{"id":1558,"date":"2009-02-23T12:45:08","date_gmt":"2009-02-23T20:45:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.clikonthis.info\/?p=290"},"modified":"2009-02-23T12:45:08","modified_gmt":"2009-02-23T20:45:08","slug":"new-customer-contact-concepts-terms-and-topics","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.poly.com\/new-customer-contact-concepts-terms-and-topics\/","title":{"rendered":"New customer contact concepts, terms and topics"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong>Of course all contact center professionals know the Call Center Management Dictionary, written by ICMI president Brad Cleveland. But in this new era of web 2.0, voice\/data integration and multichannel customer contact it sometimes seems that technological developments are going faster than experts explain what they are talking about. What are the new buzz words?<\/strong><\/p>\n<p><strong> <\/strong><\/p>\n<p>By Erik Bouwer<\/p>\n<p>Two important developments are creating a whole new frame of concepts. The first trend is about\u00a0<strong>sourcing<\/strong> \u2013 the decision making process of deciding what to do by yourself and what to delegate to others. These \u2018others\u2019 can be described as outsourcing service providers, who have developed a range of service solutions. Outsourcing we all know, but\u00a0<strong>co-sourcing<\/strong> and insourcing are relatively young. By co-sourcing both parties involved choose to work close together for a limited period of time. Although the actual process is outsourced, the outsourcer himself stays in control and is responsible for the end results more than compared to classical outsourcing.<br \/>\nWhen deciding to outsource, you might choose for one provider (<strong>single sourcing<\/strong>). E.g. after a request for proposal you decide to outsource telesales, inbound service calls, retention calls and market research to one third party company. This company will have the advantages of economy of scale but also has to deal with interdependencies between activities and takes a much larger business risk. Outsourcers who would like to maintain the opportunity of permanent benchmarking and to spread their business risks, might choose for\u00a0<strong>multi vendor sourcing<\/strong>. In this construction, you even might arrange that the two or more third party contactcenters have to cooperate together.<br \/>\n<strong>Insourcing<\/strong> is about asking your supplier to open up its own office within your company. You might think of IT-people or temp agencies that will operate within your building and deliver services that you used to do by yourself.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Homeshoring<\/strong><br \/>\nYou probably know about offshoring, nearshoring and farshoring: when you decide to move your activities to another region, often because of labour arbitrage.\u00a0<strong>Nearshoring<\/strong> means you decide to go to a region near your own country \u2013 for US companies, nearshoring is about the Latin Americas; for European companies it\u2019s about countries like Russia, Poland, Hungary or even Turkey. Offshore and<strong> farshore<\/strong> destinations are typically on another continent.<br \/>\n<strong>Homeshoring<\/strong> is the hottest trend for the upcoming years. With respect to urgent difficulties in recruitment, new and simple to implement technology like VoIP and software as a service make it much easier to work with homebased agents. You don\u2019t lose time to travel to far away destinations; you don\u2019t waste time in traffic jams.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Sophisticated marketing<br \/>\n<\/strong>Not only is our world getting smaller, it\u2019s also becoming smarter. New marketing models like unified multichannel communication (sending out messages to your audience in many different ways, like narrow casting, web casting, in store and online sales promotion, permission based street sales and behavorial targeting, all at the same time) are nowadays common sense. Each time you visit you most favorite websites, you can\u2019t explain whether or not someone has been analyzing your online behavior and therefore has send you a personalized add (<strong>behavioral targeting<\/strong>).\u00a0 Convergence between different media channels is growing too: like adverts in printed media that try to seduce and attract visitors to certain websites. On the webpages vistors are seduced again to leave their personal details. At another day, time and online place they will be confronted with new propositions, based on their left behind profile.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Social software<\/strong><br \/>\nWeb 2.0 will become integrated part of our business life and commerce will dig itself into web 2.0, which means that commercial activities will (again) enter into business environment. At the same level this is happening with consumer marketing. Social software like\u00a0<strong>fora<\/strong> and\u00a0<strong>blogs<\/strong> should be monitored by companies in order to be able to signalize problems, to analyse trends and\u00a0 intervene when necessary.<br \/>\nThe web confronts companies \u2013 and more specific, their customer service departments \u2013 with lots of unstructured data. Most customers explore the web before making any (buying) decision. Knowledge management, information retrieval capabilities and analytical competences are crucial for the new customer service agent.<br \/>\nWhen online customer service and online sales are fully integrated, agents should be able to inforce online up- and cross selling or even prevent customer from walking away, leaving their shopping cart unattended (shopping cart abandonment). Therefore technology and agents should be focused on instant messaging (<strong>chat<\/strong>).<\/p>\n<p><strong>Reject old concepts<\/strong><br \/>\nCompanies that still build their customer contact operation on scripting, should think twice. Is the process that\u00a0<strong>scripting<\/strong> should support, too complex to handle for smart people? And how should agents interact with customers that are smart enough to ask new questions?<br \/>\nMore and more contact center professionals have their doubts too on KPI\u2019s like\u00a0<strong>average call length<\/strong> or\u00a0<strong>average handling time.<\/strong> Nice to know, but more important is so serve your customer in the most efficient way by making use of knowledge systems and intelligent agents.<br \/>\n<em>Erik Bouwer is partner of Essentials, chiefeditor of Intellectueel Kapitaal, chiefeditor of Outsource Magazine.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Of course all contact center professionals know the Call Center [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[509],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.poly.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1558"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.poly.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.poly.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.poly.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.poly.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1558"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.poly.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1558\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.poly.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1558"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.poly.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1558"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.poly.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1558"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}