Running any contact center isn’t the easiest job. You have quite a number of things to keep an eye on every day—your employees’ performance, your call traffic, new technology and processes—it can all seem like a lot is on your plate from day to day. But running a public sector contact center can be even tougher than doing it in the private sector. Some of the issues they face are the same as any contact center, and others are unique to the public sector.
Budget Cuts
It’s unfortunate, but contact center spending just isn’t a very attractive use for tax dollars. Public sector contact centers have to do just about everything that the private sector does, but oftentimes with far less money. That’s because their budgets are usually relatively smaller that their private sector counterparts, and they can expect to see their budgets slashed when there’s a move to cut government spending.
And unfortunately, there isn’t an easy way to fix this. People still expect excellent service from their contact centers, regardless of their budget. In the private sector, it’s easier for a company to respond to a poor report on their customer service by allocating more money, upgrading software, or changing training practices. Government contact centers often don’t have political will behind them to get more money and fix their services. It’s sad, but people have a tough time worrying about 911 or other services until they call the number themselves and experience a wait.
Tech Gap
Another major issue for contact centers stems from a technology gap between private individuals and public sector contact centers. With the proliferation of smartphones, most people are used to texting and sending pictures and video when they think the occasion requires it. Most government contact centers aren’t equipped with the necessary technology to make this a viable option. 911 centers are currently working to allow citizens to text 911 and receive emergency support, but that isn’t yet a reality for most areas.
This technology gap also extends to the use of cell phones themselves.On his HBO show Last Week Tonight, John Oliver recently investigated the trouble that many 911 contact centers have with pinpointing the location of cell phone users who don’t know where they are. Before cell phones were in everyone’s pocket, 911 could trace the call to the location using the landline that the call was coming from. Now, it can be a much more dangerous issue if someone doesn’t know their exact location when they call 911.
These are issues that public sector contact centers face every day, and managing one can be a tough job when you have to deal with funding cuts or a technology gap. But there are ways you can help your contact center become more efficient and perform better.
Public safety software solutions from Kova give government, public, and enterprise organizations the actionable security information they need to be effective in their emergency response, investigations, and analysis. Contact us today to find out more about how Kova can help improve your contact center.
Cyber security has been a much-discussed topic recently, and for good reason. Cyber attacks are hitting hospitals, corporations, financial organizations, universities, and even governments. Anywhere that important, sensitive data is stored has become a target for hackers. And unfortunately, this applies to contact centers, as well. Depending on the type of business you work for, your contact center may have to take and hold valuable information from consumers. You assure them that this information is secure, but are you really taking the right steps to keep that data safe?
When organizations have been attacked in the past, they suddenly become quite interested in cyber security. However, the best defense against hackers and anyone trying to gain access to customer information is to be proactive, not reactive, about security in your contact center. A company that is static and unwilling to change their behaviors and practices is a company that is an easy target for a cyber attack. The secret is out, and there’s no longer any excuse for not proactively protecting your customers’ data.
ID Questions
Having strong Q&A security protocol in place can help prevent fraud at your contact center. You need to use questions that customers will be able to provide unique responses to in order to enforce the security of their data. Hackers can gain access to a wide variety of information about consumers without their knowledge, so it’s important that these questions are personal and distinct.
Keep Your Agents Educated
Probably the easiest way for a criminal to breach security through a call center is by tricking an employee. This isn’t necessarily your employee’s fault, though. Contact centers have high employee turnover, and agents are usually being taught to be helpful and to find a resolution for the customer as quickly as possible. You must train your employees with a comprehensive security program, making sure they understand all the guidelines, and how to spot suspicious activity.
Agents also need to be trained to spot suspicious emails, and know to never click on a link or document from an unknown source, as this is one of the most common ways that hackers install malicious software.
Layers Of Protection
Cyber criminals continue to evolve their methods and look for ways to beat your security, so you have to evolve, as well. This means providing multiple layers of protection for your customers’ information. Even if a document is on a secure network, it should also be encrypted and protected so that it cannot be compromised if it is sent to the wrong recipient or accessed by someone else.
Cyber criminals are going to continue to change their methods and think up new ways to beat security systems. That means businesses have to be proactive about keeping their customers data safe. Contact centers and their agents have to be on the watch for criminal activity as the threats continue to grow. So if you think your contact center could use a security upgrade, contact Kova today.
