Keynote speaker, Donna Fluss, president of DMG Consulting, shares key strategies to help you:
- Improve productivity by reducing expenses
- Provide an outstanding customer experience
- Generate incremental revenue
- Retain customers
Next you’ll here from RightNow's Director of Product Marketing, Stephen Bell. Steve will unveil technologies that will help you deliver on the recommended strategies.
Web Form Automation for Bonterra Impact Management (fka Social Solutions Apri...
Contact Center 09 – Not Just Surviving But Thriving In A Down Economy
1. Contact Center ’09 – Not Just Surviving but Thriving in a Down EconomyPresenters:Donna Fluss, DMG ConsultingStephen Bell, RightNow
2. Introducing Our Keynote Speaker Donna Fluss, President of DMG Consulting 25 Years Experience in CRM and Contact Centers Author of our give away book: The Real-Time Contact Center
3. 3 Customer-Focused Strategy, Operations and Technology Contact Centers: Thriving in Good and Challenging Times Donna Fluss, President January 2009 3
4. 4 Customer-Centric Business Trends The recession will dramatically impact the role of contact centers Customer churn plagues most industries (5% to 30% annually) and is a greater issue during recessionary times Internet-based social networking has given customers a vehicle for spreading good and bad news in the click of a mouse Generation Y’ers with an inseparable connection to technology will change the way business is conducted in the next 3 to 5 years. Contact centers are converting to revenue generators Analytical solutions are bridging the gap between the contact center and sales, marketing, operations and the executive suite The contact center is becoming the primary source of enterprise customer analytics Contact centers are increasingly viewed as essential corporate players 4
17. 9 Enterprise Role of Contact Centers Channels Calls eMails Self Service Mobile (self-service) Blogs Rss Feeds Bulletin Boards IM/Chat Video Contact Center Inquiries/problems/transactions RevenueGeneration Sales & Mktg. Opportunitiesand Challenges General Co.Feedback CustomerAnalytics Business Units ExecutiveSuite Sales Marketing Operations Fulfillment MFC 9
26. Web Blogs Capture Wikis Structure Unstructured Communications Take Analyze Contact Center Take Action
27. 11 Analytics is the Answer v Quality scores Customerfeedback Real-timeanalytics Performance management Speech analytics Web analytics Predictive analytics Analytics Applications Customer valueanalytics 11
28. 12 It’s Time to Change Corporate Culture! Corporate Lobotomy
29. 13 Customer-Focused Strategy, Operations and Technology Thank You! DMG Consulting LLC, 6 Crestwood Drive, West Orange, NJ 07052 tel 973.325.2954 | cell 973.493.0120 | fax 973.325.2071 | donna.fluss@dmgconsult.com 13
30. Contact Center ’09 – Not Just Surviving but Thriving in a Down EconomyStephen Bell, RightNow
31. Agenda 2009: Focus on Retention and Cost Control The Customer Experience Imperative Technology Strategies to Achieve Both Goals 8 Steps
32. 2009: Focus on Retention and Cost Control Major strategic Call Center priorities for 2009?* Cost reduction and customer retention are enterprise top priorities COST REDUCTION 1 2 CUSTOMER RETENTION 3 Improve Business Intelligence 4 Acquire New Customers 5 Environmental Issues “Technology investments that increase customer retention and protect revenue or help reduce inventory and operational costs will move to the forefront.“ - AMR's 2009 Customer Management Market Outlook * “CRM in the Contact Center” Datamonitor September 2008
33. The Customer Experience Imperative “80% have quit doing business after a negative experience… 20% will never return.”* “99% are likely to recommend your business after a positive customer experience.”* “In 2009, the spotlight will remain on customer experience. Our analysis shows that good customer experience is highly correlated to customer loyalty, but customer-facing touchpoints at many organizations are clearly broken” - Forrester Research, Trends 2009: Customer Relationship Management * Harris Interactive, “Customer Experience Report,” March 2007
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35. Moving customers to self-service (web, voice)“The most significant imperative for contact center managers is to offset your high operational expenses by automating more customer transactions”. - Forrester Research, 2008 Contact Center Technology Trends, August 08 “2009 Recommendations: Push more of your customer support activities to the web. Build out basic self-service capabilities” - AMR's 2009 Customer Management Market Outlook
36. The Experience/Cost Dilemma Spend money to improve the customer experience OR cut costs and risk losing customers
46. It Starts With a Knowledge Foundation Knowledge is the key to a great customer experience - right knowledge, right place, right time.
