Enterprise contact centers are becoming extremely complex, using technology from multiple vendors to meet specific customer requirements. Today, clients are using new media types such as smart phones and tablets to reach out so you need to explore new technologies such as cloud services to consolidate and improve your delivery. Why Test the Customer Quality of Experience? When you change or deploy new technology you need to understand the caller’s perspective, from the greeting through to the ag...

Watermelons are beautifully green on the outside. But if you had never seen one before, you might be deceived into thinking the whole fruit is the same color. It wouldn't be until you cut it open that you'd come to find the inside is a deep, juicy red. Even though it may sound odd, watermelons are a fitting analogy for metrics in the IT world. It's easy to get a false sense of comfort by glancing at your dashboard. It often presents a large number of indicators that give off a welcoming green gl...

Because what you don't record can hurt you Making sure your call centre monitoring solution is working properly is an ongoing challenge. Whether it's legal, healthcare, or financial services, large organizations need recordings to satisfy compliance requirements and to resolve legal disputes with customers. Financial institutions, which I'll focus on for the sake of this blog post, greatly depend on having all interactions recorded accurately and stored in an easily accessible manner. Contracts ...

The holiday rush is just around the corner!  Your companies contact centre is bracing themselves for the deluge of traffic in the lead up to the end of the year and the busiest shopping period on the planet. It is the mad rush before the holiday Seasons. Even with the most sophisticated planning and science around expected peak traffic and sustained loads, there will always be that one scenario you could not foresee ... OR COULD YOU? What if you had the ability to accurately simulate the wa...

Imagine you're trying to book a flight. You call the toll-free number and use the interactive voice response (IVR) to get through to bookings, but instead you are put through to the baggage area. You hang up and try again, but this time you wind up speaking to the airline lounge. Do you try a third time or call a competitor? I know what I would do. The IVR is now a key component to delivering a great customer experience, so what steps should a business take to ensure these systems are working op...

IVR. In many customers’ minds, this three-letter acronym is a four-letter word. It’s not uncommon for callers to mutter a diverse range of other forbidden words whenever interacting – or trying to interact – with a contact center’s IVR system. But IVR is not deserving of such hatred. IVR systems are not inherently flawed or evil, nor are the companies that use an IVR to front-end their contact centers. The reason why the general public’s perception of IVR is so negative is that so few of the sys...

In the eyes of many customers, self-service is not a compound word but rather a four-letter one. It’s not that there’s anything inherently bad about IVR or web self-service applications – it’s that there’s something bad about most contact centers’ efforts to make such apps good. Relatively few contact centers extend their quality assurance (QA) practices to self-service applications. Most centers tend to monitor and evaluate only those contacts that involve an interaction with a live agent – i.e...

Business is a fluid thing; the past 30 years have seen innovation after innovation and with it, a shift in culture. The 1980s saw a focus on quality products. The 1990s illustrated enterprises centered on branding. In the 2000s what differentiates companies? Customer Service. Customer service has climbed the list of priorities, and today one can see companies putting money where their mouths are by investing in a quality customer experience. Russ Zilles, CEO of IQ Services took some time to talk...

Are carrier and toll-free services still correctly provisioned?Are cloud services working as expected?Are IVR and self-service applications up and running?Are host response times acceptable?Are speech recognition and TTS services available?Are failover/backup servers up and ready to take traffic?Did the right data pop on the agent’s desktop?Does call intelligibility degrade at certain times of day?Is your customer-facing technology performing 24 x7?Are customers having the issue-free technology ...

The convergence of voice, web, social media and video means that solution providers are coming up with exciting and sophisticated ways to allow users to take more control of their customer service experience. Customers want to decide how they communicate with your company, and how your company communicates with them. Two of the challenges facing contact centres today are “multichannel” and “multimodal” technologies. This article will explore these terms and introduce some ways to ensure that the...

Providing Contact Centres with Reliable, End-to-End Performance Metrics Many people believe they are best served by real people, not by voice robots. That’s the rationale behind GetHuman.com. But the economics and utility of self-service as an alternative to live agent interactions are so compelling that self-service solutions are here to stay. Providing multiple touch-points is a huge technology investment. Technology is great, but you can’t just diligently manage the implementation process and...

In the world of computing technology and communications solutions, the last twenty years have been one revolution after another. Faster processes, niftier appliances, smarter phones, and virtualized services are everywhere. Contact centers have grown from hunt groups and operator consoles to full-blown CRM solutions riding on top of evolving, complex technologies. Many of us are excited to use the new technologies because of three potentially significant benefits: generate cost savings facilitat...

Since Interactive Voice Response (IVR) systems were first introduced as a customer service tool, there have been many detractors. However, a recent Forrester Consulting survey indicates that the tide has turned and customers have accepted IVR and, in some cases, even prefer it to live operators. Speech-enabled self-service IVRs have become so commonplace that many consumers report that they prefer to use such systems for simple tasks such as checking account balances, flight statuses or shipment...

Whether in the product business, or in services, a company’s brand image is shaped by how customers feel about interacting with the company. The impression they take away from a call to the business’s support or contact center has a lasting impact that can be either good or bad. Customer facing operations are crucial. As a business grows or undergoes other strategic changes, it may require updating its contact center operations as well. Signaling Change Arnab Mishra is Senior VP, Products and So...

In the eyes of many customers, self-service is not a compound word but rather a four-letter one. It’s not that there’s anything inherently bad about IVR or web self-service applications – it’s that there’s something bad about most contact centers’ efforts to make such apps good. Relatively few contact centers extend their quality assurance (QA) practices to self-service applications. Most centers tend to monitor and evaluate only those contacts that involve an interaction with a live agent – i.e...

The IVR is an integral part of any call center. Customers can call the center and get what they need without ever talking to a human, allowing agents greater availability to handle the more pressing calls. Yet despite their obvious advantages, most IVR systems aren’t perfect and can benefit from some improvements. How do you know when your IVR is due for some revamping? One of the best ways is to dial the number yourself. By putting yourself in the shoes of the customer, you’ll get to experience...