You Are Here

Last week, we were talking with a few people from a well-known research institute. We were just introducing ourselves and one of the women started talking about quality and service assurance issues for the contact center. She talked about the value of bottoms up and top down metrics for the contact center. But she also talked about a lingering gap that still remains when it comes to the ability to associate this plethora of great information with what is really happening to customers at a given moment. How do you effectively and simply put all that info into context? There are so many cures out there like speech analytics and surveys. And yet the cures sometimes come with more obstacles to overcome like: high costs, information overload, disassociation from actual transactions, lack of real time data and the possibility that the cure could itself impact the customer experience (e.g., a survey).

That’s where we got to jump in and say “Thank you for making our sales pitch for us.” She was effectively describing the gap our services fill.

Do you remember the first time you went to a mega mall or foreign airport? Do you remember how relieved you were when you found the map with the little yellow “You are here” arrow? That’s what remote availability and performance monitoring does for people navigating the megamall of contact center performance technologies and metrics. It offers the simple, straightforward view of integrated technology performance without impacting an actual customer. By monitoring the steps of a real end-user interaction, it lets you know when something goes wrong in the interaction and where to look for the problem. It provides that little yellow arrow saying “start here.” In the whirlwind of data (e.g., AHT, BHCC, abandoned calls, etc. etc.), remote availability and performance monitoring provides context so your data isn’t just data, it is actionable information.

Want to learn more? Join us for a live webinar on Tuesday, March 16 at 1 PM Central or download the recording whenever the time is right for you: REGISTER HERE.

Marla Geary

www.iq-services.com
6601 Lyndale Ave South, #330
Minneapolis, MN 55423

Communication Mishaps

We all know business is about generating revenue. In today’s era of social media, instant gratification and self-service, customer communications have a dramatic impact on revenue (just ask Toyota). Arguably, communication is the key to happy customers and a thriving business. And communication mishaps can ruin customer relationships!

I observed an example of a communication mishap at lunch yesterday. Being one of those busy people with an overloaded to-do list, I decided to go through a “fast food” drive-thru. The line was long but I expected it to move fast. It was a “fast food” restaurant and they should be prepared for a lunch rush, right?

After a 5 minute wait (5 minutes = 1 hour in fast food time) the voice from the speaker said, “We are only taking cash right now… is that OK?” I thought to myself “What if it wasn’t OK? What if I didn’t have cash?” Clearly the 2 cars ahead of me didn’t have cash evidenced by the way they squealed out of the line! I even watched one of them go across the street to a competitor.

Think about the goodwill this company could have created by having an employee walking through the drive-thru informing customers about the issue. Maybe those customers could have gone into the restaurant to use the onsite ATM instead of squealing away. I know the next time I’m in a hurry and I don’t have cash, I will pass by this place for sure.

Since I work at IQ Services, this of course got me thinking about communications technology and the importance of first call resolution objectives. Some companies (maybe not enough if you check out GetHuman.com) put a lot of effort into making sure customers know what they need to know in order to successfully complete a transaction the first go around — whether they hit the call center or just the IVR app.

But I wonder if these same companies realize the frustration customers feel when they can’t even get to their expensive, well-designed apps and technologies. A few nights ago, my husband was working on a budget and needed information from the bank. He called numerous times throughout the evening and repeatedly heard an “All circuits are busy…” message. Why didn’t they know their system was down? What good was their first call resolution strategy when my husband couldn’t even get his call through? Like the fast food place, why didn’t they have a backup plan to alert customers to the issue? To re-route them to the info they needed or at least to an agent? I wonder how long it took them to find out about it. I know it was at least 5 hours because that’s how long my husband tried before he gave up.

I wonder how many transaction fees and other revenue generating and customer service opportunities they missed in those 5 hours.

Kristy Buddensiek

www.iq-services.com
6601 Lyndale Ave South, #330
Minneapolis, MN 55423

What’s on Your Roadmap this Week?

Just for fun, I thought it might be interesting to talk about some of the exciting trends we’re seeing in the industry. If you work for a company that owns, supports, services or sells to contact centers, you no doubt have a similar list of your own. You’ve probably got a roadmap that identifies the trends appropriate to your market and how you can best leverage and evolve your product or service to meet tomorrow’s customer requirements.

