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Ameyo Announces the Launch of Channel Addition Framework (CAF) to Increase Visibility Across Channels

Messaging applications are leading the new age customers and millennials prefer to connect via multiple messaging apps. Social media is an ever-expanding landscape and the newer channels are emerging with their varied usage across the world. With the ever-emerging need of adding new channels, it becomes necessary for businesses to get a 360-degree multichannel view.
To cater to this capability, Ameyo has come up with Channel Addition Framework (CAF) that will not only allow businesses to build exceptional communication experiences across the currently available channels but will also enable easy onboarding of additional channels.

How CAF Supports New Messaging Apps?

CAF allows adding new channels to Ameyo without core product enhancements every time a new channel requires integration. The channel addition opens the possibility of doing business across the customer’s preferred channels without any hassle. Enhancing the visibility across channels, CAF has widened the channel effectiveness for customer service departments.

Why New Messaging Apps are Important for your Business?

It’s no more going to be a monologue when your customer wants to reach you. Customer service outside traditional channels gives you the opportunity to build better connections with your customers. Be where your customers are with the trending messaging apps.
Here’s what you need to know:

Deliver on Customer’s Expectations

Are you present on the channels your customers are using? Customers expect to connect with you effortlessly and on channels that they use to communicate with the rest of the world. Their expectations have changed from a simple conversation to getting regular updates on their queries.
With CAF, it has become possible for businesses to add the channels of their preference, providing true omnichannel capabilities, allowing easy integration with the new channels.

No Interaction is Missed

Customers’ requests can come from anywhere all across the web. And if any of the interaction goes unheard, you may lose a customer. Your support team needs visibility across all channels to respond to each query in time.
To support these channels, CAF will empower businesses to integrate channels that are important for their customers.

Constant Reminders & Notifications

Customers like being valued and when they are notified in time about their query, ticket status, expiry of product and more of such details, they tend to take positive actions towards your business.
Ameyo’s CAF allows businesses to get a 360-degree view of the customer’s tickets and allow agents to gather the context of each ticket in a single interface.

Auto-Ticket Creation

Tickets get created automatically each time a customer wants to interact with you through these messaging apps. This increases agents’ efficiency as they do not have to manage multiple accounts and provide a quick resolution once they receive the ticket.
You can stay connected to your customers without any siloes and let them see their ticket status to promote customer satisfaction and hence, customer loyalty.
With the detailed channel report, you can analyze which channel is effective for your business. Adding new channels to the pool of existing channels have become relevant in the ever-emerging expectations of the customers. Ameyo, with an introduction of Instagram and Google Play Store, has established its footprint in the market, being one of the early providers of Channel Addition Framework that would support the addition of channels specific to business needs.

Customer Authentication and Onboarding Becomes Easy with Video KYC

Aadhar has become an undeniable source of identification in India. And there couldn’t be better news to make ‘Presence Less and Paperless Banking’ a reality. Yes, RBI now makes it easy for fintech and startups to onboard their customers leveraging the technology for quick authentication. This will help businesses to reach their customers in remote locations while Video Customer Identification Process (VCIP) is simplified. Now the customers won’t have to be physically present in the banks as the video calling progresses across the country.

What is Video KYC?

Video KYC brings in the live video session with a user who has requested for an online identification process to further their purpose. Video KYC confirms the user identity as per the regulations established by the government. It largely prevents the chance of fraudulence during the identification process.

How Video KYC will turn out to be Advantageous for Businesses?

Video KYC simplifies the onboarding process. In a world where customers are seeking quick responses from their vendors, Video KYC adds to the instant identification process, allowing both the businesses and consumers to get going without any hassle.

And, there’s more than that:

Faster Onboarding of Customers

With the ease of video identification, now fintech startups can finally think of scaling as it does not involve the physical presence of the consumers. It has significantly reduced the onboarding time, thus allowing compliance even in remote locations.

Ease of Authentication

Now that Video KYC provides doorstep identification services, it has become the new thing for new-age customers. All you need is a laptop, smartphone or any digital device with a strong internet connection and you can easily verify the customer’s identity. Video KYC does not need wet signatures, and your customer is onboarded within seconds.

