• Why InGenius?
• InGenius Telephony Integrations

Transcript

Pete Wright:

Welcome to Connected Knowledge, the podcast from Upland Software. My name is Pete Wright and I am joined today by Dennis Francoeur, senior product manager for InGenius Products. Welcome Dennis to the show.

Denis Francoeur:

Thanks so much, Pete, for having me.

Pete Wright:

We are going to talk about InGenius and how it relates to enhancing customer experience through a personalized call center today. I feel like we need to go back in time before we dig into the today part though. How far do we need to go back, 1990, 2000? And explore what it was like living in a call center back in the day.

Denis Francoeur:

Yeah, I guess we want to look at it from both the call center agent and also the end customer perspectives when we think about these things, if we think about the age where we weren’t trying to communicate through things where we could also see video and it was strictly voice and all of these things. It’s really about how much extra information can we get to know about a person. And if we think back, maybe it’s the nineties, maybe even late eighties where call display was a new and cool thing and you could get a phone call and you could see the number that was coming up and maybe, just maybe you had a name that associated with it and that was pretty awesome because you knew who it was calling and you can decide whether or not to answer the phone. Am I home or am I not home?

But those are the kinds of things that that’s what we came from. That was the first version of personalization in any kind of a call experience is where you had some semblance of knowledge who was coming from the other side and you can make decisions and say things that might be different depending on who that is. So, that’s really the first part. And then that experience of having the person on the other end know who’s calling before they pick up is also interesting me as the caller because then if I was calling my mother and she knew it was me, then she’s going to answer the phone differently than if it was, she thought it might be a telemarketer or something like that. So all of those kinds of experiences make me feel different as a person who’s doing the calling as well.

Pete Wright:

Sure. Never is there a more salient example than the relationship of caller ID with mothers everywhere really is what we’re saying.

Denis Francoeur:

That’s right. Then I think they were also probably the first ones to figure out how to block their numbers so their kids will answer the phone.

Pete Wright:

100%. Okay. So then let’s transition a little bit to how things have evolved over time and how we get to a “better customer call center experience.”

Denis Francoeur:

Absolutely. If we think about the things that have really changed, the computerization of everything and the fact that so much of our data is stored in different place. It used to be stored on pen and paper in somebody’s drawer and then it got into a computer on maybe a spreadsheet or some kind of rudimentary database and then now we’re into the cloud and things are very fast and dynamic and maybe there’s things that can help with pulling up this information in a timely fashion. That’s what we’re fast forwarding to. And when we think of personalization, I think we think of I’m going to say there’s two stages, and those two stages would be the functional requirements of personalization. And what that means is I need to have information as the call center person or operator, I need to have the information about the customer in my system so that I can actually access it and look it up.

So pulling in information from potentially different and disparate systems into a single pane of glass is one piece of thing. And the more of that I have, the better I can make choices, the more I can customize that customer experience. Also, from the computerization standpoint, it’s the fact that more and more these phone calls are happening over, I’m going to say slightly less wires and knobs kind of environments. There’s the ability-.

Pete Wright:

… phone calls are less phony-.

Denis Francoeur:

That’s right. There’s the ability to tap into these environments and to really pull, I’m going to say very deep information out and it could be things beyond just a simple phone number and name. And what that means is we can pull in things like, okay, think of a business and I might have more than one incoming phone number. It might be that I have, I’m a call center that services five different products and I do product support for them. And what phone number the person called is important to me to know what product it is that they’re looking for support with. So I can collect that information, I could pull all of that stuff together and when the phone rings and as an agent, I can get something on my screen that pops up that the person is calling is Jane Smith and she’s calling about Product Y, and then I know perhaps that Jane has called three times in the last week about the same product and she has two ongoing cases that maybe she’s calling about that, or maybe it’s calling about another thing.

And so all of that, just in a quick snapshot, I can now know. So when I answer the phone I can say, thank you for calling Product Y, my name is Dennis, how can I help you today, Jane? And that’s the first part of your personalization. And I don’t have the context I might say. And she’s like, oh, I’m calling in because I have a case. And it’s like, okay, yeah, I can see you have two cases here. Is it this one or this one? And again, it’s just, I’m not asking her to explain all of the things, I don’t have to, okay, can you give me the case number while I look that up? Or worse we think about what, going back, dialing back to those early days, and for people even currently who don’t have the pieces in place to do the personalized experience, you’re going to start with something like, hi, thank you for calling Product Y. My name is Dennis, can I get your name please? And then you’re going to tell me your name. And then I’m going to try and type it in.

And I’m going to probably misspell it and then I’m going to say, can you spell that please? And then you’re going to spell it and I’m going to look it up and then I’m going to, I can’t find it under that name. Would there be another name that it might be under? And we go through this process.

Pete Wright:

Yeah.

Denis Francoeur:

Not only does that take a long time, thereby reducing the agent productivity, we’re talking about, that’s just really annoying for a customer.

Pete Wright:

Yeah. Well, and you’re not even getting to the point where that first level agent realizes they can’t solve the problem and has to transfer me to somebody else and I have to do it all again.