So here’s a partial list of the things we have addressed or are preparing to address with our services in the near future:

• Multichannel touchpoints
• SIP
• Cloud services
• Virtualization
• Unified (not merely converged) contact centers that extend into the enterprise
• Virtual contact centers, i.e., contact centers without walls
• Voice + Visual
• Video self-service
• Multi-modal transactions that demonstrate, not merely explain

As pipes get bigger, servers faster and applications more capable, the user experience gets richer and your responsibilities become more complex. Our challenge is to find ways to help you evaluate and monitor those complex and ever-evolving end-user interactions. In order to do that, we have to shut up and listen to where you are going with your plans to implement, support, service or sell contact center technologies.

So what’s around the corner for you? What challenges/opportunities are you prepared to take advantage of? Who are you listening to? You may only be self-service IVR with screen-pop to an agent today, or perhaps a website with a click-to-chat window, but you probably already know what’s coming if you don’t already have it.

Mike Burke
http://www.iq-services.com/
6601 Lyndale Ave South, #330
Minneapolis, MN 55423

Being a Small Business: Part 3

A couple of weeks ago, Gregg Williams kicked off a blog series about “Being a Small Business.” He wrote about a question that many small businesses hear from their prospects.

Why should I do business with a small business?”

Gregg talked about some of the advantages of working with small businesses and posed the very interesting and amusing question “Given all the great stuff small businesses can do, why would you want to do business with one of those bigger guys?”

The following week, Jim Jenkins weighed in on the topic. He pointed out that small businesses have the opportunity and responsibility to stay close to customers and to see every business opportunity as a partnership, not merely a transaction.

In Part 3 of this series, I’d like to explore the “Why should I do business with a small business?” question from a slightly different angle. What I’ve learned over the years is that sometimes a prospect asks this question when what they really mean is “If I invest time and resources into a partnership with you, how will I know your small business will still be around in 6 months or a year?”

When you get this kind of concern from a prospect, you want to help them get comfortable with partnering with your small business. You want them to share your confidence that a small business can be a partner they can turn to year after year. Small businesses play a pivotal role in many markets. They make products and services accessible to customers who might not otherwise have an appropriate option. Small businesses provide that all important alternative to the “Big Guy” in the market who might otherwise monopolize price, distribution, scope and more. I want my prospects to know I understand our special role in the food chain.

So how do I get customers to understand all this? Clearly each small business has its own way of addressing the “How do I know you’ll be here?” question. At IQ Services, the initial answer sounds something like…

Because we want to be here. Because we care. Because we have fun. Because we know where the industry is going. Because we listen. And because IQ Services builds partnerships that grow into relationships.

And then we get to the “prove it” stage of the conversation. That’s where our service offering roadmap comes in…

Our roadmap is the tangible evidence of our experience, care, market knowledge, listening skills and commitment to being a reliable partner. Our roadmap is about doing a better job of what we already do for our customers as well as anticipating and providing testing techniques and services that will help customers have confidence the next time they implement that “next big” thing in their contact center.

When prospects understand we have a vision and roadmap for our offerings and for staying relevant in the market, they get comfortable. Prospects recognize our sincerity. In our case, they sense our very real commitment to staying in business so the marketplace has an expert, cost-effective testing service to turn to when the “Big Guy” can’t move quick enough or provide that high-touch service that meets their unique needs. We know our presence in the marketplace makes remote testing and monitoring available to companies that don’t have the internal resources (time, money, schedule, expertise, and commitment) to do it themselves.

So what are other small businesses doing to address “will you be here tomorrow” question. Do you agree this is the question prospects are asking? Let us know what you think. mgeary@iq-services.com.

Marla Geary
http://www.iq-services.com/
6601 Lyndale Ave South, #330
Minneapolis, MN 55423

Being a Small Business: Part 2

One of the great things about being a small business is that you are never too far from your customers.

When we started our company, we committed ourselves to delivering the best possible customer service. Sounds like many small companies, doesn’t it? We knew we could make it by always focusing on the customer’s need. For IQ Services, it was the customer’s need to have confidence in the end-to-end performance of their contact center and communications business solutions. It seemed to come easy for us because of our collective experience in implementing telecommunications, contact center and IVR solution. We were naturally sympathetic to our customers. We’d walked in their shoes. We instinctively understood the need for a highly adaptable testing platform and related methods to meet very unique architectures, applications and business requirements.

But we also knew our customers needed to “see” our vigilance in action…not just hear the customer service spin. And because we’re a proud small company like so many others, they do get to “see” it.

