Automation versus personalisation
Mark Oppermann looks at the balancing act contact centre solutions VARs have to get right Mark Oppermann, business development director, VoiceSage
Contact centre solutions have long been essential to many business operations and in the process, have provided a lucrative opportunity for resellers with expertise in this area. But while businesses recognise that they need to maintain high levels of service in order to limit customer churn, they also have to effectively balance this against the need to operate as efficiently and cheaply as possible.
In this market, resellers have traditionally prioritised the latter, aiming to help businesses meet their efficiency targets, cut costs and make best use of their contact centre agents. One of the most popular solutions for this has been predictive diallers, which enable businesses to remove the need for agents to make individual outbound calls, saving time and effort, as well as reducing over all labour costs.
However, many organisations did not anticipate the damage that the deployment of predictive diallers would cause to company perception – the truth is, end users find this technology both impersonal and irritating. Predictive diallers are not always intelligent enough to differentiate between a person and an answer machine, and consequently often eat up answer machine recording space. They can also waste valued customers' time, leaving them holding on silent calls, having been automatically transferred to an agent that isn’t actually available. These silent calls serve little purpose, other than being a sure-fire way of increasing customer churn or getting a business in trouble with Ofcom, who have stringent rules now to tackle the problem of silent and abandoned calls.
Resellers must understand the business need to provide a personalised service, as customers do not want to be treated as just a number on a list. Furthermore, customers do not want to waste their time waiting to be connected to an agent that markets a product or service they have no interest in. More and more businesses are recognising the fine balance between personalisation and automation, and resellers must now investigate which solutions can deliver a personalised service for customers, with minimal impact on limited contact centre resources.
For example, many regular duties can be automated without sacrificing the personal touch – new messaging technology can deliver individually tailored voice calls to customers, routing them back to human agents only when the customer requests it. Crucially this means that staff are able to make best use of their time and focus on higher value business.
Resellers can also promote this technology to help businesses improve their outbound marketing campaigns, making them better targeted to ensure that they don’t end up irritating or annoying their customers. Combining the two priorities of improving automation and personalisation, through the smart use of these messaging services, will ultimately help resellers to meet businesses’ customer service objectives and boost their margins in the process.