CCaaS Sales Prospecting Guide · A predictive dialer distributes calls to agents when a live...

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CCaaS Sales Prospecting Guide

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Cloud Contact Center Prospecting Guide

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Introduction

According to Walker Research’s “Customer 2020” report, customer experience will overtake price as a driving factor in consumer buying decisions by 2020. Contact centers have become the frontline in this customer experience battleground, as companies seek to build stronger connections with their customers. Today’s businesses are trying to better understand what the contact center of the future will look like and how they can evolve to meet changing customer expectations.

In the past, customers typically only had phone or email available as their primary means of communication when needing to engage with a company to ask a question or share a concern. The modern contact center has been compelled to adopt new communication methods and strategies to ensure more efficient and convenient customer interactions.

Customer engagement has moved beyond basic voice calls, and now incorporates instant messaging, texting, video, social media and more. With these continuing advancements, it has become more important than ever before for companies to understand key considerations and available options when deploying a modern contact center.

This guide will provide a helpful introduction to the world of contact centers, including different contact center types and formats, the growing shift toward cloud-based deployment models and some commonly-used feature functionality and terminology. Additionally, we’ll identify some ideal business targets for a cloud-based contact center platform, and some suggested guidelines for how best to engage with these prospects.

What Is a Contact Center?

A contact center is a business unit within an organization that is tasked with managing customer interactions. Some companies build their own in-house contact centers while others outsource that function of their organization to a dedicated BPO (business process outsourcing) partner that provides contact center solutions. Generally, customer service and sales functions are the primary focus of contact centers. Increasingly, the contact center serves as the ultimate point of contact between a company and its customers.

According to consulting firm Site Selection Group’s proprietary database of existing contact center operations across the U.S., it is estimated that there is in excess of 2.2 million workers employed in more than 6,800 contact center facilities across the U.S. This number excludes home-based agents and contact centers with fewer than 25 employees. Site Selection Group estimates the total contact center workforce in the U.S. is approximately 3 million workers when these smaller operations are added into the equation.

Though the terms are often used interchangeably, contact centers and call centers aren’t the same thing. Unlike a call center, which receives requests only by telephone, the contact center handles inbound and outbound customer communication over multiple channels, including telephone, web, chat, email, messaging apps, social media, text, fax, and even traditional mail. Contact centers use various types of advanced technology to help resolve customer issues quickly, to track customer


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engagements, and to capture interaction and performance data. Some types of specialized technology regularly deployed in a contact center environment include:

Automatic Call Distribution (ACD): A system that helps send incoming calls to the right people at the right time. The ACD recognizes an incoming call and scans it for predetermined identifying information. This information is cross-referenced against a database of call routing instructions that are used to distribute the call accordingly.

Interactive Voice Response (IVR): An automated retrieval and processing device that provides information to callers via telephone keypad signaling and/or voice recognition. The response may be a recorded, artificial or synthesized voice. Common applications include bank by phone, check on my order and store locator.

Knowledge Management System (KMS): In relation to handling customer interactions, this system maintains a database of relevant knowledge used to assist the contact center agent when providing information to a caller, including product information, cost, warranty, company policies, installation, usage and maintenance.

Workforce Management System: A contact center system that uses historical information, future forecasts, contact channel volumes, interaction durations and schedules to determine optimal staffing for a given time period.

Workforce Optimization: A workforce optimization (WFO) suite is a collection of functional modules that work together to help companies optimize the performance of their workforce. Modules can include call and screen recording, quality assurance/management, agent coaching and speech analytics.

Automated Dialing System: An automated dialing system can reduce agent downtime and inefficiency, generate increased sales and support easier lead management. A predictive dialer distributes calls to agents when a live customer or prospect answers. A preview dialer displays an account’s information and phone number on an agent’s screen, allowing them to decide whether to instruct the dialer to call the customer or prospect. A power dialer will only dial out to a new call when an agent has finished their previous call and is available to move on to the next. A progressive dialer combines the predictive/preview functionality, dialing numbers automatically and teeing up the next call in queue once the previous call has been dispositioned.

