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Cloud Call Centers: Big Businesses Play Catch Up with Small Businesses

Rocky — Sat, 05 Jun 2010 20:04:57 +0000

When I was in eighth grade, I played point guard on the girls’ basketball team. During one of our games, an opponent’s Mom was sitting next to my Mom. I was the shortest player on the court, and the other Mom’s daughter was the tallest. At one point in the game, I stole the ball and starting weaving through the players towards our basket. The other Mom exclaimed, “You know, your daughter (me) really has an advantage, because she’s so short that she can just run past the players without them being able to catch her.” What a boost of confidence! I had always thought that height advantage worked the opposite way!

TMCnet’s article, Cloud-Based Call Center Solutions: ‘Not Just For the Little Guys’, drives home the same point when it comes to cloud-based call centers. The article expands on a recent study by DMG Consulting, which dispels the misconception that cloud-based systems are geared towards smaller businesses with smaller call centers.

Patrick Barnard says it best, in the end of his TMCnet article:

There is some irony in the fact that, when it comes to cloud-based call center solutions, larger organizations are now ‘catching up’ with smaller organizations which have been using cloud-based applications for years. It used to be the case that larger organizations always had the more expensive ‘Cadillac’ versions of the software running on-premises — and the smaller companies always dreamed of having access to those advanced features and capabilities, but simply couldn’t afford it. But smaller companies have been rapidly migrating to cloud-based solutions for the past two years now – due to the fact that they are so fast and affordable to deploy – while larger businesses have largely ignored the many advantages the cloud-model can bring to their organizations. Now, that is starting to change.

Smaller call centers first adopted virtual call centers as a way to compete with larger call centers. Small businesses implemented hosted IVR to give themselves a big business voice. Now the big businesses are starting to play catch up with the smaller ones, by realizing the advantages of cloud call centers.

In the recent stresses of our economic times, one can see a similar pattern emerge with regard to marketing in general. Smaller businesses started adopting DIY (Do-it-yourself) marketing campaigns, WOM, social media marketing and more low cost marketing strategies in an effort to maximize their reach within a tight budget, but now larger businesses are starting to follow suit.

Is the concept of “height advantage” now leveling out in the world of marketing and advertising?

Diagnose Your Call Center’s Increasing Costs

Rocky — Sat, 17 Apr 2010 20:36:16 +0000

The Problem: Low value-calls and increasing call center costs.

The Solution: ???

If you’ve been keeping up with PhoneMarketingInsider, you’re probably awaiting a message about the importance of call automation, since until now we’ve focused on cutting call center costs through cloud based phone systems. But this time the message is different. What if you have already automated many of the calls coming into your call center? Even if you plan to implement an automated business phone system, the first step is to diagnose the underlying issues and costs.

McKinsey Quarterly just released an interesting study on this topic, called “Are You Listening to your Call Center?”

What do you do when the call volumes and costs of your call center are on the rise? If you’re like many managers, you try to automate further. That’s sensible, since automated self-care menus and other applications let you handle higher call volumes and be stingier with staff. In addition, call lines unclog and customers stay relatively happy.

But wait. Those routine informational queries and requests that you’re trying to funnel into automated channels can hold valuable messages for senior managers. So-called low-value calls may be signaling more fundamental problems in areas such as customer record keeping, billing systems, or even product quality.

By charting out the types of low-value inquiries in the different departments, such as marketing, sales, service provisioning, billing, and postsales service, the company was able to identify the root causes of the inquiries, especially the most costly phone calls to handle. For example, some of the most costly “low-value inquiries” included requests to explain the charge on one’s bill or the steps for a product’s self installation. In both of these case, automation alone would not do the trick. The company needed to go back to the basics and rewrite their billing documentations and self-installation guides in a more user-friendly manner.

True, automated phone systems are vitally important for the success and efficiency of today’s call centers. But McKinsey Quarterly brings us a friendly reminder not to let the potential of automated calls cloud some of our fundamental organizational problems. The flip side is also true. Even if your new phone marketing system is not meeting your cost reduction expectations, keep looking at the big picture – the answer may relate to business issues beyond your phone automation.

