Employee Development is a wise investment

Posted on February 14, 2012 by tonyruf

I ran across an interesting article today that examines getting the most out of your training program and it made me think of how we often asks our clients, “What are you doing to help your workforce achieve their best?”
Companies tirelessly look through their numbers day after day and search for ideas on how to improve and increase customer satisfaction. Everyone wants to number 1. Am I right? But how can we make this happen? In order to do this, you have to have a knowledgeable and happy workforce.
According to the article from ICMI.com, “We invest heavily in training and development to ensure customer, employee and organization/shareholder satisfaction. So let’s be sure we are getting the highest return on that investment by taking the time to reinforce, refresh, report, review, reach out, recognize, and revitalize our training processes!”
So how can we help you to ensure your workforce is achieving their best? Intelegencia offers customized Training Solutions designed to support your organization in its efforts to become more proficient and productive. We will work with your company to design a curriculum that aligns your training needs with your business needs to maximize results.

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On-Premise or BMC Remedy ITSM Suite On Demand or Software-as-a-Service (SaaS)

Posted on February 13, 2012 by manjul

BMC Remedy OnDemand is delivered as cloud-based software as a service to manage IT services anywhere, anytime. The Remedy suite’s full functionality are ported into a SaaS model, including ITIL processes, service desk workflow and service level management capability

It is a service approach that IT organizations are considering for meeting their IT service management needs. With a SaaS model, IT organizations can focus their staff and infrastructure on high-priority activities and initiatives while still enjoying access to IT service management productivity solutions. They can achieve these benefits without having to invest their own resources in the systems or in the management and upgrading of the applications.

BMC provides the best cloud, mobile and social solutions for managing today’s consumerized enterprise IT . In a nutshell, BMC customers are keeping their on-premise software suites, but expanding their licensed seats via SaaS

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Real-time adherence, and its importance

Posted on February 10, 2012 by Rajdeep Sond

What is real-time adherence?
Real-time agent adherence compares planned agent activity to actual activities throughout the day, as well as real-time views of forecasted and actual call volumes, handle times and other key performance indicators. Managers and supervisors can compare agents’ actual activities against their schedules, review a breakdown of adherence by activity, and manage exceptions. They also see when agents are available for calls and when they take their lunches and breaks based on predetermined schedules.

Why is real-time adherence important?
A key component to managing adherence is shrinkage, which is the time for which agents are paid during times when they are not available to handle calls. Shrinkage can dramatically affect your center’s ability to meet service levels. Real-time adherence provides you the capabilities and tools to manage and reduce shrinkage.
•Monitor agent status in real-time
•Receive instant alerts for out-of-adherence states
•View agent exceptions in real-time and approve or deny right away
•Monitor and analyze key performance indicators and trends to reforecast, reschedule, and adjust staffing
•Track and compare forecasted and actual center statistics
•Schedule overtime or time off during high and low call volume situations
•Evaluate adherence and take action to improve performance

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First Contact Resolution

Posted on February 10, 2012 by Rajdeep Sond

First Contact Resolution (FCR) is a critical determinant of customer satisfaction, making FCR one of the more powerful customer care metrics. Improvement in FCR brings the best of both worlds—improvement in efficiency and effectiveness. When you improve FCR you’re improving quality, reducing costs, and improving customer satisfaction, all at the same time.
In today’s complex contact center scenario, the focus has shifted from First Call Resolution to First Contact Resolution as customers now contact us not only through calls but emails, chat, fax etc and in order to measure the correct FCR, we need to ensure that we take into consideration the complete interaction whether it happened through call, email chat or fax. For e.g. the customer might have called for a query and then followed it up with an email or fax where he sent us some documentation that was required to resolve the issue. In this case, it becomes eminent to have a tool which integrates the various Interfaces that a contact center may be using to capture customer interactions through various modes. Making all the information available to the contact center executives would assist them in handling the customer queries in a better manner as they would provide the resolution in the first go rather than depending upon other departments or Tier 2 employees who have access to this information as they use different interfaces.
Intelegencia’s CSI Interface has been specifically designed keeping in mind these requirements. The Interface provides the following benefits:
•Integrates the various tools/interfaces that a contact center uses for different purposes like Billing, Documentation, CRM etc.
•Provides level based access to users defined by the organizational hierarchy.
•Serves as one stop shop for the end users and assists in handling customer’s query in a better manner.
•Increased customer satisfaction as more queries are handled and resolved in the first go.
•Reduces repeat call by customers resulting in reduced call flow.
•Reduced call flow results in reduced staffing requirements which ultimately saves cost on manpower.

