I love logging into facebook now & then to check what my pals are upto, the photos and the statuses always catch my attention. But apart from all the relationship and copy-paste-quotes statuses I see, people tend to express their disappointments,anger and opinions about the services rendered by different service providers/companies out there. The problem about this is,if these companies do not get to these unhappy customers fast enough to address their concerns, they risk losing a customer or worst still, get some bad publicity on these social sites.
Some companies like Cisco must have thought exactly this way to put together projects to develop products that will address such a problem. I must say I was too busy to realize that many products had already been released that will browse social websites on behalf of a company for any tweet/post about the company and immediately, intelligently route it to the right customer-care representative to respond and deal with customers' posts in real-time. I thought this was a brillant idea. As there will be more happy customers out there and service providers will have a new opportunity to proactively upsell as well.
Well, you remember my last post was about how I didn't have psyk to study for my GVP exam, I did manage to pull together some psyk amidst lots of parties to study and sit for the exam. Am actually glad its over now because I had to postpone that exam thrice...had cold feet...don't ask!
While I was traveling in a bus today,the question 'what next' kept popping up in my head. That's when I realized I have an unfinished business with Cisco, (as much as I am done with Genesys. ) Since I believe in the saying "you must finish what you started",I am resuming studying for Cisco's CCIE Voice after my wedding in December this year.
Talking about weddings, please wish me luck in this one....I mean it! Never thouht nervousness was part of getting maried, now I know better.
Here is the thing, I am trying to study for my Genesys Voice Platform GVP 8.1 exam, but I keep falling asleep on my books. I don't know if it is because I am tired of taking these certification exams or because the subject is boring. But I have promised to try as hard as I can to keep studying and sit for the exam.
What is worse is that I haven't yet booked a date with Pometric for the exam, could this also be part of the reason why am dozing while studying?
My target is to sit for it end of this month of September, so i think i must just go ahead and book a date so i can get serious. off to pometric's website now!
Looking back at the revolution of contact centers, we'll notice that it was with cost in mind that the first call center was born. It all began in the US aviation industry in the late 1960s,where reservations were being handled, it wasn't long before businesses in other sectors had these 'bright' ideas for call centers: "these could reduce the need for equipment in every branch and allow us to strip out redundant people,processes and technology".
The first generation of customer service automation was the switchboard and later the PBX. These enabled customers to contact companies by phone and be routed to a particular person or department to reslove their issue. These technologies were breakthrough advancements, but could not scale to meet the pace and needs of modern customer service communications.
To solve these challenges, technologies such as Automatic Call Distributors (ACDs) and IVRs were introduced, with features such as pre-routing, music on hold, and even self-service. IVRs are typically deployed with a focus on cost containment — a way to reduce the number of calls requiring agent assistance by forcing callers through complex menu trees, options, and questions. IVRs helped reduce call volumes, but provided no assurance that customers solved their problem or reached an agent. Within this paradigm, there was no telling how many hung up in frustration.
While these solutions alleviated many drawbacks of early phone system technology, they
did not improve the customer experience and, in fact, often served to exasperate customers.
In contrast, customer-centric contact centers thrive to determine the most effective way to interact with customers and resolve their requests. Rather than force customers into frustrating IVR menus and 'voice mail jail," they leverage data and systems to efficiently interpret each interaction.
This approach not only drives customer satisfaction, but delivers efficiency gains and improved selling opportunities that translate into real bottom-line benefits.
By utilizing media resources such as speech recognition and text-to-speech, customer-centric contact centers deliver state-of-the-art capabilities to guide the machine-to-human interaction in the most compelling, effective way for the caller. Tight integration with customer data, corporate data, and content management systems deliver the detailed, up-to-date information that the solution needs to guide the call flow. Advanced business rules take this data and determine how to anticipate the caller's needs and handle them proactively.
In today's businesses where the question to answer is "how do we provide the best customer experience while managing the cost-to-serve?", it is important that businesses take on the new customer-centric approach to achieve their aim :customer retention, best customer experience and low cost-to-serve.
