This article was originally published on CustomerThink and is being reposted with permission from the editor.

A customer contacts us with an apparent product issue. With a bit of digging, we discover a larger bug or problem that may need to be addressed by engineering. Before reporting to engineering we get a sense of how many customers are impacted by the issue. Is this a one-off or a system-wide problem? Upon realizing the wide impact, the question that inevitably arises is:

How did it take the customer support team so long to discover this issue?

Ugh! This isn’t my favorite question to answer and yes, I’ve had to answer it many times during my contact center career. In retrospect, there’s always a trail of clues but somehow we missed it or caught it long after many customers were impacted — only increasing the resulting backlash.

As contact center professionals, we literally listen to the voice of the customer all day every day. We have no excuse but to be intimately attuned to our customers and their issues, right? The problem is that we listen to one call at a time or read one conversation at a time.

The question is, how do we get better at connecting the dots and catching those customer-impacting issues faster, minimizing the impact on our customers and our business?

The problem with traditional methods of spotting trends

So how do we typically spot these major trends and issues? Here are some of the methods by which I’ve discovered customer-impacting issues in the past:

A customer responds negatively to a customer satisfaction survey. After some investigation, we find that the system wasn’t working as it should.
The phone or ticket queue is triple its normal size — a clear indicator of a larger problem.
Customers blast the company on social media because of some failure of the product or service.
An analyst reviews trends using speech or text analytics software discovering many support tickets about the same issue.
For those of us without speech analytics, a quick search in the ticketing system yields multiple support tickets about the issue.

While these are all valid means of discovering customer-impacting trends and issues, I can’t help but think that some of these detection methods occur a bit late in the process. Furthermore, these are means by which managers find issues. Agents typically know about issues before managers do. The challenge is in getting them to recognize that it’s a larger issue.

It’s important to note, in the case of increased call or ticket volume that some issues, like a server outage, may result in a quick, drastic increase. But that billing bug that was introduced in last week’s release will instead cause a gradual increase in ticket volume as customers become aware of the issue.

How do we improve the speed at which we identify customer-impacting issues of all shapes and sizes? In the remainder of this article, I’ll pose six key questions that will assess the readiness of your contact center to detect issues.

Are you ready to catch problems when they happen?

Before we begin this assessment, allow me to give you the answers. In short, the answer to each of these questions should be “yes.” If you do these things in your contact center, you’ll catch and correct customer-impacting issues faster — sometimes before your customers experience them.

1. Are your agents empowered and given the time to thoroughly test an issue or are you micromanaging their average handle time (AHT) or after-call work (ACW)?

I think it’s fairly rare for contact centers to ask their agents to spend more time during and after calls. Sure, some contact centers may pressure their agents more than others. But time metrics are easy targets for managers because they can be tied to reduced costs with relative ease.

While some focus on time management is important, added pressure on agents to take less time with each customer, means they will be less likely to expend the additional effort to identify customer-impacting issues and trends. In the interest of spotting issues more quickly, perhaps it’s time to encourage agents to spend the time they need (within reason) with each customer.

2. Are your agents trained to recognize when the system isn’t doing what it’s supposed to?

Agents should be able to connect the dots and realize that if the system isn’t working correctly for one customer, it’s possible that others are impacted. If they don’t understand how the system works in the first place, that’s a training issue. The ability to recognize potential issues is an important reason to constantly improve documentation and training.

It might sound like we can improve training with the wave of a hand but it’s more complicated than that. We are constantly working to better document how systems, like billing, work so that our team is more and more educated. Training also happens when agents go to supervisors with questions, hopefully increasing the likelihood that someone will discover a larger issue.

3. Do your agents have the tools necessary to test your product?

Agents should have access to the software or hardware that customers are using and they should have an environment through which they can test. All of our employees have access to our software and mobile application to test customer issues.

In past roles where IOT (Internet of things) devices were used, we successfully created a “lab” within our contact center where agents could get their hands on the devices they were supporting.

