Maximizing Customer/Agent Interaction

Onyx Software today unveiled its latest call center offerings, including updated intelligent call scripting functionality and a partnership to provide agents with knowledge management capabilities. The upgrades are primarily designed to help contact centers optimize their business processes to handle more complex inquiries across multiple channels and to cross-sell and upsell products or services. The announcement builds on the recent release of Onyx Enterprise CRM 5, which includes intelligent call scripting, business process automation, and email management capabilities. The intelligent call scripting functionality aims to help agents make real-time decisions during sales and service calls, whether inbound or outbound. Simply routing phone calls and having agents conduct incident routing is not enough, says Patrick Angelel, vice president of marketing and alliances at Onyx. "Call center folks need more than that," he says. "What we have brought to market with scripting workflow and email integration is not only [the ability to] route the call and track the information, but to aid the agents to execute the transaction that they want to execute, which helps maximize the value of the interaction." Angelel offers an example of how this might work for a cable company: A customer may call to notify his cable company that he recently moved and wants to order cable television at his new address. A dynamic workflow system can alert the agent that cable Internet service is available in the customer's new home. If the customer is interested, the scripting tool can guide the agent through the necessary next steps to make the sale. "It automates the process and you get more out of the call," Angelel says. "Injecting a little intelligence can help quite a bit." Managers can also update the scripting tool without requiring any help from the IT staff. "We have designed the scripting so that the workflow is [created using] a graphical tool to not only build but to modify as they change. So they don't have to go to IT every time they want to put together a new script or workflow," Angelel says. "It's really difficult to keep up with the pace of change if you have to go to IT all the time." Onyx partnered with KnowledgeBase Solutions to provide agents with a knowledge management solution at knowledgebase.net that shares documents across the enterprise.