Inbound Versus Outbound Contact Centers

The main difference between an inbound and outbound contact center is the way interactions take place.

Just like it sounds, an inbound contact center receives incoming communications. The most basic characteristic of an inbound contact center is that agents wait for incoming calls, emails, chats, social media or SMS inquiries that are initiated by customers and prospects. These customers are usually seeking customer service, such as tech support, product assistance, or help with placing an order.


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Because of this, inbound contact center agents need to react with solutions to customer problems and requests quickly and efficiently.

An outbound contact center is the exact opposite of an inbound contact center. Instead of responding to incoming communications, agents in an outbound contact center initiate the interaction to reach customers and prospects. Most outbound contact centers are focused on sales. Agents have a list of contacts to get in touch with and they usually utilize customer relationship management (CRM) software to track and manage their interactions.

What Is Customer Experience? (And Why It's So Important)

Gartner defines customer experience as “the customer’s perceptions and related feelings caused by the one-off and cumulative effect of interactions with a supplier’s employees, systems, channels or products.”

Today’s customers don’t just buy a product or service – they invest in a reliable and satisfactory experience with a specific brand or company. Customer experience or “CX” is the sum of all the moments a company spends interacting with its customer base, from the calls they answer, to the follow-up emails they send. Listed below are some interesting statistics highlighting the critical importance of delivering a consistently positive customer experience in the modern era.

• American Express research shows that 33% of Americans say they’ll consider switching companies after just a single instance of poor service.

• A New Voice Media report showed that U.S. companies lose more than $62 billion annually due to poor customer service.

• Bain and Company research revealed that increasing customer retention rates by 5% can increase profits by 25 to 95%.

• Harvard Business Review states that it is 5 to 25 times more expensive to acquire a new customer than to retain a current one.

• American Express says U.S. consumers are willing to spend 17% more to do business with companies that deliver excellent service.

Customers in today’s world have higher service expectations, are empowered by social media, and are far more willing and able to shift their business to competitors. Because of these factors, contact centers must be equipped to provide a superior customer experience.

The Rise of Omni-Channel Customer Engagement

In this digital age, customers and prospects must be able to easily engage with a business via any channel – phone, self-service (including websites, IVR systems and virtual agents), email, chat, co-browse, SMS, social media and video. Contact center agents should be enabled to provide a consistent, personalized customer experience across these communication channels, and provide timely resolution, ideally in the first contact. The objective is for companies to deliver an outstanding customer experience at every touchpoint and throughout the customer journey.


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Provided below are some recent research findings demonstrating the increasing importance of omni-channel customer engagement.

• Aberdeen research shows that companies with an omni-channel engagement solution achieve a 91% higher year-over-year increase in customer retention versus those without.

• According to Forrester research, 95% of customers use more than one channel to communicate with companies.

• American Express found that 46% of customers prefer phone support for complex issues while 38% prefer to talk to service agents via chat or email for simple issues.

• American Express found more than 60% of U.S. consumers say their go-to channel for simple inquiries is a digital self-service tool (website, mobile app, voice response system or online chat).

• A Microsoft 2017 State of Global Customer Service survey of 5,000 people revealed 47% have used between 3 and 5 channels to ask customer service questions. 72% stated they have used social media as a customer service channel.

Contact centers have been gradually transitioning to omni-channel environments for close to 20 years. First came multi-channel contact centers, where various channels were supported by separate groups of agents, typically using different systems and practices. Contact centers are now striving to become integrated omni-channel servicing environments, which is becoming a necessity for companies undergoing a digital transformation.

In order to transition to omni-channel environments, contact centers need a new generation of servicing technology and systems that can position their agents to deliver a consistent experience across all channels. This includes ACD solutions that can integrate interactions coming from all channels, giving agents a standardized interface for accessing customer information and resolving inquiries.

