[April 24, 2006] Managing Interactions Across the Enterprise Tweet By: Nicolas de Kouchkovsky, senior vice president, marketing, Genesys Managing Interactions Across The Enterprise To manage customer interactions better, enterprises are breaking down the walls of the contact center to leverage expertise across departments, branches, and business units throughout the enterprise. ? Introduction The Internet has changed the way companies do business. Today, customers have complete freedom in where and how to conduct their business – storefronts, over the Internet, or by phone. Bricks-and-mortar presence no longer assures customer loyalty. Everything depends on the customer experience - before, during and after the transaction, across all channels. ? Contact centers – a key element of success Today, the contact center has become a key element of business success with a growing number of people conducting business by phone. Despite this move to non-physical interactions, customer service expectations remain high, and customers vote with their feet if their last interaction does not meet their needs. Perceptive businesses recognize this and are investing heavily in customer service processes, systems and technologies to ensure that service levels match customer expectations. In so doing, they improve loyalty, reduce churn and customer acquisition costs, and ultimately improve profitability. Success in running contact centers has resulted in more business being transacted within that channel. In a relatively short time, contact centers have moved from cost to profit centers. This rapid rise to prominence of contact centers has brought them closer to mainstream business operations, and in some enterprises they are the main interface with customers and prospects. Contact center technologies and practices are now attracting increasing attention; businesses are realizing that capabilities born in the contact center can be leveraged to improve operational efficiencies for customer transactions outside the center and across the enterprise. ? Why the renewed interest? Until recently, the promise of extending interactions across the enterprise had not been fully realized in most organizations. However, when the Internet bubble burst after 2000, many enterprises focused on increasing efficiency to meet budget cuts. This meant fewer new contact centers with fewer agents, creating a growing need to leverage business processes end-to-end across the company. Lower-value interactions were channeled into self-service and the Web, and higher-value inquiries had to be handled seamlessly to ensure single call resolution, even when the customer passed from one representative to another. ? Coming closer to the organization During this transition, contact centers opened up to the rest of the enterprise as the power of their systems and processes became obvious. The sophistication of their business processes is leading to a deep integration with enterprise transactional applications. More importantly, a strong focus on end-to-end process optimization fosters cooperation between contact centers and other functions. These evolutions are driving companies to review the role of contact centers and how they can impact their business more broadly, by embracing their discipline, best practices and technologies to manage customer interactions across the enterprise. For many companies, the business case (reduced costs, lower customer attrition, better service, finding the best person to handle the issue) for investing in customer interaction management has driven projects forward very quickly. Several of the world’s leading telecom, financial service and insurance companies have already established a proven return on investment for such initiatives. ? Bringing branch offices into the loop When Groupama, a leading mutual insurance company in France, sought to extend the boundaries of its customer service, it began by creating virtual contact centers. The company, founded at the end of the 19th century to provide insurance coverage for agribusiness, had grown to more than 8 million customers, 33,000 employees in 10 countries, and an annual turnover of 12.8 billion Euros. For more than 100 years, Groupama has grown with the constant concern to adapt to the challenges and needs of its members and customers. Groupama’s strength lies in the principles it inherited from the world of agricultural mutual insurance: solidarity, responsibility and proximity. They were looking to improve further the accessibility of their services through a virtual, multi-site customer relations center. They wanted to provide more services at lower cost, and optimize internal resources by making their branch and regional offices more accessible to the contact center, doing so by implementing an open-IP system that allows them to route calls virtually anywhere, and easily connect new sites or locations. Thus, contact center capabilities were extended out to the regional offices, taking into consideration their workloads, to provide better customer contact. ? Innovation abounds Other perceptive organizations across the globe that have a sense of the benefits of this approach are moving forward rapidly. One reason why customer interaction technology is so critical is that it enables a company to tap into all of its resources across many departments. For example, while contact center staff have great expertise in key areas such as applying business processes, routing customer inquiries and solving customer problems, they often need to engage experts from other functions to complete a transaction. The