Denis Francoeur:

I know. And that’s a big part of it. And that’s really it. So there is the, what pieces, what building blocks do you have in place to make that a good experience for all involved? How do we get you to transfer from agent A to agent B without having to start from square one? And that’s really a big part of the value that things like CTI integrations bring because they can help bridge that gap and make it so that you don’t have to repeat everything. You can pick up on step six because that’s where you left off with agent one. And away you go. Yeah, definitely. Those are the big pieces. And then there’s the, I’m going to say the aspirational side of personalization, which is, you have those fundamentals. That’s your really good basic individualized experience. I know stuff about you, but what can I do beyond that?

Well, maybe I know that you actually prefer digital communication because out of the last 20 interactions we’ve had as a customer of ours, 19 of those have been digital and this is the first time you’ve ever phoned in, oh, well maybe something’s really wrong and maybe I need to… because that’s not the normal way you engage us, so maybe I need to treat that differently, or maybe we could start to learn that these are the kinds of channels that the person prefers. So if I’m going to send as a business, maybe I’m a retailer and I want to send some marketing communications to somebody, maybe I’m going to send via channel they prefer to use those kinds of things and it’s like, hey, I can take this and I can start tailoring the way my business functions around the personalized experience of the end customer to make it of high value to them and they’re for high value to me.

Pete Wright:

There is a really valuable number in there that applies both to the organization, the call center, and the customer. That’s customer satisfaction. When I call and get the experience that I’m calling a single brain that knows my entire relationship with the organization, I can get things done faster and frankly get off the call faster because I don’t generally want to be on the phone with the organization all the time. That’s not my ideal. But I have to imagine putting all these pieces in place improve the relationship for the call center staff. I was in college in the early nineties and I had a buddy, my roommate actually, he was an outbound call center person. He was like the, a debt collector. He’d go into work and he’d get a sheet and he’d have to make phone calls. And I’ll never forget the day he came back, ordered a pizza and sat down to play video games. I said, what’s going on? He said, well, I got the sheet of people I needed to call today and my name was on it so I left.

So I feel like that leads to solving one of the great problems of working in a call center, which is absenteeism, which is keeping people in their seats. And if you give them the tools to feel like they’re solving more problems, I have to imagine that that employee satisfaction goes up and helps the overall organization. Am I just fishing here or is that a real relationship?

Denis Francoeur:

No, absolutely. There’s a lot of work been done and studies have been done to demonstrate that if you make your employees happy, your customers are happier. And that’s totally true across all industries, but particularly anything that surfaces customer experience, whether it’s call center or otherwise. I personally have worked in a call center, mine was inbound. I was doing support for software products and it was important, but I have been that person asking, can I get your name please? Okay, how do you spell that? Can you spell it again please? Because I didn’t have this kind of technological infrastructure in place to be able to make that a seamless process. The transferring required me to pass things over and do a warm handover with my second agent that I was going to maybe be transferring it to because I had no other tools to get that info over.

People ae always asking me what do you do? And what does your product do? I don’t really understand what this is because CTI, it’s an acronym, computer telephone integration. Like, okay, well what does that mean? And I always tell people it’s, well, think about, you call up and you want to order that pizza that your buddy ordered.

Pete Wright:

Sure.

Denis Francoeur:

And you call up and anybody who’s been around for a little while will start to, they’ll either build a relationship with their pizza place, old school, or there’s a faster way to do it, which is to have this information. So if I call up for a pizza, they have a popup on their screen. Oh, it’s Dennis calling for pizza again. The last three times he’s ordered, he’d ordered the exact same thing every single time and I know his delivery address and I know, so I don’t have to ask him any of that stuff.

So you can just take the order, confirm that it’s the same as the last time, say, yeah, it’s for delivery still at blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And away we go. And that’s a great experience, but it’s also great for agents because there’s nothing more annoying than having to ask the same customer that they’ve talked to 20 times the same questions over and over again. That is really, there’s a reason call centers are high turnover, is that it needs to be easy. And that actually brings in another piece, which is whether we’re talking about consumers to business communications or business to business, because they’re not the same. Obviously any business person is also a consumer at some points in their life, but they do function a bit differently, particularly when communicating back and forth. And there’s maybe different expectations or different ways.

And although some similarities, I’m sure too, the biggest thing that we have found is that our customers want business to be easy to do with us. They want it to be easy to do. It’s okay if it takes a little long, if it doesn’t, it’s not the fastest thing on earth. What they want is for it to be easy to do business with us. We should be prepared, have our duckies in a row, we should be able to give them what they need and anticipate their needs. And over-communication is always better than not enough. All of these kinds of things. And-.

Pete Wright:

This is what we talk all the time about it. We talk about, even businesses want the “Amazon experience.” They want it as easy as buying stuff personally on Amazon. They want to be able to do that with their business.

Denis Francoeur:

Absolutely, absolutely. And so that’s where this personalization comes in. And to know that what those personal steps mean. It could be something as simple as, I’m going to invoice a customer for something, but I know that this particular customer needs a purchase order and that they have a procurement department that requires these three pieces of info and so therefore I can make it easy for my customer to do business by just saying, yeah, their procurement process requires these three pieces of info and I need to send that over so I can get that without having to do the back and forth and back and forth and back and forth, because I’m prepared and I’m organized and I can just pull all that up in a moment’s notice. They say, oh, I need 200 more licenses for your software. Okay, let me help you up. And away we go.

