furthermore, in order to be able to reach excellence in their operations, VCC Live provided City Connect with customizable analytics. Among other things, with our export editor, the company is able to determine and customize what data to export from their databases. 

Last but not least, City Connect needed a solution that allowed them to monitor their performance in real-time. With our powerful dashboard, City Connect is able to see and monitor the most essential KPIs in real-time, including historical call data.

We are looking forward to a fruitful partnership with City Connect, and are ready to help them deliver the best possible results to their customers across the world.” – Norbert Simán, Customer Success Manager at VCC Live

Our company recognizes ever-increasing necessity to provide state of the art efficient and versatile software solution to connect with our clients and their customers. VCC Live meets our high expectations and offers an additional value to our proposal.” – Ivica Mađura, Director at City Connect

Increasing Customer Satisfaction With Skills-based Routing

Posted on: August 16th, 2019 by Roland Háry No Comments

Ask call center managers what’s one of the most important KPIs for them. A very likely answer is: customer satisfaction. Now ask customers what they often find annoying when they contact a company’s customer service department, and their answer may actually be similar.

Customers reach out to customer service lines with a wide range of issues. If they can be connected with the agent that excels at the service they require for the first time, chances are better of achieving a satisfactory result. This is exactly what skills-based routing is for and why you need to use it in the call center.

In this article, we will show you how skills-based routing will help you reach high levels of customer satisfaction.

What is skills-based routing?

Most call centers offer several services, each requiring a different skill set. Of course, not all agents are created equal: while some of them might be great at customer service, others might be natural-born salespeople.

And this is where skills-based routing comes in handy: it’s a technique used to direct customers to the right agent based on the service requested.

Calls might be routed based on agents’ availability and skills, the type of customer query and customers’ call history.

Benefits of skills-based routing

Every call center team consists of agents with different skill sets. And by leveraging these different skills and knowledge, you can easily skyrocket your customer satisfaction (CSAT) levels.

Skills-based routing will allow you to utilize your agents’ strengths by assigning them to calls that require their expertise. In other words, you’ll be able to direct callers with simple issues to less specialized agents, while customers with specific requests to more experienced agents.

As a result, both average wait times and first call resolution will improve as agents are not only talking to customers but are also efficiently resolving their issues.

How to use skills-based routing

For skills-based routing, all you need is a reliable software solution that enables you to route your calls to agents with the proper skills and knowledge.

When it comes to routing your calls, the best method is to assign agents to different campaigns based on their skills, a technique that is already available in VCC Live’s solution.

However, in case you work with a smaller workforce, chances are your agents need to handle several types of services, and thus you cannot divide them by campaigns. Luckily, skills-based routing is an efficient method in such cases too.

Let’s look at an example: out of your 50 agents, 25 excel at sales activities, the rest are proficient in complaint handling. Let’s say you experience peak periods when all of your 50 agents need to actively take calls. With VCC Live, you can rank your agents based on their knowledge and customer profiles and route your calls accordingly.

As such, if you suddenly receive an increased number of incoming calls after a TV spot, the calls will be first routed to your 25 agents specialized in sales and after to your remaining agents in case extra help is needed. Similarly, customer complaints will be primarily routed to customer service agents but in case of an unexpected peak time sales agents will also receive incoming calls.

In a nutshell…

Skills-based routing is inevitable for any call center that strives to provide superior customer experience. Amongst other things, it reduces average wait time, increases first call resolution and greatly improves customer satisfaction.

Learn more about call routing

Check out some other posts on call routing to learn more about this feature:

Automatic call distribution (ACD) for building great customer journeys
What is Automatic Call Distribution (ACD)?
Call Routing in a Contact Center

 

VCC Live Onboards Leading Car Loans Provider Mogo Finance

Posted on: August 14th, 2019 by Dóra Rapcsák No Comments

Fintech company focused on facilitating and financing transactions with used cars, starts using VCC Live software on its debt collection, sales, and customer support operations. 

