Guest Blogger
Charlie Cowan heads up Channel for NewVoiceMedia and blogs regularly around Cloud, Salesforce, Google Apps and Channel.
July 21, 2011
Sales and Marketing have had the fun for too long. Cloud based lead nurturing systems flow into the Saleforce Sales Cloud, proposals are generated automatically, and contracts get signed without anything being printed. The technology is closely aligned to the business goals - more leads, bigger deals, faster sales, better collaboration. You just can’t help, but be better at your job.
But, what about the millions of agents working in our contact centres? Many of them are struggling along with legacy technology as they try to look after the existing customers. Just think about your own relationship with your bank, water company, or phone company - probably plenty of “I’ll transfer you to my colleague,” “Let me just get your details,” or “That’s in another system.”
Let’s look at 5 suggestions for implementing Service Cloud to create an awesome Contact Centre that will amaze your clients and your employees.
Plan your processes
In many cases, a successful Service Cloud implementation has very little to do with technology. It relies on taking the time with the relevant members of your team to work out what should happen when. Get a range of agents and team leaders in the room and you’ll soon have vigorous debate over what the different status of a case could be, or how cases should be assigned to various queues.
Your best friend is the whiteboard. Along with your team, map out your support processes, teams, queues, milestones, and escalation procedures. Once you are agreed on the whiteboard, start talking technology.
Refine your metrics
Typically, 60-70% of a Contact Centre’s overhead relates to staffing. Executives traditionally try to drive this cost down, whilst ensuring there is adequate cover, by tightly managing metrics like average call time, cost per contact, and occupancy rate (a contact centre receiving 1,000,000 calls a year, could save $333,333 per annum by saving 30 seconds per call assuming $40/hour costs).
Salesforce is made for this kind of automation:
- Auto-pop clients details as soon as the call comes in
- Use Flow to guide agents through the call and auto-saving the data
- Give agents access to Sales/Finance/Case data in a single system
- Allow agents to log-in from home for flexi-working
However, just as with the Sales Cloud, you need to make sure that your metrics are intrinsically linked with your business objectives. There is no point driving call times right down if that reduces your business objective of customer and employee satisfaction.
Use a great implementation partner
The contact centre industry is experiencing a huge migration to the Cloud, and you won’t be the first business to have asked the questions you want to ask. Rather than having to learn these lessons for yourself, it makes sense to extend your team with the services of a salesforce partner.
As a specialist, they will have gone through the learning process, and will be able to challenge you:
- “Why are you routing in that way?”
- “Have you thought about doing XYZ?”
Using Salesforce partners can help you get the most out of your implementation. Be sure to ask for consultants that have achieved their Service Cloud Consultant certification.
Integrate your telecoms systems so calls reach the right agents
What is the most important thing in a contact centre? The phone. Without phones, nothing happens. Even in the modern social media world, most people want to communicate with your business using a phone. Using cloud telephony solutions integrated with Salesforce ensures you get the right calls to the right agents. Salesforce screen pops make sure your agent knows who they are speaking to before they start speaking.
Imagine:
- Calls from Premium clients go straight to the Premium Support team
- Calls relating to escalated cases go straight to the escalation team
- Calls get routed to agents with the same languages as the client
- Calls from clients with outstanding bills go straight to the billing team
- Clients get in-call messages relating to the products they have
All this saves time, money, and creates happy customers - no more “Just wait a second whilst I get your details up.”
Enabling home working
With your Service Desk and your Telephony in the Cloud, you can now enable agents to take calls from home. This opens you up to a much larger labour market - those who might not live close enough to travel, or those that want to work part time. It can also reduce your overheads because you don’t need desks, canteens or car parking spaces for your remote agents.
Home workers are happy workers, and happiness gets transmitted down the phone. You just have to read the Zappos story in Delivering Happiness to see how happy agents can effect an entire company’s bottom line.
Even if you are still going to have your agents in the office, by preparing for home working you can significantly reduce your Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery costs. If the contact centre is out of action, just get your agents to log in to the Service Cloud from home and they’ll start receiving calls from within Salesforce. No need to explain to your CFO why an empty building with 1000 phones sits in the next County ‘just in case.’
Action Points
I would recommend starting with building out your process maps. With a group of colleagues, work out what you would actually like your customer experience to be like in the absence of any technological or geographical constraints.
Also, have you implemented the Service Cloud? What metrics are you looking for to improve migration to the Cloud?
Please share your comments below!
Guest blogger Charlie Cowan heads up Channel for NewVoiceMedia and blogs regularly around Cloud, Salesforce, Google Apps and Channel on charliethinks.com.
