Organizations that have optimized engagement have outperformed their competitors by 26% in gross margin and 85% in sales growth

Or so says Gallup in their description of world-class companies that utilize Customer Engagement (CE) strategies and measure their CE efforts. Furthermore, Gallup has developed an Engagement ratio that can provide companies with "a macro-level indicator of an organization's health that allows executives to track the proportion of fully engaged to actively disengaged customers".

File under "Need to Know" regarding Customer Loyalty and Customer Satisfaction

Every business owner needs to know these 23 facts about customer loyalty and customer satisfaction, as compiled and presented by Adele Somers at Return on Behavior Magazine.

Organized in five categories, Somers provides compelling information that business owners need to keep in mind as they develop or enhance their customer engagement strategies.

• Facts about customer experiences and referrals
• Facts about customer retention and churn facts
• Facts about customer service and contact centers/call centers
• Facts about phone service
• Facts about customer service and contact centers and call centers

Save the Date for Avaya PDS Users Group Conference

Hey kids! The Avaya PDS User's Group is gearing up for their training summit and vendor expo coming in September.

My company will be there to inform Avaya PDS users how they can maximize their dialer and other technology investments through integration made possible by our software.

Hopefully soon I'll get a chance to interview one of the Avaya PDS Users Group board members and will publish a podcast. In the meantime, learn more about the event.

The Unified Desktop Isn't Just for Customer Service Agents

Contact centers are now beginning to realize the value of a single interface through which their various team members (agents, supervisors, executives, even IT) can do their jobs, or at least significant portions of their jobs. This single interface is known as the unified desktop, as I previously blogged.

The difference between my initial post and this new one is that previously I was focusing on the unified desktop solely for the agent - the person(s) interacting with the customer on a telephone call or via email or chat sessions. The unified desktop was a single, central place where data from disparate sources, and functionality from different systems, came together in an easy-to-use, recognizable screen that made customer interactions easier and faster to achieve.

I now realize that the unified desktop is really more like a unified interaction application which can be relevant for any and all users within a contact center operation. Supervisors can use this same interface, albeit with different capabilities based on their role as a supervisor, to perform their supervisory duties. Executives, too, should be able to use this same interface, again with information and capabilities that are specific to their user role and permissions. In this way, a well-developed unified desktop can provide a sort-of centralized operating system (OS) that literally allows everyone within a contact center to work within the same application.

More on this in future posts...

Contact Center Trends

CP Wire recently published an article outlining 10 trends in the contact center. They do a decent job of describing the activities of forward-thinking contact centers, and the ideas here are very similar to my own posts.

Right Party Contact Podcast

I hosted my first podcast for The Evolving Contact Center. This episode (about 5 minutes total) is all about right party contact for the collections industry. I interviewed Rick Novak, a long-time contact center consultant, and he offers some great info about how companies use RPC as a strategy to collect more debt. He also talks about integration with Avaya PDS (predictive dialer) systems.

Call Center Vendor Checklist

Here are but a few useful tips to consider when purchasing contact center software:

• Carefully consider the differences between hosted and on-premise solutions. Each has their own merits depending on the business need, but dig deeper than the prevailing hype. Conventional wisdom seems to be that hosted solutions are attractive due to the supposed low-cost, up-front investment. However, when calculating the total cost of ownership, on-premise solutions can be more cost-effective investments than hosted offerings—sometimes even as quickly as within the first or second years of ownership.
• Consider purchasing a call center software solution that allows you the ability to establish integrations between your dialer and other, existing third-party applications or custom, internal applications—without the purchase of additional software and equipment.
• Purchase a software solution that provides you, in a single license, all of the functionality you need to sufficiently operate your contact center. Pay-per application (agent applications, supervisor applications, etc.) can become cost prohibitive.
• Make sure your call center software vendor offers free subsequent software upgrades or otherwise does not force you to upgrade to (and pay for) future releases.
• Seriously consider the fact that many call center software vendors offer “bolted-on” systems with disparate products that were acquired through mergers. Holistic software offerings may represent the better bet since they were designed, from the ground-up, to work together harmoniously and don’t require complex workarounds, proprietary APIs, and additional professional services expertise to implement.

Technology: Does It Work On YOUR Terms?

Would you buy a car if it provided everything you wanted—powerful engine, fuel efficiency, sleek body, slick paint job and a CD player with 6-disc changer—but that required you and the other passengers to sit on the roof?

Probably not.

Of course these are ridiculous examples, but they make an important point for contact center managers to consider: technology should work in the way you need it to, and you should never adjust the way you do business to accommodate the limitations of any technology.

Certainly no business ever intends to be in this situation, yet far too many contact centers today find themselves slaves to technology—and they’re losing business opportunities to competitors who recognize that the status quo represents stagnation, not success. In short, the successful contact center is one that is enabled by technology, and not hindered because of it.


