Hear Customers, Help Overall Revenue

ResponseTek Networks unveiled its integrated software offering, called Contact Center. The latest offering from the customer service solutions provider features enhanced IVR capabilities to help improve agent service quality, as well as an organization's product and service offerings by "pushing customer feedback through the entire organization," says Syed Hasan, president and CEO of ResponseTek. Designed to capture more customer feedback on interactions with agents, Contact Center routes feedback directly to customer service agents and contact center management to improve service quality. The product aims to provide call center agents with a better understanding of a customer's experience, rather than simply relying on traditional metrics, such as length of calls that focus on reducing costs. The new IVR capability is a key addition behind Contact Center. The enhancement gives contact center agents a new set of touch points, including the Web, IVR, wireless devices, and kiosks, enabling ResponseTek clients to collect customer feedback from every interaction. ResponseTek expects clients to see improvements in agent service quality, reduced call length, improved customer satisfaction. "Our goal here was to give as many channels as possible for customers to respond through," Hasan says. "The contact center agents can also respond via multichannel communication. It's all about the customers being able access their customer support when necessary." Customer/agent interactions play an important role in customer satisfaction and loyalty. One third of contact-center customers, recent research from ResponseTek indicates, wouldn't refer a company to friends if they have an unsatisfactory experience with a customer agent. Leading reasons include an agent's lack of knowledge, a bad attitude, and lack of helpfulness. Further analysis also finds that collecting customer experience information at the time of agent interaction improves the contact center as a whole. "The customer voice is rarely included in measuring the success of the contact center," Hasan says. "Customers communicate about the whole organization via a contact center. We wanted to find a way to get that information and those issues to the right people, right away. For example, with Contact Center, if a customer calls complaining about a product, people in product management will get that feedback in real time. The customer voice can immediately become an actionable measure of success that impacts overall revenue." Related articles: Agent Training Is Not a Priority in Contact Centers QM Is Poised For Growth