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Essentials of an Effective Digital Marketing Strategy

Posted on January 13, 2012 by admin

Digital marketing is quite popular way of showcasing your products and services. And like the conventional marketing, it also requires lots of strategic planning on several parameters to yield an attractive ROI (Return on Investment). Let us briefly look at some important parameters for an effective digital marketing strategy.

Commercial Goals

The log term and short-term business goals should be clear. The goals should be fragmented into smaller and simpler achievable tasks and proper strategies of achieving these tasks should be devised. Moreover, there must be periodic checks of the synchronization in efforts and results.

Current Technologies and Media

The prevailing technologies and the respective platforms of launching the digital marketing campaign should be analyzed. Subsequent strategies should be formulated keeping in mind the feasibility and ROI of the respective campaigns.

Retrospective Analysis

The past campaigns, their effectiveness, their loopholes etc should be extensively studied. The strong areas must be strengthened and proper and necessary care should be provided towards the weaknesses. In fact, carrying out digital marketing can be quite costly affair and hence every step must be carefully analyzed.

Competitor Analysis

Business is all about staying ahead from the competitors. And to stay ahead of your competitors, you must know their strengths, weaknesses and the approach. Only when you have a complete idea of your competitors then you can plan to outsmart them.

Market Analysis

This is the most important step in an effective digital marketing campaign. And it comes naturally to many businesses. You must also know about the respective market, its potential and extrapolated growth. This way, you will be better positioned to take strategic decisions regarding the digital campaign.

Budget

Keeping a tab on the financial aspects of these digital campaigns help you in avoiding any useless monetary spillage. Moreover, you will also get a rough idea of the associated investment and the forthcoming results. You must also fix a budget for the digital marketing campaign and avoid making an elastic budget. Because this way, you will also be on spending spree without ever recognizing the fact that money is not being spent properly.

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These 10 Mistakes Can Kick Your AdWords Campaign Out Of Profit.

Posted on September 9, 2011 by Naddy

This is the second post of our blog’s “HOW TO PROMOTION?” series.  Articles of this series are focused on Digital marketing, Brand promotion and Online reputation management.

In present post we will discuss the ways to make a Google AdWords campaign more effective in terms of ROI and 10 important thing to remember while Investing in a AdWords campaign.

The strategic use of keywords in your Google AdWords campaign is an essential component to your company’s success online. Remember that the relevance of keywords used in your content and titles can spell the difference between success and failure when talking about search engine rankings. The same applies to using AdWords for your promotional campaigns.

The name of the game in search engine marketing is not about how high you rank in results pages, but rather how large a percentage of your targeted market clicks through your links to be able to get to your site. It would make no sense to have the top slot in results pages if you didn’t have the traffic needed to boost your sales. By using Google AdWords you will not only get a fair amount of exposure but you will also get a good percentage of site traffic that is enough to convert into sales.

The cost of starting your own campaign depends on the type of the keywords, the length of the campaign, and of course the market you wish to have your site advertised in. Once you are able to grasp all of these components you will be able to maximize the number of people clicking through your ad links and checking out your website. This is what produces great leads and potential customers – two main components essential to building a brand name and establishing your expertise in the niche that you have chosen.

The main thing to remember when using Google AdWords is the relevance of the keyword and not its price. Since the most popular keywords being used by internet searchers can sometimes be too costly to bid for when starting your campaign it is better to start with a mid-popular keyword. You can then combine this with long tailed keywords of your own and use them in your ad banners to make the greatest impact.

Companies who have been using AdWords as part of their marketing strategies have reported a rise in web traffic resulting from pay per click customers. You can take advantage of this as well as long as you have the right mix of keyword and creative banner ad composition. If you are new to the internet marketplace you may want to seek the help of experts who have been doing online marketing for a number of years.

Hiring a Google AdWords specialist has its own advantages, chief of which is the high level of knowledge needed to maximize a company’s profit potential through the simple use of Google’s PPC campaigns.

AdWords is easy enough to use on your own of course, but you may want to entrust the creation of an effective ad campaign to an expert just to make sure that you get the best results possible.

