Foreword by Phil Wainewright, Analyst
The way business gets done today is going through unprecedented change. The Web
has become part of everyone’s lives. We’re used to having online access to information
and resources wherever we happen to be. We expect the same when we deal with any
organisation, whether as a customer, employee, stakeholder or partner.
These expectations are transforming many long-established industries. Bookselling, classified advertising and music publishing have been turned upside-down by the Web’s easy online connectivity. Adding the fluid interaction, responsiveness and agility of the Web dissolves away the friction that gets in the way of transactions. The result is further innovation in how the business operates.
Similar changes are now rippling through other industries. As ever, the customer contact centre is on the front line. How a business interacts with its customers is a crucial factor in its success, and the acceptable performance bar is constantly rising. Customers today expect businesses and services to be available around the clock, at their convenience. When they interact, they want a two-way conversation in which their point of view is heard and respected. They expect to deal with agents who have access to all the information about their relationship with the business, and who have the power to answer their questions, resolve their issues and make things happen.
While these standards apply every day, they are especially important at times of crisis. Customers silently appreciate every day that a business routinely meets their expectations. They loudly complain about the rare occasions that disappoint them.
Organisations striving to keep pace with these expectations often find they’re hampered by inflexible IT systems. Instead of building on new opportunities for business transformation, they struggle to keep up with existing needs. Their systems were never designed to provide the up-to-date information flows, always-on automation and rapid change of today’s hyper-connected business environment.
If your customers are already online, in the cloud, then that’s where your customer relationship systems should be. Cloud-based platforms were designed from the outset to sustain extreme connectivity and flexibility. They are ready-made to provide the frictionless, on-demand interaction customers expect today. Even more importantly, cloud-based systems give the
organisation more flexibility. They easily accommodate the use of new locations, teleworking and third-party resources. They automatically stay up-to-date with new capabilities and readily accept plug-in capabilities. They scale up and down in line with your business cycles. In the past, change often involved so much disruption it was feared and avoided. Cloud platforms allow businesses to embrace change. The result is a more agile, responsive enterprise, empowered to refresh itself continuously and ready to realise all the new opportunities of our increasingly connected world.
20 Reasons to host your
Your contact centre is at the heart of your business. After all, no contact, no customers.
But setting up and running contact centres is expensive and demanding, and many
companies do not use the systems they have in the most efficient way.
Challenges include:
l Speed of initial deployment l Initial and ongoing costs l Managing change
l Supporting flexible working l Responding to fluctuating demand l Ensuring continuous operations l Improving customer service
The traditional approach is to spend a small fortune on hardware, software and consultants to create a contact centre on your own premises. Integrating the different systems presents another challenge. In some cases, new contact centres cost millions of pounds and take months to deploy. Growing businesses face similar problems even if the budgets are smaller.
You want to own the relationship with your customers and so you naturally want to use your own staff to talk to them, but there is nothing sacred about owning and managing the systems that run your call centre.
Now, thanks to cloud computing, there is a better alternative. You can outsource your contact centre systems to NewVoiceMedia. Our platform, ContactWorld, operates in the cloud and provides all the services of a conventional contact centre: automated call distribution, interactive voice response, computer telephony integration, call recording and management reporting, but we run it all for you from our own data centres.
The benefits of hosting your contact centre in the
cloud are enormous:
1. Set up a new contact centre in weeks not months.
A conventional contact centre for a large company might take six months and seven-figure budgets to get up and running. You have to manage multiple vendors, buy lots of equipment and make sure it all works together. With ContactWorld, it’s a different story. Using our cloud-based technology, we have set up call centres with hundreds of incoming lines in a matter of weeks. In one case, during the Lake District floods in 2009, we were able to set up a ten-agent call centre for a client in 45 minutes.
2. Avoid upfront capital costs.
For a start, there is no capital expenditure with ContactWorld. You don’t have to buy any additional hardware or software. All you need is the phone system you already have and PCs with an internet connection. Depending on the size of your contact centre, this can save thousands or even millions of pounds. With us, you pay for what you use, when you use it.
3. Reduce ongoing management costs.
The hardware and software for a traditional contact centre needs a lot of care and maintenance. Your data centre is filled with servers, switches and telephony hardware and all this needs skilled technicians for maintenance and support. It also consumes electricity and floor space. In addition, making changes can be very expensive. Just adding disaster recovery or changing call plans can cost a small fortune.
“NewVoiceMedia provides us with
a more strategic partnership than
just a network provider. They
enable us to reach our customers,
and our customers to reach us.”
