| Consultancy |
 |
 |
 |
|
KEY SERVICE AREAS: Organisation-wide SERVICE OPTIONS: One-off / Project-by-Project / On-going “The initial meeting with Inform was a concise and fast-moving session that didn't pull any punches. They gave a refreshing and informative insight into the good and bad sides of IVR and suggested the best ways to build user-friendly services that avoid the pitfalls associated with poor automated services, including our wish to give customers the option throughout to transfer to our call centre staff. Backed up with top-notch account management and support from the Inform team, demonstrating that they clearly understand this business.” Belinda Black, Director of Customer Services,
First class Self Service is a lot more than just having the right technology. Whether you are considering fully-managed, off-site services or if you have, or are planning to introduce, your own in-house IVR capability, making the right decisions based on accurate data at the very beginning of the process can reap substantial time and financial rewards. Designing effective services is a highly sophisticated business, involving years of historical statistics to pre-empt issues and plan what in-house facilities you need to provide to support it. Self Service is a delicate and fluid partnership between the automated front-end (telephone/email/web) and your team. It’s also seeing the bigger picture, looking beyond the specific objectives and involving seemingly non-related criteria such as what is written on every letter sent to customers – are there any ambiguous elements that simply create more enquiries? Can they be re-written to resolve this, or can your Self Service create the clarity? Going into this level of sophistication means that your service not only meets your customer’s needs and minimises the level of enquiries you receive in-house but also grows and develops as needs change – reducing headcount and costs. Here are just some of the vitally important factors to be considered when developing a first class automated service: How comprehensive should the service be? Too comprehensive and it can become overly lengthy and difficult to navigate through sections. Not comprehensive enough and the customers will simply call back or call other numbers to get the answers they need. Where and how many options to transfer to live operators are necessary? Too many and it defeats the object becoming a glorified switchboard, too few or in the wrong place and your most vulnerable, important enquiries might not gain access to the important information they need. How comprehensive is the management data provided? Clear, accurate data can identify half hourly how many enquiries are transferred to your team and what they are enquiring about. This enables you to have the correct number and appropriately trained personnel available at any given time and adjust scripts and content to positively affect the volume and type of enquiries. How should ‘peaks’ be managed? Bulk mailings, press announcements, specific campaigns such as peak recovery, can all create spikes of calls that can swamp even the most efficient Contact Centres. Can the mailings not coincide? Can a different number/email address be used for specific campaigns to divert these away from the main service and allow important calls to still get through? We could go on and on but hope the message that having the correct equipment is actually one of the least important elements of designing a truly effective Self Service system. So, why not consider using our 20 years of experience in creating hundreds of client services, successfully resolving millions of customer enquiries and producing years of statistical data to speed up implementation, keep down your costs and get it right first time?
|
Inform Products
Consultancy