Interactive Intelligence Lyncs the Contact Center for Customer Experience
Interactive Intelligence Lyncs the Contact Center for Customer Experience by Blair Pleasant
In an effort to retain customers, companies are no longer merely focusing on customer satisfaction, and have turned their attention to the “customer experience.” The customer experience begins the very first moment a potential customer interacts in some way with your brand or service.
Studies have shown that companies’ revenues can be dramatically influenced by their customer experience scores, and there is a strong correlation between revenue and slight improvements in overall customer experience scores. According to the 2011 Customer Experience Impact (CEI) Report by Harris Interactive, 86% of customers will pay more for a better customer experience, while 89% of consumers began doing business with a competitor following a poor customer experience. This means that by improving the customer experience – even slightly – companies can see significant increases in revenue. This begs the question, if such revenue is so highly influenced by mere percentage point shifts in customer satisfaction scores, shouldn’t companies be doing every little thing they can to increase their chances of positively influencing that score? The answer is, of course they should.
Customer experience is all about doing the little things right, not just the big things. There are many ways to increase customer experience scores and improve the overall customer experience from within the contact center, such as reducing transfers and hold times or by improving First Contact Resolution (FCR). FCR has been talked about for a long time, but with today’s Unified Communications capabilities, FCR rates can be drastically improved. By integrating contact center solutions with UC solutions providing presence information and a view into the availability of subject matter experts the agents can connect with, companies are improving their FCR rates and thus improving their customer experience scores.
FCR means that your customers reach the right person and get the information and service they need the first time they contact you, whether by telephone, email, web chat or IM. The concept of FCR has been around for many years, but it wasn’t until the introduction of UC, providing capabilities such as presence awareness and Instant Messaging, that it became more practical. With UC, contact center agents can quickly and easily see which experts within the organization are available to help with a customer inquiry in real time. The agent can collaborate with the expert via phone, instant messaging (IM), screen sharing, and video, regardless of where the expert resides. Agents can access experts in real time and respond to customer queries more expediently, and provide the information customers are looking for without the customer having to call back or speak to someone else.
One of the leading UC solutions on the market is Microsoft Lync, which has added more and more communication components as it evolved from Live Communication Server (LCS) to Office Communication Server (OCS) and now Lync. When Lync was announced, Microsoft touted the fact that in addition to its IM and presence capabilities, Lync can be used as a PBX replacement. The number of companies using Lync Voice has grown dramatically, with almost three million enterprise users using Lync for voice communications rather than a traditional PBX. With Lync, Microsoft is now considered to be a major player in the communications world, and was even included not only in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for Unified Communications, but in the Magic Quadrant for Corporate Telephony as well.
However, there’s one big caveat when it comes to Microsoft Lync – there is no contact center offering, and Microsoft needs to partner with vendors to provide a more holistic solution for the contact center. Lync currently integrates with products from several contact center vendors, including Altigen, Aspect, Clarity Connect, ComputerTalk, Interactive Intelligence, prairieFyre, and Zeacom.
Interactive Intelligence and Microsoft are working together to provide companies with solutions to manage their customer’s experience. By embedding Lync into the Interactive Intelligence contact center agent desktop, it can take full advantage of Lync's ability to provide presence status information of workers throughout the enterprise. This lets contact center agents reach into the rest of the business to find the right subject matter expert needed to answer questions for the customer. The result is reduced hold times and blind transfers, and increased first contact resolution rates. This little addition has a huge impact on customer satisfaction and the customer experience. In fact, studies show that customer satisfaction drops an average 10% with each call back. Improving first-contact resolution means that fewer second-contact calls will be required, which results in direct quantifiable savings. On average, every 1 percent increase in first-contact resolution results in a 0.64 percent increase in customer satisfaction.
The integration of Microsoft Lync and Interactive Intelligence’s Customer Interaction Center™ (CIC) gives contact centers the ability to greatly influence the customer experience through:
- Using IM or Video to connect to knowledge experts in the rest of the company (outside of the contact center) to get answers customers need;
- Using Lync’s screen sharing capabilities, agents can share their desktops with supervisors to get assistance;
- Using Lync’s screen sharing capabilities, knowledge experts could share their screen with the agents to show them answers for the customer; and
- Using Lync’s point-to-point video, companies could create video kiosks to route video traffic through CIC to provide a face-to-face customer service experience (such as in a banking scenario).
There is huge potential for companies to improve the customer experience by integrating UC with contact center capabilities. However, the ability to do this has been possible for several years and the market has been slow to embrace it. We expect this to change as more companies implement and deploy integrated UC and contact center capabilities. As more companies deploy UC, and as Lync customers integrate with contact center products such as CIC, the customer experience can be improved and enhanced, leading to increased revenues and long-term customer loyalty.
This paper was sponsored by Interactive Intelligence.