Garments and Wineskins

 

Jesus told a parable about putting a new patch on old clothes and new wine into old wineskins – showing the futility of following old practices or ways.  The idea is that if you try to fill the old wineskin with new wine, you will get a broken wineskin and spilled wine.  Taking that parable into my profession, I see the same mistake made every day – business attempting to fit old workflows and ways of doing things into a new system, especially those moving from premise systems to cloud contact centers, and when they attempt it, it usually ends up they don’t like the new system and their entire endeavor is a failure.  I would urge anyone looking at changing out their system to not try to come up with a way to “do it like we always did”, but rather find a solution that gets uses to the same endpoint with less hassle and more efficiency. 

Boat Anchors

I grew up installing and servicing old AT&T 25-pair, push-button phones.  These were the kinds with buttons along the bottom that were phone lines coming in and each phone could pick-up the flashing button or put is on hold for someone else.  Anyone could operate it and transfers were a matter of putting it on hold and yelling in the office for “Parts, pick up line 2”.  Unfortunately, this idea of shared line appearances, visual holds, and picking up a line from any phone does not relate well in the world of SIP and VoIP systems where there are no physical lines and in most cases, no physical phones.  So when I get the retail customer or doctor’s office asking for that counter phone or shared lines, I have to cringe and wish that there was something I could give them, but the fact is that most cloud contact center solutions just don’t offer this legacy feature.  What can be done?  Visual park orbits is one way so that once it is parked, there is a place in the software to see the call and pick it up out of the orbit.  The better way is to use presence software like we have in Genesys Cloud and Microsoft Teams to see when people are on the phone or away from their desk and to look into queues to see wait times and queue depth before transferring a caller into queue.  As for the yelling across the room – how much can we do in our own home!

A Matter of Tradition

I lived for a stint in Taiwan and it always amazed me how a city like Taipei still held to tradition.  It would not be uncommon to hear fire crackers going off for a bride and groom or traffic halting while a dancing dragging goes up and down offering good fortune.  While these are part of the culture, I am sure they don’t fit in with the modern city culture that hosts them.  I feel the same when some tells me that traditionally they have always had visibility to a certain statistic, or they had a feature on their 20-year-old Nortel that they just can’t do without.  My innovation team does their best to come up with create the illusion that we can return that feature they are missing, but most of the time that requires complexity, customization, and costs – but if I can easily do some creative automagic alternative for them, I will.  I feel it would be much better to understand what that feature was used for, how it benefitted the users, and discover if there could be an upstream alternative that could be changed to give them a similar end-result.  An example is the rich displays that Avaya and Nortel phones provided that we can now replicate in the software client or a screen pop with even more information – giving users the end result with even more rich data to work with.  Data dips in the IVR, AI-driven routing decisions, and fully-visual representation of the screen all help to give a better experience for the agent and end customer alike.

Screen Kung-Fu

One of my colleagues is fond of commenting on the “screen kung-fu” that agents have to go through in the modern contact center.  They will have their CRM open to reference data, the ERP for orders, EHR for scheduling, KSM for searching information, ACD GUI for the contact center, and a plethora of other acronym-based applications which they have juggle, swap, copy-paste, and flip between just to help a customer with a ‘simple’ request.  How many times have you called into a service center and get the story “I’m sorry, I can’t look you up in this system while I am on the screen of this other system until I pull up your information in a 3^rd system!”  Yes, agents have it hard when businesses don’t consolidate information into easy-to-use, single-pane-of-glass solutions that don’t require all the kung-fu to lookup and deliver good customer experience.  Businesses need to decide where agents will live, what information is critical to their work, and how applications can easily share information so all the manual copy-paste operations are unnecessary.  That is what something like Microsoft Dynamics and Genesys Cloud gives you – all the necessary operations in a single web interface with no Alt-Tab antics involved.  Find new ways of allowing your agents access to knowledge with Agent Assist or let supervisors use built in tools in Dynamics or Salesforce to access the stats from the contact center without leaving the application they live in 8 hours a day. 

Holding on the past will hold any business back and no decisions in today’s world can be made based on siloed request and research.  Come together as a single organization to look at that means most to productivity and efficiency at the agent level as well as what can be consolidated at the IT level for sharing of information.  This is what total customer experience is all about – the supervisors, the IT, the contact center, and the customer all able to be served by the systems that management selects for the optimum solution for all involved.  If you are looking to innovate your contact center and not be dragged down by your present environment, ask a consultant at Avtex for a look at Genesys Cloud combined with the CRM/EHR of your choice.

Robert
www.Avtex.com