Feedback from customers reaches all the people in the organization. We respond quickly to customer ideas and requests. And if someone in the company senses an issue or opportunity to make things better, we proactively make the change right then so our customer has the best experience we can possibly create for them.

When we sensed customers needed a flexible approach to test pricing and scheduling, we responded. We created customized pricing options to meet the unique technical, schedule and budget requirements of each customer. Incremental packaging and explicit re-test scope give customers control. Flexible scheduling practices 24 x7 with no up-charge give customers peace of mind.

When we saw the value of having everyone on the customer’s implementation team – including vendors – participate in the test real time, we immediately responded. We made it a part of our recommended testing practice.

When we saw how powerful it was to have recordings of all calls, we responded. We quickly added recording capabilities so customers could listen to each test call as it completed.

When we saw the power of providing on-line, real-time access to testing activity and results, we created tools and methods to provide customers with the visibility they needed to quickly identify and fix problems.

As we start our 14th official year as a successful small business, we continue to look for ways to improve our testing practices and customer service. For our company like so many other small businesses, it isn’t the size of the company, but the dedication and responsiveness of the staff that make us an ideal partner for companies of any size. Our ability to leverage technology doesn’t hurt either. We react quickly and make changes without the need to jump through management approval hoops. We give customers what they need when they need it.

Being a small business is a good thing. Working with one can be just as good…maybe better.

Jim Jenkins
http://www.iq-services.com/
6601 Lyndale Ave South, #330
Minneapolis, MN 55423

Being a Small Business: Part 1

The other day, an Account Executive and I were talking with a prospect about testing their voice systems. The customer asked an interesting question. Why should my company do business with a small company like IQ Services? Of course, we’ve heard this question before and we have a response (which we’ll share in an upcoming blog post) that usually allays any concerns our prospects might have. But what I find most interesting about this question is that we – IQ Services employees and management alike – don’t think of ourselves as a small company. Yes, we fit the definition in terms of employee count and in terms of the many hats you get to wear when you work for a small company. But it doesn’t feel that way. It got me thinking about why.

Is it because so many of our customers are on the Fortune 500 list? Is it because we’ve served hundreds and hundreds of customers with communications technology that supports just a handful to hundreds of thousands of transactions per day? Or is it because we deliver services all over the world including North America, EMEA, CALA and Asia/Pacific? Is it because we are able to test with 20,000+ concurrent telephone calls or unlimited browsers? Or that we have distributed facilities for generating millions of monitoring transactions?

When I look at the ability of small (albeit talented and dedicated) group of people to so successfully leverage technology to do so much, I understand why we don’t feel small. I’m sure there are many other small businesses out there that feel the same way for similar reasons and more. When you couple this kind of success with the kind of unique responsiveness a small company can offer its customers, it makes you wonder why the prospects aren’t asking the bigger guys “Why should I do business with a big corporation like you?”
Mike Burke

http://www.iq-services.com/
6601 Lyndale Ave South, #330
Minneapolis, MN 55423

Test at the top of the stack™

Remember trays of Hollerith punchcards & clunk clunk clunk clunk card readers? Fortran?

Remember hearing (and saying) “…but I only changed one blessed card!?!”

Remember the lesson that came from that exercise?

You have to test the whole thing together, not just the pieces by themselves... that if the whole thing doesn’t work together, it doesn’t matter that the pieces individually are works of art.

Fast forward 40 years – to BUTT Sets, T-BERDs and unit testing. Then add RFC compliance, protocol testers, sniffers, network assessment, Nessus, nmap, nikto, PerfMon, et al – it is all very important and all very, very necessary. But not sufficient.

Why?

Because it’s all about whether or not your contact center solutions can be used the way you want them to be used under the traffic conditions you expect. Not just whether or not the servers respond to a ping or a traceroute, and your ports are provably secure from attack.

And the Users interact at the top of the stack, not somewhere down in the layers. The layers all have to happily interact with each other but in the end it’s about what happens when someone tries to use it, not just whether or not Tivoli or Performance Center show no red or amber alarms.

You need more than your technology’s inside-out view of the world to make sure your customers are being served. In this situation, the top-down view is the one that matters.

Test and monitor at the top of the stack and you’ll know how your customers are really being treated by your technology.

Mike Burke

IQ Services
6601 Lyndale Ave South, #330
Minneapolis, MN 55423
http://www.iq-services.com/