Patrick Morgan, Operations Manager,
Parcelforce Worldwide
4. Get the latest contact centre technology.
ContactWorld’s technology includes all the latest features including: ACD, IVR, CTI, call recording, management reporting and speech analytics. It’s easy to add Salesforce CRM integration, PCI compliance and disaster recovery (see below). We’ll help you configure
ContactWorld to your requirements using a selection of nine main modules, but it’s easy to refine and customise the system whenever you want using our online portal.
5. Support multiple sites and countries at no extra expense.
We don’t care how many offices you have or where they are. As long as each operator has a direct dial telephone number (including mobile phones, VoIP phones and conventional landlines) and a web browser with internet access, we can put calls through to them. Everything we do is in the cloud, in our multiple, secure, geographically redundant data centres. You don’t need to install any contact centre equipment in any of your offices, so this saves you money, and makes it easier to focus on running your business rather than managing the technology.
6. Cope with fluctuating demand.
Every organisation has its busy times. For example, retailers get busy at Christmas and universities are stretched when applicants get their results. With a conventional contact centre you would have to size your systems to cope with peak demand. With ContactWorld, you can scale up and down whenever you want and you only pay for what you need. This flexibility also makes it easier to cope with unexpected peaks, such as product recalls.
7. Grow your contact centre as you grow.
Businesses grow and change. Offices relocate. Mergers and acquisitions happen (or don’t). Recessions and booms come and go. You need a contact centre that supports business change and doesn’t get in the way. ContactWorld is a flexible, scalable system that can grow, change and contract in response to your needs; and you only pay for what you use at the time.
8. Talk to customers in their own language.
If you have customers in different countries, you know how important it is to communicate in their language and present yourself as a local company. ContactWorld makes it easy to route calls from different countries to appropriate agents who speak the relevant language. We can even support multilingual agents through a ‘whisper,’ notifying them of the language of the incoming call. Not only does this mean you can offer better customer service, it also allows you to consolidate your contact centre operations. For example, one of our clients replaced 25 national call centres with one centralised operation. ContactWorld can route incoming calls from anywhere in the world, so businesses have flexibility to provide global support, and offer ‘follow the sun’ 24/7 availability.
9. Maximise agent availability.
ContactWorld simplifies staff rostering so you can meet changes in demand on a day-by-day basis. You can call in additional staff to your contact centre or let people work from home or temporary offices as needed. If required, you can also route incoming calls to non-call centre staff for extra capacity. Agents simply log in online with their current phone number to say when they are available and ContactWorld automatically allocates calls on the most-efficient basis.
10. Improve agent recruitment, retention and flexibility.
ContactWorld makes it very easy to implement flexible and home working strategies. This flexibility makes it easier to attract, recruit and retain good staff. It also simplifies compliance with HR regulations and policies. This can reduce costs too. Since the top two expenses in a call centre are payroll and office costs, allowing staff to work from home could reduce both. You can offer shorter shifts and split shifts to staff along with part-time working patterns, confident that you can call on a large pool of agents to meet peak requirements. Similarly, flexible working means that you can size your call centre accommodation for normal operations rather than have enough workstations for peak requirements.
11. Worry-free operations.
Businesses need contact centres, but generally this isn’t a core competence for them. In fact, most businesses don’t have the expertise, personnel or resources to guarantee resilient, high-availability, secure, top-performance call centre systems. Or, if they do, it is an expensive burden on the business. But at the same time, you can’t afford missed or failed calls or, worse, security breaches or hardware failures. Outsourcing it all to ContactWorld makes business sense. We provide peace of mind because we are dedicated to nothing but contact centre technology. We have a team of people who focus exclusively on monitoring our systems and keeping them safe. All of our hardware is duplicated for redundancy and reliability.
“NewVoiceMedia’s solution not
only came in at half the price of
the competition, but also offered
additional functionality that the
others couldn’t provide. The
choice was clear to us.”
12. Securely process credit card payments with full PCI compliance.
If your business takes credit card payments over the phone, you have to comply with PCI requirements. This can be very expensive to achieve and the costs of failure are extremely high. NewVoiceMedia is a validated Level 1 PCI DSS service provider, giving the same level of security as major banks. With full compliance, regular audits and high levels of security, ContactWorld PCI offers the option of phone payments, either on a standalone IVR basis with no agent interaction or using a mid-call automated payment system.
13. Take snow storms, floods and train strikes in your stride.
Every winter seems to bring the wrong kind of snow, every autumn sees floods across the country and every summer sees the traditional tube and train strikes. These aren’t disasters like a fire or terrorist attack, but they are frequent and predictably unpredictable. With ContactWorld, your business can continue to operate even if your staff can’t get into the office and, of course, there’s no expensive hardware to be flooded or suffer a power cut. Agents can log in from home or from a contingency office and carry on working without interruption. Our ability to ensure continuity can also make office moves painless.
