When you’re hiring someone for a high-stress job like a 911 dispatcher, the hiring process must be as thorough and precise as possible.
While there are always new hires who will end up not working out - sometimes before they even begin working - it’s important for 911 centers to do what they can to minimize these numbers. The turnover rate for 911 dispatchers is high, and many counties are incredibly short-staffed. These factors, plus the financial cost of losing new hires, make it especially difficult for 911 centers to lose employees during the training period or shortly after.
So what can hiring managers do to ensure that they’re hiring not just dispatchers, but great dispatchers?
Every candidate knows that being a 911 dispatcher is a stressful job. And most people think they can handle stress just fine. But as any 911 center manager knows, once someone is actually on the phone with someone in a life or death situation, they may find that their ability to handle stress isn’t as great as they thought.
While there’s no surefire way to test a person’s performance under stress, even with simulated training calls, one thing you can do is seek out people who’ve previously proven themselves in stressful situations.
To do so, make sure that it’s a prominent question during the interview process. You can also ask follow-up questions about how the person relieves stress, both at home and on the clock.
Any HR professional will tell you that body language can offer revealing insights into a person’s personality and work style. For a job like this, you want to look for people who convey confidence, without appearing arrogant. This means individuals who sit with their backs straight and their chests open, who project a calm demeanor.
Red flags to pay attention to are:
In order to increase your chances of hiring the right person, it can help to assess the job position you’re hiring for in terms of necessary strengths, rather than just job functions and experience.
To become a 911 dispatcher, a person must be resilient, practical, compassionate, efficient, and able to multi-task - among other traits. Are you asking questions that will allow you to see whether your candidates possess these qualities? Or are you stuck mostly on experience, asking more about a candidate’s previous work than anything else?
For professions that are regularly short-staffed, like 911 dispatching, it can be tempting to simply assume that a promising candidate will also naturally fit into your organization’s culture.
However, this can be a pricey mistake to make. It’s important to assess your candidates’ personal qualities as well as their professional ones to ensure that if they are hired, they’ll fit in well with the rest of your team.
Even though dispatching is largely a job in which one works alone, there are always times - in any profession - in which workers must come together as a team. If one person has a strikingly different personality or skill set than the rest of your workers, it will be much harder for that person to succeed.
To learn more about making your PSAP an efficient and successful workplace, read our post “How to Avoid Common PSAP Workplace Problems.”
When customer service executives and thought leaders in the customer service space talk about the future of their industry these days, they almost invariably say the same thing: the future of customer service is self-service.
Many companies have already bought into this idea wholeheartedly, and started offering things like detailed FAQ pages on their websites, or self-service menu options for contact center callers. These are great places to start, but what are the next steps?
In a survey conducted by Steven Van Belleghem with SSI, 90 percent of respondents said that speed was the most important issue when trying to resolve an issue with a company. This was second only to having their problem taken seriously by the customer service agent, which was selected as most important by 92 percent of respondents.
In a certain sense, this is nothing new. Contact centers have long worked hard to decrease their call handle times and increase their first-call resolution rates. But in today’s digital, omnichannel world where agents are handling emails, texts, and live chats in addition to phone calls, resolving things quickly becomes more complex.
According to that same survey, 39 percent of respondents who contact a company via email expect a reply within four hours. For those who use social media to contact a company, that rate goes up to 55 percent.
The takeaway here is that today’s definition of “speed” is different from what it was even two or three years ago. In addition, any move toward self-service must work toward allowing customers to resolve their issues as quickly as possible - meaning that contact centers must make relevant information easy to find and understand, as well as know which issues will still require the help of a live agent. (To read more about this topic, read our post “Getting Customer Self-Service Right.”)
Self-service is often discussed in the context of resolving customer issues, but it should be a part of the entire customer journey.
Contact centers should do their best to integrate self-service options into everything from initial service inquiries, to product or service purchase, to post-sales follow-ups and issue resolution. Customers want to be able to access information about the product they’re interested in, fill out necessary forms or applications, and make the actual purchase on their own.
These options must be easy to locate on a company’s website, as well as easy to complete. Doing so will help you push your customer service further ahead of the pack, and closer to the self-service model of the future.
