Answering Service Toronto | Call Centres | Business Centres

 

We’ve all been there before. You’re in a meeting and some person, your Boss or a Consultant, comes up with acronym, or a catch-phrase, a notoriously generic assertion - that while true, is hard to put to work at best and at worst means nothing for you.

Yet when when this individual turns and looks at you, the IT department, hoping for some sort of acknowledgment that you fully understand what they’re talking about and a glimpse of the master strategy you are going to follow to make the acromym become true at your office. It’s at that moment that you wish you had majored in a foreign lanuage instead of computer science.

But, don’t despair! Call Centre Toronto is here to the rescue, with a handy Lingo Translator for Geeks. I’ll try to make it easier to understand what these nuggets of business-talk mean and show how Angel can help you become a star in your organization.

In fact, there are a lot of new features coming up in Site Builder that directly relate to these areas. I’ll mention them along the way and try to help you consider how they can be used to your benefit.

Know your customer

When you hear a call center manager say ‘know your customer,’ he could mean a number of things. They all have a common theme: your application should react differently for each customer who calls because at the end of the day, their needs are different. Offering a personalized caller experience is the modern-day equivalent of having a department store clerk greet a usual customer by name as they walk into the store.

When you personalize what callers hear you are helping your customers in a number of ways: 1) You help reinforce a perception that your company cares. 2) You are helping a customer with their most pressing need at the moment. 3) You are enforcing business rules that your company has set for that customer.

You can achieve personalization throughout your Angel Voice Site. Some best practices:

• Attempt to match CallerID. - If your know who’s calling, why not greet accordingly? Think of the first prompt of your application as an opportunity to impress and a chance to direct.

• Don’t prompt for information you already know - Once you’ve identified the caller, you may be tempted to keep the application simple by not sharing state information between scripts. However, asking the same question twice annoys the hell out of callers, so think about the cost of doing this. Instead, you can use Variables and Session cookies to share key information between pieces of business logic.

• Log and recover from incomplete transactions - The phone is a ‘mostly unconnected’ medium. That means your callers are not generally connected to the application, and when they are, they could become easily disconnected (another incoming call, boss interruption, flaky cell phone connection). This will lead to incomplete transactions. For example, let’s say your application is a change of status line. You may need to collect five pieces of information before you can change the status. The customer calls, answers three, then the call is dropped. You could make the customer start from scratch next time they call, but why? Instead, personalize the caller experience and prompt them to recover from what they were doing before (”I noticed you called earlier to change your status. Shall we continue?”). Angel can help implement this behavior with Hang Up Transaction Pages, as they have guaranteed execution.

 

Get to the point

If you hear a call center manager say ‘we need to get to the point with our customers,’ he’s probably looking at his average cost per call. Many IVR systems are poorly designed and as a result force callers to spend valuable seconds just listening to prompts and menus they don’t need to hear.

When you design a ‘get to the point’ Voice Site, you are thinking hard about the call flow and only presenting the minimum set of relevant options to the caller. Options should be ordered in a manner that places the most useful choices to callers at the beginning.

Another source of time waste is poorly or rigidly worded questions. These ‘black spots’ in a design will usually yield a higher rate of user errors and a lower rate of task completion.

Angel can help in a variety of ways:

• Design dynamic menus through Variables and Transaction Pages. For example, make the home page of your Voice Site a transaction page that sends CallerID to your server, then return a series of variables representing the prompts for the main menu. That way you’ll only play menu options relevant to the current caller.

• Make good use of Site Usage Reports. These documents keep track of how callers use your Voice Site. They can give you good insight into which paths callers are taking.

• Use Transactions to define Task Completions. What are the significant points in your application (e.g. - order item, check out, credit card accepted, etc.). If you report on these back to your system, you will be able to get a picture of how your Voice Sites are performing. This will help in the next iteration of your design.

Handle less-than-perfect response scenarios through a variety of mechanisms:

• Number + Keyword Question Pages allow you to ask questions such as: “On any given month, how often do you stay with us?” and collect answers like “never,” “once a month,” or “5 times.” By asking the question in a way that the caller would expect (instead of “Please say the number of times per month that you stay with us.”), you elicit a response that comes out naturally, and doesn’t require further thinking from the caller.

• Response Filtering enables you to weed out ‘filler’ words from responses, and capture just the part you’re interested in. For example: “What car do you drive?” could be answered with: “a Honda,” “I drive a Honda,” or “Er… It’s a Honda Accord” and you could capture just the “Honda” part. There’s new advanced syntax available in Site Builder that will enable you to mark certain things as optional or for rejection. You can have it enabled by sending a Support request through the Support Center.

