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Today’s service call centers need the flexibility to cope with a growing range of communications channels, prioritising requests and distributing information to ensure effective customer service. They must also correlate information across both internal and external channels. Failure to do so risks reputational damage and creating processing overload.

Customer service is a fundamental requirement. People buying goods and services often need help. With many transactions taking place online or in larger retail outlets without specialist knowledge and capabilities, customers often need to talk directly to vendors or their agents to resolve problems.

When help is required, the first thing customers do is to try to access one of the service options available to them. These might be a telephone number, an email address or a contact form on the web.

In most cases, these enquiries are directed to a call center for processing. In our classification, we identified several types of call center and this kind can generically be referred to as a “service call center”.

Today’s service call centers are a crucial element in the delivery of service and support capabilities to customers.  But of course, nowadays there is a wider range of communications media and channels to manage – service call centers can be sent voice calls, faxes, emails, social media messages, web forms, chat from instant messenger services and so on. This diversity is likely to grow, as new forms of communications channels spread, such as WebRTC-enabled click-to-call sessions.

This means that the staff in the call center – both management and agents – must have a high degree of flexibility in order to meet differing requirements placed on them by the different media types. In turn, this means that the systems on which they depend must be capable of managing media across a range of different channels and be sufficiently flexible to cope with new ones as they emerge and gain user adoption.

In addition, centralised reporting is essential so that media can be distributed effectively, not only according to its type, but also according to the skill and service levels required. This task falls to a modern, multi-channel ACD.

With a modern, fully multi-channel ACD, tasks such as reporting and managing multiple forms of communications (for example, email and voice calls) can be managed more effectively. Call center management staff can control daily operations using a ‘cockpit’ to obtain real-time visibility of events – providing essential monitoring to enable intervention and escalation when required.

To achieve this, you need an ACD that really can manage the communications channels of today – and has the flexibility to deal with emerging channels as they become adopted. The ACD needs to be integrated with reporting tools that enable the efficient monitoring of activity so that overall service levels can be maintained.

This is particularly important when we consider that customers will not only make contact with the provider directly via the available channels, but also that they may broadcast their experience over their own social networks. For example, suppose a customer sends an email to the service contact center – but receives no response because the email channel is dependent on manual checks or is neglected.

The customer may then become frustrated and send three further emails within a relatively short space of time. This frustration can lead to anger and the customer posts disparaging messages to Facebook to report the issue. Unless the call center is actively tracking both inbound enquiries across all channels and external media and correlating them effectively, then this activity could be completely lost – until the negative remarks create a backlash across social channels.

A multi-channel ACD must be capable of not only tracking all such activity but also of correlating them into a single case, report or incident. The example suggested above could have resulted in multiple incidents that are regarded as separate, when really they are all concerned with the same thing. In this case, there would be five incidents. Taking into account call volumes, this could cause situations that overload the call center and lead to operational paralysis that, in turn, will lead to further reputational damage.

With many retailers lacking direct, face-to-face interaction with their customers, it’s essential to address customer service issues. Good customer service is the foundation of a business and businesses must ensure they meet the expected service levels, through guaranteed response times, easy escalation paths, and observation and correlation of activity across all internal and external channels. Failure to do so will result in:

• Unnecessary escalation of problems
• An increased likelihood that customers will choose another provider in the future
• Potential issues with reputation management that spread virally through the online world.

That’s why the multi-channel ACD is so important. If your infrastructure is not able to cope with the demands of a diverse and growing range of communications channels, or correlate information received effectively, it’s important to correct this.

Talk to jtel to find out how.

Cyber security is a pressing concern for the CIO community globally. Despite the growth in preventative measures, it can cause significant disruption, financial loss and reputational damage. The sad fact is that the risk is never likely to disappear: what matters is the resilience of systems and the measures put in place to protect them.

Communications platforms have been specifically targeted by hackers, as they can open the doors to fraud, user data and more, so as a mature provider of enterprise and carrier solutions, we pay particular attention to the issue. That’s why we have built security and resilience into our solutions from the outset. We know that telecoms networks are particularly attractive – back in 2015, well-known experts Kaspersky Labs stated that, of all industries, telecoms had the highest chances of experiencing an attack.

So, as trusted providers of carrier-grade solutions, we have used our expertise to protect all our products, from the smallest enterprise to the largest carrier deployment. Our investments have paid dividends. Just recently, one of our customers, with a cloud-based communications platform serving thousands of end-user enterprise accounts suffered a massive attack to its jtel|ACD. This is used to provided service centre functionality and so is a crucial element of the infrastructure.