Headquartered in Riga, Latvia, Mogo Finance operates in more than 15 countries, issuing over than EUR 358 million to date and running a net loan portfolio of over EUR 140 million. With a consistent base of more than 100 000 customers, the strategic priorities of the company are focused on consistent profitable growth and geographical expansion. Currently, it operates in the Baltics, Eastern Europe, the Balkans, the Caucasus, and Central Asia.

Mogo Finance’s positions itself in the debt market with an innovative mission: securing loan products that are designed to meet the needs of clients who are underserved by the mainstream credit market. With growing operations spread throughout several regions across the globe and a strong focus on increasing customer value, Mogo Finance relies on well-aligned and efficient customer experience teams to support company goals. And of course, all customer-handling operations must be supported by seamless technology.

Mogo Finance partnership with VCC Live comes to address customer interactions challenges, such as improving collections and sales over the phone through more efficient management of agents’ working time. For such, they will count with our predictive dialer feature developed to increase customer team’s efficiency by decreasing agents’ idle time. Also, the possibility of using several communication channels (email, sms, chat, among others) also called the attention of the company that seeks to provide its customers with seamless omnichannel care.    

About Mogo Finance and VCC Live blooming partnership, Roland Háry, Solutions Consultant for Enterprise at VCC Live, highlights: “It’s always a pleasure when a multinational company trusts us and allows us to support them in their operations in several countries. This also reflects our system’s diversity and the fact that we’re able to provide services all over the world. We are grateful for the opportunity and looking forward to a fruitful partnership with Mogo Finance.”

More about Mogo Finance

Mogo Finance products range from Car Leasing (financing used cars) to Leaseback (car serves as a pledge; clients can remain driving it). All services are provided with flexible payment and fast and easy application process. Know more about the company on its official website!

What Is a Call Center Shrinkage and How to Keep it Low

Posted on: August 8th, 2019 by Dóra Rapcsák 1 Comment

Call centers are all about efficiency, efficiency, efficiency. In such a competitive work environment, increased productivity is the key to success.

Productivity depends on a number of factors, including up-to-date technology and optimized workforce management. Indeed, throwing money ovut of the window by leveraging an outdated system and having high levels of agent idle time is clearly a mistake.

We have already talked about in a previous article how you can reduce agent idle time. This time, we’re going to take things a step further and talk about what call center shrinkage is, and how you can reduce it to keep your productivity high.

What is Call Center Shrinkage?

Call center shrinkage refers to the number of agents who are actively answering calls at a given time divided by the number of agents who are not available to serve customers for any reason. The difference between the two is called call center shrinkage, indicating how much time your agents spend not helping your customers.

As we all know, agents will call in sick and go on holidays every now and then. Similarly, team meetings and training sessions are part of every call center agents’ job.

As such, call center shrinkage comes from both internal and external factors: among other things, internal factors include holidays, sick time, lateness, while external factors might be lunch time, meetings, training sessions and after call work.

Leverage data

At a call center, data is everywhere: agent average talk time, average call volume, the proportion of closed deals or first call resolution are all examples of important call center metrics that are readily available.

When it comes to managing call center shrinkage, thorough planning is your ultimate key to success. And luckily, in a call center you’ll have plenty of data helping you to make accurate forecasts.

As such, make sure to leverage your data and forecast how many calls will be coming based on your call history. Also, you can investigate average agent talk time or the proportion of closed deal and come up with strategies to improve them.

Rely on part-time and remote workforce

Hiring remote agents is nothing new to the call center industry. In fact, as we already mentioned in a previous article, employees prefer remote working.

On the other hand, call centers can also greatly benefit from hiring both remote and part-time agents, helping call center managers better manage workforce and react to sudden peak times.

For example, in case of an unexpected flu season, which is an external shrinkage factor, you can rely on your part-time or remote agents, improving your shrinkage rates.

Take advantage of technology

Technology is advancing at lightning speed with better and better state-of-the-art technology tools entering the market year after year.

By leveraging innovative contact center technology, you can create real-time statistics, which will be essential to help you keep shrinkage rates low by monitoring and evaluating your processes and agents’ performance.

For example, you evaluate how much time your agents spend with after call work, how often they participate in meetings and how effective is your training system.

Working on these factors will all contribute to keeping call center shrinkage rates relatively low, and thus improving your productivity.