Some collections companies operate in multiple locations, often with competing debtor contact strategies and different methods and philosophies for managing portfolio risk. To be more effective, this type of organisation must adopt a holistic view of operations to sharpen competitive edge, promote best practices, drive efficiency gains, and achieve profitability goals throughout the enterprise. Greater agility and increased productivity are paramount, as are streamlining processes, reducing operational costs, ensuring business continuity, and maintaining compliance with legislative mandates, security policies, and customer-specific business rules.

Centralising list management strategies enables collections businesses to develop, execute, and manage enterprise-wide contact strategies from a single source in real time. This helps eliminate inter-company collection silos and resolves many of the technical issues surrounding disparate contact centres with multiple technologies and collection approaches. This is the beginning of true strategic business process management.

Identifying which customers are more apt to make payments or set up payment arrangements determines how successful the risk management strategies will be. The ability to dynamically change account and list segmentation in real time, to adapt to trends and patterns within specific list sectors, and to react to environmental factors that may impact contact rates within specific lists, such as weather events, regional contact patterns, are all necessary to ensure that customer contact strategies are effective.

Strategic list management enables collections centres to segment debtors according to risk level. Some are low-risk or infrequent debtors who may simply need a payment reminder as a result of losing an account statement or because of an oversight. These may require no more than a reminder notice or an outbound call scripted with an interactive voice response (IVR) to capture payment information.

This is a more strategic approach, freeing up collections agents to work on riskier accounts. This approach helps automate early-stage collection efforts, which is especially valuable for centres with large volumes of early-stage account records, enabling collections managers to target riskier debtors.

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Aspect Contact is a multimedia contact centre solution that is ideal for contact centres and help desks up to 100 seats and, according to Pommie Lutchman, CEO at Ocular Technologies, it delivers essential capabilities for streamlining customer contact practices and operations.

“It is a turnkey solution that uses Microsoft Lync as its primary media server, leveraging key functionalities from the best-of-breed Aspect Unified IP platform. Offered as an appliance, the solution can be installed in just hours with minimal disruption to enterprise infrastructures. It delivers essential capabilities for streamlining customer contact practices and operations,” he says.

With several routing, scripting, administrative and reporting options preconfigured, Aspect Contact requires little ongoing support once the solution is deployed. External contact centres and internal help desks, such as IT and HR, can also easily utilise seamless multichannel routing for instant messages, e-mail and voice interactions.

Lutchman explains that managers and supervisors are able to set up routing rules using simple, menu-driven options.

“The fully-integrated, media-independent agent desktop provides instant access to a complete view of all relevant customer, employee and other background data. Additionally, Aspect Contact features skills-based, context-aware and presence-enabled Expert Search, to help users quickly find and collaborate with available subject matter experts to resolve customer inquiries,” he says.

“Aspect Contact provides an attractive opportunity for a fast, painless ROI on Lync investments. The solution is competitively priced and includes computer based end-user training and 24/7 support. It also helps improve service while maximising employee efficiency and provides native support for at-home and remote agents.”

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Call blending technology increases the efficiency of the collections contact centre by monitoring calling traffic and dynamically deploying agents based on call volume needs. Call blending helps maximise collections agent resources and eliminates agent silos to improve cost savings. It is designed to automate tasks associated with managing inbound and outbound calling patterns, including assigning agents to inbound or outbound tasks automatically, based on agent availability as well as skill sets.

This can be further facilitated by the use of skills-based routing. Business rules can take into account the types of calls, levels of delinquency, debtor risk score, debtor contact record, and so on, to determine which calls should be prioritised and how they should be handled. A low-risk customer can be routed to a self-service IVR application, while a high-risk customer can be sent directly to an experienced high-risk collector. All contacts, whether inbound or outbound, should have business rules applied in order to ensure consistency in call treatments and maximise contact centre staff.

