In the late 1990s, the phrase “contact center” was rarely used or understood by many working in the call center industry. With relatively minor changes, call centers continued to do what they had done for years before: receive and make telephone calls from and to businesses’ customers and prospects. The role of the Internet in customer communication was poorly understood, email volumes were still low (and response rates were often appalling) and self-service consisted of touchtone IVR and little else.

Today, multichannel contact centers have been mainstream for years, with 94% of respondent contact centers dealing with a significant proportion of email as well as telephony. The Internet – as a channel for self-service, sales and increasingly person-to-person contact – is an integral part of many businesses’ customer contact strategy, with the advent of social media and mobile communication throwing other elements into the mix.

The customer has numerous devices, both voice and text-based, with which they can contact the business. They may decide to query an automated system, or a live agent. They may want the answer in real-time, or prefer to receive a reply at their convenience. They may use a fixed-line phone, a cellphone, PC, letter or use a kiosk in the street or in a physical store. Of course, not all contact is one-way – the business can also initiate outbound communications with its customers as well.

The complexity of the situation increases exponentially once a new channel, device or medium is added to the customer service mix. The only constant is that – regardless of the method they choose to communicate with the business – customers want accurate, timely information delivered in a form with which they are happy. The challenges for the business are to provide a high quality of service which is consistent across the channels and to do so in a cost-effective manner. To do this, and break down the boundaries between contact channels that has been stifling the potential of non-telephony contact, a universal queue is required.

Universal Queue

Although the ‘universal queue’ as a phrase is showing its age, having been around for at least ten years, as a concept it’s still vital to understand. A universal queue is a platform which automatically captures, processes, routes and reports on customer interactions and related activities based on a company’s specific business criteria, providing a view of each and every customer interaction. Customer interactions through channels such as voice, e-mail, fax, instant messaging and activities such as work items are handled according to business-defined processes and strategies, avoiding the problem of rogue interactions that are left outside normal workflows, or favoring one channel (usually voice) to the permanent detriment of others.

The universal queue can set priority levels to incoming calls, e-mails and chats, and may also have the ability to blend inbound and outbound calls into a single queue to allow agents to move between media as required. This approach also facilitates a single view of the customer across all channels, which is one of the key ways to improve
the quality of service offered, as well as improving the agent’s confidence and morale.

CLICK HERE to download the complimentary 2013 ContactBabel Decision Makers’ Guide and be entered to win a $1,000 gift card from Amazon.com.

Telecom Reseller: Bruce Sherman, quality management product manager for Enghouse Interactive, participated in a podcast to discuss the new features of version 5.0 of the Enghouse Interactive Quality Management Suite. Listen to the podcast.

DestinationCRM: Enghouse Interactive Updates its Quality Management Suite. View the article.

Channel Partners: Enghouse Updates Contact Center Platform. Read the article.

Channel Vision Magazine: Enghouse Updates Quality Management Suite for Contact Centers. Review the article.

IT World Canada: Enghouse Freshens Quality Management Suite. Access the article.

TMCnet: Enghouse Interactive Expands Computer Recording Capabilities in Interaction Management Suite. View the article.

May Newsletter: we released the May 2013 edition of the North American newsletter. Access the latest news, contact resources, videos, and more from Enghouse Interactive.

To learn more about Enghouse Interactive interaction management products, click here.

This release and the subsequent releases leading up to it has been two years in the making and marks a significant milestone for those of us who are part of the Quality Management Suite team here at Enghouse Interactive. This release represents what was our initiative, and downright tenacious drive, to continuously evolve the Quality Management product suite to grow with our customers, be easy to use and maintain, and to constantly add more value to a competitively priced offering. If you are wondering where we get our direction and ideas for planning these releases the answer is simple: our customers and partners from all over the globe. That input eventually feeds through to me and I use it to formulate a product plan.

The press release went into some detail on what the new release of Enghouse Interactive Quality Management Suite (formerly CallRex) covers. Let me expand upon that a little bit here:

We have co-located the separate modules of Enghouse Interactive Call Recording, Enghouse Interactive Agent Evaluation and Enghouse Interactive Computer Recording into a more common tab-driven web interface. This being a little bit more in line with the typical navigation mode of most web browsers. Also by doing this we have been able to centralize the functions for searching and reporting for the entire suite.

Our Computer Recording module has had the heftiest overhaul in this release. We now have extended the functionality to create more customized desktop recording profiles that includes the option to capture only those applications that are important or, if needed, the entire desktop. This flexibility provides the option to focus only on those activities that most critically impact business operations. New profile options give similar configuration options as our call recording profiles and allow business to decide who, what, and when desktop activities are captured and stored.

