CloudAgent can Increase your Ecommerce Sales. Find out How?

Ecommerce in India is currently overtaken the passion of Information Technology. While Ecommerce companies may allow clients to purchase goods and services online, customers who encounter difficulties may sometimes struggle to receive assistance. There is no substitute to a live operator offering customer support when your clients need it. And with so much talk about identity theft, you need a way for your shoppers to feel secure. Even though most e-commerce transactions are managed online, there is still a need for telephone support. 24/7 customer support is the difference between growing a base of loyal customers and leaving a bad impression of your brand that could hurt your business.

 Online customers expect useful product information, access from any mobile device, intuitive interfaces, full support, a fast checkout process that accepts all payment methods, and a place to rate their experiences. They don’t tolerate screen freezes, transactional snafus or confusing menus. An effective order taking procedure is the backbone of any business that sells directly to customers.

When you advertise a phone number on your website/TV/Radio, your customers will trust in your business more and will be more apt to purchase your products. CloudAgent can help you in converting that trust in increasing your sales.

Elevate your customer experience: Have On-going training for your agents about how to convince their customer to purchase a product. Have them in the loop of the new retention management programs that the company has announced and how does it benefit the customer. Have the Agent talk to the customer from the customer perspective instead of the your company. Redesign your IVR System, Use our platform KooKoo to address usability issues while complying with the complex call routing rules caller.  Once the caller responds by making a missed call, CloudAgent records the input and updates required for your business.

Order Management/Order Processing: Order processing is been the biggest worry for every customer, especially when the consignment doesn't reach him with the time frame. With Cloud Agent you can Integrate your existing sales CRM to CloudAgent. Quickly locate Customers previous information, reduced data entry requirements.

Click to Call Features: This feature of Cloud Agent allows you to run simple inside sales, with end-to-end call tracking and analyses. This feature is very useful to reduce most of your manual work and optimize your agent productivity.

Missed Call Services: This feature can be a very useful feature to customers who are not used to make online purchases. They can give a missed call to the number advertised on the website and talk to the agent and gain credibility of the website. Another method to effectively use the missed call services is to give feedback of the website services once the consignment is delivered to the customer.  Once a consignment is received by the customer, the customer gives a missed call to the given number for feedback and the agent calls back the customer. Once the call is finished, CloudAgent fires SMS to caller requesting for feedback using a MISSED call process.  No cost to the your dashboard. Advantages of Missed call services at CloudAgent are;

1. Immediate feedback about the website process or about service
2. Identify top and bottom customers as perceived by the callers
3. Identify hidden calling patterns and customer grievance patterns
4. Very important feedback loop established immediately after the delivery of service or Call

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For enquiries please send us a email to marketing@ozonetel.com or call us at 1-800-200-0820

The economics of Call center business in India - The way forward on Cloud

India, has seen tremendous progress in the last decade and continues the same trend even in these turbulent times of global economy. This has impacted a lot of domestic industries including the Domestic BPO market. Though, the domestic BPO market has been growing at a healthy pace in the past few years ( As shown in the graph - Courtesy NASSCOM ),it has seen turbulent times due to various market factors. Some worth highlighting are:

• Cost of Agents - which sky rocketed with the international call center outsourcing peaking in the last few years. Domestic BPO's had to pay on par to retain talented employees.With the rupee going down like a rolling stone, International outsourcing centers are laughing their way to good margins and also giving good hikes to their employees. 
• Real Estate costs - with the economic boom in the first decade of the millennium, Rents / Property costs in Metros & Tier-1 cities have gone up like crazy.
• Agent Transportation costs - Travel arrangements have hit the margins of BPO's and also the transportation costs. Traffic Jams, roads, long distances to travel - every aspect of a city adds its cost.
• Attrition - High rates of attrition due to too much competition and high living costs forcing agents to change for higher salary jobs.