Training your contact center agents effectively is big part of running a well-organized center that performs above expectations. It’s also a big part of reducing turnover, the Achilles heel of most contact centers. In the end, it’s all related. Good training makes better agents, leading to a contact center with low turnover and great customer service. Putting it that way makes it sound simple, but if you operate a contact center, you know that it’s anything but. So take a moment to look over these training tips, and see if you can improve efficiency and effectiveness in your training.
Contact Kova today if you’d like to hear more about our workforce optimization software, and how we can help your contact center become as productive as possible.
When your goal is workforce optimization, there are two prongs you have to focus on—investing in technology, and investing in your employees. One approach by itself simply isn’t enough. Some managers think that by getting the best software and technology, they’ll be able to optimize their workforce, but then they ignore the human component of the job. Conversely, some think that through strong management and leadership, they’ll be able to have their contact center running as smoothly as possible. But they don’t realize that they have to give their employees the right technology to excel in their job.
If you think your contact center could benefit from workforce optimization technology, then contact KOVA today. We have a wide selection of software that can fit your every need!
Contact centers are known for having high turnover and low morale, but it doesn’t have to be that way. If you manage your contact center efficiently and intelligently, you can keep your turnover low and your employees happy. Part of having a team of agents that works well and stays on the job is making sure you keep productivity high. Agents that have long periods of time between calls, or don’t work to resolve calls in a timely fashion, hurt the culture in your contact center. So take a look at some of the ways you can keep your employees productive and happy.
Competition
First, make sure this is a positive reinforcement—the agents who show the best practices and have the highest customer satisfaction get a bonus or extra time off. If you’re holding a contest, the prize has to be worth it. A gift card to a mediocre chain restaurant simply isn’t going to inspire any employee to improve their work.
Also, give your agents the means to see how they’re doing in comparison with other agents. Provide them with real-time metrics that show them the status of other agents, how many callers are in the queue, and the average waiting time. Agents that can see how they stack up to other employees will take action on their own to boost their performance.
Frequent Breaks
Agents are almost always battling stress working at a contact center. No matter how much technology and training you give them, they’re still constantly under pressure from the customer on the line. Allowing agents to take frequent, short breaks to relieve stress actually increases productivity in the long run. Knowing that they’re stuck in their chair for a set amount of time only encourages them to waste and draw out time until they can go on break. So give them more autonomy over when they use their breaks.
Information About The Caller
How do you cut down on the amount of time your agents are on the phone for each call? Give them all the information they need, instead of having them look it up for each individual caller. There’s plenty of call center software out there that can help integrate business tools and provide comprehensive information about each caller. The less time your agents have to spend gathering information, the better.
Schedule Smarter
You can’t always predict when you’re going to be getting the highest volume of calls, but there are ways to schedule your agents better. Use analytics to determine larger patterns that you may miss, and then go over this information with your agents and schedule accordingly. You’ll be surprised at what trends you discover when you gather all your data together and mine through it.
If your contact center could use some help with productivity, scheduling, or any other software needs, then contact KOVA today and find out how we can keep your contact center running smoothly.
Contact centers today - and every other business organization, really - have an overwhelming supply of data that they can draw on for insight.
From the most general information, like the number of calls per day, to the very specific, like what percentage of agent interactions results in a successful upsell of a particular product, organizations with the right software solutions can use this data to push their businesses toward further success.
All of this data falls into two categories: structured and unstructured. Not surprisingly, structured data is easier to manage, and can offer lots of useful insight for organizations.
However, unstructured data is just as important, and can often hold clues into why customers behave the way they do - if you can uncover them. So how do you manage structured vs. unstructured data, and how can each type benefit your contact center?
Structured data is information that is easily trackable, found in your CRM or other contact center database. Customers’ names, locations, purchase history, their number of social media followers - all of these things are examples of structured data.
Other examples are KPIs like First Call Resolution (the number of calls resolved during the customer’s first interaction), Talk Time (the average number of minutes agents spend on the phone), and Active vs. Waiting Calls (the current call volume compared to the number of callers waiting to speak to an agent).
These are all pieces of information that can be measured by your contact center software and pulled into easy-to-read reports.
Structured data like this is vital to organizations because it provides them with benchmarks for their agents and the contact center as a whole. Using this data, contact center managers can gauge performance, set goals, and identify areas that clearly need work.
While structured data can tell you a lot about how your contact center is doing, it can’t necessarily tell you much about why your customers are behaving the way they do.
To get answers to these more nuanced questions, you need to look at your unstructured data. This is information contained in your agents’ interactions with your customers, whether by phone, email, or chat.
For example, let’s say your agents are working on upselling a particular product - an expanded internet package, for example.
You could look at the structured data and find that the upselling is successful on 12 percent of the calls. However, you wouldn’t know why it was successful. What are those agents doing differently? How are the customers who take the upsell behaving differently?
This is the realm of unstructured data. So how do you get at the wealth of useful information locked in these customer interactions?
One way is by using a software tool like speech analytics. This technology analyzes the words, tone of voice, and even pauses that customers and agents use during calls, turning it all into data you can easily understand.
Take this example that Verint’s Daniel Ziv discusses in Direct Marketing News (DMN). One company wanted to understand what made the difference between a successful sales call and an unsuccessful one. After using speech analytics and comparing the words and phrases that agents used during successful calls vs. unsuccessful ones, they found their answer.
“[Managers] discovered that agents asking for ‘another moment of your time,’ before the upsell offer was actually driving a negative customer response. Only 6.3 percent of calls that included this phrase ended in the successful sale,” Ziv says in the article.
He continues, “This analysis also surfaced phrases that were driving positive customer response, such as, ‘You could be earning X dollars in interest on the balance in your account; would you like me to set that up for you?’” This phrasing resulted in a 57.6 percent sales success rate. Armed with this knowledge, managers could instruct agents to use that alternate phrasing to improve the overall sales rate.
Unstructured data is everywhere, but it’s not always easy to analyze. If you’d like to learn more about contact center software that can help your organization make sense of its data - both structured and unstructured - take a look at our enterprise workforce optimization solutions.
Like any other field, public safety has been through some major changes over the years as technology has become more sophisticated. Innovations in tech have changed the way we think about public safety, and more importantly, how we implement it. But what’s next for public safety? The pace of these tech changes has picked up, and there are more and more new ideas coming to light, as well as old ideas that are finally feasible thanks to new and innovative technology. So here are just a few of the things you’re going to be seeing more often in the coming years.
Wearable Technology For First Responders
You’ve probably heard a lot about body cameras for police officers in the news lately, but that’s not the only wearable tech being developed for first responders. For police, there may soon be puncture-detection sensors woven into fabric, so that if an officer is shot, a 911 call would go out automatically. Other possibilities, for first responders of all types, include fabrics that generate energy from body movement and charge devices, as well as mouth guards that can convey sound even in a loud environment.
Digital Evidence Management and Analytics
The amount of digital evidence being generated by smartphones, surveillance cameras, and social media is becoming overwhelming. It’s going to be important for investigators to be able to capture, manage, and analyze all of this data in a coherent manner so that they can come to an accurate understanding of an incident. All of the data being generated is tough to analyze manually, so agencies and organizations will turn to analytics to turn all of this unstructured information into relevant information that they can use.
Wider Social Media Usage
For many citizens, social media has become a go-to for the latest news, alerts, and updates. Public safety officials have begun to take notice of this, sending out messages and updates on social media platforms, but many departments and organizations could use it more widely. It’s an effective, and even necessary, way to communicate with people during a disaster or public safety crisis.
Building Smarter
In the past, after a disaster has hit, some communities have rebuilt as they were before, with few protections against the same scenario. This is wishful thinking that can have dangerous consequences. Look for communities to increasingly be building in more sustainable ways that provide protection from recurring events like floods and damaging storms.
At KOVA, we’re on the cutting edge of these changes and trends in public safety. Our SilentPartner data capture app revolutionizes the way that field workers do their jobs—capturing, transmitting, and labeling data for later use. Instead of grabbing a camera, voice recorder, laptop, and cellphone, imagine just walking out of the house with your smartphone.
For more information on the ways in which the SilentPartner app can revolutionize the way you do your job, watch our video on the subjecthere, check out ourFAQ page, orcontact KOVA today.
