From startups to Fortune 500 giants, all organizations rely on timely, accurate, and targeted information to stride ahead within their businesses. The primary source of this information is big data, which resides within internal storage silos.

A smaller yet authoritative set of data, circulated within the organization’s contact center, is rarely unearthed to extract and mine strategic information. Most of this data is first-hand customer intelligence that directly or indirectly affects the customer’s relationship with the primary business, product, or service. If this data is tapped using appropriate business intelligence tools, it can provide substantial insight into customer buying trends, behaviors, and preferences. Moreover, this data can be used to measure the efficiency of contact centers in achieving their primary objective: customer support.

Cloud-based visual business intelligence solutions for contact centers are the ideal tools for encompassing, evaluating, and delivering intelligence across the center’s entire domain and operations. The ethosAnalytics visual business intelligence softwarecollects, analyzes, interprets, and presents contact center data in way that helps leadership make operational and strategic decisions based on qualitative and quantitative data.

CIOs, CTOs, and CEOs usually find it challenging to understand and translate the data provided by conventional business intelligence solutions. Visual business intelligence solutions eliminate these issues by presenting data in easy-to-understand reports and a simpler user interface dashboard, reducing complexity and providing visual data that can be easily interpreted by the user.

A cloud-based call center provides substantial monetary and business benefits that cannot be achieved with traditional on-premise call centers. However, getting the most out of a cloud-based call center requires that it be designed, integrated, and delivered by experienced hands.

Cloud-based call center system integrators bridge the enterprise migration into the cloud, redesign business processes, and connect disparate systems and technologies together. Moreover, the system integrator maintains partnerships with different related technology vendors in order to provide a comprehensive, one-window solution that incorporates entire resources from:

·         IT infrastructure

·         Cloud-based call center management software

·         Other mission critical tools and technologies

Customers are at the epicenter of any business, and so are their interactions with the enterprise. Cloud-based call centers are becoming the next forefront of transparent yet economical interfaces for customer interaction.

Customers don’t care what technology you are using—they just want results and continuous support. Although having the best cloud-based contact center infrastructure is one side of the picture, mounting it with top-quality cloud-based contact center software is another. The entire cloud-based contact center infrastructure is meaningless until its software counterpart provides the desired results. The software should not only provide key operational and technical features, but also deliver the key customer intelligence and experiences that are critical for improving overall call center performance.

 Regardless of the business model of the customer service center—inbound, outbound, or both—cloud-based customer service software must provide and exhibit certain capabilities.

The call center is one of the busiest yet most critical communication sources of any organization—and its importance has increased with the need to serve a new breed of ever-demanding, information-hungry, and time-restricted consumer. Each customer requires quick, simple, and hassle-free resolution of his or her query. Call center agents, both inbound and outbound, require cutting-edge communication hardware, software, and supported solutions to ensure they remain proactive and on top of their work. Call center solutions such as interactive voice response (IVR) systems, predictive dialers, call center business intelligence tools, business intelligence software, and customer engagement solutions are the must-have tools of the modern trade. Moreover, with the advent of cloud computing and managed services, these solutions are much easier and economical to implement and operate.

IVR is serving as the primary front-end application, as it not only automates many processes, but also provides consistent customer service. Call center agents are pushed to perform under time-sensitive conditions and to provide rapid, thorough responses. Because softphones place myriad tasks and services at the agent’s fingertips, they are an ideal add-on for any call center, particularly those with IVR applications. Softphones replace legacy, non-interactive physical phones with a much more powerful, robust, and easy-to-use interface. With a softphone, inbound and outbound call center agents can automate and accelerate their processes much more easily.

Interactive voice response (IVR) technology is a breakthrough in self-service customer interaction that is being used prominently in enterprises around the world. IVR provides a host of benefits for both the organization and the customer by automating most call and contact center operations, ultimately improving agents’ usability. Although IVR can bring in substantial gains, it can also negatively affect the business if not carefully selected, configured, operated, and managed. Particularly critical is the IVR call transfer process, which, if not properly handled, can make a customer very unhappy. A bad IVR experience can increase a customer’s frustration and, in worst-case scenarios, ruin his or her relationship with the company.