Domestic BPO's have to fight their way out of these problems or the local outsourcing market will go flat sooner than later. It has now turned into a phase where - " You Adapt or Die "

The immediate option which every one thinks of is to move to the less costlier cities to run the Voice market. Lets take a look at the key challenges you will face if you move in this direction:

1. Infrastructure - It could be leased lines for your office, power supply or basic real estate. Finding the right infra & a sustainable one in these tier-2 cities might be a challenge.
2. Skilled talent -  You will find local talent for hire, who can speak local languages but if you are looking for English speaking population like in the metro, it might be a challenge.
3. Resource Pool - Unlike a metro, where you will find a large set of resources ( people) with the relevant qualifications, Smaller cities means that you have limited pool of resources. So for expansion plans, you will have to open more centers.

Way Forward:

Imagine you running 20 centers across India and have to get 20 separate reports to track these centers.We at Cloud Agent, have understood these problems a long time back and that is why we have built a multi-tenant , multi location call center product. Now, you can get the reports, tracking etc in a centralized admin. Also, the other centers will act as a backup for the existing center and also increase agent utilization & productivity.

Moving to smaller Tier-3 cities, will help businesses which need - local language support for its customers, regional knowledge of places like a travel company or website, reduce cost of call to customers by giving local numbers or an SBN(Single Board Number) number.

The major advantages of adapting this strategy as observed from the trends in last 1 year : 

1) Get an agent at as low as Rs.4000 per month where as in urban areas you end up paying Rs.10000 to Rs.12000 at the minimum

2) Real Estate cost sky dives to almost 20% of cost in a metro

3) Even if you do not find the resource pool in 1 city, it does not matter. Cloud Agent can route calls to agents in any town/center within the same language group or skill group.

4) Very Low attrition - Employees are happy in their home town and doing a white collar job. With very little competition head hunting in the same location , your risk of attrition is very low.

Using the Cloud, BPO's can leverage the advantages of a multi tenant solution and cater to a larger segment of customers, at a lower cost and at the same quality. Thus, bringing a larger change to the social structure of our country and economy.

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For enquiries please send us a email to marketing@ozonetel.com or call us at 1-800-200-0820

How Can Real Estate Companies use CloudAgent.in to optimize sales

The Real Estate industry is fiercely competitive, especially among the various brands, and apart from the obvious service differentiation, it is forced to differentiate themselves in areas that influence the customer service performance. As the consumer’s primary touch point is a call centre every incoming call is business lead. This makes it absolutely necessary to employ a strategy that provides customers a defined expected treatment every time he/she calls. Customer should be absolutely sure that if he calls up customer call centre he will be able to get his job done with minimum effort and time.

Optimizing the Marketing Activities of Real Estate

v  Instead of using just one number on multiple advertising channels, Cloud Agent can help you in dealing with each telephone number for each channel to measure the effectiveness of a channel and maximize the ROI

v  CloudAgent can also be useful to call back the dropped off customers with new deals/offers to get them be a potential buyer

CRM Integration

v  Using CloudAgent.in, you can integrate your Inbound and outbound calls to your CRM. This can help you in effectively managing your Lead Management to see which calls what are the total number of calls, which once have not been attended by your sales agent. This practice also help you in single sign-in between your CloudAgent and your CRM.

v  CloudAgent can also be useful to avoid multiple agents calling the same customer. You will have a facility to route your calls for a better call management

Regional Dial-outs

v  Many Real Estate companies advertise in multiple regions across the country, when they have multiple projects running, give the phone number of their Head office where they have their customer care team. This would be a burden for the customer to call from other regions as it would be a STD call.

v   Using the Cloudagent, you can give the regional numbers of each state and still manage all these calls at one location.

Relationship Manager

v  Large Companies, usually after the down payment is done will allocate a Relationship Manager to each individual customer.

v  Many a times these companies give the direct number of the Relationship Managers so that they can be reached without dialing the corporate number.

v  In such cases the company cannot monitor the status of the conversation happening between them.

v  Using Cloud Agent the company can give its customers only one number and the routing of calls to respective Relationship Managers can happen automatically.