47. Customer Self-Service Web Self-Service: Provides automated 24x7 online answers to customer questions, deflecting higher cost live calls Leverages online communities so your customers can help augment your support staff Speech-Enabled Voice Self-Service: Provides automated 24x7 answers to customer questions via the telephone, deflecting higher cost live calls “Contact center managers looking to automate customer interactions should focus on Web integration with the contact center and speech self-service applications”. - Forrester Research, 2008 Contact Center Technology Trends, August 08
48. Case Study: Overstock.com FCR rates have improved 10% while call handle times have been reduced by 25% Email volume is down 72% Estimated $1,000,000 in savings per month from contact center reductions The Overstock.com NetPromoter score has seen nearly a 7x improvement while customer satisfaction scores have jumped 10% RMA and Teradata database integrations bolster contact center efficiency High-value customer insight consistently delivered to decision-makers in multiple departments
49. Unified Multi-Channel Agent Desktop Empowers your Frontline Agents and Managers: “The unified agent desktop aims to bring all relevant information into one user interface, to make agent–customer interactions more seamless and reduce hold time for customers.” - “CRM in the Contact Center” Datamonitor September 2008 All channels centralized: Voice, Web, Email, Chat, and Co-Browse Seamless integration between web and contact center Information/knowledge centralized: Customer information KB answers to customer inquiries Disparate enterprise information (ERP, order status, etc.) Desktop Add-in Framework Computer telephony integration (CTI)
50. Unified Multi-Channel Agent Desktop Empowers your Frontline Agents and Managers (cont.): Contextual, guided interactions: Contextual workspaces - presents relevant information to agent at right time in context of the conversation and agent need Agent scripting –codifies customer interaction best practices and drives cross-sell, up-sell opportunities Guided assistance –troubleshooting decision trees allow agents of all skill levels to rapidly and consistently resolve customer issues
51. Case Study: Nikon Comprehensive system that enables contact center staff to view complete service histories across all channels Incidents can be quickly routed and/or escalated to the right person Powerful knowledge base enables Nikon staff and customers to find approved, up-to-date, and relevant answers 50% reduction in call response times (30-second savings per phone incident—multiplied by tens of thousands of calls per month…) 70% reduction in email response times Responsive interactions drive customer satisfaction scores above 95%
53. Case Study: Black and Decker Product management, manufacturing, and other departments gain rich, actionable customer insight Real-time feedback saves company thousands of dollars in product returns Estimated more than $250,000 in annual savings achieved through self-service Voice application paid for itself in 90 days Software-as-a-service enables new users anywhere to be added right away
54. RightNow On Demand Contact Center Platform Faster deployment, speed to value Modular Augment what you have Nimble/right-sizing for: Seasonality Outsourcing fluctuations At-home agents Highly configurable Operational vs capital expense The SaaS Advantage “Globalization, rapid market change, a changing workforce, and regulations have turned the desire for more agile and usable applications into a business imperative.” - Forrester Research, Trends 2009: Customer Relationship Management
55. Case Study: GameFly On-demand model enabled implementation of multi-channel contact center in three weeks Headcount growth rate kept well below business growth rate Customer issues quickly resolved by phone, email, and web
56. 8Steps to Great Customer Experiences 1Establish a knowledge foundation 2Empower customers 3Empower frontline employees 4Offer multi-channel choice 5Listen to your customers 6Design seamless experiences 7Engage proactively 8Measure and improve continuously
[Shelby Intro Comments]Hello and welcome to this RightNow Webcast. I’m your host, Shelby Nordhagen.Before we begin, I’d like to quickly cover a few items. If you have any technical difficulties, please call Microsoft Live Meeting Support at 1-866-493-2825. We will hold a question/answer session after the presentation today. Please use the Question/Answer tool you see on your Live Meeting Console. To ask a question please click on the Q&A menu on the top of your console. Simply enter your question in the field provided, and hit the word “ask”. Please submit your questions as they come to you throughout the presentation. All webcast attendees will receive a link to the recording of this webcast via email tomorrow. And the first 100 attendees to login today will receive a copy of the book “The Real-Time Contact Center”, by our keynote speaker, Donna Fluss, President of DMG Consulting . Again, if you have any technical difficulties, please call Microsoft Live Meeting Support at 1-866-493-2825.(Encounter: 1-800-290-5900 Option 1 for immediate assistance) [START RECORDING] Our objective today is to help you prep your contact center to not only survive but thrive in these current economic conditions. First up our keynote speaker, Donna Fluss, president of DMG Consulting, will share key strategies to help you - Improve productivity by reducing expenses - Provide an outstanding customer experience - Generate incremental revenue - Retain customers Next you’ll here from our Director of Product Marketing, Stephen Bell. Steve will unveil technologies that will help you deliver on the recommended strategies.Just a reminder, feel free to use the “Questions” area on your screen to submit your questions throughout the presentation and we’ll save your questions for the Questions & Answers session with Donna and Steve at the end..
[Shelby]Donna Fluss is the founder and President of DMG Consulting LLC, a firm specializing in customer-focused business strategy, operations and technology services for Global 2000 and emerging companies. With more than 25 years experience in customer relationship management (CRM) and contact centers, Ms. Fluss is a recognized thought leader and innovator in CRM, contact center and real-time analytics. Prior to founding DMG, Ms. Fluss was a Vice President and Research Director in the CRM practice area at Gartner. Ms. Fluss also held senior management positions at Chase Manhattan Bank, where she had responsibilities for technology and customer service. Donna is the author of The Real-Time Contact Center, a best seller in the contact center category.With that, I’d like to welcome Donna Fluss. Take it away, Donna.