4. Do you involve your agents in testing new releases?

This one is a major challenge in a contact center environment. After all, we need our agents to interact with customers, right? As your engineering team is releasing new features and updates, it’s important that the contact center is involved as much as possible in the testing process. Create a means by which they can report bugs and raise feature suggestions.

At our company, our engineering team is begging for as much feedback as they can get which puts the onus on contact center leadership to carve out the time for agents to be involved. This familiarity with the product or service pre-release is invaluable if and when issues arise post-release.

5. Do agents have an effective means of collaborating with one another?

In a contact center environment, there’s incredible value in one agent being able to turn to another agent and say, “Hey, this customer is experiencing an issue. Have you encountered this before?” When multiple agents say, “I’ve seen a few tickets (or taken a few calls) about this today” a trend has been discovered.

In the modern, hybrid contact center where the team is distributed between an office and remote work, a collaboration tool like Microsoft Teams or Slack is the new way these discussions happen. Leaders must create a culture where agents can talk and collaborate. Sure, some of the conversations might seem like a waste of time, but when issues arise, you’re going to want them to speak up as soon as they notice that something isn’t right.

6. When team members raise a concern, is someone listening, filtering, and quantifying?

Finally, the challenge for supervisors and managers is to understand an issue and determine the full impact before raising it to the engineering team. Lest we be accused of crying wolf, this is where we quickly work to quantify the gravity of the situation. As mentioned before here are some ways we can piece together the clues:

Resulting negative customer satisfaction: It’s not uncommon for us to talk about negative customer satisfaction results or complaints on social media and review sites about an issue.
Overall ticket volume: Speech and text analytics can be invaluable tools to figure out how many customers have contacted us about an issue. Create alerts for certain key words or phrases that might indicate a problem. For those of us that don’t have these tools, the search function in our ticketing system is helpful. For known issues, we’ll often have our agents apply specific tags to tickets so we can more easily track them.
Review the queue as a whole: It’s easy to focus on one customer interaction at a time but someone should always be tasked with looking at the entire queue. For example, at our company, if we see multiple tickets with a subject stating “Unable to send text messages” we dig deeper.
Database query: Our management team has access to query our customer database. If a customer reports that they were able to do something out of the ordinary, we’re able to quickly search for other customers with the same issue. This level of access sometimes allows us to catch problems before customers do.

Once we’ve completed this investigation, we can confidently proceed to the engineering team with a full report of the issue and an understanding of the priority level.

Fostering a culture of open communication

I’ve never known a contact center agent who was unwilling to talk about the issues impacting customers. At their very core, I find that customer support professionals are passionate about solving customer problems. They derive a sense of purpose and accomplishment by improving the customer experience. They also don’t love interacting with upset customers– at least I don’t.

In environments where agents either don’t feel heard or are made to feel that their concerns are invalid, self-preservation kicks in and they will stop sharing. It’s critical that we, as leaders never allow this to happen. We must always be listening and working to understand the depth and breadth of issues. And when agents raise issues, our response should always be, “Thank you” — even when it doesn’t end up being a large issue.

If the contact center wants to be a good partner to the rest of the organization and take better care of customers, we must hone our ability to recognize and report customer-impacting issues as quickly as possible. Try this assessment on for size and let me know how it goes.

Everyone’s moving their communications to the cloud…but what’s the best, most cost-effective (and secure) way to move your business?

Working with a trusted cloud communications provider like RingCentral is a great start. Our expertise and professionals can take the guesswork and hassle out of cloud migration.

In this article, we’ll answer some FAQ’s about RingCentral Professional Services. That way, you can see for yourself if we can help your team get up and running on the cloud.

Let’s get started:

What is RingCentral Professional Services?

Simply put, RingCentral Professional Services is an add-on set of services for RingCentral MVP, RingCentral Rooms and RingCentral Contact Center customers. Professional Services helps guide our customers through consultation, implementation, adoption and ongoing support points of the RingCentral customer lifecycle. By assisting our customers in choosing and deploying RingCentral, and thus achieving business outcomes more quickly.

