The New Model for Multi-Vendor Customer Care

Contact Center Challenges

Your customers are increasingly multi-channel, mobile & geographically dispersed

Your competitors are investing in system upgrades and technology

You have budget constraints

Overcoming Challenges - Cloud Contact Center

• Avoid capital investment • Decreased total cost of

ownership • Decreased reliance on

internal IT resources • Ongoing technology refresh

without additional investments and forklifts

• Ease of scaling • Locate agents anywhere • Redundancy

Overcoming Challenges - Agent Outsourcing

• Lower labor costs • Decreased costs/effort for

hiring, training, scheduling, and managing a team of agents

• Improve overflow call handling • Access to languages / skills • Access to established worforce

optimization benefits

Outsourcing Growth

“Both shared services and outsourcing are on the increase. One in four enterprise buyers are reinvesting heavily in their global shared services operations, while seven out of ten are continuing to make (largely moderate) investments in their outsourcing delivery. This is driven by technology advancements and automation and the rampant globalization of enterprise supply chains and business ecosystems” Executive report: The State of Services & Outsourcing in 2014

“Many companies’ internal CCS-related capabilities have declined over the past several years as budgets have been continually reduced and requests for technology investments and upgrades have been denied. This in part has fueled the near double-digit growth in the market for outsourced services during the past four years. Today, 22 percent of all contact center services spending is for outsourcing.” CONTACT CENTER OUTSOURCING A Peak Time for Contact Center Outsourcing: Why Recent Developments are Making Outsourcing the Right Decision for Some Companies Today

What is Multisourcing?

For Contact Centers: • Use of multiple vendors who’s

agents are deployed, frequently in a cloud contact center model, to answer calls and messages.

• Each vendor has a contractual relationship with the cloud contact center “owner”, not the caller / message sender.

Multisourcing is the disciplined provisioning and blending of business and IT services from the optimal set of internal and external providers in the pursuit of business goals. - Gartner

Multisourcing Pros & Cons

Multisourcing Pros

• Geographic Coverage – Multiple vendors may be required to cover your dispersed customer base. Regional presence and expertise as well as “follow the sun” availability come into play.

• Language / Special skills – Regional presence may make it easier to acquire agents for specific languages and experience.

• Cost benefits – Locating agents in less costly labor regions addresses the highest cost associated with contact centers.

• Reduce vendor risk/reliance – Spread your risk across multiple vendors. • Price negotiation – Makes it easier to compare and contrast pricing between vendors

for comparable services. • Performance incentives – Competition between outsourcers can help to push overall

performance metrics. • Agility – Possible to manage a diverse pool of agents within a loud contact center

infrastructure as a virtual resource with cost flexibility.

Multisourcing Cons (Beyond agent consistency, training and business issues)

• Diverse systems – 3rd party vendors have their own systems, especially agent desktops. You can’t expect standardization across multiple vendors.

• Performance visibility – You need KPI accountability by vendor to ensure quality, monitor costs and pinpoint bottom line contributions.

• Contractual obligations – Many multisourcing deployments involve call volume contractual obligations required to achieve cost savings, thus putting the reins on complete call transfer flexibility.

• Management independence – Outsource vendors usually demand some level of control if you are going to hold them to performance metrics.

• Intra-outsourcer competition – Your team of outsourcers are frequently comprised of natural competitors. Expect to manage evidence of distrust when you need your contact center outsourcers to work to together, especially when transferring calls and messages from one vendor to another.

New cloud contact center technology is making Multisourcing a powerful customer care solution

Key Challenge – Managing Vendor Diversity

Challenges - Vendor Diversity

Desktop variations - Especially with the agent are a primary source for inconsistent customer care. It gets more difficult if some of your vendors cover a range of communication channels while others may not. It is highly unlikely that you will be able to dictate uniformity. Where are the $’s going - Pinpointing your costs down to the vendor level is another challenge. Will your systems allow you to maintain billing integrity by tracking costs by vendor? Each vendor wants some degree of management control – Your contact center vendors will press for some level of queue management and control over their agents’ pool. You also need to ensure that each vendor does not have visibility into another of your multisourced vendor’s network.

Resolve the Desktop Dilemma Multi-channel integration within popular CRM systems deliver consistency for calls, chat, email and other channels of communication across vendors.

Multi-Channel Media Bar

Cost/Billing Granularity

51

13 8

51

Solutions allow traffic to be “classified” by tags such as vendor name or contact center identifier. This translates into drill down detail for billing and allows you to compare vendor costs head to head.

Queue Status by vendor

Management Delegation - Vendors Some cloud contact center solutions provide management delegation with the ability to “firewall” against extending control beyond a specific network. For example, VoltDelta makes it easy for managers to define “sub-management” for any of their multisourced vendors as shown below:

New cloud contact center technology is making Multisourcing a powerful customer care solution

Key Challenge – Balancing Customer Satisfaction with Cost Savings

Challenges – Balancing Care & Costs Service Level Agreements (SLA’s) for volume – You would like to automatically transfer calls from a busy contact center to agents managed by another vendor who are available. However, you have SLA’s is place that ensure specified call volume for each vendor. Do you keep callers on hold when there are agents available within your multisourced network?. Transfers to agents - Are you setting your agents up to ask callers to repeat information if there is a transfer from an IVR or from another agent? Messaging flexibility – Can you adjust audio instructions and IVR menus within your multisourced environment? The ability to flexibly manage expectations of your callers by messaging for hold times when calls surge, or when transfers to agents managed by other vendors will work to improve customer care, especially when agents are busy.

