|
CIS: What is your company's specialty and mission
statement?
ER: Having been around for more than a century, Dictaphone is one of the
most enduring brands in the United States, specializing in helping
organizations of all types find more effective ways to capture, manage and
make use of 'voice.' Some examples include the voice of a doctor dictating
patient information, the voice of your customer talking to your contact
center agent and the voice of a frantic caller dialing 911. Dictaphone
products are used by the world's leading healthcare organizations. We are
also leading the way in creating new contact center solutions that not only
capture 'the voice' of customers, but also give enterprises the tools they
need to improve customer service and retention.
CIS: What makes your products unique and how can users
benefit by using them?
ER: Dictaphone's point of differentiation is that we offer a complete
all-in-one solution to address the many diverse recording needs of contact
centers, which can include optimizing agent performance, harnessing business
intelligence, or ensuring legal compliance.
When it comes to optimizing agent performance, Dictaphone offers a solution
that is unmatched in the voice recording and monitoring industry. That's
because our solution goes beyond traditional quality monitoring to provide a
total solution for Workforce Relationship Management. What's the difference?
Almost all contact centers today employ some form of a quality monitoring
system to ensure excellent service. Typically, this involves recording
calls, evaluating agents, coaching and training. But there are inherent
problems with this approach. First of all, a quality focus doesn't begin
with monitoring agents. It begins with choosing the best agents for the job
' agents with the right combination of skills, knowledge and abilities.
After they are hired, companies can coach, train and motivate them to reach
their maximum potential. This is exactly what Dictaphone's ContactPoint
solution was designed to do.
The centerpiece of ContactPoint is a unique competency model that defines
the skills, knowledge and abilities that agents need to be successful on the
job. Once you identify these competencies, ContactPoint then helps you to
systematically apply these attributes to your hiring, training, and
assessment initiatives. This revolutionary approach helps everyone ' the HR
organization, the training department and contact center managers ' work
together as a team toward a common goal, optimizing contact center
performance one agent at a time. Agents are recruited based on the specific
competencies that are required for the job, training is delivered to agents
based on individual needs, and monitoring and assessments become a mechanism
to develop, reward and empower agents.
This competency-based approach helps contact centers make the right hiring
decisions at the outset, reducing costly turnover. Because agents get the
right training right away, training costs go down and training programs
become more effective, as do agents.
CIS: What is your vision of the future of the
CRM/contact center/teleservices industry?
ER: In a recent survey conducted by the Aberdeen Group, almost half of
senior managers, directors and C-level executives interviewed rated the
contact center's strategic importance as 'critical' to their enterprise. I
think in the future that contact centers will be increasingly recognized for
their strategic importance to the enterprise for two reasons. Contact
centers are the first of point of contact where companies connect with
customers. The contact center can define your customer's perception of your
brand and create an indelible impression. Contact centers are also of
strategic importance because they are in many ways, literally, the voice of
the customer, a place where customers freely express their opinions, wants
and dissatisfaction. Enterprises are increasingly coming to realize that if
they capture their customers' voice, listen to it, and take the opportunity
to adapt and respond, they will win their customers' hearts and wallets.
Technology such as word spotting is giving customers a voice, by unearthing
hidden information in voice recordings. Contact centers might use this
technology to identify business practices that negatively impact customer
satisfaction or retention, and be able to salvage a long-time customer (who
because of one bad experience) was about to defect to a competitor, or to
provide valuable information to the company about what customers are really
thinking, saying and doing.
CIS: What, in your opinion, is the most pressing issue
facing our industry today?
ER: If the future of the industry is moving toward the contact center as a
strategic asset, then I think the most pressing issue facing the contact
center industry today is ' 'how do we change our thinking about the
importance and the role of agents?' If contact centers are strategically
important to the enterprise, then agents should be strategically important
to the contact center. After all, no matter how much process and technology
you apply to customer interactions; ultimately it is the quality of the
contact between your agents and your customers that matters most. When your
agents deliver great service, they create lifetime customers. When they
provide bad service, on the other hand, it's as good as showing customers
the door.
Still, for all of their importance, contact center agents can feel
underpaid, under appreciated, insufficiently trained and dead-ended in their
careers. And when agents leave their jobs because of poor pay, lack of
career paths, lack of recognition, insufficient training or simply because
they're ill-suited for their position, the costs can be staggering: missed
sales opportunities, lost customers and high recruiting costs.
CIS: What are your recommendations to alleviate such
problems?
ER: In contact centers, pay is an issue when it comes to agent turnover.
However, agents leave for a variety of other reasons, such as absence of a
career path, lack of recognition and insufficient training. It's also
estimated that a large percentage of turnover is due to simply hiring the
wrong person.
By employing a workforce relationship management approach, contact centers
can be sure that they are hiring the right candidate for the job and help
agents get the exact training they need to succeed. A competency-based
approach also means that agents are hired, assessed, developed, promoted and
offered incentives based on objective competencies rather than subjective
preferences. That makes performance appraisals less painful, more productive
and makes it easy to spot employees who are achieving beyond expectations.
An agent can even be assessed for a job to which he or she aspires. This is
key, particularly for agents who feel stagnant in their careers and may
likely leave. By empowering agents with the right training and rewards,
contact centers can create a culture that values employees as much as its
customers. This approach inevitably provides companies with a distinct
competitive advantage.
If you are interested in purchasing reprints of this article (in either
print or HTML format), please visit Reprint Management Services online at
www.reprintbuyer.com or contact a
representative via e-mail at
[email protected] or by phone at 800-290-5460.
For information and subscriptions,
visit www.TMCnet.com or call 203-852-6800.
For information and subscriptions, visit
www.TMCnet.com or
call 203-852-6800.
[
Return To February
2004 Table Of Contents ] |
SUBSCRIPTIONS
TMCnet LOGIN
WEBINARS
