Contact centers constantly grapple with the problem of how to cut costs without ruining the customer experience. The classic example is the contact center managers’ desire to reduce Average Handling Time (AHT), the length of time is takes an agent to deal with a customer, while retaining First Call Resolution (FCR)  – the percentage of calls where the customer’s request is fulfilled on the first call, and customer satisfaction scores.

If an agent adheres to the process too strictly, the customer will say s/he is “robotic”. If an agent doesn’t give the customer time to explain the problem, or s/he doesn’t work his/her way through the problem solving questions, then the customer may need to call again, because his problem wasn’t solved. The customer may also think that the agent didn’t listen and was rude.

This dilemma is not going to go away. More organizations will progress to voice activated IVRs. Customers will be routed through automated processes to meet simple requirements. They  will only speak to a human for the complex tasks. Customers are not going to like talking to machines. I’ve never met anyone who enjoyed dealing with an IVR saying “Press 1 for….., press 2 for… etc.”

As long as all the competitors in a specific industry follow this trend, the customer will have no choice.

All it takes is one player to move in the other direction, give superior human service and operational efficiency will be turned on its head.

Think carefully about your projects to improve operational efficiency, and make sure you don’t get so efficient that you lose your customers in the process!

We know contact centers face many challenges. We believe these are the core.  Do you agree that the issues shown below really are the most important?  Help me to improve this list. Let me know if you feel there are additional challenges or more pressing ones than these listed.

From my reading, agent attrition is one of the most challenging issues to overcome. Many companies address this through various incentives, training programs and an active corporate culture. Is agent attrition really an issue or are contact centers able to cope with a healthy churn? Can they absorb the recurring costs of recruitment and training? What can they do to minimize recruitment and training costs? How does this affect contact center quality? What do they do to lengthen the agent life cycle and achieve effective retention?

Customer satisfaction and Customer experience is at the top of the list for some, and maybe a step behind call handling costs for others.  Is there a cultural divide between East and West on which is considered to be the most important? While the West strives for the highest level of customer service, focusing their KPIs on net promoter and CSAT scores, the East seems to be focused on reducing costs and increasing operational efficiency. I Imagine all of you would agree there has to be a fine balance between the two.  Help us to understand which of these is of a higher priority for you and your organization. Don’t forget to let us know where you are based so that we can test how real this cultural divide really is.

Managing Risk and Compliance is a combination of training, script adherence, call recording and most importantly quality monitoring.  What technologies do you rely on to protect you?  Do you find that there is a tough balance between maintaining compliance and maintaining performance? Are you recording 100% of your calls and pushing your QM team to monitor for any infringements? Are you doing anything innovative or cutting edge? We’d like to hear about it!

Many books have been written about leadership and performance. Let’s narrow the discussion down to Performance versus Motivation.  This is also a key component to employee attrition.  How do you motivate your staff to produce a better performance?  How does this affect how long they stay with you?

ZOOM is very much interested in hearing your thoughts on these topics.  Add your thoughts and comments below and let’s talk…

Cisco Partner Velocity is a great initiative by Cisco to help Cisco partners accelerate their (and Cisco’s) business by discussing and sharing the latest and best marketing techniques (focused on B2B and technology) and by enabling sharing of best practices between partners.

Cisco calls it: “… an opportunity to gain a better understanding of how to drive demand in today’s challenging economy, and how to innovate in a constantly-evolving arena. We’ll help you get comfortable with new technologies and tools, and you’ll come away with relevant marketing resources to build into your marketing plans the moment you return from the conference.”

A number of great speakers presented on topics like “doing more with less, thinking out of the box, integrating social media to become a thought leader in your field, the flipped funnel; how to get more business out of existing customers, (paid) search strategies, lead nurturing, social CRM; capitalizing on relations and how to develop personally and as a business by reaching beyond your capabilities”

A packed 2.5 day program…

Velocity started off with a meeting of Cisco Global Marketing Counsel in which ZOOM International has a seat. The marketing counsel discusses new developments / programs in Cisco, the availability- of and feedback on Cisco provided marketing materials and shared marketing activities. ZOOM provides valuable feedback as not all Cisco provided collateral is suitable for Cisco Development partners.

The event closed with an Emerging Markets ‘Marketing Idol’ competition where 7 (or 8?) teams had to write and present a marketing plan in half an hour for the Cisco’s UMI product. ZOOM’s David Ruzius joint a team with partners from Russia, Africa, Czech Republic and a few other countries. The team decided to put what they had learned over two days in practice and go for a hyper-targeted, personal approach and to mainly let the product speak for itself by bringing it under the attention (and in the hands) of a as many people as possible.

David Ruzius and Vera Boltova presented the plan together and managed to collect the highest score from the Cisco Jury ! We are now all Cisco Marketing Idols ! More pictures on Facebook

This has been a very successful and valuable event and ZOOM is considering to use a similar approach to accelerate it’s own partners.

Read more about Cisco Partner Velocity on Forrester

As a member of the Cisco Developer Network, ZOOM closely follows any new Cisco developments. Actually ZOOM has been working with the MediaSense product management team over the past 2 years and contributing to the specification. Currently, ZOOM is working on a flexible and open Quality Management Solution that will include interaction recording and quality monitoring that will leverage the Cisco MediaSense platform.

What will you get with a joint Cisco — ZOOM solution?

The Cisco MediaSense Platform provides an open interface using the Cisco Open Recording Architecture (ORA) and provides an open API for solution developers like ZOOM International to provide value-added functionality leveraging the Cisco foundation platform.

