So often, the people working in a contact center’s back office—the people who perform clerical duties, fulfill orders, approve refunds, and many other tasks, depending on the industry—are essentially invisible to the customer.
It makes for an odd situation, as what they do each day actually has a huge impact on the customer experience. At a credit card company or bank, it’s the back office that approves lines of credit; in the insurance industry, they’re the ones approving or denying claims.
Yet back-office employees get neither the thanks when things go right, nor the blame when something goes wrong. It’s a mixed blessing, for sure. Dealing with an angry customer is rarely an enjoyable aspect of a contact center employee’s job, but it can also be difficult when managers, supervisors, or other employees fail to notice and applaud the things that back office workers do to make the front office’s job easier.
While it’s true that many back offices can be seen as inefficient, compared to the minute-by-minute standards of a contact center’s front office, there are excellent employees in every organization. If you want to improve your contact center culture, it’s important to recognize their hard work. Here are a few things to focus on when you’re letting your employees know how much you appreciate them.
As important as monetary rewards like bonuses, reward cards, and raises are to employees, those things alone will not make someone feel truly appreciated. It’s equally important to show your gratitude in more personal ways. That could mean verbally thanking your employee, whether in private or in a larger team setting, or hosting an informal get-together in the employee’s honor. For more ideas on how to reward your employees without spending much money, check out this list from American Express’s Small Business blog.
Plaques, gift certificates, and other standard “thank yous” are just fine, but why not get creative? If an employee has been working extra overtime during a period when you’re short-staffed, send an appreciative letter to the employee’s significant other along with a gift card for dinner at a nice restaurant. If you know a helpful employee has a particular hobby, like birding or painting, give a small gift that’s somehow related—a nice set of paintbrushes, for example. Include a handwritten note to make the gift even more personal. The extra time and thought you put in will be more than rewarded.
If you have back-office employees who have consistently exceeded your expectations, the gift of time will go a long, long way. Who wouldn’t want an extra vacation day or two? For some organizations, flextime—shifting work hours to avoid commuter traffic—or giving the employee the opportunity to work from home a day or two a week are possibilities. These rewards not only show that you trust them and are grateful for their work, but will encourage loyalty and appreciation in your employee as well.
You don’t have to make a big gesture to tell your employees that you appreciate them. If you give someone a token of appreciation one day, but ignore their hard work the other 364 days of the year, your thanks won’t seem very sincere—no matter how nice the gift is.
Instead, try to make your back-office employees feel appreciated regularly. It doesn’t take much: a Post-It with a nice message stuck on your employee’s keyboard, a quick visit from you and the CEO or CFO to say thank you in person, or a gift of flowers for someone whose child or spouse has been ill.
It can be more difficult to pick out outstanding employees in the back office, partly because the productivity tools don’t really exist, and partly because you’ve got a lot of other tasks and issues that take up most of your time.
But there are ways to free up some of that time, allowing you to put more effort into identifying stellar workers. One of those ways is KOVA’s Verint Media Recorder Workforce Management software, which helps managers build optimal staff schedules based on accurate forecasting. If you think this KOVA solution might help you, contact us today!
This August marked the 10th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina.
We all remember the storm’s devastating effects on the city of New Orleans and the surrounding areas — but perhaps the memories that stands out the most are of the dire conditions that so many evacuees had to endure after the storm was over. From overcrowded shelters, to inadequate food and water supplies, life for those living in Katrina’s wake was difficult, even nightmarish.
At KOVA, we’re in the business of helping people deal with emergencies. And while we can’t do anything about the storms that may come our way this hurricane season, we can offer some public safety tips on how to keep your family safe during a hurricane.
The most important first step you can take is to put together an emergency kit and create a family communications plan.
Your emergency kit should contain food, water, and any necessary medications for all members of your family (don’t forget your pets!). Ideally, you want enough to last 72 hours. In addition, you’ll want supplies like matches, blankets, a flashlight, and a first aid kit. You can find full lists of what to include on Ready.gov.
For your family communications plan, pick a location near, but outside your home, where all family members will meet (if possible) in the event of a disaster.
In case you’re separated from your family members when the storm strikes, you should also agree upon a family member or friend — out of state is best — to whom each person in the family will communicate their safety.
Know your hurricane evacuation routes. You can usually find these on your city or town government website.
Cover your windows — storm shutters offer the best protection, but boarding them up with plywood will work well too.
If you live in a high-rise building, be ready to take shelter from wind on a lower floor.
Stay informed. Watch or listen to the news, or search for the storm online. And if you’re in a public place like an airport, pay attention to any public emergency alerts. These could be sirens or public address messages, like the ones that come from our public alert system the KOVA Emergency Alert Notification System (KEANS). You can learn more about KEANS here.
Make sure you have enough water to last a couple of days, not only for drinking but for washing and flushing toilets. The general rule is one gallon per person per day. If you made your emergency kit in advance, you’re already covered.
Turn your refrigerator to the coldest setting — this will keep your keep food safe for longer in the case of a power outage.
Use your cell phone for emergencies only, in order to conserve battery power.
You should always evacuate if local authorities direct you to do so. If you are unable to evacuate, take refuge on the lowest level of your home or building, in an interior room like a closet or hallway. Stay away from windows and keep curtains and blinds closed.
Remember that evacuation routes will be very crowded, and you could be in standstill traffic for some time. It’s best to bring your emergency kit with you. At the very least, bring food, water, and blankets for the entire family, pets included.
Hopefully, your family communications plan served its purpose and you’re able to locate your loved ones. However, in the unfortunate case that you cannot, contact the American Red Cross at 1-800-RED-CROSS or visit the Red Cross Safe and Well website at safeandwell.com.
If you evacuated, but are unable to return to your home because it’s unsafe or destroyed, you can find the nearest shelter by texting SHELTER plus your zip code to FEMA at 43362.
Don’t use your tap water until you’re sure it’s not contaminated.
We hope that you and your loved ones are never affected by a natural disaster — but if you are, these tips should serve you well.
If you’d like to learn more about KOVA’s history of helping first responders keep people safe, call us at 800-204-5200 or send us an email.
The idea of implementing a new software system can be enough to send some managers running for the hills. It’s an understandable fear, especially for contact centers—today, there’s hardly a single job function an agent can perform fully offline, meaning that if something goes wrong during implementation, productivity goes way down.
But switching to a new software system doesn’t have to be an anxiety-ridden experience. Here are a few things you can do to make your software switch as smooth and efficient as possible.
One of the biggest mistakes you can make when making the decision to implement a new system is to skip doing a thorough analysis of your organization’s needs. What are the day-to-day operations that the system has to manage? What functions does the system have to perform? What kind of data will it need to bring over from the current system?
These are the kinds of nitty-gritty details that must be addressed if you want the implementation process to go smoothly. Without them, you risk getting halfway through the switch and realizing that there’s an essential function that your system isn’t able to handle. This might sound far-fetched, but unfortunately, it really isn’t.
Changing over to a new contact center software system requires major investment of time, money, and employee resources—bottom line. It can be frightening to consider how long it may take to complete a successful software system switch (several months is normal), or what the cost could be.
On the other hand, you have to keep your eye on what this new system is going to do for you. If you’re considering making a change, it’s because something in your current system isn’t working. Maybe it’s always given you problems in one specific area. Maybe employees don’t find it to be user-friendly. Or maybe the software is simply outdated.
Now you’re looking for a new software system—whether that’s SaaS or workforce optimization—that will be efficient, easy to use, and agent-friendly. Those are all attainable goals, if you’re willing to put in the time and effort. This applies to the entire process: before you start implementation, during implementation, and afterward, too. It’s normal to experience some bumps along the road, especially in the first couple of weeks after the system goes live. You’ll want to make sure you have training resources, both formal and informal, available to your agents when they need them. This will ensure they use the system as it was intended, rather than creating workarounds.
Since they’re the ones who will be using the system day in and day out, make sure your employees are involved in the implementation process. Ideally, you’d want people from each department to participate; if that’s not possible, try to at least offer regular updates on the process to the company at large, with opportunities for feedback.
Mock “going live” setups can be extremely helpful for everyone involved, from your agents to the vendors who are setting up your system. You need your agents to be able to try out the new system, so they can see how it handles their day-to-day, minute-to-minute job functions.
When you do actually take the system live, be prepared for it to need some fine-tuning. Mock setups or no, there ae bound to be issues and circumstances that you just can’t know how to address until they actually occur.
Implementing a new software system is a major decision, and it’s important to find the right vendor to fit your needs. If you’re thinking of making a switch, contact KOVA—we pride ourselves on helping our customers find exactly the right solution to fit their needs. Browse our workforce optimization solutions, and then let us know how we can help you!
Halloween is a fun, exciting, and of course, candy-filled time for children and young people. And we mustn’t forget the adults—who can resist a good costume party, after all?
But like any holiday when people come out in force to celebrate, Halloween is also a time to pay close attention to safety. By doing so, you can ensure that your ghoulish celebration will be all treats and no tricks (or at least, only harmless ones).
Follow these tips to help keep you and your family safe this Oct. 31.
911 dispatchers and emergency workers work especially hard on holidays, and Halloween is no exception. If KOVA can help your Public Safety Access Point (PSAP) with a public safety software solution, contact us—we’d love to help!
Public safety professionals have difficult jobs. In high-stress, crisis situations, they’re the ones whose job it is to keep a cool head and think strategically. They interact with people of all sorts on a daily basis, and often have to secure the cooperation of those people in order to do their jobs well. If those people don’t speak English, that quickly becomes a very difficult task.
That’s why KOVA recently add a new feature to our SilentPartner app for professionals working in the field. Silent Partner is an app that transforms your phone into a secure mobile recording device, allowing you to take pictures and record both video and sound, then tag and organize the information, and securely transmit it to your HQ.
Now SilentPartner can do even more. We’ve just added a universal translation feature to the app that will allow detectives, medical personnel, insurance adjusters, and anyone who uses the app to instantly connect to a translation service when speaking with someone whose language is not English.
Below are two examples of how SilentPartner can help those working in the field.
Let’s say Mary is a physician who works in an inner-city clinic, where she sees lots of immigrants from around the world on a regular basis. Since there are a lot of Hispanic patients, the clinic has several people who can translate Spanish to English.
However, because of the serious unrest in the Middle East, the number of immigrants coming from that region has skyrocketed over the past year. As a result, many of them are coming to Mary’s clinic. While the clinic has tried to find a reliable Arabic translator, they haven’t had much luck—plus, not all the new patients speak Arabic, anyway.
Then Mary downloads SilentPartner for her phone. Now, when she has a patient from, say, Syria or Turkey, Mary can turn on SilentPartner and tap the universal translation feature on her screen. With that one tap, Mary’s speakerphone is enabled and an operator helps her identify the language she needs to translate.
Then the operator connects her to the appropriate translator, who can listen in on the conversation and translate it for Mary. The entire conversation is recorded, and Mary can tag it and save it for later reference.
Here’s another example. Dave is a detective who is working on a serial robbery case that’s taking place in a neighborhood with lots of Asian immigrants. The area is home to people from South Korea, Japan, China, Vietnam, and Thailand, and several of their homes have been broken into and robbed over the past month.
Dave is a great detective and skilled at working cases like these—but he doesn’t speak any Asian languages, and many of the people he’d like to interview don’t speak English.
Before SilentPartner, Dave would either have to rely on finding people within the community who could help translate—not all that reliably—or use agency resources to hire translators that would meet his needs. Or, of course, he could simply not interview the people he can’t speak to, which is a pretty undesirable option.
Now that he has the app, though, all he needs is a single tap on his phone to instantly connect to a translation service that can handle any language he encounters throughout his day. Those conversations are automatically recorded and securely transmitted back to his HQ where they can be used as evidence to build his case.
These are just two examples of how SilentPartner can make work easier for individuals who work in the field. With the app’s universal translation feature, there is truly no one you can’t talk to. That also means that you can put your resources, both personal and professional, to use on doing your job, rather than spend time and money scrambling to find translators, and possibly missing an important opportunity to help someone or solve a crime.
If you’d like to learn more about the app, check out our short video introduction to SilentPartner. If you’re ready to talk about how SilentPartner can help you or your employees, give us a call at 800-204-5200 or contact us via email!
Sources: SilentPartner info on KOVA website, universal translation press release
When it comes to criminal investigations, law enforcement needs every helpful tool it can get.
From mobile voice recording apps like KOVA’s SilentPartner to the multi-media recording system, Audiolog for Public Safety, there are many recent technological advancements that are helping police officers, detectives, and other public safety officials do their jobs even better.
One you may have heard about is speech analytics software. What speech analytics software does is convert audio recordings, like 911 calls, into indexed, searchable data. This allows investigators, police officers, and others to identify trends across calls by noting the frequency of specific words, as well as where they’re used in relation to other words.
What makes it more than just simple word-identification, however, is the fact that words are indexed for content and meaning, making correlations between calls and incidents easier to spot.
For example, if a certain district with known gang activity is experiencing a high number of shootings, investigators could predefine words—the names of various gangs, for example—and enter them into the speech analytics database. By being able to see when and how often a particular gang is mentioned, they may gain a new level of insight into their investigation.
This feature is especially helpful with 911 calls, since the caller is often agitated or frantic, and can hardly be expected to discuss a possible root cause or previous, similar issue while on the phone.
One successful use of speech analytics occurred at a Public Safety Answering Point (PSAP) in Pennsylvania, when the software was used to investigate a series of porch fire arson incidents that had been happening across the city. As part of the investigation, the local fire department compiled a list of all the addresses that had been affected.
Then using speech analytics, law enforcement was able to identify similar incidents that had not already been included in the list of addresses. This allowed them to see the bigger picture, ultimately making for a quicker end to the investigation.
Another important benefit of speech analytics software is that by making trends visible, it can help police initiate a proactive response earlier than they might have otherwise. Sometimes the information may even allow them to take preventive actions.
You can learn even more about speech analytics software by reading our white paper on the subject.
Speech analytics has actually been in commercial use for more than a decade, but it’s only recently been put into place in the public safety realm. And now, analytics software is being used for more than just audio recordings.
Take video analytics. This software can scan surveillance footage for a particular person or thing, based on an uploaded photo or user-generated image. Some software is even able to filter out environmental factors like lighting or background movement. This can mean a drastic reduction in the time investigators have to spend manually scanning video for a face or car that there’s no guarantee of spotting anyway.
And now that there are text-to-911 services in certain cities, text analytics are emerging as well. These software systems analyze key words and phrases, just like speech analytics, but they can also analyze things like text response time. When used in concert with other analytics systems, text analytics can provide useful information.
As useful as all these tools can be, without properly trained users, they can result in a flood of data that complicates, rather than simplifies, an investigation. If your PSAP is implementing speech analytics software, it’s vital to make sure that those using it receive good training on how to use this important tool.
If you’re in need of speech analytics or other types of software for your PSAP, 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!
https://www.fcc.gov/text-to-911
http://www.officer.com/article/12031164/the-increasing-importance-of-analytics-in-law-enforcement
https://www.kovacorp.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/Kova_SpeechAnalytics.pdf
We’ve written about how speech analytics are being used to help law enforcement see trends, identify underlying issues, and connect the dots between cases more efficiently. But while speech analytics software just recently became common in the public safety industry, it’s been used for some time in business settings—specifically call centers, or contact centers.
Of course, in a contact center, speech analytics aren’t used to help solve crimes. Instead, they’re used in a wide variety of ways, with the ultimate goal being to create a better customer experience. Isn’t that always the goal, after all?
Here are a few of the most effective ways you can put your speech analytics software to use.
One of the most valuable use of speech analytics software is for contact center employee training. Because this software can record both agents and customers simultaneously, it can be used to track things like agents’ adherence to a script, or to make sure they’re sticking to company policy.
But there are more sophisticated uses for speech analytics, too. Speech analytics can be used not only to identify actual words, but tone of voice, unusual pauses, variations in pitch, and other nuanced indicators that a customer isn’t happy or that the agent is having trouble with a certain aspect of the customer experience.
When used this way, the software can make it easier for managers to offer targeted training to individual agents, rather than take a one-size-fits-all approach.
Finally, managers can use speech analytics to identify what their highest performers are doing right. By being able to identify certain phrases used at certain points in a call, for example, managers can see what’s working best and use that to help their other agents achieve the same level of success.
Improving customer satisfaction goes hand-in-hand with agent training. When your agents are performing their job duties better, your customers will naturally be happier. But there are other ways that speech analytics can be used specifically to give your customers a better experience.
Just like the software can spot trends in the use of words and phrases, it can also spot trends across the calls of the entire contact center—like which customers are more likely to take an up-selling or cross-selling offer. It’s also able to pick up on any hints of stress or emotion in a customer’s voice, as well as to decipher potential motivating factors for the customer’s call.
Another way speech analytics can be especially helpful is by reducing customer attrition. Managers can look for the specific moments when customers tend to leave, and then react accordingly. Maybe the call agent’s script needs some tweaking, or an option needs to be presented at a different point.
This is naturally an important goal for most companies, and speech analytics software can help achieve it. Just like the software can help identify when customers are leaving the call, it can help sales managers when those up-selling or cross-selling opportunities seem to be the most successful. Then they can employ targeted training to help agents make the most of those opportunities.
According to several sources, speech analytics software can pay for itself in cost savings in as little as three months, with most organizations reporting significant cost savings within nine months. This can be great news for companies that are trying hard to keep their contact center operations domestic, rather than outsourcing them to other countries.
For industries where regulatory compliance is a major issue, like banking or government contracting, speech analytics can be used to ensure that agents are adhering to any and all regulations. Agents can even be given real-time prompts via a desktop client if they need help remembering to use the correct language.
This means that problems can be addressed much more quickly—really, before they even become problems.
If your organization is looking for a contact center software solution, take a look at KOVA’s Workforce Optimization Solutions. From speech analytics, part of our Enterprise Feedback Management software, to total workforce management solutions like our software package Verint Media Recorder, KOVA has something to help you achieve your organizational goals. Contact us today!
Sources:
http://blog.zoomint.com/blog/using-speech-analytics-in-call-center-agent-training
http://searchcrm.techtarget.com/report/Top-five-benefits-of-speech-analytics-for-the-call-center
In some ways, the contact center model hasn’t changed in years. Customers call. Agents answer. Hopefully, questions are answered correctly and courteously, while problems are resolved quickly and efficiently.
The overall purpose of the contact center is to facilitate customer contact, whether the center’s goal is to sell products or provide customer support. And while that remains the same, new trends are changing the way contact centers handle their customers. We’ve put together a list of the top five trends shaping the contact center industry below.
The biggest takeaway for contact centers is that technology is becoming more and more a vital part of how they interact with customers. Without current, optimized software solutions, contact centers will be left far behind. Think your contact center is in need of a technology solution? Contact KOVA about our Enterprise Workforce Optimization and Management solutions like the Verint Media Recorder package or the Enterprise Feedback Management system.
Sources:
https://fonolo.com/blog/2015/01/whitepaper-top-10-contact-center-trends-for-2015/
http://www.ameyo.com/blog/top-contact-center-technology-trends-of-2015
Contact centers are getting in customer feedback all the time. Whether it’s through a formal channel, like a survey, or an informal one, like a quick mention during a support call, customer feedback can be enlightening and useful—but only if it’s managed well.
If it’s not managed well, all you have is a flood of data that will quickly overwhelm the people tasked with sifting through it and finding the message buried somewhere within.
Enterprise Feedback Management makes data manageable
That’s why KOVA offers Enterprise Feedback Management (EFM) software. With this software package, managers in charge of customer experience are able to get a clearer view into what customers think of their company. They can deploy surveys easily and retrieve responses just as easily, and all across multiple channels: phone, email, SMS, mobile, and web. They can become, in short, customer feedback superheroes!
You can watch this video for an overview of how EFM can help improve your company’s customer experience. (embedded video: https://www.kovacorp.com/info-center/videos/enterprise-feedback-management-2/)
How EFM can help your contact center
Let’s say your company offers text support, allowing customers to text in problems, questions, etc. With Enterprise Feedback Management, you’ll be able to analyze the data in those texts to discern customer sentiment, not to mention valuable information about what your customers are using the text service for. Are they texting for minor issues, or major ones? Are the problems being resolved through text or not?
And since social media continues to be an important source of customer data, with customers sharing their views increasingly on Twitter, Facebook, and on blogs, KOVA’s EFM software can capture and analyze this information as well.
Use EFM to proactively engage your customers
Another major advantage that EFM offers users? Extensive case management capabilities. For example, you could deploy an email survey to customers asking for feedback on a new credit card feature. You can choose to automatically open the cases in which someone fills in the “Needs improvement” answer, so that you can go further with that data specifically. Maybe you want to send an email or a text to those customers to gather more information.
For the ones who answer “Hate it,” maybe you want to offer them some kind of incentive program, or reward, or some other acknowledgement that you’ve heard their response and want to make them satisfied customers once more. All this can be easily managed with EFM software.
To really strengthen your company’s feedback management, take your EFM from Ironman to Superman status by adding Voice of the Customer analytics. This software includes Text Analytics and Speech Analytics, as well as our Verint Media Recorder Customer Feedback solution.
Text and speech analytics give you incredible insight into how your customers feel about your products and company. Not only do these programs analyze the words customers are using—they can also analyze unusual pauses, tone of voice, and changes in pitch.
Combined with the feedback you get from surveys, this data can be extremely helpful in developing a full view of your customer.
The Customer Feedback solution offers yet another way to retrieve feedback from customers, by using short, context-sensitive surveys at the end of their phone calls. Businesses can collect data on everything from products to customer service and customer satisfaction.
Democratizing data
KOVA’s EFM solution is one of the most progressive around, with the ability to scale up to thousands of users through an in-depth collection of permissions and workflows designed to protect customer data, while still making information available to those for whom it’s most useful.
This is part of the trend toward decentralizing data ownership—getting it into the hands of front-line managers and supervisors quickly and efficiently, rather than allowing it to pile up into reports that must be received, reviewed, and shared across multiple departments.
Is your contact center in need of an Enterprise Feedback Management software solution? Contact KOVA today!
Sources:
http://www.verint.com/assets/verint/resources/datasheets/efm.pdf
It’s official: Labor Day has come and gone, and fall is in the air. Many of us parents are sending our kids off to college—some for the first time. And among all the things we’ve got to think about, from making sure our new collegiate have the right textbooks, to buying sheets, to updating the laptop, one surely looms larger than others: safety.
Now that our kids are living away from home, making sure they know how to stay safe is even more important than it was before. But even those of us who work in public safety don’t always think of every little thing they can do that will help them in an emergency—or, even better, help them prevent an emergency.
Public safety is vital to us here at KOVA—after all, our business is public safety software solutions. So to help you out, we want to share this list of 10 vital public safety tips that to pass on to your college student (and if you’ve got younger children, check out our safety tips for being around school buses and for the outdoors).
College is an exciting time for both you and your student (though probably more for your student if you’re suffering from an empty nest!). Ensure that it’s also a safe time by sharing these public safety tips with your student.If you’re a public safety professional, we hope this list jumpstarts your own ideas of safety tips to help make college a happy, healthy, and safe experience. And if your Public Safety Answering Point is in need of an upgrade, contact KOVA today and ask about our public safety software solutions.
Sources:
