Can you hear me? Can you see me? Is it your problem or my problem? Is anyone willing to own the problem? Well, without any visibility into your contact center’s network performance, your answer is a resounding and overwhelming…NO!
If you’re a customer experience focused organization, there are a few core metrics that can differentiate you from everyone else – customer effort and first contact resolution top the list. But when considering these two metrics specifically, some things that impact these metrics can be out of your control. The problem becomes hopeless when you don’t know what you need to manage it.
This is exactly what can happen with your contact center messaging and communications network. Everybody hates to get dropped, cutoff and to deal with choppy audio and video. Connectivity and clarity are more vital than ever in customer experience management and thanks to Joe White from Brightlink for giving me visibility (and hope) into this issue when we met at Customer Contact Week.
Here’s an edited transcript of my interview with Joe:
Jim Rembach: Hey this is Jim with the Fast Leader Show and Call Center Coach and I’m with Joe White of Brightlink. Joe, how do you help folks get over the hump?
Joe White: We help people get over the hump by providing them with information and visibility into the network, especially carrier network, that other carriers just don’t provide. That’s anywhere from historical graphs, looking at call flow data, being able to see packet loss jitter, MOS scores inside our care network as we hand-off to the PSTN or to another partner.
Jim Rembach: When we start talking about Bandwidth, connectivity – all of the things that are associated with that customer being able to communicate with us, regards of the channel I would suspect, a lot of people think that that’s just pure commodity play – send to procurement or send it to somebody’s going to negotiate a contract and let’s just be done with it. But you’re telling me this is different for you guys.
Joe White: Yeah, we think it’s very different. You know one of the things that we want to help our customers with is not making it a commodity or giving them something that’s above just sending it to procurement. The reason that people choose us for their network is because you get more than just a minute on some sort of pipe. You get the visibility, you understand – hey, we had a great call score there was not jitter, no packet loss – you get real visibility into what’s happening.
Jim Rembach: So, when we start talking about the supervisor, that’s a critical role in the contact center how do you make a supervisor – a frontline supervisor’s job easier.
Joe White: We make it easier through information. The more information they have the better equipped they are to talk to their leadership and understand what happens in call queues. Was the caller out because they got frustrated or were they out because they had a bad connection. And a lot of times when you’re looking at abandon rates and you’re looking the statistics are really make a contact center successful – that’s very important.
And that’s a layer of data that we give that no other carrier out there does.
Jim Rembach: So, I guess you’d say for me and I could even see this for myself – is that the whole connectivity and call quality thing is something that customers just don’t tolerate any more. So, when you start looking at that visibility component what do you really mean by that.
Joe White: Yes, so we mean that you can see was there any choppy audio was there or was there something in the call that caused that user to hang up or disconnect, to get frustrated other than what they may have called in about.
That’s why we also, when we can, negotiate high definition audio and our visibility will show you this call is in HD or wasn’t in HD. So, you can you can start to look and say, our average call hold times are higher and we have a higher user sentiment rate – when the calls is negotiated in HD and that tells you something about the customer experience.
Jim Rembach: So then I also suspect that even when you start talking about different channels more and more contact centers using video – meaning that that also comes into play when you start looking at how is the customer best served and where do they feel that their best level of experience is based on all of those different channels. Is that correct?
Joe White: Absolutely. And we can look at those things as well. We actually do some video services through a micro-service in our UC platform. We can do this a similar of visibility on what was the throughput rate; was there any sort of broken frames or things like that allow them to see that as well. What was the user experience? Because at the end of the day that’s what everyone’s being scored on.
Jim Rembach: So, Joe how to folks learn more?
Joe White: Learn more by going to www.brightlink.com.
Jim Rembach: Joe thanks for sharing your knowledge and experience and we wish you the very best.
Joe White: Thank you.