Ever wanted your IVR to respond with a custom,personalized greeting when your customers call your contact center? To automate up-selling/cross-selling at the right time and opportunity? Ever wanted a dynamic IVR menu option to your customers, discerning their identities and intent of the caller and determining how to treat different callers based on preferences, caller history and business rules?
If the answer is YES to these questions then Genesys intelligent Customer Front Door (iCFD) is the product you've been waiting for all these years.
Genesys iCFD consists of a unique combination of Dynamic Contact Center capabilities and advanced self-service applications. The result is a transformative intelligent routing solution that leverages a business rules engine to apply context to self-service calls to determine the most appropriate next step — self-service or assisted service — to deliver faster call resolution and superior service.
The iCFD delivers a branded, personalized, and effective customer experience that:
Discerns the identity and intent of callers in the fewest steps
Gathers relevant information from back-end data or workflow to understand the context of their calls
Determines how to treat callers based on preferences, resource availability, and business rules
Matches the most relevant and available resource, including self-service, proactive notification, automatic callback, or assisted service
The iCFD can co-exist within multi-vendor environments, operate in multiple languages
with any speech recognition software, and include business processes tailored to the unique needs of any customer service organization.
The core principle behind the iCFD is to deliver a superior customer experience by
automatically responding in a personalized way to the caller’s needs.
From the Customer's perspective,
When callers contact a company, the iCFD answers the call and assesses existing customer information. For each caller, the iCFD creates a unique interaction based on the contextual view of why the caller is making contact. By using all the information resources available about the customer, the iCFD can proactively guide them to the most effective and expedient solution, provide self-service, or route the call directly to the best available agent and offer the most relevant services. Further, the caller experiences a common voice for the company — one that reinforces the company’s brand personality and promise.
Customers can also experience the iCFD in other innovative ways — through call backs,
notifications and alerts, surveys, and other services that help further personalize and improve the experience. For instance, the iCFD can offer bill payment options when bills are overdue, route the caller to a ‘collections expert’, offer cross-selling suggestions after recent purchases, or suggest other highly relevant offers in anticipation of the individual caller’s needs.
How cool can a contact center be? There's no more leaving customers frustrated after an IVR session.
Wow! Another cool tool I saw today for the Genesys consultants and engineers.
It is called Audit Trail for Genesys.
Many Genesys engineers will usually worry about how to monitor the Genesys environment and track changes made in CME. If you are one of those then you got yourself a saviour! This tool actually details WHAT, WHEN and WHO made the change to WHICH Genesys application. How cool is that?
And that's not all, it can roll-back to your working config if the changes made have broken anything.Forgive me am just too excited about this tool, it is really cool.
Other features include:
Capability to manage and implement scheduled lock-downs for CME access. This feature is intended to prevent changes being made during pre-defined critical operational hours.
Email notifications to users and system administrators of changes made by users as they occur throughout the day. This feature is intended to prevent changes being made during pre-defined critical operational hours.
Execution of external triggers such as shell scripts when a particular object type is changed.
Audit Trail for Genesys is awesome. If you are a Genesys consultant or engineer, you need this one!
As I sit here waiting for Pizza,my mind drifts to a solution I was shown a demo of today. MOBILE IVR.
I was very impressed, not just with the technology, but the big savings that Service Providers will see with this solution. It already claims to give SPs about 70% of CapEX savings on network resources and 50% savings on OpEX.The question: how does this exactly work?
The way it works is that an app will be installed and always be running on the phone, this app will be able to detect when a customer dials an IVR number.If its the first time they are dialing, it downloads the menu options and a visual menu on their handset,via a data connection to the IVR server,then it simulates a call to the network,playing a ringback to the customer,it then plays the menu voice prompts locally on the users device using TTS. When the user selects a menu option, messages are passed between the device and the IVR server at the SP's premises over a data connection again.What's imporant here is that a voice channel actually gets used only when a user selects the option to talk to an agent,then the mobile IVR app actually makes a call to the network, otherwise, no voice channel on the SP's network is used.
This gives the caller a much better experience, no more 'network busy' errors, improved customer handling and network resource savings by the SP.
