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%.

Technology powering Cloudagent-Cloud based Call Center Product

We at Ozonetel take great pride in powering the call centers for SMEs/SMBs and Enterprises as well. We know that the call center is generally the first point of contact for a customer with a business and we are proud of the architecture we have created to make this contact as error free as possible.

Some numbers:

Currently Cloudagent handles more than 10 million call center minutes in a single month with more than 30,000 agents logging in. We also manage 10s of terabytes of data(audio, logs etc)

The Cloudagent API is also pretty robust and handles 10s of millions of API requests every month.

Technology Stack:

We have dabbled with all the cool new kids on the block including Redis, Mongo, Nodejs etc, but for our core, we have gone with the tried and tested stack and it has held us in good stead.

1. Mysql: The complete backend is handled in Mysql. Our star DBA, Anupam, has created a set of scripts and procedures which somehow magically handle whatever we throw at it.

2. Java and PHP: For the application layer we went Java and PHP. Though they may not be as sexy as the new programming languages, they have got the job done and we have so far found no reason to try out new things.

3. Beanstalk: For all queuing purposes we use Beanstalk. Once again, we had to add a lot of monitoring stuff on top of this, but its fairly solid.

4. Mongo: We push all our logging to Mongo and manage that centrally.

5. Redis: This is a new addition to the family, we are experimenting with a new analytical engine using Redis. The results are encouraging and we will be rolling out new dashboards next month.

Really sorry, this blog post is not about some flashy new tool which has helped us out :)

But the truth is, the old, tried and tested tools with proper fundamentals and good design patterns have helped us to reach this scale. We will talk about our design patterns in another blog post.

Taking a rural BPO operation live in a day - Just another day in the life of a cloud telephony company

August 14th:
Just another normal day of office. We are all working on our respective jobs( or playing TT :)). At 10:14 am we get a lead on our portal at http://www.cloudagent.in. This was from one of the biggest rural BPO organization in the country. Immediately sales team reaches out to the lead and gets the details.

The Requirement -

1. Calls from every circle in India, have to be greeted and treated in their local language or atleast identified and tagged for that circle. 
2. Also, calls should be routed to North, West, East and South based on circle of the caller. 
3. All calls have to be greeted first, then loaded into the dialer so that heavy loads can be catered to.

This is for a prestigious government project and has to go live immediately after the independence day speech. Some time ago UPA government gives a nod for one of their dream project. Soon, a private BPO provider with agents from rural areas in India bags the contract and reaches out to us, Ozonetel, to help them out in setting up a cloud based call center.

Image courtesy:bpovoice.com

2:30pm:
All teams are a go for making this project a success. The telecom team reaches out to our partners in various telcos to get a fancy number. The provisioning team starts the resource provisioning process and the IVR team gets the requirement on the IVR.

5:30 pm:
Requirements are frozen and all systems are kept ready for deployment once the announcement is made.

August 15th

Independence day speech- The Prime Minister Announces about the project to the Nation to keep their promise.

9:00 am: Ozonetel starts work and deploys the contact center solution with the complete requirements in 4 hours. This includes configuring agents, setting up skills, configuring administrators, user management.

Every good thriller story has a twist and even our go live had a twist. Though we were told that the go live date would be August 17th, we were told at 12:00 pm that the advertisements about the service would come the next day itself and hence the go live would be on August 16th. No problems, the wonderful team at Ozonetel has handled much harder twists than this.

4:00 pm: The call center goes live with training to the agents for 15 minutes ( Our Agent UI is that simple to understand and use ). The agents take test calls and are happy with the simplicity of the system.

10:00 pm: Call testing is finished.

12:00 am: Ozonetel team calls it a day and the team break open a few bottles of beer.

August 16th:

The phone number is published in leading dailies and agents start getting live calls.

Now - We have a happy client, UPA breathes comfortably at the successful go live ( just kidding :) ) and our team still working on other such projects...its an every day job at Ozonetel to make live such projects....

More stories coming ....The real ones ...from the Experts in Cloud Telephony.

Top Reasons Indians Call Businesses

We at Ozonetel, handle millions of call center calls in India(more than 700 million so far). Most of the top companies in India use our products to power their communication infrastructure. To support this we have a whole host of monitoring dashboards. Today, we want you to have a peek at a cool Live calls dashboard that we have built using Arborjs and Angular that gives you an insight into what verticals Indians call. This is a live dashboard(but only of a subset of the total calls) of the verticals which are receiving calls on our platform right now. It auto updates every 10 secs.

We will be open sourcing the dashboard code on Github next week.