Agents must also have immediate and timely access to a servicing/customer relationship management (CRM) application that captures and shares everything customers have done and requested throughout all touch points and channels.

Bottom line – customers wish to communicate when they want, how they want – and expect a consistent level of service across multiple communication channels. By leveraging an omni-channel contact center platform, businesses gain a competitive advantage by engaging with customers via their preferred contact method, whatever it may be.

What Is Contact Center as a Service?

As contact centers continue to evolve in the face of new technology, channels and trends, companies also have an opportunity to choose how they want to deploy their contact center infrastructure.

Contact Center as a Service or CCaaS broadly refers to the delivery of contact center functionality and associated benefits through the use of cloud-based technologies offered via a consumption-based model. CCaaS solutions offer similar functional capabilities to those of on-premises contact center


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infrastructure, but there are key differences. With CCaaS, connectivity to other cloud-based applications may be easier, consumption is paid for via monthly subscription, and there is a stronger focus on service capabilities.

CCaaS solutions can provide companies of all sizes with multi-functional contact centers that deliver immediate access to the latest tools and technologies. Because the contact center infrastructure is hosted in the cloud, organizations can scale the services they require up or down according to demand and pay for exactly what they need. Premises-based contact center infrastructure simply can’t similarly scale or adapt to evolving customer expectations and digital innovations. In addition, skyrocketing operating expenses leave little room for companies to re-invest and improve on-premises contact centers. The end result is often a poor customer experience.

Many businesses perceive that cutting-edge contact center solutions are out of reach and cost prohibitive. Moving to a cloud-based contact center empowers small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) to cost efficiently enhance the customer experience on par with their larger competitors.

These are a few of the reasons businesses are moving their contact centers to the cloud:

• CCaaS eliminates large capex upfront costs because of its inherent pay-as-you-go model. This effectively removes the barrier to entry for SMBs.

• An entire contact center can be deployed in days, not months, as can often be the case with premises-based solutions.

• Elimination of costly and extensive hardware/software/infrastructure and IT resource burdens. • Elastic scalability—companies can quickly adapt to changing business needs and seasonality.

They pay for actual use, not anticipated use. • Effortless upgrades and continuous innovation, as the software is implemented and

maintained in the cloud. • The architecture easily supports agents working from anywhere. Businesses can attract agents

from a larger talent pool, which decreases employee churn and reduces hiring and training costs.

Cloud-based contact center solutions are not a passing fad. It is the fastest-growing sector of the contact center infrastructure market, and cloud-based solutions will account for an increasing percentage of new purchases in the future.

Top Targets for Cloud Contact Center

Cloud-based software-as-a-service models are being considered for all kinds of business applications, and this shift to the cloud also includes contact center technology. The challenge involves identifying the prospects most likely to be receptive to a cloud-based platform. While nearly any company can be a candidate, the most productive approach is to target those with financial, technical or operational pain points that can be relieved only by leveraging the unique capabilities of a cloud contact center model.


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The following rundown details the best business opportunities for a cloud-based contact center platform deployment, based on matching customer needs to the inherent benefits of the cloud model.

Startups or established companies with first-time call centers. These often represent the ideal greenfield opportunity. Startups in particular are typically cash-strapped, which means they are unable to hire IT personnel to manage contact center equipment. They are also ill-equipped to predict call volumes that will determine what their infrastructure needs actually are. An existing company launching its first contact center operation faces similar challenges.

The cash requirements for a cloud-based platform are minimal, no paid service contracts are required and agents can be added quickly to accommodate growth without adding infrastructure. Deployment cycles are typically a few weeks instead of a few months, enabling rapid ramp-up. These factors, plus the fact that first-time operators are not accustomed to the ins and outs of deploying on-premises equipment, will usually steer a company toward a cloud-based solution option.