Our Agent Evaluation module has been extended to take advantage of the new Computer Recording functionality. Now the recorded desktop activities can also be used along with recorded calls to train and evaluate those essential staff members who handle critical customer interactions. This is a powerful and effective way to leverage all insightful interaction activity data that is captured and stored in the Quality Management Suite to make the proactive adjustments needed to help improve staff performance, raise customer satisfaction levels, reduce liability risks, and simply operate more efficiently. For those customers that haven’t yet started using the Agent Evaluation module there is now an even more compelling reason to start.

Lastly, and most certainly not least, in this release we have added some gems for those responsible to maintain and support our Quality Management products for the thousands of businesses around the world. In the 5.0 release we have implemented new system alerting that can monitor for specific failure events and generate notifications instantly to those parties who are charged with keeping the systems up and running. Of course – we hope you won’t ever need that feature, but better safe than sorry. Additionally for the IT\IS teams we have updated our support for infrastructure and operating system components from Microsoft, including new support for Windows Server 2012, Windows 8, SQL Server 2012 and Silverlight 5.0.

As you might suspect, we aren’t done working. We have a very aggressive release plan for the rest of this year and going into the 2014 calendar year. If you want to hear more about those plans and see what we are up to next, I suggest you register for our upcoming sneak peek Webinar scheduled for May 23, 2013. During that event I will be going into our plans for the future for the Quality Management Suite. I hope to see you there.

ContactBabel has released their US Contact Center Decision-Makers’ Guide (2013 – 6th edition) studying the performance, operations, technology and HR aspects of US contact center operations. Using random industry samples, a detailed structured questionnaire was given to 205 contact center managers and directors between January and February 2013. Results were analyzed in March and April 2013 in order to produce the 6th edition of the largest and most comprehensive study of all aspects of the US contact center industry.

The US Contact Center Decision-Makers’ Guide identifies six of the major pain points and issues that affect the contact center industry:

• Improving quality and performance
• Maximizing efficiency and agent optimization
• New media and the customer of the future
• Increasing profitability
• HR management
• Strategic directions

Within each section, specific solutions are identified that can be used to solve these issues, along with the analysis of the primary research data that are relevant to this area, including a comprehensive statistical analysis in graphical and tabular form.

Download your complimentary 2013 ContactBabel Contact Center Decisions Makers’ Guide to be entered to win a $1,000 Amazon.com gift card, and let Enghouse Interactive help design your contact center strategy.

View an overview video of CTI for CRM for Salesforce:

CTI for CRM provides the following out of the box capabilities: screen pop, click to dial, comprehensive statistics and logging of calls (including Date, Time and duration of the call, ANI and DNIS), one click new case creation, and integration with agent work flow. By automatically executing a search on call and customer data in Salesforce with screen pops, agents can reduce call time by 10-20 seconds per call and have the customer’s information at their fingertips. Enghouse Interactive also has the ability to extend CTI for CRM capabilities to integrate customer data gathered in your IVR system and to implement custom call routing applications.

>> Learn more about Enghouse Interactive CTI for CRM.

Organizations of all sizes are migrating to Microsoft Lync to provide telephony functionality to the desktop. Lync offers some compelling cost savings, but if you are looking to evaluate Lync for your contact center operations, you’ll need to consider the cost of purchasing, training, and deploying a new contact center solution, or the administrative headache of running two separate contact centers – one for your existing PBX and one for Lync.

You no longer need to run Lync in parallel with their legacy PBX systems, nor do you have to implement disparate systems to meet your ever changing business needs. With Enghouse Interactive CTI Connect, you can make your applications compatible with Microsoft Lync and any other PBXs/ACDs that CTI Connect supports. Reduce development time, cost, and complexity by building your CTI applications with CTI Connect.

Whether you are evaluating just a few agents or planning a full migration, CTI Connect seamlessly integrates your existing contact center technology with Lync, so you can fully leverage all of your investments:

• Enable existing third party call center CTI applications to have direct access to the Microsoft Lync platform
• Minimal programming changes to the original application
• Faster time to market

If you are considering moving your contact center to Lync, or you are struggling to Lync-enable your application, contact Enghouse Interactive. Our CTI Connect software can help you reduce development time, cost, and complexity, while allowing you to leverage your existing technology investments.

>> Learn more about Enghouse Interactive CTI Connect.

A contact center with seasonality is characterized by large influxes of customer interactions that correspond to annual events, such as the holiday season, sporting events, vacation season, hurricane season or back to school. Seasonality can also be a planned event such as liquidation sales, conferences or seminars.

Seasonal spikes creates a number of problems and challenges for contact centers such as:

• Staffing – it doesn’t make sense to employ the agents required for peak volumes on a permanent basis.
• Infrastructure – the capital expense and recurring costs for contact center infrastructure required at peak times is prohibitive.
• Facilities – physical space is required for additional computer and application infrastructure as well as contact center resources to accommodate peak interaction volume.