Improving CRM Through Call Centers and Social Media Tracking

Rocky — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 12:00:01 +0000

Forbes.com recently featured a discussion article with RightNow Technologies CEO Greg Gianforte about the tools that his company uses to transform customer service. What struck me most about this article was its holistic approach to customer service. In today’s day of marketing, businesses need to look at the full picture of their customer interactions, and how their customer perceptions develop.

With customers today communicating their experiences on twitter and facebook seconds just after they interact with a company, companies don’t always realize what their customers are saying about them. RightNow Technolgies noticed that the solutions to impored customer service cannot stem from one dimension, as talks about the high expectations of customers calling into a business’s call center. The performance of the call center agents and customer accessibility to multiple forms of interaction (email, phone, etc.) may be the first step. But businesses must also realize who they are talking to, and what customers are saying about the company’s products, services, and CRM.

RightNow Technologies uses a new cloud monitor capability to allow companies to ”actually put a listening ear out in the primary networks and connect it with the workflow back to their business, even to the point of measuring how angry someone who’s sending a tweet might be.”

Through a full statistical natural language analysis, RightNow detects emotional content of tweets, facebook updates, blog posts and chat room comments as positive or negative with a 75% success rate. That’s pretty good, considering that the organization can then take that information and react through the appropriate channels.

As I discussed in the previous post “Phone Marketing in Between the Frames: A Lesson From Seth Godin,” marketing is not just about providing customers with a great product or service. To quote Godin’s great examples,

“It’s not marketing when everything goes right on the flight to Chicago. It’s marketing when your people don’t respond after losing the guitar that got checked.

It’s not marketing when I use your product as intended. It’s marketing when my friend and I are talking about how the thing we bought from you changed us.”

Ginaforte actually used the same guitar example in his post “Good from Bad” on his Customer Service Blog last week. As a lasting message in marketing, I’ll share this nice quote from his post,

Every organization occasionally misses customer expectations; however, rapid, sincere intervention often results in higher customer loyalty than if the problem had never occurred in the first place. So when things go wrong, we are really being presented with opportunities to build customer loyalty.

InContact Announces Key Wins to Finish 2009

Rocky — Wed, 13 Jan 2010 21:27:48 +0000

InContact announced a number of key wins during the month of December, thus concluding their 2009 positioning in the on-demand call center software market on a high note.

The new customer wins included companies in a variety of industries, with organizations ranging from 25 to 500 agents. The industries included telecom, health and human services, insurance, hospitality, high tech and outsource call centers.

In summary, the press release highlights several of these new contracts. InContact signed with a Fortune 500 company involved in multiple markets, such as cleaning, food safety and healthcare, as a way of providing increased support to their call center agents through their eLearning solution. In addition, inContact won a contract with a leading telecom provider for small business and mobile professionals, due to their “guaranteed 99.9% uptime,” and their integration with salesforce.com CRM software. Lastly, the press release features inContact’s involvement in 18 of the organizations of the 2-1-1 market around the country.

Call Fire’s Cloud Call Center Goes International

Rocky — Fri, 08 Jan 2010 01:00:41 +0000

CallFire just posted a video on YouTube showing the power of the newly released International capabilities for their virtual call center. Their International cloud call center enables agents to call from anywhere in the world to anywhere in the world.

The video features two examples of International uses for cloud call centers, such as worldwide political campaigns, or International hurricane relief donation campaigns. The real power of the service, however, will depend on how creatively the users employ these tools to fulfill their goals.

DiabetesAmerica Saves $240k with Ifbyphone’s Virtual Call Center

Rocky — Wed, 09 Dec 2009 00:00:47 +0000

One common goal of all marketers, and all businesses for that matter, is to cut costs while increasing service. The good news is that when it comes to phone services, businesses can actually realize this goal by simply migrating to a virtual call center through a cloud-based service like Ifbyphone. Ifbyphone’s Cloud Telephony Blog describes this great case study (which was also released today to the press) to demonstrate how they save customers lots of money, while fulfilling their business needs:

Ifbyphone is not the only IVR and cloud call center provider, but “DiabetesAmerica chose to work with Ifbyphone because our system provides an unbeatable combination: easy configuration, scalability, reliability, and cost savings,” said Irv Shapiro, CEO and Founder of Ifbyphone.