Skills-based routing can also consider agent proficiency and skill level at a granular level when making routing decisions. It can be most effective when contact centre administrators can specify what skills an agent should have for a particular type of call and assign a specific level of proficiency for that call type. For example, an outbound calling campaign may require French-speaking agents with a high level of proficiency. Only agents with the matching skill – French, High – should have calls routed to them for that campaign to maximise account collections and minimise potential call transfers.

Credit card lenders, in particular, have realised that product improvement alone is not enough to drive long-term profitability in an environment of radically changing, heightened customer service expectations. Fact is, today’s demanding consumer is forcing credit card lenders to step back and re-examine the effectiveness of their entire customer experience programme within both the contact centre and throughout the enterprise.

Creating a differentiated customer experience is, however, becoming more and more challenging, particularly when taking into account the fact that card holders have a myriad of bank, programme and service options available to them. As never before, the contact centre is poised to play an integral role in accelerating growth and profitability as organisations undertake customer experience makeovers.

Due to recent technological advances, consumers have come to expect immediate and consistent answers from knowledgeable service providers regardless of their channel of choice. The real challenge thus is to exceed elevated customer expectations, something that can be achieved by next-generation customer contact solutions that extend the reach of the contact centre.

These solutions also empower and improve employees’ performance through automated coaching and by allowing staff to manage their own schedules using predefined rules. Finally, data may be easily integrated using industry standard technologies to create a truly global view of operations.

The most comprehensive solutions:

• Conduct a quick scenario analysis to identify the right staffing profile for effectively responding to unexpected events.
• Optimise tasks across contact centres and back offices to create a centralised plan for effectively and efficiently servicing customers.
• Offer multi-site scheduling capabilities that provide a global perspective for environments that share tasks across sites.
• Enable convenient workforce data sharing with outsourcers to gain a complete, accurate view of activity.
• Capture data on tasks and employees, to effectively optimise and report on operations.
• Evaluate employees by monitoring real-time and historical adherence to work schedules, to inform corrective actions related to staffing plans and employees’ performance.
• Track actual to targeted employee performance with scorecards that help employees understand and optimise their performance, and help managers identify areas for improvement.
• Provide dashboards and reports that measure an organisation’s and individual employee’s overall productivity.
• Initiate online coaching when an employee’s performance falls below a set threshold, to improve individual and overall operational effectiveness.
• Empower employees to manage their own schedules within preset parameters to increase morale and retention.

The ultimate reward of an automated workforce optimisation solution is consistently quicker and more accurate response to customer queries. In this way, organisations are able to cultivate loyalty through long-term satisfaction – without adding resources or budget.

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According to Pommie Lutchman, CEO at contact centre solutions provider, Ocular Technologies, the global contact centre market has for many years, up to and including 2009, been stagnating in terms of technology adoption and innovation. Since the beginning of 2010 though, a number of new concepts have evolved within the industry, with the focus shifting from an inward-facing, technology-focused strategy to an outward-facing, customer experience based ideology.

“This is no different in South Africa and many enterprises are now realigning their corporate strategies around the consumer experience. This is mainly due to the phenomenal rise in social networking sites, an online presence and the emergence of Web 2.0 methodologies. In South Africa at present, a number of innovative service- and solution providers are finding ways to integrate this reliance on the consumers online personalities and this can be used very effectively to target a specific audience and/or demographic,” he says.

In a presentation titled “Social Networking and Call Centres” put together by researchers Connie Crosbie, Rob Reid and Dara Renton, social networking is defined as “a network that is made up of people and links between people. So it’s all about how people can find and contact people that they want to reach through the people that they already know. And that makes it very different from a database. It’s the human connection.”

Showing the strength of this human connection, observer Dave Paulding states on online site, Call Centre Focus, that when someone tweets about bad, or good, service, it is not to one person but to a large number. That comment is out there, many people including potential customers and competitors read it, and it can be searched.