We understand the ins and outs of business communications, and believe that by opting for complete RingCentral technology adoption & usage, you get the right communications tools to help you achieve your business goals and provide the best customer experiences possible. We have the migration expertise and resources to assist you in using the functionalities of call routing and IVR systems, eFaxing, real-time SMS, team messaging, video conferencing, phone calls, CRM integrations, and various cloud-based contact center solutions.

What are the benefits of using Professional Services?

RingCentral Professional Services is designed to make cloud services simpler to deploy, use and manage. Our decades’ worth of cloud telephony and contact center experience can be used to your advantage, and when you do, here’s what to expect:

Faster deployments and ROI realization – Get installed and use your software faster. Accelerate your ROI and investment, make business leaders happy. We remove complexity and headache of migration for our customers. Our expert consultants seamlessly port your phone numbers, deploy communications solutions, migrate legacy on-premise PBX systems, ensure rapid cloud phone system implementation, and set up a mirage of business apps integrations that keep processes running smoothly.  For contact center deployments we can assist with agent administration, creating your Contact Center IVR, configuring WEM and ACD, call flow scripting, API development, telephony implementation, IT Infrastructure/Network Setup, as well as deliver training for agents, admin and managers.
Peace of mind – As the leader in cloud telephony and contact center, RingCentral is the most experienced integrated UCaaS & CCaaS provider in cloud communications deployments. RingCentral professional service experts deeply understand the complexities of both the UCaaS and CCaaS products. This understanding allows us to steer each customer to realizing the highest value from these tools.
Improved productivity and efficiency – We help companies find new ways to increase productivity and efficiency with these tools. We work with you every step of the journey—from planning, implementation, and deployment to management, training, and customer support. You will realize the benefits of UCaaS and we can support hybrid PBX deployments, application customization, integrations and more.
Personalized assistance – To ensure you receive the most suitable communication and team collaboration tools, we take the initiative to offer high touch services including end to end project management with a playbook to optimize your new communications system’s configurations and performance.
Better admin and  user experiences – You can opt for personalized in-person onboarding and and user training, but you will also get access to on-demand user and IT admin level training and knowledge transfer. This includes helping you as an IT admin learn how to create customized user profiles and setting up your custom business phone systems ring, how voicemail-to-email works, how call queues are handled, how phone numbers are managed, and more. We can help you set up caller IDs, auto-receptionist, call routing, call forwarding, power dialing, and other phone service configurations.
Managed service ongoing enterprise support – Your customer’s expectations are higher than ever, making RingCentral one of the most important investments in your tech stack. Let us provide you with the VIP support experience including full outsourcing of day-to-day management of your UCaaS and CCaaS applications. This  will help you reduce OPEX, increase coverage, ensure response time guarantees, have tailored proactive monitoring, and enjoy 24/7 support.
What are “managed services and enterprise support”?

RingCentral managed and enterprise support services are ideal for large businesses that have multi-locations, custom integration needs, remote workforce, no dedicated IT resources for UCaaS or CCaaS tools, or advanced integrations. Managed services in particular are popular with organizations going through change management, rapid growth, globalization, M&As or large complex operations and tech stacks.

Managed services is a full stack offering to reduce OPEX by fully outsourcing day-to-day management of their UCaaS/CCaaS applications. It’s third party help desk support to keep your employees and customers serviced. Perfect for large enterprises, we act as your own global helpdesk, so your users get expert support no matter where they are. 

Enterprise support packages are a cost effective way to enjoy some of the benefits of managed services through a partnership between RingCentral and your business to ensure business continuity. 

What kind of businesses can benefit Professional Services?