Cisco MediaSense is providing:

• Call recording of G.711 and G.729 on CUCM 8.5 with 3rd generation phones
• A rich API to query and playback calls with pause and resume features
• Linux based UCOS Appliance
• Runs on approved UCS hardware and scales to 450 concurrent users (this limit will soon be liftet)

ZOOM — MediaSense Integration

ZOOM International will provide an easy to use unified interface for the customer to utilize powerful media life cycle management, a PCI-DSS compliance feature set as well as quality management to leverage recorded interactions.

ZOOM QM Suite features enhancing Cisco MediaSense:

• Rich UI that accommodates search, display and plays calls based on attached data from UCCX, UCCE and CRM data is attached during the transfer of the calls from MediaSense to the ZOOM QM Replay Server
• Multiple MediaSense clusters can be supported through one interface via synchronization with the ZOOM QM Replay Server
• PCI-DSS compliant encryption support with key management, password strength and lifecycle management
• Granular users and roles with complete audit log of user actions supporting LDAP & Active Directory
• Rich media lifecycle management based on attached data to backup, restore, delete or move files to SAN/NAS

By integrating the Cisco MediaSense Platform with the ZOOM Quality Management Suite, customers can ensure their unified communications are captured efficiently and are accessible and manageable using ZOOM’s easy to use and rich UI.

Read more about Cisco MediaSense in the ZOOM MediaSense Support Paper or in the Cisco MediaSense Datasheet.

Cisco Expo

The last 2 months felt for us like the annual ‘Cisco Expo Season’ as we were attending four expo’s in a matter of weeks. ZOOM was happy to present itself and the products from the ZOOM QM Suite in Moscow – Russia, Kiev – Ukraine, Warsaw – Poland and Budapest – Hungary.

Being an exhibition partner of Cisco during Cisco Expo is for ZOOM the ideal way to meet with our partners and customers, discuss their needs, answer any contact center and quality management related questions and to present what’s new in the latest ZOOM QM Suite release.
Of course we also use Cisco Expo to catch-up and hear about the latest developments around Cisco’s Unified Communications and Contact Center products. Being part of the Cisco Developer Network we align our product road-map with Cisco’s and continuously translate Cisco’s new developments into future ZOOM product features.

This year Security, PCI-DSS compliance and Unified Communications were well covered on the Cisco Expo agenda and that provided us with some really good anchor points and topics for discussion with partners and customers because of our latest product release.

Cisco Expo Poland

In addition to the new generation of ScreenREC and new features in ScoreCARD, the fresh 4.7 release of the ZOOM QM Suite has been mainly focused on security and delivers a complete PCI-DSS compliance feature set. This feature set includes full encryption with key management, enhanced password management, pause and resume functionality for call and screen recording and full auditing. A comprehensive PCI-DSS overview screen indicates to what extent all required compliance policies are enforced.

If you did not have the chance to meet us during one of the Expo’s, attend one of the product demo’s or have questions about what it means for your contact center to be PCI-DSS compliant, feel free to contact the ZOOM sales team via sales@zoomint.com

We hope to meet you during any of the upcoming Cisco Expo’s or other industry events. Keep track of where you’d be able to find ZOOM via the ZOOM news on our site.

The ZOOM website is one of the most important communication channels and we’d like to hear from you, what you think could be improved.

To do so, we’d like to ask you for 5 minutes of your time to fill-in a short survey.

To thank you for your efforts we offer you to enter a draw to win an iPod touch or one of the 10 Moleskine notebooks.

Please access the survey via this link.

Thank you for you help !

Being a technically advanced market, it is no surprise that Turkey is  open for very advanced and  new technologies. As an example we’ve seen an increased demand in Speech Analytics solutions and a need to move this technology  into the mainstream.

Some other  requirements and questions we’ve received:

• the ability to consistently evaluate agents because of ever increasing customer expectations
• the need for business process integrated quality management solutions to act as motivator for agents
• the need for multichannel recording solutions to capture not only the calls but all agent interactions with the customer and the back office applications

In a nutshell, it has been a great opportunity for us to see and hear from people where the market is heading and what is its demand. Following these trends closely, ZOOM is positioned at the top among the best technologies on a very competitive  and expanding market.

I just read a great post on b2bm.biz on how to find out if Social Media Marketing is something for your business and am happy to find my own thoughts confirmed and to know that ZOOM’s recent 2.0 (sigh..) marketing efforts do make sense.

I was happy to be able to answer “yes” to these three questions:

1. Do you have something to say?
Yes, looking at the history of ZOOM and the people running our Product, Support and Tech we can safely say that we know the ins- and outs of IP telephony and especially in the field of IP recording I don’t think there are a lot of people or companies out there that know the possibilities and maybe more important the impossibilities of the existing technology, standards and the platforms used, as they do.

Currently we are applying this knowledge at our customer sites, where our engineers are often establishing complex configurations (although our own products are easy to install).
I truly believe this knowledge could serve a bigger goal and deserves a larger audience. I’d like to see  ZOOM becoming a ‘thought leader’ in its field.

2. Do you have a way to say it?
Yes, we are all busy but our people are passionate about what they are doing and by offering them a low barrier public platform to share their knowledge, they will able to extend their reach and even have  their ‘moment of fame’ when helping someone out there.
The tech/telco industry (especially ours) is no longer satisfied with a marketing / sales message but is interested in hearing about real solutions to real problems, and that’s exactly what we think we’re good at.

3. Do you have a place to say it in?
Yes and although I realize that we are at the (late) start of a new marketing approach, we do have the tools  in place and we’ve started our first attempts on youtube, twitter and facebook. And of course also this blog is the result of our new marketing approach.
In addition we have become active on new platforms such as the Cisco Partner Central Community and I’ll be attending the Cisco Partner Velocity Event in Paris in November to learn more on what channels and marketing methods work best specifically in our industry. A lot happening, I’d say.

So it’s yes,yes,yes for us, but what about your business? I’d be interested to hear.