This sentiment was not just a marketing plug by the company’s CEO. DiabetesAmerica’s VP of IT, Trang Dawson, agreed, “Throughout all levels of the organization, from sales to support to management, Ifbyphone has exceeded our expectations and impressed us with its innovative technology and exceptional customer service.”

Three New Trends of Cloud Contact Centers

Rocky — Wed, 25 Nov 2009 15:00:42 +0000

According to CEO of Contactual, Mansour Salame, “Contact center managers must realize that their technology and infrastructure must be nimble enough to respond to future trends and the only way to do that is to adopt a cloud-based solution.”

These three trends, posted on Destination CRM, are:

1) Proliferation of home based agents

2) Customer service through social networking

3) Transformation of the contact center agent into a revenue generating representative

When I read this article, the question that I started thinking about was: what exactly is the relationship between cloud contact centers and these trends? Contact centers have definitely enabled companies to take advantage of these trends, and they could also be called “benefits” of cloud call centers, if they were phrased in marketing jargon. But the trends of businesses employing more home based employees, using different methods of social networking, and pushing to generate more revenue through CRM, are all broader trends today. They apply to a variety of businesses, beyond the industry of contact centers.

Were these trends not within reach of contact centers until cloud computing came about? Did the existence of cloud contact centers spur further growth of these trends? How will the trends develop in the future, in light of the growth of cloud contact centers?

DMG Consulting Awards Contactual as Leading Solution

Rocky — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 04:00:39 +0000

DMG Consulting’s recent naming of Contactual’s Hosted Contact Center as a leading solution will surely give them a boost. But, as PhoneMarketingInsider, a blog covering everything about phones, sales and marketing, this recognition contains additional value.

Take a look at this interesting comment, from the President of DMG Consulting:

Hosted contact center infrastructure solutions are quickly gaining ground in enterprises of all sizes,” said Donna Fluss, President, DMG Consulting LLC. “The recession is shifting investment from premise-based to hosted contact centers and solutions geared for smaller organizations are an important component of this growth.” Fluss adds that “Many early adopters are not classic risk takers; they are enterprises of various sizes that want to do business differently.”

What’s so interesting to me, PhoneMarketingInsider, about this quote?

I’ve seen lots of writings about cutting costs through cloud telephony and SMB accessibility for a big business voice through new IVR solutions. DMG, though, adds the concept of “risk” to the mix. True, the notion of risk is implied in the advantages of on demand payments and lower upfront costs. However, this emphasis attributes particular significance to the risk aversion of many SMBs (as opposed to the culture of small start-ups).

Contactual’s call center solution occupies this unique niche, by offering “right size solutions for small contact centers,” as opposed to one-size-fits-all.

To read the entire press release click here.

Ifbyphone Releases New Virtual Call Center Service

Rocky — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 15:00:50 +0000

Ifbyphone, a cloud telephony provider, describes their new virtual call center application as follows:

Call Distributor includes virtual call center capabilities such as advanced call routing, interactive voice response and call queuing for saving time, reducing costs and creating efficiencies designed to help SMBs thrive.

TMC net‘s review of the new application focuses on Call Distributor’s affordability and flexibility. As the Ifbyphone staff points out, every company, from the smallest shop to the largest enterprise, faces the need to capture and manage every phone call that comes into the business. While SMBs were traditionally limited in their available services, due to cost, Ifbyphone’s Call Distributor offers on-demand payment.

On-demand payment has been an important trend in cloud-computing and cloud-telephony. With cloud-telephony services, like Call Distributor, the ability to run telephone applications through the “cloud” eliminates the infrastructure costs on the “ground” of traditional PBX boxes.

The on-demand payment structure takes the accessibility of telephone applications even one step further. Especially in today’s tight economy, it enables SMBs to feel that they are paying for what they get and getting what they pay for.

To view the Call Distributor Application on Ifbyphone’s website, click here.

To read the full article, on TMC net, click here.