It is reasonable enough to expect that the amount of traffic on your site will be higher than what you normally receive when you’ve set up your own ad campaign. Keep in mind however that Google AdWords is only a tool that you can use; it is up to you and your creativity to make it work.

Be aware these 10 mistakes can kick your AdWords campaign out of profit.

  1. Creating a long list of less than targeted keywords
  2. Failing to identify unique aspects of your product or service
  3. A lack of keywords in your ad text
  4. Directing users solely to your home page
  5. Creating single ad groups
  6. Utilizing single campaigns
  7. Using broad match only
  8. Failing to optimize ad serving for your ads
  9. Failing to track results
  10. Entering the content network without modifying bids
Posted in Google AdWords, How To Promotion? | Tagged , , , , | 35 Comments

Contact Center Health Check

Posted on September 7, 2011 by admin

I recently paid a visit to my doctor due to what I surely thought was a sinus infection. I’m unfortunate in that I suffer from these quite often and I just knew I had one. All the right symptoms were present, trouble breathing, very congested, pressure headaches, so I knew the visit would be quick, I had self-assessed and knew I was right…I wasn’t. No sinus infection, which means I would have prescribed myself the wrong medicine. I was so sure of it I had not stopped to even consider other possibilities, to really diagnose the issue, I had assumed and it was a bad assumption.

So it is with call center assessments, as an operations manager, a call center director, or even a Chief Operating Officer, often, we are too close to the action to really step back and perform a fair and balanced HEALTH CHECK of our center. The constant interaction with customers, the tremendous reliance upon technology, and the desire to produce at the highest efficiency and effectiveness rates warrant a periodic review.

So I ask – When was your last call center HEALTH CHECK? When was the last time you had a second opinion on the key metrics, quality attributes, agent productivity, and customer satisfaction that drives your care center? If it has been more than 24 months, I would recommend a look into a partnered review of your people, processes, and technology that drives your customer experience every day.

With the blazing speed of social networking can you afford to wait?

Looking forward to comments and discussions!
Tim

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Customer Care Centers: Are you listening?

Posted on August 3, 2011 by admin

Most senior level executives view the customer service channel as a pure and sometimes irritating expense.  A necessary evil subtracting from the top line revenue of any company with the need to stay fully available to their customer base.  It often becomes a point of contention and can create frustration with all parties involved. 

I would employ any executive who finds him/herself in this mindset to dedicate some time, grab a headset, and take a trip to your call center floor.  Really listen to both your customers and your employees who speak with them hundreds or even thousands of times a day.  Listen to what they are saying positive, negative, what issues they face, learn about thier lifestyle, their movements, when do they use your product or service, how do they use your product/service.  What you will typically find is how to sell them more! 

The leadership group of many companies have done just that, and are quite glad they did.  The power behind voice-of-the-customer interactions and the data provided as a result, should serve as a focal point for all road-map activities of a company.  Who better to direct you in some of the most important decisions you will make about products and services offered, pricing, timing, care channel preference, than the very customer you are serving. 

If you haven’t done so already, I highly recommend researching and implementing a strong voice-of-the-customer survey with good analytics.  Analytics is so key here!  Without them the survey is simply a car with no engine, no way to propel the effort forward or make intelligent decisions based on what the customer has told you. 

Looking forward to questions and comments!

Tim

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How to Use Facebook Fan Page to Engage Your Customers?

Posted on May 19, 2011 by Naddy

This is the first post of our blog’s “HOW TO PROMOTION?” series. Ongoing from this week we will share important researches, facts, tricks, tips and tactics to promote a business on the web using paid and unpaid advertising methods.

In this post we will discuss the ways to engage your customers using Facebook fan page, The DIE methodology for fan engagement.

Facebook Fan page is like a public profile or a platform to expose your product/services on the most popular social network over the web. Most of the internet users like to spent their time on Facebook for entertainment for communicating with their family or friends and some of them are promoting them self they are searching for potential clients.

Using Facebook fan page you can establish a channel to communicating with your potential clients or current visitors. Before implementing a fan engagement strategy you should categories your fan following according to their geo location their field of interest and their degree of orientation towards your promotion.
You can categories your engagement strategy into three parts Distribution, Interaction, and Examination in short DIE. To complete an engagement cycle we have to implement all three parts of it effectively.

Here we will discuss the complete cycle of fan engagement in reference of DIE. Pick the trend, go ahead and offer them the same what exactly they want to consume.