Lead Nurturing

v  When there is advertising activity happening over different medium’s. Real Estate companies give their numbers for the agents to reach them. When the reach of the advertisements is high, the number of customer enquiries would increase and it will be difficult for the agent to attend to all these calls. And many of the un-attended calls would not be recorded.

v  CloudAgent gives its customers a facility to record all the unattended calls from the customers and nurture them to be a effective customer.

Agent Rating Customers after attending calls

v  The agent who talks to their customers can judge’s whether he is a prospective customer or not. But, many a times the management wouldn't know about the interaction that happens between the agent and the customer. In the absence of the agent, the company wouldn't know the context of the customer and could lose a potential buyer.

v  In CloudAgent, you can create a structure where, as soon as the customer ends the conversation with your agent, your agent can give a feedback about that customer whether he is a Hot Deal, Worm Deal or a Cold Deal by assigning 1, 2 or 3 numbers respectively.

For enquiries please send us a email to marketing@ozonetel.com or call us at 1-800-200-0820

Secret Ingredient’s for increasing effectiveness in Call Management

Business communication is handled by the people who talk to the customers directly. Very often we hear about the difference between the top management who makes Policies and the employees who are making conversations with the customers. Many a times these policies that are made by the top management are passed on properly to their junior employees, or monitored by the top management to ensure these policies are in place. Having the Quality Management in place can help the organization ensure quality in their business communication with its customers. Quality management has become an essential monitoring for all business calls.

Few of the differences that arise out of Absence of quality management are;  

v  Lack of Knowledge of purpose for the junior employees

v  Ineffective communication or no complete communication with the customers

v  Absence if Performance evaluation or merit rating in the organization

v  Running the call operations based on internal data rather than quality benchmarking

v  Ineffective resources for call recording.

In order to ensure that the strategies framed by the top management reach its customers, there need to mechanism which ensures continuous improvement with its ground level staff which represents the company to its customers.

CloudAgent’s quality management features allow organizations to constantly monitor the conversations of ground level staff. Some of the secret ingredients for effective call management are;

1.       Adopting a universal philosophy of Sign on. Quality has to be a Central thought: CloudAgent offer’s a universal sign in policy for its employees. The management can see the amount of the time spent by its employees on calls. This can show if the resource allocated to a particular process gets utilized effectively.

2.       Culture Leadership: Organizational leadership is like spokes in a cycle tyre. The top management has to be aware of what is happening in each of their processes. Even if one spoke of the tyre is missing, would affect the productivity or the organization. CloudAgent help the management ge the complete view of the organization. It give 200+ reports which can be scheduled or evaluating the performance.

3.       Training employees: Training employees on new and the existing policies can ensure that every employee in the organization is in the same page. Ongoing weekly or monthly trainings can increase the depth of the conversations they can have with their customers.

4.       Encouraging Team Work: Employees learn quickly from their peers. Creating and encouraging the culture of team work and payoff as many employees would not want to go back to their seniors for every question they want to get clarity on. Many of the small questions can be address at a peer level itself.

5.       Introduce Self Evaluation Criteria: Assign/define performance matrix for employees and ask your employees to take up self evaluation tests. Many companies consider self evaluation as a good learning tool. It can also act as a powerful building blocks to quality improvement

For enquiries please send us a email to marketing@ozonetel.com or call us at 1-800-200-0820

3 Strategies to Optimize Your Call Centre Management Effectiveness

Call Centre management has been transforming from what we had yester years. Now, the game is more about Customer Retention, Customer Acquisition and cost optimization and excelling in your competition. Now comes the question of how can you excel in your Customer Service Management? As it has emerged as a key to the success of every businesses.

Cloudagent has been designed keeping in view about each and every vertical and the processes involved in such verticals such that we can deliver a superior customer experience. Cloudagent recommends 3 strategies to optimize your call center operations. 