Significant Cost Reduction

Cost has been a dominant factor for startups to scale. Now that Video KYC is permitted, businesses, especially startups can leverage this opportunity as it does not require any hardware for biometric identification. Startups will not have to send an official to remote locations to further the identification process. Since it has become a quick process, the attrition rate is decreasing and startups can retain their customers without involving them in the authentication hassle.

Embraced Customer Experience

The world is driven by the customer’s increasing demands. And today’s customer is tech-savvy and prefers digital media over visiting any bank. Now, Video KYC has given them an edge to do away with standing in long queues and wait for their turn, this embraces the customer experience. This is preferred by millennials as they are not willing to fill in multiple forms and have no proper tracking mechanism.

No more Cyber Frauds

Video KYC can prove out to decrease identity theft as the consumers/customers will not have to submit a physical copy of their KYC documents. Forged signatures will not work and it will penetrate ways for startups to tap in urban locations without a cyber theft.

In a Nutshell

Video KYC Solution has become the swift alternative to physical KYC, allowing users to confirm their authentication with ease. Though millennials prefer digital media, there will still be a challenge for businesses to penetrate this scheme in urban areas where people are not always willing to submit their documents online. Businesses will need an understanding of the market before executing Video KYC.

Ameyo has launched the Video KYC Solution, following RBI Regulatory Compliance, for video based customer identification process. Ameyo’s Video KYC Solution will help in onboarding customers faster. This solution can be deployed on Cloud, Private Cloud or On-premise setup.

How to Build Great In-Product Experiences?

Do you know what your customers truly love? Yes, the answer is Great In-Product Experience! It’s not the new world of customer experience we’re entering into and it is imperative for you to understand PX inside and out to create an experience that will get you customers’ loyalty for life.
What makes customers stay invested in your business depends on how you are solving their problems. If you are not adding any value to their product experience and remind them that you are their choicest brand, you are going to lose the business. And there aren’t any alerts greater than losing your customers to your competition.

What do you need to deliver great in-product experience (PX)?

Let your PX be Data-Driven

How do you analyze the user behavior of your customers? Are you still busy analyzing user behavior with anecdotal observations? It’s time that you make use of data to understand what makes your customers stay.
With analytics, you can track each activity of your customers and monitor the data to understand customer behavior. Feature adoption lets you understand the success of your products and allows you to identify gaps in your services.
You can use these opportunities to upsell based on feature adoption and temper the demand for your product effectively.
When a customer, Ron, checks out a certain style of sweatshirts, he is willing to define his choice through his user behavior. You can channelize this behavior in guiding him find similar products when he reaches your platform the next time. Yes, analytics is that powerful.

Make Customer Feedback Count

Did you check how your customers feel about your product? If you have not, let me tell you how important customer feedback is. Users may spend some time to visit your website and explore some features but they do not convert. Why? What is the driving factor?
There could be multiple answers to it and the easiest way out for any business is to conduct a survey and collect user/customer feedback. Once you’ve collected the feedback, it’s time you take action to resolve their queries and simplify their user journey.
When your customer chooses to tell you that they are not able to find the right pair of shoes, you need to understand that the navigation journey could be complicated for them. Make the feedback count and tell your customers that you value them.
Sales reps, on the other hand, could gather customers’ feedback and understand the challenges that they face. These insights work wonder when you plan your next strategy upholding this feedback.

Prioritize and Personalize

When you collected the customer’s feedback, you have raised the customers’ expectations up a level. And now you cannot leave them hanging in the loop with the same old features and strategies.
Now, your customers are expecting to be delivered with improved services and you can make their PX amazing if you prioritize their requests and send a personalized alert via email or a call that their requests have been acted upon.
“Hi Ron, based on your feedback, we’ve created a list of items that you might be interested in. Your dream shoes are just a click away,” can make Ron’s day and most likely he will convert into a customer.

Engage with Customers Often

What makes your users stay? No, the users/customers won’t stick around for long if they are not engaged in your product.
For new users, there should be an onboarding process that walks them through your product capabilities. And a regular notification ensures that the users are updated with the new feature addition.
You can create user manuals and guides to get them onboarded with new products that you are launching. Yes, businesses do reach a time where they start losing their users but you can engage with the lapsed users with exciting offers to tell them that you’ve got the product they need.
Bringing back inactive users via email helps you get your customers back and drive effective engagement with them.