14. Ensure disaster recovery.
In the event of a much more serious problem, such as the loss of a building, you need to get your staff back to work as soon as possible and minimise the disruption to your business. Most disaster recovery plans include the provision of backup offices, often with standby phone and computer systems. This is fine as far as it goes but, with a conventional contact centre, you could lose your multi-million pound data centre along with everything else. If it takes six months to reinstate it, you could be in deep trouble. So, rather than pay for expensive duplication of systems, rely on ContactWorld for robust disaster recovery. We already duplicate all our systems for security and redundancy. You can activate your disaster recovery with a single phone call and the switchover happens in minutes. As the old advert said, “We won’t make a drama out of a crisis.”
15. Simplify system management and changes.
You don’t have to be a technical expert to manage your contact centre. With ContactWorld, you can add call queues and change call plans using a simple drag-and-drop interface in a web browser. It’s easy and user-friendly. It’s also straightforward to get regular management reports that help you get the most out of your systems and staff.
16. Get free 24/7 support.
All our customers have access to free customer support from our Service Desk. The team is available 24/7 to respond to priority 1 support issues. (Is this true for your in-house IT team?) ContactWorld users can also log cases via the support portal and view the solutions and answers to common questions.
17. Integrate with Salesforce CRM.
Customer relationship management (CRM) software such as Salesforce can turn a call centre into a relationship centre. ContactWorld for Salesforce integrates seamlessly Salesforce CRM. Benefits for agents include a screen pop-up with incoming caller details and ‘click to dial’ directly from the screen to make outgoing calls from within Salesforce. At a more advanced level, we can route calls according to information in the CRM database. For example, in a multi-manufacturer car retailer, BMW owners could be directed to BMW-specialist agents and played BMW messages while they are waiting; similarly, VW owners gain access to VW experts and messages. You can also use this integration to put VIP customers at the head of call queues, or direct client senior managers through to their peers in your own business. (What happens if the CEO at one of your clients calls you today?)
18. Faster dispute resolution.
With a conventional contact centre, it can be expensive and difficult to set up call recording. For example, if you have multiple centres, you may find that the recording you want is not easily accessible by individual teams in the event of a dispute resolution. Another challenge is managing the storage of the call recording. The more calls you deal with, the greater the storage demands. However, with ContactWorld, storage capacity and backup is our concern, not yours. Our cloud technology means that you can access recordings easily from any location, regardless of who dealt with the call.
“On average our technical
helpdesk receives over 70,000
calls per year, and thanks to
ContactWorld we are able to
manage these seamlessly”
Jane Midwood, Operations Director,
Seymour Hunter
19. Reduce abandon rate.
It’s only natural that customers prefer companies offering the best service. For example, if you want to book a holiday and you get straight through to an operator, you’re more likely to book than if you have been kept on hold for 20 minutes. With ContactWorld, you can refine and modify the way you handle calls, generating a more personalised caller experience. You can identify previous callers and route them through to the correct agents to resolve their query, or close a deal. For example, insurance companies could prioritise customers who call during the month before their renewal. This kind of smart call processing increases sales and reduces abandon rates dramatically.
20. Improve customer service.
The best reason for hosting your contact centre in the cloud with ContactWorld is to improve your customer service. With our cloud technology, you can give priority to your most valuable clients, route customer calls to the right people or reduce the amount of time people spend on hold or navigating through menus. Your agents are also provided with the correct technology to deliver excellent customer service and they feel happier. This matters because happier agents result in satisfied customers, who are better consumers – which benefits your bottom line!
About NewVoiceMedia
ContactWorld from NewVoiceMedia is an enterprise class contact centre, delivered via a true cloud model. Our customers benefit from fast, flexible and cost effective access to contact centre capabilities that would normally be very complicated, expensive and slow to acquire, integrate and use.
ContactWorld offers customers an incredibly rich suite of integrated call centre technologies. We leverage the cloud to provide complex data driven routing of calls so they are delivered to the correct agents. We provide them the technology and information to resolve more enquiries first time, resulting in a more rewarding interaction between agents and customers.
The ContactWorld platform provides a market leading 99.999% service availability SLA, and processes hundreds of millions of calls, for thousands of agents working across the globe. We have customers in 14 countries on 5 continents, including Berry Bros & Rudd, Long Tall Sally, QlikTech, Royal Mail, SHL Group and Parcelforce.
For further information, please visit: www.newvoicemedia.com