Without Professional Services, IT admins must deploy software manually themselves, or depend on outsourced managed services. Admins distribute apps to target machines remotely. They deploy from a centralized web console with silent installation switches in place. Alternatively, IT empowers the end users to self-install software using a self service portal. In this scenario, admins publish a list of software on the Self Service Portal which can be accessed by the end user from the system tray. End users in the same network have the option to access this catalog of software and choose to install them without asking the administrator every time. 

Problems with this approach: Time and resource intensive, it is also difficult to be an expert in all types of software to know the ins and outs of deploying them all. The complexity and overwhelm of migrating to the cloud can turn some folks off of the migration all together.

Thus, RingCentral Professional Services is for customers across all sizes and geographies. We serve the customer across their lifecycle, from consultation to lifecycle support. Our offerings include basic remote implementations for the tech-savvy all the way up to onsite, full service deployments designed for customers deploying integrated UCaaS and CCaaS in a complex, global environment. 

All industries use our Professional Services and we have a custom price point for every size of business. We offer professional services for all our product lines including RingCentral MVP, Contact Center, Rooms and more!

What experts can I engage via RingCentral Professional Services?

You can engage our in-house IT experts directly for your implementation or lifecycle support needs, or alternatively we do have channel partners, strategic partners and Carriers you can rely on if you have a longstanding relationship with one of them. 

Is anything included for free for small business deployments?

Yes! For businesses who are deploying fewer than 20 licenses we offer express onboarding and implementation which is a self guided and self-initiated onboarding for your business. You will get basic instruction and configuration of new RingCentral MVP customers. You call the shots with ultimate flexibility to call us when you are ready to start basic admin training, online account setup, and push out end user training. Once you have successfully implemented RingCentral MVP, you can continue to call in for any training-related assistance to the same hotline, 30 days post ticket completion.

For businesses deploying between 20 and 100 licenses we offer enhanced onboarding and implementation – a comprehensive instruction and customized configuration for customers. By going through the RingCentral service implementation playbook and discovery questions about your business, a customized onboarding agenda will be created to be used in the actual training. Once you have successfully implemented RingCentral MVP, you can continue to call in for any training-related assistance to the same hotline, 45 days post ticket completion.

Best of all, both of these are free of charge when you purchase RingCentral MVP. 

Why are professional services so critical for contact center migrations?

A contact center implementation is highly complex compared to most other software deployments because: 

Developing a contact center solution that delivers the custom workflows and desired customer experiences requires a high level of customization 
Helping to navigate the world of AI within contact center requires extra training and expertise
Advanced self-service options including chatbots, proactive engagement, and Conversational AI are critical to implement – but these need to be set up properly first
Our professional services team can empower your agents with AI-driven coaching and guidance in real-time
Setting up multiple channels/methods for customers to contact agents – voice, chat, email, SMS, social media messaging and monitoring is challenging to set up without expertise
Our professional services team can integrate your contact center into your 3rd party platforms such as CRMs, ERPs, Databases, Web Services, etc.

From our experience, the biggest lift in a contact center deployment is setting up the customized workflows. We’ve run a survey with our own customers and RingCentral are 56% faster on setting up workflows.

What kind of ROI have businesses seen with RingCentral Professional Services?

According to our own customer survey, RingCentral customers have found time to implement to be 3 months, time to payback of 9 months, with 43% improvement in speed of workflow deployment and 42% faster integrations with RingCentral MVP. Overall our customers saw their telecom costs decrease by 23% and IT spend decrease by 16%. 

Migrate your communications with the #1 team of cloud telephony and contact center experts in the industry

Remove the guesswork from your decision-making process and allow RingCentral to take care of the planning, designing, and deployment of your cloud communications system.

We have the most experienced team of UCaaS and CCaaS experts in the industry. RingCentral will keep your business up and running – securely and reliably. RingCentral delivers a powerful platform for connected, intelligent experiences across customers and employees. Lastly, we partner with your business to design a migration and cloud strategy that is tailored for your users and customer engagement strategies.

