As Smartphone usage Increases, the Importance of Agents Will Grow. Are they Ready?
It is predicted that 75% of the total mobile customer base will be smartphone users by 2014 and smartphone support is already becoming a huge issue.
A worldwide survey of 55 wireless service providers conducted by analyst firm Heavy Reading, and sponsored by Amdocs, revealed some disturbing trends. Increased device complexity has led to greater confusion among users on how to tap into new smartphone services. This confusion has led to an under-utilization of data services by consumers, higher support costs for operators, lower revenue per user and an increase in “no-fault” device returns. In a first step to capturing the higher revenues that smartphones can generate and boosting their margins, service providers need to improve their customer support.
Over 60 percent of the respondents in Heavy Reading’s survey stated that the cost to support smartphones is anywhere from 10-50 percent more expensive than feature phone support. The growing complexity of smartphone customers’ support questions was listed as the primary challenge for service providers’ call center operations, quickly followed by the increased time needed to resolve smartphone users’ problems.
Smartphone support calls are usually longer, with consumers asking how to use an advanced device feature or seeking troubleshooting for a device malfunction. The survey found that the majority of these calls are transferred to a more senior agent for resolution, due to their complexity. These transfers raise costs, because service providers either pay a fixed fee to the device manufacturer per call, or a higher hourly rate for technical support.
Getting Prepared
Amdocs recently launched its Customer Management (CM) 8.1 suite, the market’s most comprehensive customer management products, to help agents in call centers and retail stores deal with the coming challenges. Designed to redefine and improve the overall user experience for agents, Amdocs CM 8.1 increases agent efficiency and productivity with intuitive tools to offer a fast and consistent response to customer inquiries. Service providers across North America, Europe and Asia are already demonstrating demand with several Amdocs CM 8.1 business wins.
For many customers, the call center and retail store are still (despite so many technological advances) their primary points of contact with their service provider, as well as their main source of pain. Inefficient operations and poorly trained agents, although frustrating, almost seem to be a fact of life. But this doesn’t need to be the case.
Tools exist today that help alleviate these issues and can enable agents to shine. These tools can enable even the most junior agent to provide superior service by reducing the complexity of handling customer interactions through desktop unification and by providing agents with the guidance they need to succeed in any scenario.
More importantly, these tools can also be leveraged to improve the speed at which agents can handle the interactions and ensure that customer issues are resolved the first time, reducing the need for multiple interactions. Automating routine processes, propagating information across multiple systems and providing just the information needed, exactly when it’s needed, can make a significant difference in reducing the handle time for interactions and improving first call resolution rates.
Improving the efficiency and productivity of agents will not only help the bottom line, it will also reduce customer frustration by providing customers with the service levels they expect while improving their overall experience. And that would be pretty special.
