Real-Time Results: Intraday Automation Reduces Costs and Keeps Customers Coming Back

STRATEGIC SOLUTIONS SERIES.

Real-Time Results: Intraday Automation Reduces Costs and Keeps Customers Coming Back

By Paula Bernier, Executive Editor, TMC  |  April 14, 2015

Nobody likes to wait. Yet both customers and employees are frequently put “on hold” by businesses, which could eliminate these delays – and deliver better customer experience –if only they could take advantage of the many optimization opportunities that exist throughout the day.

If you think this lost time doesn’t amount to much, think again.

The average person in the developed world spends a total of 123 days of their life on hold, in line, or sitting at home waiting for a service technician to arrive. And this is happening in a day and age in which people are increasingly intolerant of waiting due to the instant gratification to which they have become accustomed in light of the Internet, smartphones, and the new on-demand society.

It’s not just customers who are suffering, however. Businesses are missing out, too.

A recent Harvard Business Review study reveals that there’s a 240 percent annual revenue difference between companies whose customers rated their experiences as great compared to those who rated them as poor. And making customers wait does not make for a great experience.

That said, it simply doesn’t make sense for organizations to have customer-facing employees sitting idle when customers are awaiting assistance, notes Intradiem CEO Matt McConnell. And with Intraday Automation solutions, he says, they don’t have to.

The problem lies in the fact that contact centers manually monitor conditions and manually adjust their frontline workforces. This consumes significant resources, and reacting in this labor- and time-intensive manner makes it impossible to address all problems and take advantage of all opportunities.

With Intraday Automation, frontline workforces react in real-time to optimization opportunities such as periods of lower or higher call volume, imbalance across interaction channels, overstaffing, understaffing, and individual adherence issues. A more agile frontline workforce is better able to adjust throughout the day to deliver a dramatically more consistent customer experience. “In an environment where seconds and minutes matter, the impact on cost, productivity, agent engagement and the customer experience is dramatic,” adds McConnell.

Before Intraday Automation, contact centers were incapable of responding to the mountains of data coming at them at light-speed and stored away in siloed systems. As contact centers manage multiple interaction channels, including chat and social, the proliferation of data only increases. What is especially powerful about Intraday Automation is that for the first time the contact center can reduce complexity and turn all this data into immediate frontline optimization.

For example, daily staff management encounters issues with voluntary time-off and overtime where the goal is to match staffing levels to actual customer demand. Today’s manual and unstructured practices negatively impact costs, agent morale, and engagement and the customer experience. Through Intraday Automation, contact centers can automate time-off and overtime at the agent level in real time. Intraday Automation’s ability to interpret and take action on data from existing tools makes investments in those tools more valuable.

There’s a lot of talk in business circles lately about smart planet and smart city solutions, says McConnell. Intradiem helps clients – and their customers – become smarter companies by enabling them to realize the immense value of providing exceptional customer experiences while improving productivity and decreasing operating expense.

Intradiem is out to do for customer service what Salesforce.com (News - Alert) did for CRM, says McConnell, addressing business problems unlike other solutions and breaking the status quo notion that delivering exceptional customer experience has its limitations. Smarter companies, McConnell says, won’t accept the status quo any longer.

Case in point, a major telco company uses Intradiem’s Intraday Automation solution to deliver training during periods of lower than expected call volume. On average, agents are idle for almost 20 hours a month, but these opportunities are wasted, neither serving customers nor training. By triggering training during what was unproductive idle time, the company delivered 3 hours of additional training per agent per month without increasing staff. The business benefits included significant training velocity and first call resolution gains. This is just one example of what’s possible with Intradiem.

More than 50 global brands use Intradiem's solutions every day. If you want your organization to join the smart company revolution, check out Intradiem’s Intraday Automation solutions.

To read other case studies and find out how your organization can benefit from these solutions, visit Intradiem at www.intradiem.com.




Edited by Maurice Nagle
Get stories like this delivered straight to your inbox. [Free eNews Subscription]
blog comments powered by Disqus