What’s more, with RingCentral Professional Services, you pay only for what you need (a la carte model pricing). Whether you require the guidance of an implementation advisor or need full-service onsite deployments, we have you covered. 

Learn more about RingCentral Professional services

Originally published Jan 24, 2023

Technological advancements have put an astounding amount of automation and control into the hands of customer support teams. Not only has this changed the way businesses can interact with and provide service to their clients, but it’s also transformed the role of the customer support agent. Tools that utilize artificial intelligence have made communication easier and the overall support process faster. Much of this is due to machine learning.

Tools that employ machine learning are able to learn without the help of humans. They can collect and sort through metrics and make adaptive changes based on the data. This capability is highly beneficial to B2B support agents. If you’ve incorporated tools with machine learning into your infrastructure, it’s important to ensure your agents are getting the most they can out of them. Let’s go over some ways this technology can help.

More Reliance on Chatbots

In the past, chatbots could only provide one-dimensional support to clients. If a chat interaction didn’t lead to a solution, the client would get transferred to another support channel. AI and machine learning have changed all that. If modern chatbots are a part of your B2B customer support software, agents can rely on them to take a huge amount of the workload off their shoulders. AI-powered chatbots can gather data related to client trends and support history and use this information to provide in-depth solutions. Your agents should only have to step in if a client’s problem requires specialized knowledge only agents have.

A Stronger Knowledge Base

A self-service knowledge base can be a great tool, especially when agents must handle a large volume of inquiries every day. By using the knowledge base, clients can find answers to product issues on their own. However, this means the content needs to be relevant and up-to-date. Artificial intelligence and machine learning can help by analyzing the context of support tickets and chatbot sessions and turn this data into insights that can be added to your knowledge base. With a high-quality knowledge base in place, your agents won’t be overwhelmed with inquiries regarding minor issues. Plus, AI-powered chatbots can provide clients with relevant links to knowledge base articles during a chat session.

Managing Incoming Requests

When a client gets transferred to multiple people before they reach someone who can help them, resolution times increase. Client frustration increases as well. However, with machine learning technology in place, incoming inquiries will get filtered to the right person immediately. These tools can examine the context of a ticket and make sure the issue makes it to a person or department who’s capable of addressing it. Machine learning can also use natural language processing to tag conversations and chat interactions so the client gets transferred to an appropriate agent. This helps make agents’ jobs much easier and also cuts down on angry customers.

Give Your Agents the Gift of Machine Learning

A support agent’s job can be complex and extremely stressful. However, with artificial intelligence and machine learning in place, they can enjoy a streamlined process and the opportunity to learn new technology.

PhaseWare can help bring these tools to you with customizable customer support software. Contact us today to learn more.

By Peg Ayers

As Supervisors and Managers, we often feel we must have all the answers. We need to share our great experience and knowledge with those on our teams. We’ve been promoted for our skills, and we need to make sure everybody understands that. This can lead to coaching conversations where we spend more time talking than listening. If your goal is to develop your people, consider spending more time listening and less time instructing.

Why listen instead of talking?

Buy In: Everybody’s more interested in doing something when it’s their idea.
Credibility: Showing a willingness to learn and to consider another point of view earns you major points and makes your people more likely to listen when you DO speak.
Understanding: You don’t know people’s motives and values; you just know about the behavior you see. The only way to learn what motivates someone is to let them speak.

What questions can you ask in Quality Monitoring and Coaching that will lead to greater understanding and development?

What were you really happy with in that interaction?
What do you wish you’d done differently?
How did you connect with that customer?
What did that customer want from you? How did you show your understanding of that?
What will you do differently next time and what results do you expect?

You won’t be asking every question every time. Each coaching interaction is different, and some people need more specific coaching and assistance than others.

In addition to Quality Monitoring coaching, you’ll also be conducting general coaching sessions about where the employee’s performance is now and how it could be improved. In these meetings, questions like this can create dialogue:

Tell me about a recent customer interaction you had that you feel was really successful.
What made it successful?
Was the customer as happy with it as you were? Why or why not?
How did this interaction serve the customer and the organization well?