“Social media integration is significant and most certainly the new buzz term for the contact centre industry,” comments Lutchman. “This encompasses the ability for companies, once they have established an online presence through sites like Facebook, Twitter and Linked-In, to monitor any and all traffic, blog entry, complaint or compliment related to their brand, product or service, and proactively manage these on a daily basis. This has insurmountable positive consequences for companies wanting to get the edge over their competitors and has a possible target market in the billions, in terms of number of users, as opposed to the hundreds or thousands from generic websites and print media.”

To stay on trend, corporate business models are therefore evolving form being extremely technology-heavy and cost-focused to being very much in favour of the customer. This model is simpler to plan and implement as the technology and requirements are clear-cut. That is, what is it that our customers want?

Says Lutchman: “Those enterprises that answer the above question correctly, and base their corporate goals and objectives around the answers, have won half the battle in terms of winning market share. Case in point: Apple Inc. The Cupertino-based pioneers successfully mapped out, planned and implemented their products based on what the answers were to the question above. iPad anyone?”

In terms of future trends, Lutchman predicts that a high adoption of newer, simpler technologies that result in higher returns is on the horizon. “Sweating-the-asset has never had such a succinct connotation as it does in today’s post-recession marketplace and vendors that have this unique selling proposition as their business model will come out on top. In conjunction with this, cloud-based computing and hosted contact centres will certainly take a small slice out of the captive market, if the offering is secure and, with due respect to the business process outsourcing industry, managed effectively and efficiently.

“Another trend that may come to fruition, finally, is the emergence of South African based offshoring successes. This is mainly due to the new incentive offered by the Department of Trade and Industry, which promises a 20 percent reduction on costs, as well as substantial, multi-year incentives for companies offering business process outsourcing and offshoring services. It may just be what the industry has needed in order for us to gain market share over the likes of India and the Philippines. I wouldn’t hold my breath though, as this has been attempted before, and has failed dismally. Our only hope is that South African business process outsourcing providers see the benefit of the scheme and utilise it so that the industry may go out and market South Africa as the next ‘go-to’ destination for business process outsourcing and offshoring services,” concludes Lutchman.

“As part of our reseller agreement, Ocular Technologies will market, sell, and integrate the AudioCodes suite of products and solutions into our business,” says Pommie Lutchman, CEO of Ocular Technologies. “This is excellent news for our customers, as AudioCodes provides a range of innovative, cost-effective products.

“Moving forward, Ocular Technologies will be in a position to supply our clients with AudioCodes solutions directly.”

AudioCodes is a VoIP technology leader focused on VoIP communications, applications and networking elements, and its products are deployed globally in broadband, mobile, cable, and enterprise networks.

“There is a clear lack of focus in this sector in South Africa,” says Lutchman, “and Ocular feels it necessary to offer the local consumer world-class solutions. AudioCodes is the ideal partner for us in this respect, as the company’s solutions are an excellent fit for the South African landscape.”

AudioCodes High Definition VoIP technologies and products provided enhanced intelligibility and a better end-user communication in emerging voice networks. The company’s range of products includes gateways, multi-service business gateways, residential gateways, IP phones, media servers, session border controllers, security gateways and value added applications. AudioCodes’ underlying technology, VoIPerfectHD, relies primarily on AudioCodes’ leadership in DSP, voice coding and voice processing technologies.

About Audiocodes
AudioCodes Ltd. designs, develops and sells advanced Voice over IP (VoIP) and converged VoIP and Data networking products and applications to Service Providers and Enterprises. AudioCodes is a VoIP technology leader focused on VoIP communications, applications and networking elements, and its products are deployed globally in Broadband, Mobile, Cable, and Enterprise networks. The company provides a range of innovative, cost‐effective products including Media Gateways, Multi‐Service Business Gateways, Residential Gateways, IP Phones, Media Servers, Session Border Controllers (SBC), Security Gateways and Value Added Applications. AudioCodes underlying technology, VoIPerfectHDTM, relies primarily on AudioCodes leadership in DSP, voice coding and voice processing technologies. AudioCodes High Definition (HD) VoIP technologies and products provide enhanced intelligibility, and a better end user communication experience in emerging Voice networks.