Transfers Mindful of SLA’s

There is a way to balance customer care against SLA commitments. VoltDelta’s CareFlex feature makes it easy to transfer calls between multisourced vendors, with consideration for SLA’s. Managers can configure queue transfers up to an overflow/underflow percentage that could correspond to SLA tolerances or established expectations. An example of this screen is shown below:

Agent heads-up & DIY Messaging

Agent heads-up – When transferring a caller from an IVR, you can provide a recorded segment of the conversation for the agent to review prior to connecting. Agents can also conference in each other to pass along detail prior to connecting with the customer. DIY messaging – Some cloud contact center systems are making it easier for you to quickly make changes to IVR prompts, menus and even dialogs. In a multisourced environment this prompt flexibility to add floodgate messaging for surges or inform the caller to hold a bit longer as the call is transferred to another contact center will keep caller’s engaged and improve satisfaction. VoltDelta’s Content Manager facilitates immediate changes with pre-recorded audio or TTS within a “do it yourself” framework.

Cloud Contact Center Any multisourced contact center is only as strong as its weakest link. Its hub and spoke call/message distribution to multiple contact centers demands reliability and security at its core. Key characteristics to evaluate include:

Reliability metrics beyond “brochureware” – Question uptime statistics with call volume at the forefront. Look for 99.99% reliability at call volume measured in the 100’s of millions of calls per year. Surge Performance – Look for cloud contact center vendors that can point to customer situations where unexpected call volumes were encountered and resolved. Security – A foundation for high security sets the tone for a multisourced infrastructure. An independently certified PCI environment establishes the standard for multiple contact center vendors that you are working with.

Establishing Vendor Expectations

Although the focus of this SlideShare is on new technology facilitating multisourcing, you must remember to not overlook the expectation setting, management and reporting requirements of your multiple vendors.

Your Vendors’ Perspective

What makes the aforementioned technology options attractive for multisourcing is that they take into account what is important for each of your vendors.

Some Degree of Management Autonomy - It makes it easier for them to manage their agents with some degree of autonomous control. SLA Protection - They will know automation is in place that works to improve customer care while maintaining their SLA’s if you implement transfers within SLA tolerances utilizing systems that prove performance. Visibility by Vendor - Management and billing integrity means they know they will be held responsible for what they can actually control.

Vendor Communications

The foundation for multisourcing success requires clear communication between you and your vendors. In many cases it also demands “coaching” to encourage the intra-vendor communication necessary to ensure that you will actually achieve a virtual contact center infrastructure. Key points to consider include: • Infrastructure – You can make it easy to deploy a multi-channel solution as, but do

all of your vendors have compatible software and systems? Ensuring that each vendor is up to the required software revision makes a big difference.

• Training – Are your vendor agents up to the task of handling specific types of calls

and messages, especially when transferred from another of your vendors?

• Goals – Make sure that your outsource vendors are clear on your service goals. Outline exactly what you are looking for in the area of customer satisfaction and how you intend to measure it. Address your cost goals as well to promote consistent service between vendors.

.

Vendor Communications

• Process for intra-vendor problem resolution – Confront the specter of finger pointing from the start. Establish a framework for problem resolution particularly for situations including dropped calls / messages between your outsourcers, customer complaints regarding inconsistent service, and reviews of calls and agent screen recordings when customer interactions span diverse outsourcers.

• SLA expectations – If you have SLA’s in place especially for volume, you have to set expectations on how you will automate queue transfers to ensure customer satisfaction. Knowledge by all involved that automated transfers up to tolerances due to queue backup will make it easier for all of your vendors to work together by focusing on customer satisfaction.

Vendor Communications

• Scheduled communication – Regularly scheduled communication between all parties involved sets the table for problems resolutions as well as for service optimization.

• Supplier replacement – Having a team of outsourcers that works together is certainly the goal, but expectations must be set that components of the group can change without renegotiation with the incumbents.

Conclusion

1. A multisourced agent population can deliver significant benefits in the areas of customer care flexibility, agility and cost savings as long as your technology integration and business requirements are understood and in agreement across all parties.

2. New systems are now available that make it easier to deploy multisourced customer care Key among these are the ability to maintain performance visibility and billing integrity within a cloud contact center deployment, and automation that enables queue transfers with consideration for SLA commitments.

3. Now is the time to review your contact center strategy to determine if you can reap the benefits of a multisourced environment. Take advantage of the cloud contact center agility to aggregate a team of outsourcers to deliver next level customer care with costs savings that delivers a competitive edge.

.

About VoltDelta VOLTDELTA IS A CLOUD-BASED CONTACT CENTER PROVIDER WITH 35 YEARS OF EXPERIENCE. We perform intelligent, data driven contact management to optimize your customer's journey. VoltDelta rapidly tailors and integrates our multi-channel contact center solutions to enable you to increase revenue, boost retention and reduce operating costs with proven scalability and reliability.

The information contained herein is provided for information purposes only, is intended only to outline (VoltDelta’s) presently anticipated general technology direction and is therefore subject to change. The information communicated is not an obligation to deliver any product, product feature, service, service feature, software, software upgrade or functionality and VoltDelta’s version of the (Hosted Solution operating system) may vary. None of the information should be interpreted as a commitment on the part of VoltDelta.

www.VoltDelta.com

info@voltdelta.com

Twitter.com/VoltDeltaNews