Although an IVR system can have many different abnormalities, below are some of the most common pains and frustrations faced by customers in IVR call transfers.

Modern businesses around the globe are quickly transforming from the standard silos to Business 2.0 models. Businesses today have more customer challenges, more customer interactions, and more customer objectives than they did a decade ago. Similarly, an enterprise-class call and contact center is a hub for first-hand customer interaction that has to deliver services with the same efficiency and productivity over and over again, on a 24/7/365 basis.

Although many factors and methodologies can be used to evaluate the performance of a call center, Quality of Service (QoS) is considered the benchmark of customer satisfaction. While QoS certainly provides substantial insight into the contact center performance from a customer standpoint, it is not the only method for assessing the customer’s experience. Moreover, the increasing adoption of cloud-based call center solutions has largely shifted QoS to the service provider.

Phone calls and other direct contact serves as the primary communication backbone in any organization, ensuring the connectivity and bonding of current and prospective customers with the enterprise. Recently a massive shift has occurred as organizations have migrated their entire contact center operations to cloud-based managed service platforms.

The flexibility, scalability, and business agility provided by a cloud-based call center are limitless; however, many organizations still are reluctant to “go cloud.” The prime driver for this disinterest is the enterprise’s inability to evaluate, identify, and realize the business values that such a solution brings. More importantly, enterprises often find it difficult to estimate and justify the net return on investment (ROI) that a third-party managed solution can offer.

Cloud-based call center value realization and ROI are two completely different paradigms: the former describes business benefits as a whole and the latter depicts monetary gains. ethosIQ helps enterprise organizations understand the key performance indicators (KPIs) and the correct value realization of a cloud-based call center solution. In addition, we will define a brief yet concrete method for helping enterprises understand and calculate the ROI of a cloud-based call center solution.

 Call routing is generally considered to be a random, computer-generated call distribution process among available agents. This method is so prevalent that hardly any organization or contact center dares to alter the call routing “wheel.” Although this process succeeds in that it provides callers with quick access to an agent, it doesn’t route calls based on operational business intelligence. Typical automatic call distribution (ACD) software only looks for an available agent, with no consideration of that agent’s capability, experience, preferences, or past records.

This is where an intelligent call routing solution comes into play. Intelligent call routing not only automates the call distribution process, but also improves the call center’s efficiency, utilization, and alignment with business objectives.

Every call center employs agents with different skill sets and different professional attributes. Utilizing each agent intelligently will substantially increase the productivity of call center operations. This white paper will discuss some of the strategies that can be used within call routing processes to boost the performance of a modern call center.

Call centers are the key communication bridge between an organization and its customers. Customers around the world interact with them through voice-, video-, email-, and social media–based communications. Call centers are also used by internal employees—specifically, sales and marketing use them to interact with prospective customers.

Migrating the entire in-house call center infrastructure to a cloud-based managed service platform is a strategic decision that directly affects an organization’s relationship with its customer base. Identifying, evaluating, and selecting the right combination of cloud-based call center solutions require substantial research and planning.

Although many different criteria and characteristics may be involved in this decision, there are some must-haves that exceed any other requirements. Below are five of the key essentials that a managed call center platform must provide to qualify as a enterprise-class solution.

ethosIQ™ offers speed to market with Interactive Voice Response (IVR) applications through leveraging a reduction of overall system development and costs.  Our custom IVR Applications may be purchased and then “tweaked” to match your environment versus being developed from scratch, thus reducing long-term maintenance costs.

Benefit your enterprise by reducing cost and reducing time in development cycles. 