“All of this takes companies beyond workforce management and into workforce productivity,” he says.
He explains the term “workforce productivity” as being a concept which core techniques include: applying technologies that go beyond traditional forecasting and scheduling applications, empowering contact centre staff to take responsibility for their own contributions, and tying contact centre metrics to business goals such as growth and profit.
“The way the contact centre used to be managed, and still is for some, was by measuring seconds and counting beans. Managers who take this approach use workforce management software primarily for forecasting call volumes and devising schedules that get the most work out of the fewest agents. They use simple metrics, like talk time or number of calls handled, to assess agent performance. Reporting is primarily a process of proving to management that the centre has met its cost-reduction goals, not a process of using information to affect positive change. It is an inward-looking philosophy, with the ultimate objective being to please a tight-fisted CFO.
“Most centres are successful in accomplishing this – meeting and even exceeding their savings goals – but ‘bigger picture’ corporate objectives, such as winning customer loyalty and increasing revenue, often suffer as a result,” he says.
In order for the cost centre investment to yield the biggest return, workforce management practices and technologies should be aimed at empowering staff to make the largest possible contribution to achieving the company goals.
“With multichannel contact centres, consumers are more informed than ever and the competition is fierce. The only way to keep customers happy and acquire new ones is to differentiate on something other than price, and this means changing the way the workforce is managed,” says Lutchman.
He lists nine things every contact centre needs to know about workforce productivity. These are:
1. Reset goals to achieve greater productivity
The highly evolved capability of a workforce management solution to control costs is valuable, but not the only game in town. Workforce managers must also establish goals and metrics for reaching corporate expectations for business success and ensure new staff understands the importance of these productivity goals.
2. Institute best practices for productivity
Create a work environment that is conducive to productivity by automating clerical changes and empowering agents to, for example, view their own work schedules, easily request shift changes, arrange vacation time and schedule adjustments. Also institute real-time views of staff members’ performance for self-monitoring, and clarify and help them understand corporate objectives by tying contact centre metrics and processes to their performance goals.
3. Implement the right technology
Having the right technology makes it easier to manage the workforce and allows for the shift from cost-efficiency to workforce productivity. Importantly, workforce management solutions must be implemented and utilised with corporate/business goals in mind.
4. Understand the importance of analytics
The most valuable technology available today is analytics. In fact, workforce productivity equals workforce management plus analytics. It creates a structured process, through which a company can manage and improve its overall performance.
5. Focus on relevant statistics
These should be based on the strategic objectives of the company coupled with the overall objectives of the contact centre.
6. Draw information from business applications
The essence of workforce productivity is to enable contact centre managers to administer agent performance based on business goals. Pull information from multiple contact centre systems, sites, channels and data sources, such as business applications, payroll, HR and more, and combine these to provide true KPI tracking and management.
7. Match the data to the task
Each staff member should see the particular KPIs related to his/her function and, therefore, different views should be available for agents, supervisors, managers, executives or business owners and support staff.
8. Analyse for root causes
An analytical tool that dumps statistics is no more useful than traditional call centre reports. The tool must include navigational mechanisms that allow a user to drill down into the data and identify root causes of performance challenges and shortfalls.
9. Manage the infrastructure for optimal productivity
Lastly, analytical applications should be applied to more than just the contact centre and customer-facing business processes. Use them to analyse the management of the infrastructure to gain insight into trunk usage, glean data around Web site traffic and track and measure IP bandwidth. This way you will improve the productivity of both the infrastructure and workforce.

“The reality is that customer communications are shifting from interaction on the company’s terms to true collaboration on the consumer’s terms,” says Pommie Lutchman, CEO at contact centre solutions provider, Ocular Technologies.

“This new generation of customers, of all ages, is using social tools and demanding communications anytime, anywhere and across any channel, resulting in companies taking advantage of unified communications, mobility and communities and collaborating with partners and other vendors.”

