The contact center industry can seem very fragmented at times. One thing that we must remember is there are new contact centers being opened all of the time, and in a wide range of industries. When considering live chat the same thing is true. We have some new to supporting the chat channel and some experienced at chat. But success in both cases hinges on two key factors.
Thanks to Jeff Epstein of Comm100 sharing his insight at Customer Contact Week. Here is an edited transcript of my interview with Jeff Epstein:
Jim Rembach: Hey, this is Jim at the Fast Leader Show and Call Center Coach and I’m here with Jeff Epstein of Comm100. Jeff, how do you help folks get over the hump?
Jeff Epstein: What we do with our platform, Jim, is we want to make sure we make it very easy to get into live chat, whether it’s your first time or you’re replacing a different system. There are two factors that play into that. One is the ability to get our platform onto your platform, whether it’s a website or a mobile app, very, very quickly, very painlessly from an IT perspective. The next one is, and this is the bigger challenge, is making your agents really comfortable with live chat. So the customer side are used to it, they’re texting and they’re messaging all day long. Agents are now getting into a new communication channel, a new way of conversing with their clients. We’ve built our console to make sure those agents can learn very, very quickly to get up to speed and get all the data they need to answer those questions that are coming in via live chat.
Jim Rembach: You and I had the opportunity to talk a little bit off mic before we started the interview. My question was–there’s a lot of different communication platforms that are out there and you said, well, we’re not omni-channel. What do you mean by that?
Jeff Epstein: Okay. So when you think of call centers, the traditional model is phone, where you had live phone calls coming in and then you had IVR, interactive voice, right? Where you—press one to do this, press two to do that, but more so where the trend is going in the future or the digital conversation channels that’s via website, via chat, via sms, via social media. Those digital channels are the channels that we specialize in.
Jim Rembach: Got It. So when I start thinking about your particular solution and how you were focusing in primarily on the digital piece and the whole training piece, I started thinking about the impact to the supervisor. So their role is critical. How are you making their life easier?
Jeff Epstein: Well, we have three core personas that we designed for this. Obviously, the visitor and the agent, but you’re right, the supervisor, the one who’s making decisions on agent deployment, on agent training, they need the data points to make sure that their agents are on company mission and are meeting the metrics that they put in place. So, into our system we’ve built a wide range of analytics and proof points that help them measure and track agent performance, things like average queue, time spent on a call, queue capacity. How many chats can a typical agent handle as they get more mature. And those data points are all converted into analytics that can help those supervisors plan for the future more effectively. Now it could come down to routing chats based on tenure and skill set, routing chats based on product line or based on seniority of that agent, the more the supervisor can do that, the more control they’ll have over that live chat experience and the more confidence they’ll have in their agents when they execute.
Jim Rembach: So, Jeff, how do folks learn more?
Jeff Epstein: Visit us at www.comm100.com.
Jim Rembach: Jeff, thank you for sharing your knowledge and wisdom and we wish you the very best.
Jeff Epstein: It’s my pleasure, Jim.
