CFO Perspective
Managing the money in any business is a huge responsibility and challenge. As we discuss in our message to the CEO, ‘Top Line’ revenue growth is directly related to customer loyalty. And customer loyalty is directly related to your customer’s perception of their experience when doing business with you. So, spend, spend, spend in the contact center? No, we don’t advocate that.
We advocate the following:
- As a management team analyze and agree on the value of a customer. What does it cost the enterprise to lose a customer due to a ‘bad customer experience’ or you not meeting your service levels?
- At the same time, analyze and understand how to ‘ELEVATE YOUR CUSTOMER’S EXERIENCE’. Develop a strategy to differentiate yourself based upon exceptional customer service. In our message to the Contact Center Manager, we discuss how to consistently deliver an elevated customer experience.
- Develop a ‘virtual’ or ‘home-based agent’ strategy or program. With the increasing cost of transportation, this will give you competitive edge in hiring and retention, as well as help you control labor and facility costs. Remote, home-based agents are also much more willing and able to work flexible shifts, even as brief as 2 hours, giving you much more flexibility in meeting short period peak demands with the right-sized staff. The Interactive Intelligence Customer Interaction Center® (CIC) supports remote workers natively. Make sure you consider these savings and costs.
- Set and manage to those service levels. You’ll need a Contact Center platform like CIC and partner like Altivon to help you implement and manage it correctly to do this.
- Understand your true ‘Total Cost of Ownership’ for your contact center technology and operations. See the research done by independent consulting firm, BenchmarkPortal on the TCO advantages of the “all-in-one” platform. The IC platform provides all of the features and applications you need to maintain a world class contact center without expensive integration points and multiple disparate systems. This saves you a lot of money. BenchMark Portal’s report quantifies this.
- Protect existing and future investments by investing in a standards-based solutions that does not lock you into proprietary devices, such as handsets, servers, or gateways. VoIP, SIP, and SIP based carrier services offer significant cost reductions now and will deliver more in the future. Make sure that you are investing in technology that does not require proprietary devices in order to benefit from these technological advances. In our message to the CIO we discuss the importance of compliance with open-industry-standards.
Technology alone does not provide the complete business solution. This is where Altivon comes in. Altivon is a true ‘value-add’ business partner that will work with your team to customize, configure and integrate the technology to meet your exact business needs. We will also train your technical staff and users in how to get the most out of the system on a day to day basis. Furthermore, we provide consultative assistance as well as technical. We will be happy to work with you to develop an ROI analysis for your contact center. There are many hard-dollar benefit opportunities in the contact center. You need a partner, who understands how to help you identify those and then help you deliver those savings.
For example, what’s the savings opportunity in reducing the time it takes to serve a customer by 3 seconds?
Proving you have the technology to accommodate and the business partner to help you identify areas where you can improve and reduce interaction time, this could be an investment that pays for itself in weeks, versus years. Altivon and IC can do this for you.
And it doesn’t stop there, using our simple example of reducing interaction time, see how savings can grow by proving such contact center applications such as self-service, improved call routing, skills-based routing, workforce management, quality monitoring to reduce time in your contact center to further reduce interaction time.
While the above examples illustrate the hard-dollar savings of this improvement, perhaps the biggest payoff will be in improved customer experience. Who doesn’t want their problem or request solved faster. This builds customer loyalty, which builds the top line. IC and Altivon can help you achieve this. Altivon has been helping our customers elevate the communications experience of their customers since 1989.