In a Nutshell

To simplify your customers’ in-product journeys, first, understand what your customers are looking for. You could have a great product but if it’s not user-friendly, it won’t drive any engagement for you.

Top 5 Contact Center Reports Supervisors Must Look At

Call centers have been around for a long time now and have gained even more importance in recent times since the businesses are increasingly going online. Call centers or contact centers are extensively used by businesses today to manage their customer service process.

With businesses increasingly moving from legacy models to modern contact centers, they are being provided with an abundance of data. Once the managers and business heads learn how to leverage this data, they can ensure high agent performance and improved call center performance.

5 Contact Center Reports Managers Must Use

Call Details Report

As a supervisor you need to know what is happening in your call center. As the name suggests, a call details report tells you about various details of all the calls that were made and received by the system. Some of the parameters to manage are:

Abandoned Call Details: Know how many calls were lost because customers couldn’t connect with your call center
Call Type: Details about whether the call was inbound, outbound or dialed manually
Call Time: Date and time at which call was made or received by the system
Campaign Name: Campaign for which the report is being extracted
ACD Call Details: Inbound or other calls that were transferred to the automatic call distributor

This report is a good way to know what all happened with or during a call. Having this information allows the supervisor to review any escalations or check in case of any discrepancy from the agent or the customer’s side.

Agent Performance Report

Monitor the performance of individual agents assigned to a campaign. In case of an inbound agent, you can look into their average talk time, wrap up and their first call resolution (FCR) rate. This information can be used to identify any training gaps and further steps can be taken accordingly. Similarly, for an outbound campaign, get details about the number of manual dials, call, call connect rate to get the right picture.

This report helps the call center supervisors and managers identify high and low performing agents. Once they have done that, they can also listen to their call recordings using the voicelogger and further note down the gap areas for the low performers and make their training programs accordingly. Similarly, they can also use the call recordings of the top performers as an example to train other agents.

Advaced Call Center Reports and dashboards options for call center supervisours.

Call Disposition Report

What was the purpose of the call? How did it conclude? These are some of the questions that a call center manager should know the answer to. After all, helping the customers and increasing sales are some of the main reasons for setting up a call center. So, having this data only enriches your knowledge as a supervisor.

Basically, call disposition tells you about:

Outcome of a call
Reason for the call
Any future action required

Using this report the call center supervisors get to know the gaps in their operations, delivery, customer experience, etc which can then be communicated to the respective teams to make the necessary improvements. Moreover, agents can also select a future action like scheduling a callback and can even add a note for instructions.

SLA Summary Report

Service Level Agreements (SLAs) such as average wait time (AWT), average hold time (AHT), call wrap up time, call pickup time, etc are important for call centers. This report allows the supervisors to see how often the SLAs were breached, by whom and in which campaign or queue.

Along with the real-time monitoring and dashboards, having this report will give further insight into gaps. For example, in case the inbound queries are at its peak, leading to high wait time, the supervisors can reshuffle the agents from different campaigns to handle the peak traffic.

Agent Activity Report

Managing a large workforce can be a difficult task for the floor managers and supervisors. Knowing what the agents are doing throughout the day – when did they login, their working hours, calls handled, etc are some of the activities that needs to be monitored on a regular basis.

Agent activity report provides a sequence of information about the all/selected agents in the given campaign. The supervisors can use this information to make sure all these activities are in alignment to the roster and agents are not surpassing the system.

Ameyo Embarked on a Successful Journey in 2019

Contact centers have been blooming in 2019 and it will continue to be the most dominant sector for all the industries across the world. Following this trail, Ameyo has successfully embarked on a journey to acquire new geographies, establish new partnerships and has become the choicest brand for the customers in 2019.

Honored twice with the “Best Technology Provider” award, Ameyo has made to the list of TMC Awards and BFSI Summit Leadership Awards. Distinguished as the innovator and market leader in emerging markets, Ameyo has established its footprints in new geographies.

The New Geographies

Ameyo has started spreading its legs in 8 new geographies of Africa, the Middle East, and APAC, helping businesses build the future-ready contact center of tomorrow.

In the Middle East, Ameyo is putting its best foot forward in Kuwait and Bahrain, changing the outlook of customer experience. The market is changing in the Middle East and businesses are becoming proactive, prioritizing their customers in all verticals. Starting from Banks to Healthcare, CX has become the center of the Middle East world.

