Contact practitioners who implement multimedia communication channels without the necessary service level agreements (SLAs) run the risk of damaging their company brands.
This is according to Silvio Navarro, independent consultant and CRM specialist at the Avaya University. Navarro was addressing delegates at the "Contact centres: The search for excellence" executive forum, hosted by ITWeb and Avaya in Johannesburg yesterday.
The past four years have seen an increase in adoption rates of technologies that support the addition of e-mail, Web chat, faxing and SMS functionality to call centres - aimed at enabling customers to deal with companies via their preferred communication method, said Navarro.
However, although these practitioners had strict SLAs governing how calls were handled by agents, many had neglected to implement the same controls around multimedia channels.
This meant that response times via these channels by agents were often unacceptably long, and the quality of responses could be substandard. Service levels dropped, customers and agents became frustrated and brands suffered, said Navarro. "A brand is a very expensive asset to protect," he said.
He urged local practitioners add value to contact centres by concentrating on outbound as well as inbound communications.
International examples of how these could boost company brands were airlines calling passengers to alert them regarding flight delays; healthcare practitioners sending appointment reminders; and cellphone service providers giving advance warning before contracts elapsed.
[VIDEO]He stressed the need to use predictive dialling technologies. Research had shown that 25% of manual calls were not completed, 5% would get a busy signal, and another quarter would go through to an answering machine.
"Generally speaking, about 40% of the time you do reach someone, it turns out to be the wrong person," he said. Predictive dialling would mean only completed calls would be switched to available agents, allowing them to spend around 55 minutes out of every hour actually talking to clients.
Speech-based self-service applications could also save contact centres a significant amount of money, transforming them form cost centres into revenue generators. Initial capital outlays had dropped during the past few years, he said, while available offerings had also become far more sophisticated.
Research showed that the cost per call using these technologies could drop from US$8.87 to as little as 25c.
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