Multichannel Strategy Drives Customer, Employee Experience to New Heights

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Multichannel Strategy Drives Customer, Employee Experience to New Heights

By TMCnet Special Guest
Matt Matsui, Calabrio
  |  October 02, 2013

Efficiency, reduced costs, increased customer satisfaction and boosted revenues are on the wish list of every organization. In the contact center, multichannel communication systems are turning these goals into reality by converging management of any support service medium into one comprehensive tool.

Historically, many contact centers developed and deployed applications separately, leaving them unable to easily correlate and compare data to share throughout the enterprise. The emergence of new multichannel approaches has enabled a more unified and user-friendly strategy to managing contact center operations.

Polaris Industries Inc., an on-road and off-road power sport vehicle manufacturer, has found value in a multichannel workforce optimization approach. With a passion for delivering the ultimate customer experience, the company set about finding a solution that would measure agent consistency, as well as monitor service level changes and quality of support provided to the 1,800 dealers that are part of the global Polaris dealer network.

Polaris’ contact center operations consist of 70 agents across six contact center sites that assist via traditional voice calls and an Ask Polaris website, so the company required a solution that could integrate multiple communication mediums into one comprehensive report. Polaris needed to identify standard phrases and delivery processes for agents to ensure a consistent and better user experience, as well as provide these agents a standard set of evaluation metrics.

Historically, Polaris only performed quality monitoring on its traditional voice calls, leaving inquires and interactions on Ask Polaris unmonitored. To compare online cases with voice calls, call center managers would have to manually review and compare transactions – a method that is inconsistent, inefficient and did not provide a lot of value.

Polaris selected a Web 2.0-based Calabrio (News - Alert) ONE Quality Management solution to deliver consistent evaluation metrics for agents across dealer, technical and customer service teams, as well as seamlessly incorporate critical website support features. With the multichannel platform, Polaris is easily integrating these cases into the system so agents have a complete record of interaction, whether it is through the website or the call center, and can turn that into more effective communications.

For example, each month Polaris agent and managerial teams meet to review and evaluate customer support transactions and discuss best practices. The groups get together and decide what needs to be worked on, focused on and/or changed.

During the review of one online interaction, an agent greeted a written case by typing the word hello. The dealer on the opposite end of the transaction interpreted the word condescendingly as “hello, you should know the answer” instead of a simple greeting. During the best practices discussion, the Polaris team decided that agents should engage more with online inquiries before using a standard script, and those agents should begin each online conversation addressing inquirers by name.

By integrating multiple channels of monitoring and reporting into its QM strategy, Polaris is able to evaluate support services more comprehensively and easily present the information to active team members for review and assessment. Polaris’ best practices discussions utilize this information to engage and empower the organization’s teams, allowing them to hear what people are saying, what they might not be saying, and approach it as a group.

Polaris is currently taking its multichannel strategy even further. By using the data received from its Calabrio ONE Workforce Management solution, Polaris is able to monitor service level changes when the Ask Polaris website goes down. Unsurprisingly, call volumes tend to spike when that occurs. Polaris is not only able to adjust staffing requirements accordingly, but is also able to evaluate and flag any potential issues across the organization. Communication levels remain high as the WFM analysts are able to highlight the downstream impact of the website outage to other channels within the call center team.

As a result, Polaris’ multichannel strategy is achieving greater consistency and communication across teams regardless of the application. Everyone has a clear understanding of what’s expected of themselves and others, lending to greater confidence from agents, evaluators and management during evaluations. Service levels can remain high with monitoring across the organization when one channel is impacted. And Polaris agents are empowered and motivated to deliver the highest quality of support and, in turn, high customer satisfaction.

Matt Matsui is vice president of product and marketing at Calabrio (www.calabrio.com).




Edited by Alisen Downey
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