While Ameyo is transforming the idea of CX, our channel partner states that “The disruption has started. Organizations are increasingly moving towards a cloud-based call center set up because of ease of scalability and lesser maintenance responsibility”. With this thought, Ameyo is providing businesses with ease of deployment of cloud-based contact centers in Kuwait and other parts of the Middle East.

In APAC, with customers becoming more informed and tech-savvy, businesses are striving to become the choicest brand. With Ameyo’s Omnichannel Contact Center Software, we were able to establish ourselves in Vietnam and Mongolia along with other countries. In Conversations’19: Global Series of Events, our team of experts has walked around the globe to help businesses unleash the secret to customer win through simplifying customer’s journeys.

Moving around the globe, our team has analyzed how the face of customer service is changing and Africa is no far behind. In Africa, while entring the new countries like Uganda, South Africa, Ethiopia, and Egypt, our industry experts and thought leaders have drawn thought-provoking ideas to overcome the challenges of a contact center.

Moving a step ahead in the customer service game, one of the experts said, “85% times when you call a customer to know why they are becoming inactive is usually about bad service.” How you serve your customers explains the loyalty of your customers. When the customers are valued for their time and faith in your business, they will come back again. Setting an example of excellent customer service in Africa, we’ve increased the overall CSAT score.

Conversations’19 in a Glance

Our team came up with a thought-provoking idea of unleashing the current challenges in contact center space and launched a global series of events through Conversations’19. With our partners, we have engaged with different customers on an open platform where our team has come up with the following insights:

1. Preserving the Context

Have you been asked to repeat your query by a call center agent? If yes, you know the level of dissatisfaction and disappointment it creates. To avoid this problem, our team has come up with the strategy of context-driven conversations. Businesses need to preserve the context throughout the customer’s journey and across all channels to exceed the customer’s expectations and increase the customer satisfaction rate.

2. Why Omnichannel Service is important?

The biggest challenge is that customers have changed and undeniably their expectations are increasing. Customers do not compromise on customer service and they will switch to other brands if you are not meeting their expectations.

Customers expect answers across channels and it has become important for any business to be provide omnichannel support to make it a customer-first world.

3. Capture Customer’s Feedback

Have you analyzed what customers think of your business? Capturing customer’s feedback can solve most of the business’ problems. This gives an insight into which channel is performing excellently and which agent is delivering amazing customer service.

With customer’s feedback, businesses can draw a pattern and understand what is important for their customers. And once you have collected enough data, you can strategize how to solve the most repeated queries with ease.

Ameyo Family

Ameyo has added new regions to our list and we have grown into a big family in 2019. Our family at work belives in One Team One Goal and with the expertise of our strengthening pillars, we have grown 17 years old as one team and one family.

Refuting 7 Common Call Center Myths

Call centers are an integral part of the customer service story. They have been instrumental in helping businesses manage their customer support and thus, impacting their retention and brand loyalty. However, more often than not, call centres have had a notorious image with numerous myths outlining their existence. Today, we will try and burst these myths one by one.

Busting Call Center Myths

1. Agents Don’t Care about Customers

This is one of the most common myths about the call centers which need to be burst right away.Organizations invest heavily in screening and hiring the best candidates to manage their customer support processes. As they also know agents are the front-end people and basically the voice of the brand. So, companies tend to have extensive training programs ranging from software & tools to sensitivity training to ensure that agents are up for the task.

Moreover, agents being professionals themselves want to be helpful.Of course, at times there can be a negative experience but it’s important to understand that sometimes it’s not in the hands of the agent to give you what you want because of various reasons.

2. Phones have become Obsolete

This is a common notion among the millennials who are comfortable in using chatbot, voicebot or social media for customer support. Customer support & service is increasingly moving towards a multi-channel model but phone calls still hold an important place. In case of a complex issue where reading the FAQs on the website or the user manual is not sufficient or self explanatory, customers still prefer to call. Moreover, when time is of importance, and you need quick solution, one might not wait to drop an email or tweet – phone call is the way here.

3. Remote Agents are Less Productive

This is an old-school mentality to think that employees work best when in the office environment, sitting on their seats. Working from home vs working from office has been one of the most debatable topics in the industry – irrespective of the sector. A cloud call center software allows the workforce to operate from remote locations without hampering their efficiency. At the same time, this can also be a cost-effective solution as you do not have to maintain an office location, hardware, servers etc while ensuring no data is lost as all of the call recordings and other data is available in the system itself.

