Transform Customer Service, Migrate to IP

For businesses that aren’t leveraging SIP in their customer service operation, the contact center may be costing more than they realize. Existing customer service solutions based on rigid contact centers, simply can’t meet evolving customer service expectations, in an age where one bad experience can send customers to a competitor.    

Moving to a software-based SIP solution allows businesses to deliver a level of customer service that isn’t possible with traditional telephony solutions, while optimizing resources and lowering delivery costs.

SIP normalizes your communications infrastructure, allowing for the intelligent leverage of resources across the organization. When customers interact with the right resource, problems can be solved more quickly. Enabling a customer service pool that incorporates resources at remote branches, home based agents, or outsourced agents can give a customer service operation the flexibility it needs to react dynamically to fluctuating customer demand.

With the use of SIP customer service operations can also benefit from richer customer communication because SIP supports the blending of different media in the same interaction, Including voice, IM, and video. 

Unlike traditional telephony, Genesys SIP doesn’t require rip and replace or a disruption in customer service. It can overlay the existing infrastructure, normalizing it in a way that is transparent to customers.

Genesys IP solutions, built on the open SIP standard, are evolving enterprise customer service to meet customer expectations. Genesys SIP integrates with Genesys Routing for a comprehensive solution that leverages resources throughout the organization to create intelligent customer contact.

Genesys SIP :

• drastically reduces the cost of incorporating resources that are outside your contact center, such as expert agents in the back office
• enables the integration of branch office workers and at home agents as needed
• handles customers IM and Video communications
• separates the customer service application from the telephony infrastructure, so the contact center can be incorporated into IT best practices for substantial savings

Genesys SIP eliminates vendor lock-in. Instead of being forced to buy from a single vendor, SIP allows enterprises to select contact center solutions based on their function and price.

Businesses are free to choose the contact center solutions that meet business objectives including service differentiation, increased sales, budgetary constraints, and rollout timelines.

Genesys also allows full control of when and where to deploy SIP without interrupting customer service operations. Businesses can deploy VoIP in remote branches without migrating existing contact centers, enable expert contact or home agents, or even convert the communications to VoIP one contact center or one agent at a time.

Make a Business Case for Increased Customer Satisfaction

Moving Beyond Cost Containment

The cost benefits of VoIP are common knowledge, but the true value of the SIP-based customer service operation goes beyond toll charges and reduced “cost per call.” The increased functionality raises the level of customer service, increasing loyalty and offering new avenues for revenue and growth. A strong business case for moving beyond the contact center and and creating a customer service operation that incorporates the entire enterprise can be built around three areas:

 

Effective Management

• IP simplifies administration by substituting an extensive infrastructure that required placement and management of hardware in multiple locations with software that can be centrally deployed, managed, and scaled across numerous sites. Because staff can be located anywhere, more opportunities are available to accommodate call fluctuations. Customer service professionals at remote branch sites can be part of the customer service operation, something that is cost-prohibitive in a traditional telephony environment. Real-time changes to customer interaction routing can be adjusted with drag-and-drop remote management, bringing new resources into the customer service chain or dropping them out when traffic ebbs. When paired with the Genesys suite, Genesys SIP makes your customer operation dynamic, your customers have a better experience and you deliver it at a lower cost.

Business Agility

• Standards-based IP provides visibility and flexibility previously unattainable. With VoIP, customer service operations enjoy a deeper integration between the front and back-office, providing a more personal and rewarding customer experience. It does this, not by trying to make experts out of your agents, but by enabling the intelligent routing of customer contacts to experts within the enterprise. They become an integrated part of your customer service operation. The ability to use new interaction methods like video, IM, chat, co-browsing, and push-page technologies lets customers communicate in the mode they prefer, and allows employees helping customers to quickly resolve common questions.

Cost Reduction

• An IP contact center saves salary, real estate and communications overhead — all without compromising customer satisfaction. By leveraging the dynamic nature of SIP, outsourced agents can be blended seamlessly into the customer service operation when necessary, reducing salary overhead without sacrificing customer experience. Adding home workers and branch offices to the contact center helps manage real estate expenses and provides a previously unavailable pool of resources. And by using SIP trunking (transporting calls over a WAN), multi-site contact center environments, especially global service organizations, can reap significant savings in call charges.

Taking customer care to the next level requires a new approach that doesn’t impose limitations around the locations of resources involved in customer communication. SIP (Session Initiation Protocol) makes long-time customer service desires like this economically feasible today. There are seven key ways that SIP can improve your customer care.

 

#1 – Front and Back-Office Integration

• Including back-office resources in the customer service operation increases first contact resolution. Training agents to be experts is time-consuming and expensive. But, integrating back-office experts into the customer service operation allows you to shorten the call time, because experts won’t need to put customers on hold while they pore over material in the knowledgebase.

#2 – Multi-sourcing

• SIP gives your company the option of making the customer service operation more dynamic through blended outsourcing. Outsourcing has long held the promise of supplementing ”on-premise” agents in handling increases in customer demand. But in a traditional telephony environment, the handoff to the outsourcer is often manual, leaving behind customer information and forcing the customer to start over with the outsourced agent. SIP makes it cost-effective to include outsourced agents in the customer service routing strategy, making the use of outsourced agents more intelligent and maintaining customer context during a transfer.

#3 – Support of Branch Offices

• Many businesses have trained customer service employees at locations where the cost of traditional telecommunications equipment for remote customer service can’t be justified. With SIP this cost constraint goes away, making a very dynamic and widely dispersed remote customer care force available to the remote customer service operation.

#4 – Support for Work-at-Home Agents

• Because SIP simplifies the equipment requirements at the agents’ physical location, well-educated, capable customer care representatives and sales resources no longer have to be located in large contact centers. They can work out of their homes. In addition to the cost savings associated with not providing infrastructure, home-based agents exhibit higher levels of job satisfaction and less turnover than traditional contact center agents.

#5 – Meeting Multi-channel/Multimedia Requirements

• Generation Y is coming of age along with converged devices that support many forms of communication from a single device. This new breed of consumers, enabled by rapidly advancing technology is ready and willing to use video, e-mail, and IM in their communications with each other and with the enterprises with whom they chose to do business.

#6 – Improved Analytics and Real-time Customer Service Tracking

• SIP enables multi-channel blending of interactions across a wide range of physical locations. This new way of staying informed solves the growing desire within the enterprise to manage and track the success of the business as it relates to the customer service operation, in real time.

#7 –Greater Profitability

• Migrating from a hardware-intensive routing infrastructure and multiple long-distance trunks to software-driven routing over broadband IP saves significant cost. In addition, the efficiencies gained by including non-traditional customer service representatives can cut costs while improving the customer’s experience with your organization.