He adds that these changes are also fundamentally changing the contact centre, and that enterprises are breaking down the silos between the contact centre and the rest of the enterprise. “Enterprises are creating plans to comprehensively interact with customers using unified communications and collaboration to facilitate the conversation,” he says.

Unified communications improves business productivity through communication that is focused on people, their availability and willingness to communicate, rather than which tool or device to use. It is a solution platform that allows streamlining of business process steps that cannot be automated.

“Unified communications in the contact centre is about keeping the customer in the equation and enterprises should thus be focusing on communication in order to enable its customer-facing processes such as sales, collections and service. Fortunately, enterprises need look no further than their contact centre,” he says.

Yet, if unified communications is the answer, what is the question? “Companies are continuously being challenged with doing ‘more with less’ in order to maximise every resource. The promise of unified communications, first, and most importantly, is therefore increased productivity. Second, it is about streamlining processes,” says Lutchman.

Art Rosenberg (http://unified-view.blogspot.com) offers a framework for identifying these productivity enhancements: micro-productivity – individual users can save time by accessing information and people more flexibly and faster and; macro-productivity – the ability to achieve greater business process efficiencies by all users in a given group.

“Lastly,” says Lutchman, “It is about enhancing the customer experience. That is, it is the differentiator between excellent companies and those that are merely ‘good’.”

“The Three ‘Ds of Customer Experience” by authors Allen, Reicheld and Hamilton outlines companies delivering superior customer interactions as such: they design the right offers and experiences for the right customers; they deliver these propositions by focusing the entire company on them with emphasis on cross-functional collaboration and they develop their capabilities to please customers again and again.

“Revisiting the original question ‘why unified communications’, there is an increasing body of evidence that the technologies of unified communications, applied with the goal of communications-enabling businesses processes, can have a direct impact on the value a company can deliver to its employees, to its customers and, ultimately, to its shareholders. Improving productivity and streamlining processes can make it easier for a company to deliver the ideal customer experience.

“The reason enterprises should start with the contact centre is because the contact centre has already developed disciplines that enterprises can apply to their unified communications strategy in order to ensure that the customer is part of the equation. The success of the unified communication strategy will ultimately be measured in terms of the customer experience,” concludes Lutchman.

“Together with the recent release of Unified Communications Applications from Aspect Software, Ocular Technologies now provides a more complete UC Ready products and services package. A selection of the most popular UC Ready headsets and desk phones from Plantronics are immediately available through our sales channel,” says Ebrahim Dinat, chief operations officer at Ocular Technologies.
According to Duncan Barnes, channel manager at South Africa’s reseller of Plantronics products, Headset Solutions, the company has always seen Ocular Technologies as a strategic partner in the African contact centre environment.
“With Ocular Technologies extending its specialist skills into the UC market, it allows us to jointly ensure that local customers get the best technology solutions enabled by best-of-breed end user devices. Ocular Technologies has proven itself through its ongoing passion to drive business value for its clients as well as service of the highest level.
“Having Ocular Technologies as part of our value added reseller (VAR) programme supports Plantronics in its African strategy to deliver devices that are recognised for their sound quality, reliability and comfort, thereby fostering better business communication and efficiency, regardless of where professionals are working,” he says.
For contact centre workers, every day is a whirlwind of conversations where they provide expert help to a steady stream of customers. Each caller might have very different needs, and workers are under constant pressure to provide effective, personable service as quickly and efficiently as possible. Dinat says the contact centre workers thus need robust tools that can withstand constant daily use and are comfortable to use for long periods of time.
“These tools also have to be able to reduce background noise, protect against sudden loud sounds and also provide crystal clear audio quality at both ends of the line. With the Plantronics offering, the Ocular Technologies UC Ready headset programme for Aspect UC Applications provides proven products that have a strong reputation in the industry and provide superior voice quality and reliability to enhance the day-to-day operations of a call centre. In addition, these products have been optimised for use with Microsoft Lync Server, which assures the highest usability and seamless integration,” concludes Dinat.