next situation describes how improved connectivity across the organization has beneficial effects for both the organization and its customers. ? Better access to functional experts The innovative approach taken by a major country’s tax office is a striking example of how improved connectivity to the right people can have a significant positive benefit. The tax office found that while most people wanted to pay their taxes correctly, their attempts to get specific queries answered were blocked by their inability to get in touch with the right experts in the tax office. The problem was that the customer service center was staffed by generalists, while special questions needed specialists. The issue was two-fold – to track these skills sets, and to locate a resource quickly when needed. Such a capability would also help in load balancing during tax season, when specialists could take some pressure off overloaded call center generalists. Systems exist that allow a customer service agent to gain faster access to functional experts. This has had gratifying results for everyone – the tax office has experienced a significant increase in collections, and fewer people are out of compliance. ? Back office experts improve contact center productivity An insurance company recently produced dramatic ROI results by investing in technology to manage interactions across the enterprise. As one of Europe’s leading insurance companies, it wanted to extend the ability to route customer calls and complete transactions beyond the contact center. The company took a core group of 400 contact center agents and linked them with 300 knowledge experts who typically handle claims processing and other insurance-related activities. Their goal was to improve both customer satisfaction and the efficiency of its knowledge experts and agents. After assessing the initial phase of implementation, the company found it had realized a 25% saving in personnel costs through greater overall productivity. This not only freed up additional agents to address other customer needs, it created better communication from the contact center to knowledge experts in the broader organization. In the future, the company plans to phase in the technology to tie together up to 5,000 knowledge experts and as many as 600 contact center agents. ? Matching customer needs to the right skills The largest mortgage lender and financial services provider in Denmark faced a similar problem as it tried to extend its customer service to incorporate branch office experts into its core contact centers. Nearly 150 agents in the contact center handle first-tier inquiries and customer service, but advanced mortgage questions are referred to local branch office experts. Instead of asking customers to call branches directly, which increased the time required and added discontinuity to the customer experience, they enabled a solution that made it easy for customers to engage with branch experts quickly. The mortgage lender company tapped into the productivity gains that can be created by integrating its 2,400 branch office employees. As a result, they route calls to personal agents associated with the mortgage process, as well as leveraging more experienced branch personnel for more advanced inquiries when needed. ? Contact centers as a customer interaction hub With the experience gathered through the preceding success stories, here are a few principles to improve the effectiveness of contact centers: • With the right infrastructure, it is easier to know the customer and create the right context the moment he or she contacts the company – via any channel or location. • Connecting the customer to the person best suited to help meet their needs produces immediate payback. • It is critical to set, and deliver on, service expectations: consistently handling all customer interactions to improve satisfaction and retention, as well as to maximize revenues and minimize costs. • Once a company is no longer bound by the walls of the contact center, it can do a much better job of managing work with fewer resources, including those beyond the contact center. ? Taking customer interactions out of the contact center Contact centers are on the verge of redefining the entire customer service interaction chain, by taking the interaction out of the contact center and across the enterprise. Companies can become much more effective by linking all of the elements of the supply chain that must work together to produce a quality product. In service businesses, much of that integration takes place through human interaction. In the service chain, the key elements are people, processes, and the interactions that must be linked to create a great, lasting customer experience. Going from an isolated contact center to distributing customer service capabilities across the enterprise is an obvious and very logical step. ? Extending contact center capabilities across the enterprise By leveraging the best practices and technologies from their contact centers and extending them across the enterprise, businesses can address the most critical needs of their clients, reduce operating costs, and grow and retain their most critical asset: their customers. Nicolas De Kouchkovsky joined Genesys in February 2000. As vice president of Products and Strategy, he oversaw product management, product marketing and strategy, while helping achieve a market leader position in the contact center software market. He is currently senior vice president, Business Development, based in Daly City, Calif. [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ]