Contact center agents are often first in the line of fire when it comes to providing good customer service, and are also under pressure to meet demanding performance metrics, but Verint Systems says that the root cause of problems often originates in back-office inefficiencies.
To address those issues, the company has launched Verint Work Allocation Manager, which it has added it to its customer engagement optimization suite. By blending customer service capabilities from Kana (which Verint acquired last year) with workforce optimization capabilities from Verint, front and back office work is blended, and not only aids in meeting service level agreements, but boosts customer service and satisfaction as well.
"We've been talking to our customers for quite a while about the tools that they need to enable their employees to provide better customer service, and some of the conversations aren't just about the front line, the contact center, but about their needs in the back office,” says Jenni Palocsik, solutions marketing director at Verint.
Palocsik points to recent research from Capgemini that found that 60 percent of customer dissatisfaction begins in the back office, and 10 to 20 percent of contact center volume is a result of execution issues in the back office.
"We often hear our customers say they need to prioritize different types of work, which is critical for them in order for them to be productive and efficient," Palocsik says. "Even more importantly, especially these days, is that if employees aren't doing the right thing in the back office, it can have a dramatic negative effect on customer service.
"Essentially, we are providing capabilities so that a back-office or front-office employee who sometimes works on the phone and is not speaking directly with a customer [has] an easy way to immediately know what the next thing is that they need to work on.”
Addressing the Needs of Blended Contact Centers
Palocsik says that Verint has seen shifts in customer preferences as the use of digital channels increase, which has forced organizations to evolve how they interact with customers. This, in turn, has led to a blended contact center environment. Palocsik added that Saddletree Research and National Association of Call Centers 2014 Survey discovered that 66 percentof U.S. organizations have contact center and back office reporting into the same internal department. Additionally, 41 percent of contact centers are now using contact center workforce management software to schedule the back-office workforce.
With the use of Verint Work Allocation Manager, companies no longer have a silo between their front and back office. “Blended teams can do a wider