Despite what some of your customers might think, not all contact centers are built the same. They might have different software and technology based on the size of the contact center, its purpose, and its location. It can be incredibly complex and sophisticated, or it can be very simple depending on what needs it serves. There isn’t one right way to build and maintain a contact center, but there are some technologies that are more important than others when it comes to providing great customer service.
CRM Software
CRM is a system for managing a company’s interactions with its customers, utilizing technology to streamline processes such as sales, customer service and technical support. Agents use it to respond to customers and document their issues and requests and how they were resolved. So next time a customer reaches out for help, there are documented interactions that can be used in that situation.
Automatic Call Distributors And Dialers
Inbound contact centers use this system to field and distribute the flow of incoming calls so that calls go to the most appropriate agent. For outbound contact centers, a dialer is required to quickly and efficiently complete outbound calls. These are the core systems of any contact center. Everything else is helping or complementing these systems in some way.
Call Recording Systems
It makes sense that any contact center would want to record their calls. This is important to maintain quality. The recording system allows calls to be replayed if there is an issue with an interaction, or if an interaction was particularly helpful to a customer and management wants to use it for instruction.
Speech Analytics
It’s all well and good to record all of the calls that come in and out of a contact center, but how are you supposed to learn anything from manually going through each call? Not only is that a waste of time, but you may not be able to recognize the patterns that develop over the course of hundreds or thousands of phone calls. Speech analytics give you the ability to take all of those calls and mine them for data that will inform how you train your agents. The software finds patterns that you may not have known existed, helping you identify the reasons for long hold times and resolving calls quicker.
Workforce Management Software
This software is used to forecast the volume of calls and help optimize scheduling agents to meet those needs. It automates the process of planning schedules to meet projected needs, taking into account planned and unplanned absences. It can also determine the number of agents that need to be hired to handle a certain level of transactions each day. Simply put, workforce management software takes some of the guesswork out of hiring and scheduling.
If your organization is in need of software to streamline your processes, increase collaboration, or gain insight into your company’s customer service success, KOVA can help. Contact us about our Verint Media Recorder Workforce Optimization Suite today!
Speech analytics is one of the fastest growing technologies for contact centers, but it also has important uses for public safety answering points (PSAPs). Speech analytics software converts conversations and audio into data that can easily be searched and analyzed. Once the recorded conversations are converted into indexed, searchable data, they can be taken apart to reveal keywords, tone of voice, and patterns that develop during calls. Spotting trends in calls is important to public safety officials because of the high volume of 911 calls and other conversations that transpire each day.
Identifying Trends
This isn’t just identifying keywords, however. Predetermining words like gang names, neighborhoods, and streets and entering them into the database can help officers spot trends and gain new insight into their investigations. And these trends often serve as precursors to incidents, meaning public safety agencies can be better prepared or even take preventative action.
A Pennsylvania PSAP used speech analytics to help end an investigation into a series of porch fire arson incidents. They compiled a list of the addresses that had already been affected, and then used speech analytics to identify similar incidents that weren’t already on their list of addresses. Analyzing the data helped them to bring about a quicker end to the investigation.
And that’s the power of speech analytics—it allows public safety officials to look at the audio data they collect as a helpful tool for investigating and solving cases.
Improving Call Response
Without speech analytics, reviewing enough calls to identify performance trends and challenges is a manual task that takes an overwhelming amount of time and effort. 911 contact centers may not be the same as business contact centers, but they still face some of the same issues and challenges.
Speech analytics can find situations in which a call taker handled a response well, and use that to help guide and train other employees, creating best practice policies. On the other hand, the software can be used to find calls where a problem arose, and place them together in the same category. Administrators can then go through these calls to find out what exactly could have been done to help bring about a better result.
911 callers are often quite agitated or panicked, and they aren’t going to have time to discuss a previous problem or identify an issue while they’re on the phone with a call taker. Speech analytics allows PSAPs to dig through the massive amounts of data gathered by these conversations, and spot trends, keywords, and other helpful information that would otherwise be glossed over or missed.
If your PSAP is in need of speech analytics or any other type of software, take a look at KOVA’s Verint Media Recorder for Public Safety. This public safety software solution includes a wide range of features: performance management, quality assurance, speech analytics, incident investigation and analytics, workload forecasting and staff scheduling, staff coaching and training, and citizen surveys. Contact KOVA today!