The attack proceeded in two waves. The first spanned a period of 1 hour 45 minutes, while the second lasted for 45 minutes. During these times, almost 25,000 illegal login attempts were made to the system. Despite this, the system remained secure and fully functional. Our software took precautionary measures to prevent logins during the period, while maintaining open sessions until, finally, at 1715, the last attack was denied.

System integrity was maintained, with no illegal access and all data was protected – an essential outcome, given the coming GDPR legislation and the implications this have for responsibility and compensation. This resilience is critical – and is an essential consideration when choosing a supplier or partner. It’s not enough to provide functional performance, today’s solutions must be able to fit into an organisation’s cyber protection policies and procedures, delivering the performance required while protecting users.

jtel’s expertise was crucial. We’ve been building enterprise and carrier-grade solutions for 20 years, which means we have evolved software and practices to stay ahead of threats. As a partner, we work with our customers to ensure that our solutions are adapted to their security needs and we advise on how to ensure the resilience that operational goals require.

Why not talk to jtel and see how we can deliver the communications platforms you need while ensuring best-practice to protect against cyber security threats?

With business across all sectors increasingly taking advantage of cloud-based offers, they are also waking up to the potential to increase the value of solutions and processes by capitalising on integration between them. This used to be a technical and highly specialised area, but things have changed dramatically in the last year or so.

Most cloud-based solutions offer APIs that allow them to be combined with others. So, an order processing system can be connected to a CRM, allowing important data to be shared between them and for the two to remain synchronised. Indeed, many of the leading CRM solutions come ready with a wide range of existing integration packages, allowing simple connectivity to be enabled.

There’s also a growing series of resources that are available to download, which effectively enable off-the-shelf integration, so that almost anyone can now take advantages of the benefits of connecting different systems.

All of which makes life a lot easier and brings new efficiencies within the reach of any business. Basically, if you are considering a new solution, then the ability to connect it to others you use is now a key consideration when choosing from different offers and providers.

We’ve been doing this for years. Almost every solution we deliver has to be connected to something else in the enterprise, be it a CRM, a resource planning solution or some other software function that provides specialist capabilities for particular industries. This latter area is the one to which we have to pay most attention. While many systems are used by industries from all sectors, many others are designed for the needs of healthcare, or insurance or something else.

We make sure that we allow for any integration need, to ensure that valuable information from the call center is shared with other processes, allowing them to track customer communication, messages and more. What we’re seeing is that the enterprise domain is becoming increasingly unified, which increases efficiency and ensures that systems and processed are updated with valuable data.

If you haven’t taken steps to integrate your contact center with other processes that are valuable to your business, then perhaps it should be a key goal for 2018. It will definitely deliver benefits and the effort isn’t as much as you might think. And, if you want help in doing this – or if your existing contact center solution cannot cater to these needs, then perhaps you should talk to us. We can definitely help you create a more connected, unified enterprise and enhance the performance of your business.

For many retailers, this is by far the busiest time of the year. While many people still enjoy the delights of Christmas shopping, seeing the decorations and browsing the Christmas markets, it’s also true that many of us also rely on online retailers, simply because of the convenience and the special offers that we can find.

Behind the scenes though, there is a complex network of logistics and communication, to ensure that customer orders are processed and that their enquiries are dealt with smoothly. Not only does this require coordination on the order side, it requires close management on the delivery side. And, customers need to be updated regarding the progress of orders and scheduled delivery times.

For retailers, this is a sensitive time. Much of your business may be crammed into a short and urgent period, so it’s critical that you get it right. You must be able to take enquiries, manage communication with customers effectively and ensure that your distribution is seamless. Failure to get this right can lead to a poor experience and customer dissatisfaction, which means your customers may not return for their next order.

That’s why an effective contact center is critical. You need to be sure that you process all enquiries, across multiple channels and can provide the updates that your customers expect. We enable you to seamlessly manage all communications and provide deep integration possibilities with your logistics and delivery systems.

If something caused service disruption this year, then perhaps it’s time to think ahead and make sure you’re ready for the rush in 2019. We know you’re probably looking forward to the festive break, but if you have time, why not find out how jtel has helped a leading e-commerce and online retailer ensure operational effectiveness and deliver outstanding customer satisfaction?

Read our case study to see how jtel’s contact center expertise helped Chal-Tec deliver!