The consensus among experts, according to Verint’s Executive Perspective “The Future of Self-Service,” is that the ultimate customer service model of the future is the virtual personal assistant. Think of the iPhone’s Siri or Windows’ Cortana - these are initial versions of virtual personal assistants, able to read your calendar, send you reminders, scan your email, and more.
Speech recognition technology is the key to making these personal assistants useful, so as it continues to get better, so too will our personal assistants.
So how does this affect contact centers? Well, speech recognition is already an important part of the data-driven contact center, as speech analytics technology can offer incredible insight into the customer experience.
Another vital element of tomorrow’s self-service model is data. With the vast amounts of data that speech and text analytics will offer - not to mention the data-collecting abilities of software solutions like workforce management solutions, workforce optimization suites, and more - the contact center that isn’t putting this data to good use will quickly fall behind.
If KOVA can help you learn more about whether one of these solutions might be right for your contact center, contact us.
As a contact center manager, there’s no doubt that you spend a lot of time thinking about how to improve your customer experience. Self-service options, speech analytics, multi-channel communication, even workforce optimization software - today’s contact centers have lots of tools available to them when it comes to serving their customers.
But how do you know which of these tools are the most effective? How do you know what your customers are really thinking? Take a look at this infographic to learn more.
Want to improve your customer experience even more? Check out this video on The Power of the Voice of the Customer.
Despite being part of the same business, the front office and back office rarely work very well together.
The customer-facing front office is concerned with customer satisfaction and quick issue resolution. The back office is concerned with longer-term tasks - things like remaining compliant, maintaining the budget, or evaluating legal issues.
Because the work of these two divisions is so different, it can often feel like they’re working at cross-purposes. Given these differences, it may seem counterintuitive that a workforce optimization (WFO) solution that has been successful in the front office could also work in the back office.
However, it turns out that the benefits of workforce optimization can absolutely be extended into the back office - especially when the back office solution is a part of the same system that works in the front office.
Here are some benefits of bringing workforce optimization into your back office.
When a single WFO solution is in place, management is able to centralize staffing and workload distribution. Instead of toggling between two different systems, which makes it nearly impossible to see the big picture, managers can view the entire enterprise as a whole.
This makes a huge difference when trying to identify trends, locate trouble areas, and forecast workload.
When a WFO suite is accessible in both the front and back office, it allows you to “blend” your workforce.
That’s not meant literally, of course - front- and back-office operations require different sets of skills, which is why your employees work where they do. However, that doesn’t mean that the front and back offices can’t improve their collaboration.
According to the whitepaper Bridging the Gap Between the Front and Back Office by Aspect, 60 percent of customer dissatisfaction is due to some sort of problem in the back office - even though customers never come in contact with those employees.
A WFO suite can be a great solution to this problem. By providing that centralized management, a WFO solution can help managers improve the way the front and back offices work together by improving communication throughout the contact center as a whole.
For example, managers can:
In order to decrease those complaints that are related to back office problems, the front office and back office have to communicate more effectively.
After all, if the front office doesn’t know what limitations the back office is dealing with, front office workers can’t offer the best solutions to customers. And that goes in reverse, too: if the back office doesn’t know what complaints the front office is getting regularly, they can’t do anything to improve their processes.
A good WFO suite will give all employees access to real-time information, which is a vital part of reducing customer handle times and reaching resolution more quickly.
For example, let’s say a credit card customer called the company to check on the status of a credit line increase application. Typically, the front office worker would have to contact the back office to ask them to investigate the status of the application. This, naturally, results in at least one customer hold while the call-taker transfers the information to someone who can find out the answer.
With a WFO suite that extends to front and back office, however, the front office worker can simply check on the application status himself, accessing the same real-time updates that the back office workers do.
Workforce optimization suites aren’t just for the front office - they can work wonders for an organization as a whole. Learn more about how a workforce optimization solution like Verint Media Recorder can help your company here.
Giving great customer service doesn’t seem like it should be that hard. Hire nice people, train them well, provide them with the tools they need to do their jobs, and amazing service should follow naturally - right?
If only it were that easy. Assuming you’ve got the right people working for you (let’s leave aside, for now, the issue of how difficult it often is to find those people), giving consistently excellent customer service requires a complex mix of solid training, true empathy, and a culture of customer care that stretches from the top of the organization on down.
So how do you start transforming your customers’ experiences from OK to amazing? Here are a few ideas from three companies that are doing it right.
Ace Hardware, the chain of neighborhood hardware stores that has nearly 4,900 locally owned locations all over the world, trains its employees to be not just nice, but helpful. As customer service expert Shep Hyken writes on his blog, “Anyone can be nice … but [Ace Hardware VP Tom Knox] wants more. He wants his people to be nice plus knowledgeable.”
You can hire the kindest people in the world who honestly want to make your customers’ experience great, but if they aren’t able to fulfill that customer’s needs, you haven’t won. The customer probably won’t be angry. They’ll probably give you another chance. But if they can find a place where the people are nice as well as knowledgeable (which is how Ace defines “helpful”), then you can bet they’re going to take their business there.
Discover, which has been credited with revamping the credit card business as a whole, got the highest scores for customer satisfaction among U.S. credit card companies in 2015, and the company garners consistently great reviews from the people who use it.
What’s their secret? Don’t be afraid to pioneer new methods and ideas. For example, Discover CEO David Nelms says in a Forbes article about customer service that his company pioneered the 24-hours-a-day, 7-days-a-week customer service model for credit card customers. This is because one of the keys to customer happiness, they found, was enabling customers to connect with the right employee right away.
To that end, Discover’s phone options include the option to connect with a real person immediately. In an industry where the customer isn’t always treated with respect, this really makes a noticeable difference for customers. And it never would have happened if Discover had just gone along with the typical industry practices.
Apple may be one of the best-known examples of a company that obsesses over every aspect of its customers’ experience. It all started, of course, with Steve Jobs, whose “take nothing for granted” philosophy encompassed everything from product design to functionality - and customer service.
By employing rigorous analysis of what their customers want and need, Apple has been able to consistently present an excellent, holistic customer experience.
This laser focus on the customer at every level of the company has helped Apple become one of the top companies in the world for brand loyalty. When it comes to customer-facing positions, like the Apple store geniuses and phone tech support, employees are trained to listen or watch for emotional cues, to employ empathy and listen closely to customers’ issues, and to avoid using certain words - “crash,” “incompatible,” and “problem,” for example - that Apple has found to heighten a customer’s anxiety.
The final lesson from this tech giant? Apple employees are empowered to do what is right for the customer, without needing to go through an unwieldy or frustrating approvals process.
Offering great customer service is a complex directive, but the payoff is well worth it. To learn more about how to help your contact center improve its customer experience, watch our video Call Center Solutions for Superior Service.
The Internet of Things is one of the most exciting technological developments since, well...the internet.
If you’re not familiar with this concept, all it refers to are objects - from toys to electric meters to watches - that are connected to the internet. There are plenty of these items connected and in use already. Most of those that have gained a lot of attention are in the private sector: the Amazon Fire TV Stick, for example, and the Apple Watch are both part of the Internet of Things (IoT).
While the public sector is also starting to use the IoT in interesting ways, public safety organizations are really only just beginning to take advantage of the IoT and the many possibilities it offers. Those that are, however, are finding that the IoT presents them with all kinds of opportunities. Check out some of the recent developments in this area below.
The winner of the 2016 IJIS Institute Innovation Award, the Internet of Public Safety Things Wearable Gateway is a wearable communications gateway for first responders. The device connects other devices already used by first responders - body cameras, heart rate monitors, public safety drones, and other sensors - and allows the first responders to share that information with command posts and other relevant parties.
The device can transmit multimedia information, making it useful for all branches of public safety. According to a press release by Mutualink, the company that developed the gateway, potential uses for the device include:
Predictive policing involves the use of analytics, technology, and/or mathematics to identify potential areas or instances of crime before they occur. One company, Hitachi Data Systems, has released a tool called Predictive Crime Analytics that uses real-time social media and internet feeds, along with analytics, to help police make predictions.
According to DataCenter Dynamics, this tool is the first to tie information from social media and the internet together with analytics. The platform is part of the Hitachi Visualization Suite, which brings together data and video from various public safety systems.
Like Physical Security Information Management technology, this kind of data integration tool can greatly improve law enforcement’s situational awareness, as well as provide the real-time information that can help prevent incidents from becoming crises.
ShotSpotter is a new technology that uses sensors mounted in high crime areas to identify the sound of gunfire (you can read about how this technology is being integrated into smart streetlights here). These sensors not only identify the sound of shots, but also pinpoint their location, analyze the sound, and then send all of that data to connected police stations and PSAPs within one minute.
ShotSpotter has been deployed in many cities around the country, and according to news reports, it’s been successful in lowering rates of gun crime. In Wilmington, N.C., for example, gun crime has been reduced by 2 percent, while homicides have decreased by 20 percent, since the city installed the technology. In addition, police response time to gunshot incidents has gotten faster.
As public safety organizations continue to embrace the possibilities of the Internet of Things, cities will continue to become safer places to live and work. To find out more about how public safety technology can help make your PSAP, command post, or security system more efficient and effective, read about KOVA’s software offerings here.
There’s lots of talk these days about omnichannel customer service, or omnichannel customer engagement. What this industry jargon term actually means is something pretty simple.
Essentially, it means that your customer is able to access your product or service no matter where they are - on their mobile devices, on your website, on your social media profile, or in your physical store or location.
But there’s another important facet of omnichannel. In addition to covering all the different channels through which a customer can interact with your brand, it also takes into account interactions that happen between channels.
For example, that could mean a customer who calls your contact center to set up a new account, then decides to finish the process at one of your physical locations instead.
While many brands are working hard to ensure that their online services are truly omnichannel, sometimes the physical locations end up getting left out of the loop. This means that the employees who deal with your customers face-to-face may be less able to help them than one of your contact center agents.
This can be a costly mistake. The last thing you want is for a customer to take the time to visit your store, then realize they can get a better customer service experience online.
So how do you make sure that your customer engagement is seamless across the virtual and physical worlds? How do you make sure you are truly an omnichannel brand?
One of the most important aspects of an omnichannel customer experience is that the transition from one method to another is smooth and efficient.
If you’re shopping on your phone and put something in your cart, that item should still be there when you go to complete the purchase hours later on your desktop.
Likewise, if you started a customer service inquiry on the phone but had to hang up before it was resolved, you should be able to go finish it in a bricks-and-mortar store, with an employee who can access your account and see your interactions.
This necessitates that the employee who is working with you face-to-face has access to the very same information as the one whom you talked with on the phone.
This can seem like a tricky thing to manage, but it’s quite possible with the right software. Employee desktop software that allows for access across channels can help you give all your employees, both at the contact center and in your physical locations, what they need to be successful.
The other element of a good omnichannel customer experience is to have a robust knowledge management, or KM, system in place. Having resources like articles, how-tos, and more at your employees’ fingertips is vital for good customer service at the contact center.
However, it’s just as important that your employees in your bricks-and-mortar locations have this as well. In fact, it doesn’t hurt to make your knowledge base - or at least, parts of it - available to your customers through your website. In this age of self-service, there’s less and less need to hide resources behind your company walls - especially since it makes not just your customers, but your employees happier, too.
Managers tasked with scheduling, arranging training, gathering employee feedback, etc. spend enough time behind a computer. By streamlining these administrative, time-heavy tasks, they can gain more time for coaching and engaging with their employees - whether those are in a contact center or at a branch location.
Selecting a workforce optimization software solution that works across an enterprise, from the back office, to the contact center, to branch locations and more, is vital.
With this kind of multifaceted system, like the Verint Media Recorder Workforce Optimization suite, managers can see the entire big picture of the business. This allows them to schedule more appropriately and make better business decisions.
For more on how omnichannel customer engagement can help your contact center and business at large, read our blog post “The Future of the Contact Center.”
In the public safety arena, citizen confidence is paramount. The people that PSAPs, local law enforcement, EMS, and firefighters serve have to feel that these organizations are holding themselves to the highest standards - otherwise, the system just doesn’t work well.
That’s one reason that the strongest public safety organizations place such emphasis on accreditation. Accreditation is one way that public safety groups can prove their current excellence, as well as their commitment to continually pursuing that excellence.
Having the right technology in place can be of great help to agencies pursuing accreditation, as well as help defend themselves should litigation arise. Here are a few ways that software can help organizations streamline this important process.
Technology that can keep track of documents like internal policies, memoranda, and more allows agencies to see who’s accessed or signed off on what. This can help supervisors ensure that all staff are familiar with protocols, rules, and agency policies. Then, when the time comes to renew or apply for accreditation, supervisors can be confident that the agency will be prepared.
Ongoing training and e-coaching are vital if an organization wants to keep its standards of service high. Workforce management software, like Verint Media Recorder for Public Safety, can help you focus on individual professional development opportunities for your staff as well as group learning.
Verint Media Recorder allows supervisors to use recorded interactions as “learning clips,” editing bits of audio into segments that can be sent directly to an employee’s desktop as a training tool. In addition, the software’s coaching tool lets supervisors schedule, track, review, and report on coaching sessions for call-takers or other staff.
Having these sessions and training opportunities documented can not only help an organization internally, by allowing supervisors to see whether and how continuing education goals are being met. It can also help boost public safety agencies’ applications for national accreditation.
Good public safety software will allow users to search for incidents as needed, enabling supervisors to stay apprised of their organization’s overall performance, as well as that of individual employees.
This feature is especially important should litigation arise, as the organization will have the audio, video, text, or other assets necessary to defend themselves if the need arises.
Reliable recording systems are also valuable during the accreditation process, however. If an employee is failing to meet the national or international accreditation standards that the organization is maintaining, it can jeopardize the organization’s status.
Being able to identify any unprofessional behavior quickly allows for quick handling of the issue, whether through training, coaching, or if necessary, punitive action. This makes it easier to avoid a potential loss of accreditation.
Too often, public safety organizations that want to become accredited find themselves rushing to institute a host of new and improved practices to meet the necessary standards.
This puts a huge amount of stress on everyone.
Supervisors have to formulate new protocols and rules, as well as ways to train employees on them and enforce compliance.
Employees have to change the way they do their jobs to meet a new set of policies that, if they’ve been put together hurriedly, likely seem arbitrary.
Organizational leadership has to ensure that the new processes are moving along efficiently, and put out fires as needed.
Then, once accreditation has been achieved, these organizations may look at the policies they spent so much effort creating and find that they’re actually not the best possible fit.
On the other hand, if organizations can review their own policies on an ongoing basis, they stand a much better chance at ensuring that the protocols they uphold make sense and are relevant for their employees and the community they serve. With the data that public safety software makes easily available, supervisors and leadership can commit to regular review and recalibration of their policies, as needed.
To learn more about how public safety software like Verint Media Recorder for Public Safety can help your organization, read our whitepaper “Emergency Communications Training.”
As customers become more adept at solving smaller issues through self-service channels, the problems that they contact companies for are becoming more complex.
This is putting contact center agents in a challenging position, as they find themselves having to work harder, as well as smarter, in order to make sure customers leave the interaction with their issues resolved.
Because of this increase in issue complexity, knowledge management (KM) is becoming ever more important. In order to leave customers happy, agents need to be able to quickly access the information they need, whether that’s a list of technical instructions or something as simple as a customer’s shipping address and order history.
In many cases, an effective knowledge management program can mean the difference between an excellent customer review and a mediocre one.
And it doesn’t only affect customers. Employees who are empowered by an efficient, easy-to-use KM system are both more productive and more satisfied, as they don’t have to waste anyone’s time scrolling through endless files to find the one piece of information they need to help their customer.
Here are a few tips on how to improve your knowledge management program.
If your contact center is like most, your knowledge is spread out among many different places. There could be bits of important information in emails, spreadsheets, Word documents, housed on various social media sites...the list continues.
In addition, you may find that certain people or teams have specialized knowledge that you want to capture. Should that person leave or the team dynamic change, that knowledge could be lost. Prevent that loss by asking whoever holds the specialized knowledge to document it in an article.
Then, you’ll want to make sure that all this knowledge - articles, instructions, websites and passwords, etc. - is placed in one easy-to-access location.
Collecting this information and aggregating it into a single place can be difficult and certainly time-consuming. However, it’s vital if you want your KM initiative to succeed.
According to the report The State of Knowledge Management, by thinkJar Research, only 34 percent of companies have knowledge maintenance processes in place. This is in spite of the fact that maintenance has been proven to be the biggest factor when it comes to knowledge management program success.
If you have a specific KM contact center software platform, try seeing whether the system has an alert system built in. Many platforms offer reports that will show you when a section needs maintenance, as well as the amount of usage and user satisfaction.