4. Call Centers are Difficult to Set Up

Call centers are inherently deemed as difficult to set up. But in reality that is not the case. For instance, a cloud based call center software can be up and running within minutes. You just need a stable internet connection and laptop to get started. Moreover, one of the major concerns for a business is integrating new systems with the existing ones.

Ameyo’s call center software which is compatible with all the major CRMs and other third party applications takes care of this concern. Integrate with any helpdesk ticketing system or in-house tools and application easily to ensure faster onboarding.

5. Call Centers are Expensive

Just like the setup difficulty, this is also one of the most common myths which makes people perceive call centres as cost centers. But that cannot be farther from the truth. An on-premise call center sure requires infrastructural investment along with other financial and personnel costs but an effective call center has the potential to be revenue generating as well.

Moreover, if you are just starting off with your business then you can also opt for a cloud setup which offers a subscription based model wherein you pay for what you use. The bottomline is, finding a good contact center vendor is the first step towards this journey. Once you have zeroed in on that, all of your costing and setup issues will be taken care of.

6. Robots will Replace Humans

With technology advancing in recent years, it’s a common fear among the people that automation and artificial intelligence will take over the customer support jobs thus, leading to unemployment. This fear is not completely irrational especially since chatbots, voicebots like Siri, Alexa and Google Assistant are becoming a part of our everyday life. Having said that, customers still seek the human touch. As discussed in Myth 2, complex queries make the customers seek help from live agent. As long as human touch is still relevant, AI based automations won’t be able to replace contact center agents completely.

7. Call Center Jobs are Easy

The grass is always greener on the other side. People tend to underestimate the work of call centre agents. Whereas, in reality this job requires a lot of patience and enthusiasm. Dealing with the same problems on a daily basis can be monotonous and hamper the motivation level. So, it is important for the customer support agents to be on the top of their game irrespective of the long working hours. Being a call center agent entails listening, understanding the customers’ problem and react to effectively resolve the query.

Contact Center Technology Trends That Will Boom In 2020

The aim of any business is to acquire more customers and deliver exceptional customer service. But, without a sound strategy and technological transformation, your business will hit a dead-end and there’s no turning back once you start losing your customers to the competition!

Now is the time for businesses to adopt new technologies because 2020 is rolling around the corner and these technological trends will transform the way businesses operate. You’ll get the best of both worlds with new technological transformation and less capital expenditure.

So, which contact center strategies are you following in 2020?

Contact center technology is shifting from being a cost center to a customer engagement platform and businesses are planning to use newer technologies to meet the rising customer demands.

Presence on New Digital Channels

Businesses that work in silos have disconnected conversation and because of such inconsistency, customers may lose their interest in your product. No matter how great your product is, if you are compromising on exceptional customer service then someone else is winning your customers.

To overcome the battle of delivering context-driven conversations, being present on customer’s preferred channels like Facebook, WhatsApp, Viber, Instagram, Email, Chat, Call and more is the key.

According to a Global Customer Service Report, 33% of consumers prefer getting the issue resolved in a single interaction (no matter the length of time)

With unified conversation across touchpoints, agents can easily track customer’s information through previous interaction history, thus eliminating the need to ask repetitive questions and resolve customer queries instantly.

Cloud Deployment

Cloud technology has been an asset for many businesses and it continues to be the most preferred technology for businesses across the globe. Cloud platform has opened the possibility of working across multiple geographies without having to invest in infrastructure and hardware setups.

With the offering of easy scalability and flexibility, 83% of Enterprise Workloads Will Be In The Cloud By 2020, says a Forbes Report.

With a smooth CRM integration with cloud contact center software, businesses are benefitting while it proves out to be a cost-cutting software with all the on-premise features.

Voice Biometrics

Voice authentication is solving most of the persisting problems in call centers. Now, customers won’t have to repeat their queries even if they call in from different numbers. Voice biometrics identifies the customer’s voice and ensures a smooth journey for customers across channels.

This also solves the security concern for contact centers as the customer’s voice is used as a password and avoids fraudulence.

