(originally published in From the Consultant’s Files on ICMI’s web site)

Technology of the Year for 2007

The beginning of a new year is a great time to assess technology and start making decisions about where to invest your time and money. It's always a bit of a gamble, and your decisions will have a great impact on future performance. Let's start the year out right by putting the investment where we'll get the biggest payback.

So what new, advanced, paradigm-shifting technology wins my award for technology of the year? Contact routing. Yes, I know it is not normally delivered by one single piece of software, and I also know it isn't very new, sexy or cutting edge. But I also know that the power and possibilities of effective contact routing are often misunderstood, and the gap between what we could achieve and what we actually achieve is greater with contact routing than it is with anything else involving technology.

Just what kind of potential exists? Before we even start outlining ways to improve menus and skills-based routing, let’s take a strategic look at how customers are routed to different access channels.

For the past 10 years or so, we’ve been trying to move more and more contacts into self-service channels in an effort to reduce expenses. There’s nothing wrong with saving a buck (when it doesn’t impact customer satisfaction), but we missed a concept of vital importance while doing this.

For many of us, the Web is proving to be the most dominant self-service portal. Yes, it is normally cheaper in the long run. But if you focus on that, you’ll miss the fact that, for some transactions, it is actually better. Why is it better? The Web offers a visual element that the phone channel does not. When designed correctly, Web pages offer the ability to view and compare multiple options at one time, while a phone conversation only provides for blind, one-at-a-time comparisons. A great example of this difference can be seen in the airline industry, where a Web site can show many different travel options at once. A travel agent on the phone can only tick off the choices one at a time.

So strategically, our first move should be to match the types of contact-handling technology that we have with the types of inquiries we receive. Identify not only the cheapest choice, but also the most effective one, and we’ll be on our way to getting the customer through the right door.

Regardless of our success with Web-based self service, the phone will continue to be an extremely important contact channel for 2007 and beyond. Once a customer has picked up the phone and dialed our number, we are faced with the related tasks of identifying the need and locating the right resource. We need to do it for every single call we receive, and we need to make it easy and quick if we expect to satisfy our customers.

How have we fared in easily and quickly moving a caller to the right agent? As an industry, our record of success over the past few years is not a pretty one. For proof, you need only look at typical call transfer rates in call centers, read the numerous articles written recently about how to circumvent certain companies’ service menus to get to an agent, or visit the www.gethuman.com web site to understand how frustrated our customers are with our menus.

How Can We Improve?

There are two steps to successful call-routing—identifying the caller’s needs and locating the right resource—and you need to start at the end of the process to get it right. There is a long list of items to consider when creating skill groups and call-flow parameters, and here is a sample of some tactics that we employ to do a better job of finding the right agent for a caller:

• Accept the fact that you should only route a call to an agent who possesses the skill required to complete the call. Ideally, we’ll get our calls to experts, but failing that, the target agent has to have enough skill to adequately address caller needs. Too often, we see a “fallback” position built into routing programs that sends a call to an untrained agent if a properly skilled one is not available. This inevitably leads to errors, long calls, transfers, callbacks and other nasty outcomes. While you might initially make your service level and abandoned rate look better with this tactic, all of the re-work and caller frustration will more than erase the short-term gain.
• There are very few situations where voicemail works in a call center. If you offer an option to leave a general message (one that is not specific to an agent already working a case) that will require a call-back to the customer, get rid of it. If the thought of losing this safety net concerns you, then you need to improve your forecasting and scheduling processes.
• Be patient. Too many routing programs look for the best possible agent, and then immediately “check down” to second- and third-choice agents if the best match is not available. You will get better results if you let the caller hold for a brief time to see if a “best-match” agent becomes available. How long should you wait? Let service level be your guide. If your goal is to answer some percent of calls in 30 seconds, then hold the caller for 25 seconds before looking for other resources.

And what about those menus? There are many different factors to consider when setting up menus, but here are a few items we can all look at when assessing improvements to make in 2007:

• Hiding the operator option is a bad idea, so don’t do it. Let your callers know right up front that an operator can be reached at any time by pressing “0.” If you find that callers are accessing agents when they could be using an automated solution, train your agents on ways to educate your callers after handling the inquiry.
• When creating menus, don’t compromise the primary rule: Each menu should provide each caller with one, and only one, clear choice that addresses his/her need. To do this, you have to adhere to a strategy where each level of the menu addresses one specific call characteristic.  Examples include: 
• Type of customer (e.g., business or residential)
• Customer status (e.g., prospect (sales) or current customer (service))
• Type of inquiry (e.g., billing, technical support, or all other)

Call centers get into trouble when they try to mix these options on one menu level (e.g., “…for business customer service, press one, for residential customer service, press two, to schedule a service appointment, press three”).

• Take some time this year to research automated options, like ANI/CTI-based routing, speech recognition and, where appropriate, voiceprints for identification. Not only has there likely been improvement in the technology since you last looked at it, but your environment probably has become more complex in the past few years. As call centers are continually asked to provide more types of support for more products and services, some advanced technology is necessary to come up with routing that is efficient, accurate and customer-friendly.

So while contact routing may not be the first consideration you have when identifying where to spend your technology dollars, it remains the biggest opportunity for most call centers to improve both efficiency and customer satisfaction. That kind of win-win does not present itself often, so maybe 2007 is the year you need to cash in on the potential of better contact routing.

- Jay Minnucci
President
Service Agility
(215) 679-5250
jaym@serviceagility.com