Organizations with highly variable call volumes. A cloud-based contact center solution is a great fit for prospects with extreme seasonal or emergency-related fluctuations in call volume. Instead of buying an installed switch capable of handling 100 active agents during busy periods when the normal head count is usually 25, for example, a cloud-based platform shrinks or grows as needed and allows companies to pay for the number of seats used in a given month.

With this usage-based pricing model, companies can contract for a minimum number of agents, increase or decrease their port allotment when required, avoid an expensive equipment investment and save on monthly fees during slow times. It’s a compelling sell for customers with predictable peaks and valleys in call flow.

Companies with at-home agent needs. Many businesses and non-profits are using or considering work-at-home agents because of limited physical contact center space, insufficient local talent pools, the need for 24/7 staffing and/or initiatives to reduce agent attrition by offering a better work-life balance. Since remote agent capabilities cannot be added easily to premises-based contact center systems, these organizations are promising targets for a cloud-based solution.

With the cloud model, there is no need to deploy SIP phones, specialized routers, client software and other gear to outfit home agents, and the technical complications of linking remote users to an installed ACD or IVR system are completely avoided. All that is needed is a standard phone, computer and Internet connection, making a hosted platform a clear choice when some or all agents work at home.

Businesses with multi-site contact centers. For companies with multiple contact center locations, a cloud-based platform offers the benefit of easy centralized management. This can be achieved without the difficulties of connecting disparate premises-based switches to a centrally installed ACD and trying, usually unsuccessfully, to merge all call handling and reporting functions.

A hosted ACD enables unified routing for all agents regardless of location. Agent skills can be configured centrally and calls can be routed to people instead of buildings, eliminating overstaffing


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and other problems caused when each center operates independently. Any number of locations both in-house and outsourced can be managed through the same system with standardized reporting and quality control. These are strong selling points for multisite prospects.

Companies needing to upgrade obsolete legacy systems. Replacing obsolete or end-of-life switches, ACDs, IVR systems and other components with new premises-based systems can potentially cost hundreds of thousands, if not millions of dollars, even for a medium-sized facility. The economic benefits of a cloud-based solution provide solid sales opportunities by eliminating the huge capex requirements of traditional premises-based contact center installations.

Companies that want to eliminate outsourcing. Another target for a cloud-based contact center infrastructure are companies that have been outsourcing their contact center needs and want to bring call handling in-house. All of the usual cost and rapid deployment advantages of the cloud model apply; eliminating upfront capital expenditures, ongoing in-house maintenance costs and lengthy rollouts that would be required with on-premises implementations.

Organizations with 100 percent uptime requirements. For operations ranging from 24/7 help desks to airline booking agents and 211 community information referral services, downtime is not an option. Yet small- and mid-sized contact centers are unable to provide the physical security, fire control, backup power, systems and network redundancy and around-the-clock network monitoring to ensure continuous availability of an installed system. Even larger operations are limited in their ability to provide these disaster contingency/recovery features. Cloud contact centers again can address that gap, offering high availability and other protection via the inherent safeguards and redundancy built into data centers and networks.

KEY VERTICAL MARKETS

• Finance: Banks, credit cards, loans, debt collection, credit checking, corporate

• Insurance: Insurance for medical, life, auto, house, corporate, reinsurance, etc.

• Manufacturing: Primarily B2B sales and support, along with customer helplines

• Medical: Hospitals, pharmaceuticals, medical supplies

• Outsourcing: Large full-service outsourcers/BPOs and telemarketing firms

• Public Sector: Government (federal, state and city) agencies, 911/ 311 / 211

• Retail & Distribution: Retailers, home shopping, mail order, parcel carriers, logistics

• Services: Non-physical service offerings to public and business

• Technology, Media and Telecoms (TMT): Technology sales and service; cell and fixed line telco, TV, satellite and cable providers; broadband/ISP; triple/quadplay


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Knowing Your Audience

When preparing for a cold call or first appointment, review the job title of the person you will be meeting with. Think about the specific interests this title will have. Remember, when you start your sales presentation the prospect is going to be thinking, “What’s in it for my company and for me?”, and if you are going to have a meaningful conversation this question will need to be answered quickly or your call or meeting will be short.