Artificial Intelligence

Choice rules CX and customers will choose you again if they are happily satisfied with their first interaction with your customer service reps. Artificial Intelligence will become a major hit for businesses because it smartly understands the customer’s intent and allows agents to prioritize the tickets according to the customer’s emotion.

Agents will be notified with high priority tickets once AI identifies customer’s sentiments, allowing them to deliver the prompt response to a customer who is not happy.

For instance, when a customer is planning to travel to his/her dream destination and is not able to check the flight status, might try to reach out to an agent. The customer might get frustrated if he/she does not get an instant response from any agent. While the customer is trying to reach an agent, with AI’s intelligence, the agent can see the ticket priority and understand customers’ state and deliver a timely resolution to avoid escalation.

Data-Driven Customer Insights

Data allows businesses to connect and personalize each interaction from beginning to end. Data tells you a lot about your customers and you can utilize it to plan future actions for your customers, delivering exceptional CX.

It is becoming more relevant in 2020 because businesses can drive patterns on the basis of defined data.

For instance, if there are multiple queries around travel packages, this could be resolved through a self-service IVR and agents can focus on critical issues while most of the routine queries get resolved at IVR level.

Stay Ahead of the Change in 2020

The choice will rule 2020 and here’s your chance to stay ahead of your competition. With technology adoption and change in strategies, it will become easy for businesses to realign their goals with customer’s increasing expectations. If the technology is used with the right strategies, it will transform the customer experience and will help you be the right choice!

Ameyo Product Updates: New Features, New Commitments

Enterprises that center their business processes around customer experience and customer engagement strategies are often more successful than those which don’t. With a focus on enriching the customer experience, they need to stay responsive to the customer’s changing demands. With a plethora of options in their hands, customers look for faster and easier solutions to their problems.

Businesses need to operationalize customer-centricity across each level and deliver the desired customer experience in a jiffy. Realizing the fact, customer-facing organizations are now transforming the way they connect and communicate with their customers. This calls for a perfect customer engagement platform that is adaptive to the growing market needs.

At Ameyo, we choose to invest in the right set of technology to enable our customers to keep up with the customer service standards. Every update that we introduce in our product(s) is aimed to free our users from tech challenges and glitches and to ensure that customer journeys are made absolutely hassle-free. A number of interesting features are making their entry into Ameyo’s Enterprise-grade platform in GA 4.7 release. Scroll down to see what’s new!

User-Level Privileges for Customer Data Access

Businesses often want to specify users-level privileges to prevent data from getting corrupted and authorize the users as per the role requirement. Moving a step ahead in this direction, Ameyo would now have options in administrator panel to grant restrictive access to agents with campaign level authorizations to edit/read customer data. The admin would be able to pick and choose customer data fields at the campaign level, that he/she wants to assign to agents to have Read/Write privileges for each column, ensuring accuracy and consistency of data.

Strategize Auto-Dialing based on Customer interactions

When the dialing takes place in siloed campaigns, businesses face challenges while supporting the calling process for multiple products/campaigns. This often ends up with customers getting disgruntled with repetitive calls for multiple products. Fragmented customer records and lead dialing information across multiple campaigns become a blocker in lead nurturing and lead’s journey.

Let’s say Jane is being followed-up for Credit Card Sales and Home Loan Sales in two different campaigns, respectively. When called by Credit Card Telecaller, if Jane opts to be called after 5days as she is on travel, she should not receive any call for Home Loans as well.

Let’s say in a different scenario in the insurance campaigns, customers would prefer to get in conversation with the rep they are already in touch with, as the rep would know their exact requirements better. In this case, as well, the previous dialing state is to be retained.

Keeping a close eye on these pain points of the CC Industry, Ameyo would now support the sharing of dialing state of a user across the campaigns in a process to deliver a glitch-free and seamless user experience.

Voice Agent App to serve on the go

Recently a survey was held by Salesforce which revealed that as much as 51% of customer service teams use mobile apps to align with their customer’s expectations. Chaining customer service reps to their desks not only reduces their productivity and flexibility but also hampers 24/7 support deliverability of businesses.

Mobile apps leverage contact center businesses with instant access to interactive customer engagement. Bringing Ameyo’s Voice to the user’s fingertips, Ameyo now has Voice Agent Mobile App to serve customer calls on the go. With the help of this app, Ameyo users would be able to connect via inbound/outbound calls, view/schedule callbacks, view call history, and manage their presence- all in one app!