Distribution

Develop unique interactive and interesting content highly relevant to your niche. A unique and new idea can grab more attention than older one. So distribute the content as much fresh as possible and of course it can be developed because you know your business very well and also know that how to represent it in front of your fans?

You can make some attractive videos because videos are easily consumed form of content over the web these days. Create a channel on YouTube upload your videos over there and share them on your fan page. By this you will get double benefit, traffic from YouTube as it is the largest video sharing community and second largest search engine after Google and additionally it will fulfill the need of your engagement cycle.
Images and graphics are second highest consumed form of content on the Facebook. Share them frequently add some creativity and mention your label on each of them and see how your content is spreading in the form of an atomic reaction, wall to wall.
You can add your blog to your fan page using networked blog. You can integrate your LinkedIn Twitter profile with your fan page for additional updation on your fan page.

You can offer gifts to your fan time to time; it will encourage new people to like your page too. Suppose you are promoting mobile apps on your fan page, you can add newsletter related to mobile technology you can offer a free trial of your mobile app or can offer a free mobile game to download. It will expose your page in a ballistic way. There are lots of forms of content to share but your concentration should be freshness and quality of content.

Interaction

With great API Facebook allow users to interact effectively like never before. E.g Coca-colas Facebook fan page has millions of fans and most of the content on the page is generated by users or lovers of coke. They organize events, polls and contests time to time for their fans.
So, interact with your fans. Organize events and polls, ask them the question related to general interest as well as specifically targeted to your niche. Encourage them to publish their own content on your page, choose best one to reward.

Examination

Track and analyze the movement of your fans over your page. Update your strategy if needed and recall the entire cycle again.

In my upcoming posts I’ll discuss the best ways to interact with your fan and how to improve your current strategy after tracking and analyzing the feedbacks and movements of your fans over your Facebook fan page.

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Call volumes forecasting: Creativity is vital towards effective staffing solutions in customer care industry

Posted on April 25, 2011 by Tuhin

In my last blog, I had talked about agent level dashboards (iDAT), and the vital role they play in the judgment about the 3 P’s (Presence, productivity and performance) of call center agents. Hence iDAT is an immensely useful tool for TLs to asses individual agents based on their scores on various parameters like AHT, Occupancy rates, Phone time variance etc.

In this blog, I will discuss about iDAT’s feature which also includes forecasting Call volumes (could be daily, weekly or monthly) for a particular process/skill set wise/agent department wise etc.  Call volumes forecasts are essential for any call center process to get a “night vision” of the expected number of calls in an hour/day/week/month and hence agent resources could be allocated accordingly, so that “supply is always sufficient to meet the demand”. These forecasted call volume numbers are not just randomly guessed , but, they are analyzed from past historical call volumes data, put under rigorous analytical process to fit significant Time series models and in turn precipitate out reliable and statistically significant call volume forecasts.

From what  I have learnt doing some past projects dealing with forecasting numbers and volumes,  is that the process of forecasting call volumes is a fine blend of creativity (studying patterns and trends in the past data) and technical knowledge (Fitting of appropriate ARIMA/ARIMAX models to the historical data to produce sensible and statistically rigorous forecasts).

In this discussion, I will talk only about the creative aspect of Forecasting call volume numbers. Studying the various patterns in the call volumes data like, seasonal patterns (lesser calls in December due to Christmas breaks, etc.), weekly patterns (more calls on Mondays and Tuesdays consistently over months), daily patterns (rush of calls in the morning hours, less calls in evening hours), general trends (call volumes are increasing gradually over time), cyclic patterns (which occur over large time intervals, may be 5 or 6 months), and detecting random variations is a test of the analyst’s creativity and art.  Accurate analysis of the patterns in the call volumes is very crucial for a robust and accurate forecast. Under/over assumptions  about the patterns in Call volumes might lead to unreliable numbers which in turn would result in inefficient staffing models.

So from the above discussion, it’s clear that it is creativity that counts when it comes to deciphering patterns in the past data. Thankfully, the removing of patterns/cycles need not be done manually,  as there are standard statistical packages like SAS, R etc which fit a Time series model automatically (provided we identify the patterns correctly and decide on the most probable models to be fit) , which next would lead us to the technical aspect of Call volumes forecasting.

In my next blog, I will discuss about the technical aspect of the call volumes forecastingprocess which would close in the dimension of an analyst’s capabilities to treat historical data of calls and come up with reliable and significant forecasts of call volumes.

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