Call Centers are forever focused on providing valued customer experiences at affordable rates. Call Centers have evolved into Contact Centers and are no longer a "cost center" but a "strategic differentiator" viewed as an asset of the organization.
New technologies have been very instrumental in the transformation of Call Centers. By streamlining processes and measuring results, management has ever increasingly been empowered with the tools to focus on the problems and implement improvements.
The common approach over the past 20 years has been to focus on the internal metrics of the Call Center, addressing areas such as average speed to answer (ASA), average wait time (AWT), and average handle time (AHT). And more comprehensive approaches that measure the whole process may look at service levels or single call resolution percentages.
The missing measurement in all of these approaches is customer satisfaction!
Customer satisfaction is the true "roll up" metric that measures how your customers like your product and are willing to remain loyal. The ability to measure attitudes, professionalism, and overall interaction of the CSR and the company, goes beyond the metrics of the call and identifies the "Delivery" of the call. Measuring this data point however is not easily achievable with internal metrics and requires a technology that speaks directly with the customer.
So the challenge in the industry, once again, is to identify a technology that provides the qualitative measurement of customer satisfaction at a reasonable price while not disrupting the existing infrastructure. The solution would also be required to fit into most Call Center technologies with minimal or zero disruption of service and generate statistically valid measurements across multiple queues. And finally, the design had to be affordable for the smallest of Call Centers with the ability to scale to the largest.
Using a Microsoft Speech Server-based solution, integrated with Envox’s CT Connect CTI server, an economical solution with scalability can now be offered as a packaged application addressing all sizes of the market: the Primas Post Call Survey application. This application typically shows an ROI of below 6 months.
When a call arrives at the contact center, a built-in algorithm selects a percentage of the calls that will be intercepted and presented to the MSS subsystem. The remainder of calls is not touched and proceeds through the call flow as normal.
The MSS-based solution then presents the call with an initial greeting informing the caller that they were randomly selected for a survey and asks if they would like to participate in the survey immediately after the call. The response is noted in the CTI server for later retrieval.
Upon termination of the call, and disconnect by the customer service representative, CSR, the Post Call Survey application inspects the initial response and if a yes was noted, the call is presented back to the MSS-based subsystem for the survey. Typical surveys comprise a series of questions ending with an open ended recording of the callers choosing. Results are immediately available with ad-hoc reporting.
Although post-call surveys have been used in the industry for a while, they most often require some form of manual operation to identify a random list of customers to survey and can be expensive if performed by live agents as an ongoing operational expense. Such solutions provide a high degree of manual intervention and are often times costly to administer.
By automating the process with a CTI server, CSRs are unaware of which calls become part of the survey. Since information about the caller as well as the CSR are stored in a SQL database, ad-hoc reports could be generated to further measure group or even agent performance.
Two platforms are used to build this Post Call Survey application: an IVR platform to perform the automated survey, and a CTI server to integrate with the existing infrastructure to perform the necessary call control functions of randomly selecting calls and routing them appropriately.
Microsoft Speech Server (MSS) is the preferred platform because it meets the IVR requirements and has the added benefit of being able to use speech technology at no additional cost. This value-add benefit provides the final touch on measuring customer satisfaction!
Envox’s CT Connect CTI server was selected as the middleware for call control. The solution has the ability to integrate with most Call Center technologies in the market today and provides the necessary scalability for growth.
Both of these solutions are installed on site and integrated into the existing call flow. As the application is an overlay to any existing IVR application that may be running, there is no disruption to the existing IVR infrastructure and minimal impact on the Call Center operations and customer interaction.
With Primas Group’s Post Call Survey application, companies are now able to gain valuable insight into one of its most valuable intangible assets: Customer Satisfaction!
From April through June, Primas is offering a 25% discount for the initial set of customers using different Contact Center ACDs and who agree to serve as a reference.
For more information on the packaged Post Call Survey application, contact The Primas Group at (714) 901-2705 or visit the web at http://www.primas.net/primas_pcs.htm.