Target an Optimized Call Quality Monitoring

According to a call center survey conducted by Statista in 2018, 39% of customer service leaders worldwide stated that they possess an optimized level of quality assurance process while 46% are still in the development stage. Customer service leaders need a hassle-free, easy to track and access call quality monitoring process relevant to their business needs. With thousands of call recordings in hand, tracking and scoring calls gets overwhelming. The common challenge here is identifying the calls and faster retrieval of search results.

Let’s say a quality analyst in an E-Commerce organization would want to retrieve calls for buyers with a spending limit of more than X amount during the sale days. Ensuring a prime service to such customers and nothing goes amiss in their experience is the real objective behind setting up this team. Doing this search manually is like finding the needle in a haystack.

To ease out the search in such scenarios, Ameyo now offers advanced search on voice logs/call recordings based on 5 customer attributes at a time (which can be extended to max 10). The fields for the search can be enabled from the admin panel as per the business requirements. To enhance the experience further and to save the supervisor/QA’s time, these searches will work in the background and the user would be able to perform other tasks at the same time.

These are just a few of the big updates from our recent generally available version 4.7. There is a lot more to it. With a commitment to become an enterprise-grade customer service leader, we are not gonna stop here. Stay tuned, we will be coming up next with some other exciting features to transform your customer experience!

How to Rock Customer Support During Holiday Season

Ho ho ho! It’s that time of the year again! Get ready to celebrate and stuff your faces with some yummy food. Holiday season sure brings a lot of joy but can also be stressful for both customers and businesses. Businesses see a surge in traffic during this time as people are shopping for themselves and their loved ones.

This is one of the most important times of the year and everyone wants to put their best foot forward. Brands want to deliver the best customer support. and people are looking to gift the best to their friends and family. Basically no one wants to compromise.

In the spirit of the holiday season, I have tried to prepare a guide to help you sail through your customer support and leave a happy and memorable experience for your customers.

1. Plan Ahead

To ace customer service you cannot plan and achieve your goals at the 11th hour. The planning and strategizing needs to be done at least three months prior to the peak season. Looking at the past trends can help with the planning for the future. Forecasting the traffic, possible resource requirements and scheduling training sessions for the agents.

Some of the factors that you can look into are:-

What were the most frequent queries?
What were the most common challenges your agents faced?
What were you most used communication challenges?

2. Seasonal Hiring

It is observed that hiring tends to increase ahead of the holiday season. However, you do not need to hire permanent staff if your year round demand can be handled with your existing workforce. In that case, it is better to go for contractual workforce or outsource the same. Forecasting the personnel needs will be more effective if you analyze the past trends and infer from there. Having said that, just recruiting new employees is not enough. On-boarding is the key. Get them on pace with your customer service process and acquaint them with any existing systems for better operations.

3. Train those Elves

You know the holiday season means peak traffic and stresses customers. It is important to train your agents to handle the high demands and query traffic. You can do that by providing them with the right customer support system which helps them resolve the queries faster and effectively. Along with training the agents in practical skills and giving them hands-on training, it is important to train them in soft-skills as well. The most important virtue for an agent, especially this time of the year is empathy. Sometimes the customers just want someone to listen to their issue patiently – be that listening year. Also, since there are seasonal hires, it is important to train them well to handle the customers. After all, agents are the voice of your brand. Do not screw this up because you didn’t train them well.

4. Transform your Contact Center

A contact center is the gateway for the customers to reach you for support and service related issues. With the technology taking leaps and bounds in the recent times, the role of a contact centre has also evolved. Now, they have transformed into customer engagement centers or hubs. Taking this definition forward, you can use the latest technological advancements to ace your customer support. Some of the ways to do that are:

Prioritizing urgent queries based on sentiment analysis and putting them at the front of the queue for the agents to resolve first
Using a unified desktop to provide the agents with a 360-degree view of the customer and have well-informed conversations
Providing the customers with an omnichannel experience and not restricting the ways for them to seek help.
Having a knowledge base for the agents to refer to in real-time and resolve the queries faster

5. Make it Simple for the Customers

During the holiday season both adrenalin and emotions are running high. People have a lot of chores to do prior to the festive days and they are looking for quick answers. An effective way to manage this is by providing the customer with self-service support.

