Changing the Paradigm of the Contact Center

The contact center is quickly becoming more than just an avenue to field customer calls and complaints -- it can also help other arms of an organization, such as marketing and sales, do their jobs more effectively. Bearing this in mind, Columbus, Ohio-based CallCopy, a call recording and quality monitoring software company, has unleashed a product called cc: Survey for those looking to determine which customers will help actively promote products and services to their social networks.

Speaking to the benefits companies gain by having this information in hand, CallCopy Executive Vice President of Business Development Rick Daley explains that surveys have the potential to provide benefits far beyond merely calibrating internal perceptions of customer satisfaction. “As you have more customers actively promoting your product and services, it lowers your cost of acquisition for new [users]," he explains. “So, if you can get a baseline measurement of that, you can see where you’re getting true marketing benefit out of your customers.”

By using the software-as-a-service (SaaS) cc: Survey, Daley says companies can create multiple, customized surveys through a Web-based interface. Customers can complete these surveys either via phone or the Web, and the surveys can employ automation including interactive voice response and Web-based self-service, according to Daley. Additionally, survey questions can be assigned dynamic point values in order to weigh sections and surveys according to a contact center’s needs and reporting capabilities.

Daley says different applications, including speech analytics, are driving this move to extend surveys beyond a contact center manager’s desk. “[Customer service centers] are no longer the necessary evil for companies,” he says. “We’re seeing enterprises [recognize the value] of having survey results tie in from the contact center to the rest of the organization.”

Donna Fluss, president of DMG Consulting, agrees. She explains that her organization has found that 58 percent of companies are extending the use of contact center survey data to other areas. “This is an interesting and telling statistic,” she explains. “[The response] helps explain why we’re moving from ‘surveying’ to ‘enterprise feedback management.' ”

Fluss goes on to add that surveys serve four main purposes for companies:

• determining customer satisfaction;
• calibrating internal company and customer perception regarding satisfaction;
• letting customers know they’re cared for; and
• using information to make a difference.

CallCopy's delivery model and its flexibility in survey generation are two major points of differentiation for the company, according to Daley. “The SaaS model makes it easy to set up and cost-effective," he says. "Since there’s not a hardware footprint to the client’s data center there’s less time to turn it on and [it's] easier to manage. We can mark a survey as complete after getting an answer to a [particular] question, save the data, and continue asking questions. Most other applications lose all of the data if a survey terminates before it's complete.”

Fluss says that cc: Survey is not only easy to use, it also works with companies measuring the Net Promoter Score, as well as other methodologies including the American Customer Satisfaction Index and Customer Loyalty Index. “Good surveying applications must be able to incorporate any of the methodologies...and CallCopy can facilitate that,” she says.

Looking ahead, Daley says we can expect his company to further build out this capability in the next six months. The additions, he adds, will include expanded reporting capabilities throughout the application and different scripted libraries for surveys. “We’re pushing forward aggressively on this project,” he insists. 

Fluss believes there is great value in reporting, and notes a growing demand among organizations for this capability in real time. However, the onus is on the companies themselves to actually undertake actionable strategies using the survey data and reports. “The biggest issue with surveying is [that] enterprises [are] not using the information," she says. "[As a result], customers are getting really annoyed and ask themselves ‘Why do I want to invest my time if the company doesn’t care enough to do something about this?' "

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