Tell me about a customer interaction you didn’t feel went well.
What was unsatisfactory about it?
What do you wish had happened differently?
How could you create that different outcome in the future?
Why would that be better for you, the organization and the customer?

What are you most satisfied with in your current performance?
How can we build on that?

What are you least satisfied with in your current performance?
What would you like to do differently?
What would the result be if you made that change?
How would that serve our department and our customers?

What about career path conversations, where you want to think more about the future and the bigger career picture for your employee? Helpful questions here might be:

What are you enjoying most about what you’re doing now?
What do you enjoy least in your current position?
When you look around the department (or organization), do you see people doing things you’d like to do?
What skills do you think are needed in these other positions? Which of those do you have, and which need developing?
What challenges would you face if you had a position like that?

No matter the subject, you want to be comfortable with a long pause before answers, because not everyone is comfortable speaking up. It’s up to you to create a safe space for dialogue.  Your engaged employees will appreciate the chance to give thought and voice to their own performance and how they can improve it. Allowing those opportunities will lead to greater employee engagement.

The most important question, the one that should be asked in every interaction, is “What can I do to help/support you?’ Then really listen to the answers, which may include some surprises and may lead to great improvements for your organization and your team.

For help with leadership and contact center interim management, contact the Taylor Reach Group.  Just CLICK HERE to schedule a free consultation.

Follow Taylor Reach and Peg Ayers on Twitter at @Taylor_Reach and @ayers_peg.

Zendesk Customer Experience Trends Report 2020 showed that 51% of customers wish to receive an answer to their questions in less than 5 minutes on the phone when they contact companies for support. At Transcosmos we understand the expectations of the customers and utilize the best tools to fulfill their needs. As part of the Transcosmos Knowledge Management System, we create, maintain, and use knowledge base systems to provide our clients with fast, informative, clear, and relevant responses.

Through 5 examples we will demonstrate how beneficial the knowledge base systems are for our organization and customers.

1. Difficult issues can be prioritized

By having an FAQ or an external knowledge base on the website, many customers can find a solution to their questions independently. This allows call center representatives to focus on resolving more difficult customer issues that require assistance. To improve the efficiency of the processes, we may also have internal and external multilingual knowledge bases or FAQ sites which are available in different languages and contain the most frequently asked questions.

2. They help to improve SLA targets

Customers do not want to call us back on the same query several times. Fully resolving their case at the first contact within a short period of time is very important to them. The efficient use of internal knowledge base systems helps us to answer customer queries for the first time and reduce the number of records created for the same case. This improves the First Contact Resolution rate, a key metric for measuring team performance. Solving customers’ problems successfully at the first attempt may also increase customer retention.

3. They are effective tools to handle information

New questions, concerns raised by customers, can be added to efficient knowledge base systems easily, at any time. That information can be communicated to the team promptly. This helps team members to cooperate, increases the team’s productivity and customer satisfaction.

4. They make customers satisfied

External knowledge base systems can be extremely useful for customers. According to Gartner, 70 % of customers use self-service channels during the resolution of their difficulties. There, they can search for articles and information to find immediate answers to most of their questions without further assistance or contacting a support team. This is surely a great benefit and makes customers happy.

5. They help with the onboarding of new employees and remote workIn a knowledge base system, everything is stored in one place. New employees can therefore easily find the information that they need. This is important in remote work, where employees do not always have direct contact with the more experienced colleagues or managers. Knowledge-based systems can also reduce training costs by shortening the training time.

Conclusion:

Knowledge base systems are key components of the Transcosmos Knowledge Management System to simultaneously educate our customers and employees. By doing so, we can build trust with our business partners and customers, provide a better user experience, enhance customer engagement, and ensure the satisfaction and self-development of our employees. These factors are essential elements of our business strategy.

How do you leverage your Knowledge Management System?

Please let us know in the comments.