Healthcare Solutions

Healthcare organizations consist of hospitals, clinics, nursing homes, and HMO’s. One of the largest concerns in this industry is freeing up care providers to provide adequate time to care for patients. This entails providing patients with access to selected information while protecting that patient’s confidentiality. Government regulations are prominent in this industry and require high levels of compliance to qualify for various Federal and state monies. This industry has been relatively slow to adopt new technologies aimed at information dissemination since this has been traditionally accomplished face to face with the care provider. But there are some areas that lend themselves to customer self-service as noted below. 

Retail Solutions

ethosIQ™ applications provide efficient ways to manage and communicate information between retailers and customers. 

Insurance Solutions

The insurance industry is striving to provide information and service while containing costs to remain competitive. A variety of technological solutions have been used to accomplish this. The key is using an approach that will be utilized and valued by their customers, thus creating customer loyalty. And customers are constantly redefining what they need to remain loyal. Access to account/policy information, rates for specific needs, location of nearest agent, and ease of claims processing are but a few of the concerns. Finding the correct solutions mix will provide self-service for those customers who can benefit from it, while freeing up internal resources to enhance the revenue stream for the business. 

Financial Solutions

This market segment consists of consumer and commercial banks, finance companies, credit unions, brokerage houses, and investment institutions. Information access and transaction processes have been the driving factors in supplying enhanced customer self-service opportunities. This market has been an early adopter of customer interaction technologies, recognizing the benefits to customers of real time self-management of financial accounts and portfolios. The brokerage segment was one of the first to realize the significant benefits of speech recognition for obtaining quotes and performing financial transactions over the telephone. The key was providing tools for customers that they were willing to use and that gave the caller options for conducting business. In addition, the investment return in terms of reduced transaction costs and customer loyalty was significant. The original applications were oriented toward a touchtone method of data entry, but in the past few years there has been a migration to oral interaction through the use of speech recognition technologies. In addition, voice authentication is being adopted to increase the security of access to sensitive account information and to provide an audit trail for transactions. 

Higher-Education Solutions

Say goodbye to those long, tiresome registration lines. Colleges and Universities throughout the country are taking advantage of the numerous benefits that are gained through automated registration functions. Benefits include reducing time demands on both staff and students associated with face-to-face registration, implementing an automated Wait list function that simplifies administration processes and delivery, and a credit card tuition payment system that significantly increases revenues. 

K-12 Education Solutions

Technology today helps schools not only increase parental participation, but increase the likelihood of voter-approved funding.

Through Interactive Voice Response (IVR), Web access and email distribution, a school district can quickly and effortlessly provide critical and timely information such as absentee or emergency notification, homework assignments, bond measure updates, meeting changes and other answers to commonly asked questions. 

Government Solutions

Government entities are constantly being asked to provide increasing services to a growing population in the midst of declining budgets. Many of the services provided by state and local government agencies involve information dissemination, which can be automated so that callers are not limited by hours of operation or availability of agency personnel. Taxpayers want high-quality service for the dollars they are investing in their governments. Providing self-service options can greatly enhance the taxpayer experience with their government agencies. 

Technology Solutions

The technology industry faces a variety of challenges in providing proactive customer service. Many of the products sold in this market space are technically complex and are not well suited to automated support processes without an extensive, “smart” database. On the other hand, there are other general customer service issues that are suited for automation. The key is identifying those areas that lend themselves to customer self-service and focusing on solutions for them.

Utilities Solutions

The utility industries consist of gas, power, and water companies. During a time of heightened competition due to deregulation in these industries, customer service has become a key differentiator for competitive advantage. Additional service offerings and enhanced customer interactions are key activities to gain this advantage. 

Call center operations are plagued by the myth that they deliver very litte business value and have a meager ROI. Call center agents are always pushed to perform at peak capacity to meet business objectives and ensure happy customers. Many methods and procedures have been used to measure the performance and productivity of call center agents, the most fundamental of which is maintaining agent scorecards. Scorecards not only help managers to evaluate individual agent separately, but also assist top leadership in understanding and estimating the business value of a call center.