Companies that are affected by seasonality include travel and tourism, retail, manufacturing, technology and insurance to name a few. These companies use their capital to build additional in-house contact center infrastructure to handle these seasonal peaks. In the off-season, these the extra resources sit idle.

Technology Can Help with Seasonal Peaks

Enghouse Interactive can help seasonality contact centers problems with solutions designed to help deliver exceptional customer service during peak times. Here are just a few solutions to efficiently use all your resources during seasonal spikes:

• Seasonal Licensing – “Flex” your Contact Center: Enterprise licenses expanding the number of agent licenses required for your peak period.
• iAgent – Fully featured, browser-based agent enables agents to work from anywhere, at any time. Staff can work from home or any location with network access and a phone.
• Cloud Deployment Options – Scale your server capacity up and down with cloud infrastructure. The OpEx model lets you pay only for the computing resources you need.

To learn more about solutions for seasonality, contact an Enghouse Interactive sales representative.

A core focus is on providing your customers with their preferred choice of communication through IVR, Voice, Email, Text, Fax, Web and Social Media.

Watch the following short video to learn more.

>> Learn more about Enghouse Interactive’s multi-channel contact center solutions.

Improve Training & Customer Service Delivery
Beyond minimizing vulnerabilities, call recording can and should be a tool to improve the quality of customer interactions. The “training purposes” cited in the message you receive while on hold for a company needs to be real. Managers and supervisors may be extremely talented at training their staff and dealing with internal issues, but they need the right tools to do their job. With interaction recording, they have the best material for training possible – real examples of what to do and what not to do to improve customer service.

Managers that have on-demand access to recordings are also able to quickly address issues related to agent behavior and more readily deal with customer complaints and disputes.  In case of customer complaints, call recording can set aside the emotionally-draining waste of time of hearing two seemingly different versions of the same story, one from the customer and one from the agent. There is only one version of the conversation and that is what is recorded.

Understanding Customer Interactions
Most companies have at least some basic forms of measurement in place that look at call duration and volume. But sometimes the ability to understand context can trump the value of those more linear measurements. The understanding that can be gained from a sample of real-life recordings of customer interactions can sometimes provide more context and more clues about how to improve customer service, company procedures, and the business in general than a thousand metrics.

So if the benefits are so profound, what is holding back small to medium businesses (SMBs) from taking on call recording? For SMBs, cost is always a major concern. They do not have the multi-million dollar budgets that their larger competitors have. However with call recording, cost is not the issue that they may think or fear it is.

The problem can sometimes be a lack of understanding of both the actual cost and therefore the ROI from this type of technology. It is easy to think that it is much more expensive than it really is, because they are looking in the wrong place. If they are looking at call recording targeted at larger companies, it is no wonder that they think it is out of their reach.

The truth is that there are call recording solutions which are directly targeted at SMBs. Yes, every new solution has a price tag. But with solutions that are targeted at SMBs, the costs are dramatically lower than many SMBs may think. That said, the ROI will not be any lower, proportionally, than it would be for a much larger company. The legal vulnerabilities and customer service issues that remain for smaller companies without call recording are real. But it does not have to be this way.

>> Learn more about Enghouse Interactive’s call recording and quality management software. 

There has to be a reason why almost without exception large companies use call recording in their contact centers. In fact, there is not one reason, there are several; all of them important. Each of them minimizes risk that companies face. And of course each of those risks are just as real for smaller companies as they are for large ones.

When companies reach a certain size, they often have dedicated risk management and/or legal resources to protect their interests. In such cases it is almost assured that call recording will be a required part of customer interaction processes. Laws may be evolving consistently, but hard evidence of conversations with customers will never be anything less than vital in any dispute that may arise.

In particular, certain verticals like healthcare and financial services, which have a high volume of claims or transactions cannot afford for those interactions to go un-recorded. If they do, they could find themselves with a large percentage of invalid or dragged out disputes. Each extra percentage point of gray-area disputes or disputes that cannot be nipped in the bud represents lost revenue. No wonder call recording is one of those check box items that many such organizations insist upon.

Regulatory Compliance & Dispute Resolution
Another consideration is regulatory compliance. When a company has ongoing legal representation, it should be inevitable that the companies have a greater understanding of regulations, best practices and guidelines than those that do not. Again, in certain vertical markets with well-established regulatory frameworks, call recording is more likely to be strongly recommended. It may or may not be insisted upon, but in cases of dispute or investigation, the legal team needs to make sure it has as much in its favor as possible.

>> View part two of this series, Call Recording for Small Businesses, further detailing how smaller companies can benefit from call recording software.

>> Learn more about Enghouse Interactive’s call recording and quality management software.