The core components of your contact center technology infrastructure—predictive dialer, ACD, IVR—should not be so obtuse and unfriendly as to force you to bend to their will, so to speak. These systems should be flexible enough to easily and intelligently connect to and interoperate with the other critical applications that power your business such as workforce management, speech recognition and quality assurance, to name but a few.

The all-important data that flows between these internal systems should do so freely, based on the rules you define and in the ways that you decide. These technologies should provide an easy way to make simple or complex changes (update a call script, change a data source, replace vendor A with vendor B, or provide a different agent application). And, once changes are made, your technology should allow instant, real-time updating and not force downtime during peak activity or require after-hours system pushes.

Practical managers are fond of saying, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” But just because a technology component works doesn’t mean it works well, or that it works in the ways you want and need it to. When practical managers add insight to their thought process, they will successfully avoid the trap of mistaking practicality for the acceptance of the status quo, and they will optimize their IT investments for the sake of their business.

Take the time to honestly and soberly assess your IT landscape. If, after doing so, you can confidently state that your current technology investment has your business poised for future growth and success, then congratulations are in order. However, if you discover that you’re sacrificing efficiency for the sake of technology, you need to reconsider your business priorities. Your position in the marketplace will be dictated by how well you meet market demand, and failure to recognize the need for adaptation can yield disastrous results for your contact center.

Be practical. Be insightful. And be careful. If you’re not, you may find yourself driving your car from the roof, or using a diesel-powered laptop!

Some Additional Insight Into ContactBabel's US Contact Center Operational Review

In "The US Contact Center Operational Review", a free study of over 200 contact center operations carried out by ContactBabel in association with the American Teleservices Association (ATA), they report some interesting reasons why outsourcers are, or are not, adopting hosted vs. premise-based solutions.

Drivers for adopting hosted solution
According to the report, the main drivers for adopting a hosted solution are:

...decreased capital expenditure that such a model brings, as well as the possibility of increasing functionality quickly and cost-effectively, allowing them to try new applications without having to commit massive resources of time and money. More than half of respondents report that they strongly feel that hosted solutions can provide these two advantages.

The report also indicates that other drivers for hosted solutions include managing call fluctuations, reducing ongoing costs and saving on technical support costs.

Concerns about adopting a hosted solution
Reason for concern, according to survey participants, in adopting a hosted solution included 1). a lack of justification for replacing an existing system and 2). the loss of control as it related to getting problems fixed quickly.

I tend to agree with Contact Babel on all of these points, but a glaring omission in their report, as far as reasons NOT to adopt a hosted solution, have to do with inflexibility for integration.

Increasingly contact centers have to connect with multiple and numerous disparate systems, both internal and external to their enterprise. Once you've hosted your contact center capabilities, you no longer have direct, immediate access to the architecture that must be exposed in order to facilitate integrations with mission-critical systems like CRM packages, ERP systems, and a whole host of other business applications and systems that play an integral part in every interaction.

I completely understand a contact center's need to manage and reduce costs and to expand functionality quickly and selectively based on customer demand and seasonality. And I am a fan of the SaaS model when appropriate. But it's important to keep in mind that, because the contact center is becoming more and more a major part of the enterprise and thus requires comprehensive integration into the rest of the business, the ability to achieve integrations should be as lofty a consideration as price.

Make sure your contact center solution provider can give you the best of all worlds. Many vendors offer leasing options for premise-based systems to create the "feel" of a hosted solution. Large up-front capital investments can be repurposed as monthly payment that prevent cash flow crunches while enabling the scalability for connectivity that your center will undoubtedly need.

The report, created in association with ATA (The American Teleservices Association) is entirely free and can be downloaded from www.contactbabel.com.

Maximizing Contact Center Productivity: A few clever ideas

Over at the Evolving Contact Center, a podcast series that I produce for Interactive Softworks, we do a monthly segment with The Call Center School on topics like IVR menu design, staff management, and verbal makeovers.

In the most recent episode, Penny Reynolds, one of the founders of the The Call Center School, offers some crafty ideas for maximizing contact center productivity. This is a good listen for those anyone who manages contact center staff or technology.

The Consolidated (or Unified) Desktop

Contact centers are subjected to constant change: clients are forever updating, modifying and changing scripts, adding new projects, and introducing new sources of data that must be accessed to make an interaction be successful.

And while it might seem the IT team would be victimized by such continuous fluctuation, its the agent who may suffer the worst. Without a unified, or consolidated desktop, agents are clicking through multiple screens, copying and pasting data from one place to another, and otherwise engaging in effective tasks when they need to be focused on customer service and quality.

The consolidated desktop is one that, within a single interface, data from different sources (and even in completely different physical locations) can be assembled for easier access by the agent. Contact centers of all sizes are beginning to move towards this vision.

I was interviewed by The Evolving Contact Center podcast about this very subject. Check it out and let me know what you think.