“72% of customers prefer self-service to resolve their support issues”

Forrester

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Create a Holiday Guide with answers to all the common questions that customers might have and make it readily available on online portals. Some of these FAQs could be:-

What are your working hours?
Where to get discount coupons?
How to get an express delivery
Return/ exchange policies
Payment options & related issues

You can also publish the same on your website for easy access. Similarly a self-service IVR can also do the trick and help in reducing your customer support queries.

6. Expectation Management

Holiday season is one of the busiest times of the year for everyone – customers and businesses likewise. Thus, it is important to be clear with your customers as to what and how much they should expect during this time. For example, notify them of slight delay in delivery due to high demand. That way, customers will be prepared and you will receive less queries from disgruntled customers inquiring about their order status. It is always better to underpromise and over-deliver.

How to Improve Agent Productivity – 7 Effective Strategies

Call centers are inherently seen as cost centers – cost of a lead, cost of conversion, cost of workforce, etc. As a result, BPO is a highly competitive sector with its own share of challenges (also read: Solving the Most Common Operational Call Center Problems)

Agents are the foundation of a call center. And maintaining high agent productivity is imperative for the success of a call centre. Managers are constantly looking for ways to improve agent productivity. Hence, we have tried to put together a list of effective strategies to help the call center managers to improve their agents’ productivity.

1. Give Them Autonomy

Call center operations tend to be quite structured with processes being set and not too much room for change. The work can seem monotonous for the agents and can impact their zeal to work along with agent motivation. Giving your agents some degree of autonomy will help them feel part of the customer service success and can also help them connect better with the customers. Allowing them to experiment with their sales pitch or tweaking the email templates or basically giving them the leevay to change and experiment can have a significant positive impact on their productivity.

2. Self-Service Options

Call center agents are busy people. With so many tasks and queries to handle, the work can sometimes get to them. Having self-service options for routine queries will take some work off the agents’ plate while resolving the customer’s query faster. For example, if a customer wants to know their bank account balance, rather than connecting them to an agent, it is better to have a self-service IVR. This will free up the agents to handle more urgent and complex query.

3. Recognize and Reward Good Performance

Appreciation goes a long way. An employee who feels recognized and well appreciated will be motivated to go out of their way to help the organization. In contrast, an employee who is only dumped with more and more work without any acknowledgement will start to resent it and eventually lose the motivation.

There are too many metrics to be tracked in a call center. Reward the agents for achieving their short term goals (conversation quality, FCR, customer feedback, etc.) and not just the long-term goals (conversion rate, CSAT, etc). With these instant gratifications, agents feel their goals are achievable and thus, increases their morale to work towards the bigger picture aka the long-term goals.

4. Let Agents See Their Performance

Probably it’s time to move away from the conventional call centre KPI and adopt some new ones. Having said that, knowing where they stand with respect to their own performance and those of their colleagues pushes the agents to improve their performance. Wallboard can be a useful tool to achieve this objective. It displays key metrics in real-time to give you an idea about the overall as well as individual agent performance. Having this scoreboard on the floor with provide an additional reinforcement.

5. Right Tools and Technology

To be a truly agent friendly contact center you need to empower them with the right tools. After all, on an average, an agent spends around 80 to 90 percent of their workday in front of a computer or using the calling tools – softphone or a PBX hardphone. Having the right call center software can transform your customer support while making the lives of your agents easier.

Get all your customer interactions on a single screen using a unified agent desktop to give agents a 360-degree view of the customer. According to a study, 87% of respondents requiring their agents to use multiple applications within a call slows down their work. A good way to tackle this issue can be using call center integrations to sync with any pre-existing system and make the operations smoother.

6. Work on their Career Growth

Provide the agents with the necessary training and coaching to hone their existing skills but at the same time offer opportunities to widen their horizon to learn about other aspects as well. Having an L & D program which allows the agents to self-evaluate while figuring out future career growth can be a step in that direction.

7. Community Forums

Sometimes the agents encounter a rather difficult or tricky case and they might not know the answer to such questions. Rather than struggling with it and spoiling the customer experience, having a knowledge base or an internal forum to access the right documents or used cases will help the agents to enrich their knowledge. The seasoned employees can share their experiences their to help the new incumbents. Similarly, compiling a list of frequently asked questions will help the agents to quickly get the right information to resolve the customer query.