The following section provides some interest stimulating questions you can pose to your prospect to help identify their issues (pain points) and specific areas of business focus.

• CEOs are interested in profitability, ROI, increased productivity, impact on organization, etc. You might ask, “One of the issues we’ve heard from other credit union executives is the difficulty they are having in growing their membership base, how are you handling this issue at the XYZ Credit Union?”

• A VP of Sales/Marketing is interested in achieving revenue targets, sales productivity, customer satisfaction, effectiveness of advertising programs, etc. You might ask, “How do you determine the effectiveness of your advertising programs?”

• CFOs are interested in operating costs, costs of ownership, credit write-offs, etc. You might ask, “What would be the financial impact of reducing ordering errors in your call center?”

• CIOs are interested in ease of implementation, compatibility with existing structure, support requirements, etc. You might ask, “Are you able to report on the customer’s experience with your business processes?”

• Department Managers are interested in meeting department goals/metrics, impact on other projects, resource requirements, etc. You might ask, “How do you measure employee proficiency?” or “What do you do when a customer complains about service?”

General Conversation Starters

• On a scale of 1 to 10, how well does your current platform handle seasonal spikes or fluctuations in new business?

• Can you currently support agents in multiple locations, including those working “at home?” • We are helping customers to manage the budget constraints they may face when acquiring

new equipment, is that of interest to you? • Does your current disaster recovery plan put your contact center back online in minutes? • On a scale of 1 to 10, how well does your current solution support multiple communication

channels, such as mobile, chat and social media? • What is your company’s action plan for integrating multiple solutions, such as CRM, into one

system?

Customer Care / Customer Experience / Sales

• What are the top-priority customer experience goals in your contact center operations?


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• How do you ensure a consistent, quality customer experience today? • How are you driving revenue through the contact center today? • Where are your greatest challenges in meeting customer expectations? • In what ways are you looking to improve your customer satisfaction?

BUSINESS KPIs & GOALS • Improve Customer Experience

o Customer Satisfaction/CSAT o Net Promoter Score (NPS)

• Increase Revenue o Retention rate o Growth rate o Conversion o Upsell/cross-sell

IT Executive / Leader

• What contact center features or functionality are you looking to extend or upgrade in the next 12 – 18 months?

• What levels of IT resources are required to make modifications to your current contact center system?

• To what degree do you have flexibility within your current system to customize the customer experience?

• What issues relative to network and data security are you dealing with today? • How do you handle system outages/disaster recovery today?

BUSINESS KPIs & GOALS • Maintain security and reliability

o Uptime security o Scalability o Flexibility o Supportability

• Decrease costs

Contact Center Operations

• How are you able to track and act on your most important metrics? • What methods are available for a customer to reach you? • How do you manage the scheduling process today? • How are you minimizing customer wait times? • How many times does the typical call get transferred?


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BUSINESS KPIs & GOALS • Improve customer experience

o Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) o Net Promoter Score (NPS) o First Call Resolution (FCR) o Average Handle Time (AHT) o Mean Time to Resolve (MTTR)

• Decrease costs

Common Contact Center Challenges

FINANCIAL OPERATIONAL TECHNICAL / INNOVATION Time-consuming and expensive CAPEX decisions (hardware, maintenance, etc.)

Challenges with multiple locations and remote agents.

Painful upgrades

Company cannot afford adequate disaster recovery measures.

Seasonal call volume and reliability issues

Solution is always playing catch up to the customer’s needs

Upgrades are viewed as desirable, but cost-prohibitive.

Complex routing struggles Agent motivation issues (poor workflow processes, outdated technology).

Fear of abandoning investments in existing infrastructure and legacy applications.

Disparate applications and data (for example, CRM) hinders agent efficiency and company insight.

Inability to accommodate self-service and social media engagement.

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