First let me share with you some recent industry data from two leading analysts, AMR research and Datamonitor. In both reports you can see that Customer Retention and Cost Reduction are top of mind priorities for the contact center and across the enterprise.The bottom line is that in this economy, its easier and cheaper to take care of your existing customers than try to acquire new ones.
Switching gears for a moment, let’s look at the other major initiative – cost reduction.Common contact center cost control measures: Improving agent productivity Moving customers to self-service automation for both web and the phone)
That’s exactly the problem we solve for our customers. We empower our customers to execute their customer focused business strategy and in turn deliver an extraordinary customer experience while at the same time reducing or controlling their current costs. Let me tell you how…
Let me start by briefly talking about the common customer experience. The customer communicates with the organization via different channels, which aren’t connected. And each department is firewalled from the next. Call Center agents have siloed view of customer: departmental silos information/knowledge silos channel silosThis result is an inconsistent, poor customer experience
I’m going to cover five technology strategies…
The second technology strategy is customer self-service - for both the web and the phone. Self-service is the single greatest area for cost reduction and ROI of any customer service technology.
To give you a case in point, let me share a case study on Overstock.com, a RightNow customer. Every time an Overstock customer uses web self-service instead of calling or emailing the contact center, Overstock.com saves approximately $6.38 per interaction. Overstock.com conservatively estimates it saves more than $1 million per month from contact center cost reductions alone.
A third contact center technology strategy for helping retain customer with a better customer experience, while reducing cost, is a Unified Multi-channel Agent Desktop.
Contextual workspaces – a dynamic desktop environment in which only the relevant information is presented to the agent, in the context of who they’re talking to and what they are trying to accomplish.
Enables Nikon’s contact center staff to view customers’ complete service histories across all contact points—including telephone, website, email, and fax—so they can provide effective, personalized support. It allows incidents to be quickly routed and/or escalated to the right staff member across the department’s various locations and tiers. Powerful knowledge base that both Nikon staff and customers can use to find approved, up-to-date, and relevant answers to common questions with just a few keystrokes.Because RightNow’s reporting and analytical functions encompass all channels, Nikon has also gained unprecedented visibility into its customers’ issues and concerns.
Benefits:Gather actionable customer insight – that you can you for continuous customer experience improvementUncover unmet customer needs – makes your customers feel that you know them, which drives loyaltyPrevent downstream costs – addressing issues early, preventing snowballing into a larger problemTechnologies: Event-triggered notifications (email marketing) – sending relevant, timely information Proactive chat – strategically offering chat agent support when a customer is online and may need assistance Customer feedback – gathering the voice of your customers across all the channels they communicate with you, and taking immediate action. Analytics – Measuring the quality of your customer-facing engagements And finally, leveraging your customers – using online forums/communities to tap into what your customers are saying about your company, products, and services.
For example, Black & Decker received feedback that helped them discover a small, 30-cent part that wasn’t machined correctly. Had the error gone undetected it could have resulted in a lot of returns. But because of the timeliness of the feedback they were able to report on it quickly, and the engineering and manufacturing teams were able to make a running change at the plant—which Udzinski estimates saved the company thousands of dollars in returned products.Similar information is made available to marketing and sales and even the legal department if a product liability issue emerges during a customer call.
No conversation about cost savings is complete without talking about Sofware as a Service, or SaaS. The RightNowContact Center Platform is delivered on demand, eliminating over 80% of ownership costs compared to traditional on premise systems. It’s designed so you can deploy fast and reap benefits quickly.We know every contact center is different. So we built a modular solution. We can deploy a complete, integrated multichannel contact center solution, or we can augment and enhance your existing infrastructure with targeted new functionality to drive additional agent productivity, cost reduction, and a better customer experience. RightNow’s on demand delivery model gives you the flexibility to easily manage contact center staffing dynamics such as seasonal volumes, at-home agents, and outsourced call center staff. It’s configurable by business users so you can adapt nimbly to changing business needs and you aren’t constrained by the length of your IT department’s project queue.And of course, it’ goes on your books an operational expenditure which is great new is this economy where budgets for large capital outlays are harder and harder to justify.
Just one quick example of the power of the on demand contact center solution:Gamefly, another RightNow customer, is the Netflix of the videogame world. With RightNow, they stood up a multi-channel contact center in 3 weeks.
Finally,I’ve talked about technology strategies to help you thrive in a down economy, but to fully succeed at delivering exceptional customer experiences while reducing costs, you need to have the right business strategy and processes in place. Based on the expertise gained from our over 1,900 customers RightNow has defined 8 Steps to a great customer experience. In fact our CEO Greg Gianforte as written a book about it. To learn more hold on until after the Q&A session for details…