• Threshold tuning, a part of the ASR Settings pack, allows you to instruct Angel about the confidence levels (certainty) needed to handle caller responses. There are two levels you can play with: confidencelevel and confirmationthreshold. The former determines how confident should the system be before it rejects the response as out of context (no match). The latter instructs the system on how good a response should be before it bypasses confirmation altogether. By changing these parameters you can ensure your high-confidence callers are zooming through the application, while still taking care of less-than-perfect responses.

Pick your best player

If you hear a call center manager say ‘when a call comes in, you need to pick your best player’, he’s probably referring to how you select which agent the call will go to. Maybe in the past you’ve had an ‘agent from hell’ experience, where an agent had very little clue of how to deal with your problem, and just wasted a lot of time to get it resolved.

In the past you would need an expensive ACD (Automatic Call Distributor) system to address this issue that would handle monitoring the status of agents and matching their skills to those required to handle incoming calls.

With Site Builder, Angel can do this for you, and save you tons of money in the process. Through the Call Queue Page, you can now distribute calls based on a number of parameters. For example, if you pick “Skills-based routing” you can first filter available agents based on whether they possess a skill requested by the caller or inferred by the IVR as it handled the automated leg of the call (E.g. ‘agent must speak Portuguese’ or ‘can handle support inquiries about product x’). You can then use a load-balancing algorithm, such as ‘Least Occupied Agent’ to discern what agent the system should select before transferring.

This ensures that the ‘best available player’ is handling the call. Bliss for your manager, brownie points for you!

Don’t fly blind

If you hear a call center manager say ‘our agents are flying blind’ he’s probably referring to the fact that your agents know about the caller when the call is picked up. Or, even worse, your IVR system knows about the caller but is incapable of communicating to the agent what they need to know to answer effectively.

The traditional approach to this conundrum involves expensive CTI (Computer Telephony Integration) systems. If you have a few hundred thousand dollars to spare, CTI systems are a viable option. But, if you’re in the same boat as most IT managers, you probably have a tight budget.

Angel can help you deliver a great solution with very little work. Here’s two common approaches:

Call Screen Pops: when transferring the call, use the new Call Screen functionality to ‘whisper’ to the agent the information needed to provide good service. For example, you could design an audible pop that says:

• “You have a call from Johnathon Smith, Customer ID 3489, he has a problem with: Microsoft Word, and has been on the line for less than 2 minutes. Ready to connect?”

This gives the agent all the information to greet me:

• “Good evening Mr. Smith, I see you have a problem with your word processor, thank you for holding, let me pull up a troubleshooter here for you…”

Computer Screen Pops: if you have an existing web-based CRM system, you can make use of a Transaction Pages prior to a Call Transfer Page to call on a script that looks up the IP of the computer of the agent receiving the call, to then generate a message to that computer (HTTP Push, IM / Jabber, etc). Since Angel is standards based, the possibilities for integration are endless, as you can reuse the stack of Web standards to your advantage. I’d be happy to share more specifics of some customer projects where this has been done.

Keep an eye on the bottom line

If you hear a call center manager say ‘we need to keep an eye on the bottom line’ he’s probably fainted after getting  the thousand plus dollar bill that the telco company just sent.

There are many reasons why call centers are expensive operations, and not all of them are under your control as a developer. However, one item that you can control is how you perform transfers from the IVR system to agents.

Traditionally with Angel calls are bridged, meaning your Voice Site is still ‘plugged in’ through the end of the call. This allows you to take the caller back to the Voice Site if needed in the middle of the call (Call Cancel). But in a call center, you may have no use for this kind of functionality.

Instead, you could make use of Blind Transfers. This is functionality offered by your Telco company, usually under different names (e.g. AT & T calls it “Take Back and Transfer” and MCI calls it “Transfer Connect”). Under this setup, you instruct your Telco to route your toll-free calls to a local DID (Direct Inward Dialing) number corresponding to an Angel (703) number. Later in the call, when you need to transfer to an agent, you execute a Message Page that plays some DTMF tones in the line. These tones instruct the Telco to take the call back, and transfer it to another (possibly toll-free) number, where it will be routed to your agents.

Angel will detect a hang up and stop billing you for the call at that point.

This strategy makes sense for you if your Voice Site is transfer-heavy (i.e. a large part of the call minutes are spent on the transfer). It is more complicated than a simple bridge transfer, and carries with it some disadvantages (like establishing where to transfer at runtime or using the Call Queue page). But it could be a good money saving approach for you.

Call Centre Toronto