1)   Adhering to Departmental Key Performance Indicators 

Although fundamental agent-monitoring KPIs such as average handle time (AHT), average speed of answer (ASA) and average talk time (ATT) will continue to be important measures in evaluating contact center performance in the foreseeable future, there is an increasing need to broaden the toolset. Using measurements focused on meeting company goals (such as increased sales) and objectives in the areas of customer satisfaction (“Are my customers happy?”), corporate and brand image (“How are we perceived?”) as well as building customer loyalty become more critical. These goals and objectives must be reviewed and adjusted annually, at minimum, to ensure an ongoing match between corporate mission and objectives and contact center performance. The corporate agility to change measured metrics and management tools to match evolving objectives and changing market conditions will be crucial to the success of the overall customer service effort.

At CloudAgent, “Interactive Analyst” helps you in sticking to your KPI’s. The Interactive Analyst  is contact center analytics tool bundled with CloudAgent. IA enables supervisor and decision makers to get the In-depth knowledge of their contact center . IA lets businesses know SLA performance, Agent Productivity, Overall Contact center productivity and customer satisfaction. You can also schedule the selected report to be delivered as email in your Inbox. The CloudAgent contact center dashboard provides real-time statistics of contact center performance. Supervisor can monitor one or more sites from Anywhere, Anytime over the web. This allows supervisors to easily monitor and manage distributed contact centers across locations. There are over 200 Dashboards that the customers can schedule on a daily, weekly or monthly basis. This helps the customers in closely monitoring their KPI’s and achieving them.

2) Building an Integrated Call Centre

Optimizing a customer service implementation requires integration and a complete customer

profile development across front-office and back-office operations, multiple departments and all available access channels. In addition, all operational data gathered from support systems must be unified within an actionable insight framework to drive operational KPIs from efficiency to effectiveness. Until this data integration and system coordination is achieved throughout the technologies, processes and data stores within the enterprise, customer service efforts will be sub-optimized. Building a integrated cloud contact center is a complex proposition, Cloudagent provides it all at just one click away. Using Cloudagent is easy and will just take 30 mins to install. Cloudagent can also be used not just for calls but also for emails and SMS. 

3) Process Optimization

Process optimization has been the key challenge for the senior management of companies. Process optimization if handled End-to-End, can attain desired results for any organization. Integrated quality monitoring tool, allows supervisors to judge and rate the agent performance on various process specific parameters. This helps isolate performance shortfalls and take corrective steps to rectify them, and align training to improve performance. This also provides early insights into customer expectations and behavioral trends, that helps decision makers align business strategies to keep up with business competitiveness.

For enquiries please send us a email to marketing@ozonetel.com or call us at 1-800-200-0820

How to increase your leads 300% with a single button

For all our products, KooKoo, BizPhone and Cloudagent, we have done almost zero website optimization. We have just blogged about our products and almost all our customers come through word of mouth. Maybe, because our content is good, Google sends a lot of leads our way. In fact, our click through ratios, bounce rates, leads generated etc are more than the average rates. We do not use any of the new age things like A/B testing or run a survey software etc. We are old fashioned that way :)

So recently, we decided to do some experiments and tried to apply some good practices and make some changes to our web site. I will try to share our learnings as we go along on this blog.

The first experiment we did was to add a call to action button. Before we added the button, our website looked like this:

And after adding, it now looks like this:

We just added a button which said, Request Demo.

We analyzed the traffic patterns after one month and were shocked to find the result. The number of leads generated shot up by more than 300%. We did not run any other extra campaigns in this period and our Adword spending was also kept the same. We were also not featured in any media prominently. So I guess, we have to associate the increase in leads to this one small button :)

Learning:
Give visual feedback to your website visitors with hints about what you want them to do. In our case, being a phone company, we want our visitors to call us. In our experience, once we get to talk to a customer, we have almost always been able to convince them about the advantages of our product. Hence we displayed our toll free number in a couple of places and also provided call to action buttons so that visitors can leave their information. That lead to an increase in our leads.

Next week, I will share a small one liner which helped us to increase our leads by 20%.