You can view the live dashboard in a separate screen

Ideas to reduce your Agent talk time in an Inbound Call Center

In this article, we will discuss on how to improve agent productivity by discussing on various ideas with which Agent's Talk Time can be reduced. Call center software solution should look at reducing the agent talk time as much as possible. The premise for this discussion is that the Agent / Call Center Executive is the costliest resource in the system and every thing else works around them to help and maximize the Agent's efficiency.

Some of these are common sense and most common practices across Contact Centers. Some of them are specific to how the agent talks and walks the script with the customer. We have listed them down all here:

1. Have Cheat sheets -
• Ready made information like phone numbers of branches , Escalation numbers where you need to transfer etc. Some of this information can be stored in your contact center software itself like transfer number lists, conference numbers etc - This feature is part of our product http://cloudagent.in 
• Some data will be specific to your process, like if you are a cab operator you will find that having all the operator numbers listed ( easy to search) will shorten your talk time, or like having all numbers of bus operators will help in case you run a call center for a travel operator
2. Your Contact Center software should be integrated with your CRM ( CTI integration) for giving a POP to the agent with the customer information. It has been observed that POP helps reduce Agent talk time by almost 30% in various processes.

• Here at Cloud Agent , we ensure that all our customers experience this efficiency by integrating their CRM systems. We have integrated almost 30 different CRM systems till date.
3. Incoming Number display - Agents will have ready made reference of the customer number and they need not spend time in asking the number.
4. Script:  Having a script which is related to your process is another way to reduce your agent talk time. The agents can quickly get the problem addressed. Obviously, the script is an evolving phenomena and has to be changed based on feedback received periodically. Script reduces talk time by 10% especially in support contact centers
5. Skill Based Routing:  Diagnosing the customer problem/ needs in the IVR itself by providing options in the IVR is another way to reduce talk time. The moment call lands on the agent screen, your agent is equipped with information on what the customer wants. This works best in tandem with Screen POP and is the most effective feature.

There are lot of ways to reduce talk time or eliminate the need to talk to an agent in the IVR itself. You can refer to our previous blog for this - http://blog.cloudagent.in/2013/06/5-characteristics-of-good-ivr-system-in.html

Hope to save some bucks for you ...Cheers

5 characteristics of a good IVR system in a call center

Browsing on Quora, I came across a question

IVR : everyone hates IVR's , wonder if anyone thought to visulize them instead listening to these long and complicate recordings? We only want to speak with someone ... Not to a machine

That started me thinking about the reason why in general, people hate IVRs.

A good IVR should not make you hate it :)

The main reason why people hate IVRs is because they are not well designed. Unfortunately, not many people

design good IVRs. Just as a badly designed web site will lose a prospective customer, a badly designed IVR also leads to a lot of heartburn. Studies have shown that more than 80% people with a bad IVR experience will stop giving business to the company and more than 70% will spread the bad news through word of mouth. So it is imperative that companies spend time and thought on designing their IVRs. In-spite of this, we have found that most companies provide an IVR as an after thought which does more harm than good.

But a well designed IVR is really useful. Remember, customers are calling your hotline to get some information. The main reason is not to talk to someone as the question above indicates. They want to talk to someone because customers believe that people can solve their problems better. But if they call and find their answer in an IVR, they will be just as happy. If the IVR is intelligent enough to recognize you, do a database dip and and answer your query automatically(like playing the status of your order etc), then you would not need to talk to a person also and you would still be happy.

So, based on our experience with call centers in India, we have come out with the following 5 characteristics that every IVR system should have.

1. Recognize your customer

This is by far the most important one. When a caller calls and you welcome them by name, you show that you care. You start of on a good note and the caller gets a little bit more confidence on the IVR system. Without this, the caller thinks the IVR is just a dumb system and will start looking for the option to connect to an agent.

2. Recognize context

If I have called your IVR earlier and asked a question and you have an answer to my question, the next time I call, the IVR should recognize the state and give the correct contextual answer to me rather than asking me repeat the question.

3. Provide default options

A customer should never be lost in an IVR. He should always be able to go back to previous menu, go to the top menu or talk to an agent directly. These are the bare minimum. Also, you should have fallbacks for touch-tones and allow a caller multiple tries for entering the tones.

4. Route caller to correct agent and pass info to the call center

After collecting caller information, select the proper department/specialist and route the call to that location so that the caller can talk to the corresponding expert immediately. 

5. Support multiple languages

India is a land of many languages.So, provide options to callers to choose their language of choice. More importantly, remember their choice so that the next time they call, they are welcomed in their language of choice.