Even if you don’t have a dedicated KM software platform, you can still create effective methods of maintaining your knowledge. Make your KM system easy to access and update, for example, to encourage agents to fill in any holes or update outdated articles.
Web-based self-service is immensely popular among today’s customers. In fact, according to a Forrester research report, in 2014 76 percent of customers reported relying on web self-service to resolve their issues.
Since customers have proven their preference for self-service over talking to representatives, why not give them access to some of your KM resources? Placing articles and other content on your website in a special customer portal will increase customer satisfaction while also saving your agents time. Making this information available can provide you with up to 50 percent incident deflection, according to Atlassian.
If you want your KM program to truly succeed, it needs to be valued as an element of your workplace culture - not as an afterthought. If agents are expected to contribute to your KM initiative, they need to be given the time to do so.
Too often, companies say they value KM but don’t budget any time or money to build up their systems. This will only lead to frustration for everyone, from leadership on down to employees. If you want to reap the many benefits of KM, you’ll have to devote the resources to building your program - and you can be assured that it will be well worth it.
To learn more about how contact centers are approaching knowledge management in 2016, read our blog post “7 Trends in Contact Center Knowledge Management for 2016.”
It’s been said by many that 80 percent of technology users will use only 20 percent of that technology’s features. While at first, this might seem hard to believe - after all, most of us consider ourselves to be fairly tech-savvy, at least when it comes to things like tablets and smartphones - if you were to think about it, you’d probably come up with similar percentages.
This doesn’t necessarily have negative consequences when it comes to recreational technology, or the tech that we use in our daily lives. Maybe it means you spend a few more minutes uploading a video to Google Drive because you switch to your laptop, for example, instead of realizing you could do the same thing on your phone.
But when it comes to technology for the workplace, using just 20 percent of the available features can mean a whole lot of wasted time and effort.
Take workforce optimization software. If you’re spending time working outside the program to update your planning sheets, which is something the software already offers, then the tech that’s supposed to make your workload more streamlined is actually doing the opposite.
Workforce optimization software is an investment in your company, which is why it’s so important to make sure you’re getting everything you can out of the program. Here are a few tips on how to make sure you’re optimizing your workforce technology.
Technology on its own is useless - it takes a well-informed user to unlock the benefits it can offer. In fact, a well-informed user can even compound those benefits, as the better she gets at using the software, the better and more efficiently she can do her job.
That’s why one of the most important elements of making any software work for your company is to make sure you and your employees know how to use it. Any software provider worth their salt will also offer, or be able to connect you to, solid training options for you and your team (at KOVA, we offer on-site training plus Help Desk support for all the systems we provide).
Because the effects of training can be hard to quantify, it’s often one of the things that companies aren’t too enthusiastic about. However, consider this data from a study that the Boys and Girls Clubs of America (BGCA) did to evaluate the value of their training.
BGCA needed to develop a new generation of leaders, and developed a training program that was targeted at specific areas of personal development, After conducting a thorough analysis of attendees performance before and after the training, the organization found that it had gained a fourfold return on the cost of the training.
Now, not every organization will attain these results, but it does go to prove that good training does, in fact, have a substantial - and measureable - effect on employee performance.
Now that developers of workforce optimization and other workforce technology systems are prioritizing mobile capabilities, managers and supervisors can get out of the offices where they’ve traditionally had to spend much of their time.
Instead, they can access the programs they need while being out among their employees. This increased visibility has two major benefits.
First, managers gain a clearer picture of what’s going on with their teams. Instead of being sequestered in an office for most of the day, managers who can go mobile are able to spot issues as well as notice high performers firsthand.
Mobile capabilities can also be helpful for other back-office employees, giving them more freedom to complete their tasks without being tethered to a desk all day.
Today’s workforce optimization programs offer a wealth of data that companies can draw upon. The Verint Media Recorder Workforce Optimization suite, for example, offers voice of the customer analytics as well as desktop and process analytics. These all can provide an extensive array of data that can help greatly improve your decision-making capacity.
When you spend the time and money to invest in new workforce management or workforce optimization software, you want to make sure you’re putting it to the best possible use. To learn about how one company made the most out of the Verint Media Recorder Workforce Optimization software, read this case study.