Pete Wright:

Let’s transition a little bit. We wouldn’t be talking about all of this stuff, about putting all these pieces in place if you didn’t have something worth talking about. So we’ve got this product, Upland InGenius. Let’s talk about how InGenius helps you put all those pieces in place to improve everything we’ve been talking about today.

Denis Francoeur:

Absolutely. I’m very proud to say that we have a fantastic product in that we’re colloquial called the glue between the two. We take two completely disparate systems and stick them together in a meaningful way. And really that’s at the crux of it. And we have organizations around the world who’ve spent hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars on their telephony infrastructure. And as much as everything in the world is transitioning to the cloud, some things don’t change as fast as others and especially if it’s working. And so being able to take this stuff and bring it in to leverage some of those modern technologies and some of the extra wins that you get from being able to computerize the agent and customer experience even though it’s still through voice, to be able to serve information in a timely fashion that’s accurate is important.

Being able to report on and to identify what it is that agents are doing on a daily day basis. How long are they spending on break? How long are they on the phone call? Do they spend a lot of time on hold? Because that’s not good for the agent or for the customer. All of these things are important data points that help makes call centers make better decisions and improve their training and customer experience. And so we hook up phone systems like Avaya, Cisco, Genesis, Asterisk and be able to connect to popular CRM systems like Salesforce, Microsoft, and ServiceNow. And we think about that. That captures a lot of the market because those are some of the biggest phone systems and some of the biggest CRMs out there and we can help bring those things together in a time when you might not otherwise be able to do that.

Pete Wright:

Let’s talk then about some of the big nightmares that InGenius can helps resolve. We talked about absenteeism improving all of this information, this business intelligence that’s at the hand of call centers has got to improve just general work life, improve customer satisfaction. What are some other things that using InGenius can help us resolve?

Denis Francoeur:

Yeah, certainly those are important from the agent experience. Again, agents want things to be easy and their call center managers want that too. They want the onboarding process to be easy. The trainings program should be able to be done in a matter of days or weeks, not months or years. We want to be able to leverage and surface information that’s stored within the CRM to help those agents solve the customers problems faster. So shorter calls, less repetition, less having to ask for help because we can actually help surface things bring up with some of our products that we sell at Upland. We have knowledge software, things like that that can bring up knowledge base articles that might be relevant to the particular point in the conversation, things like that. And then take those things and again, shorten that cycle both for the agents and for the customer.

We want higher first call resolution rates. We want shorter call times because that’s going to maximize productivity and keep customers from having to be on the phone by providing all of that data about what’s happening in the calls and how long they’re taking, it can improve for call center managers to be able to do better training and coaching to find out which agents need extra help and what areas or topics they might be talking about. So if we’re collecting results and say, okay, this call was about product support for X, Y, Z and we find that a couple of agents are really struggling in that area, maybe we do a little training seminar for product X, Y, Z to try and close that gap, but we can isolate that and bring that to fore so that we can help those customer call centers be able to do that in a timely fashion.

Pete Wright:

Customers call centers are massive organizations and once you get these things implemented, there’s just a lot of the mechanical workaday stuff that goes on. But do you get any good stories of integration stories problem solved from your customers that are worth sharing?

Denis Francoeur:

Some of our customers have implemented things and where we’re finding that we can really add value is bringing voice into a blended situation with digital channels, because without being able to bring them together into the same space and correlate the different types of channels, it really is a different experience. So when you’ll have to have agents who are focused solely today on voice interactions and customers who are focused solely on digital interactions, whether that be chats or cases, emails, SMS, things like that, or maybe even some of those social channels. And so those agents, they have to be really focused on one thing or another because there’s no blending of that.

And it might be that, going back to a earlier example, is that if we have our agents completely segregated like that, we might have a situation where our customer Jane calls in for the first time after 30 digital engagements and the voice agent might not have any history. Maybe some of the chat agents might have interacted with Jane a couple of times and so have some familiarity, but because they don’t work on voice now it’s going to be a completely different person. And so being able to blend those, one, makes it so that we’re channel agnostic. It doesn’t really matter how you want to engage us, whatever’s convenient for you and feels right for you at this time. And being able to do that in a meaningful way.

Also wanting to balance the agent workload so that we can help the agents not have to try and do multiple things at a time. It might be because we think of channels as being active or passive. Things like chats and voice are active channels because somebody’s on the other end waiting for a response right now. Not email like I’ll get back to you in the next couple days kind of response, but rather I want a response right now. And so we don’t want to start trying to blend those things too much, because having more than one active channel at a time means somebody’s getting ignored. Just like if somebody were to start talking to me off to the side right now, I wouldn’t be talking to you.

And so those are the kinds of things that we have to keep in mind. So we help the customers walk through the setting up their environment so that they can really maximize that productivity and be able to blend those all seamlessly. We’ve had customers go in and say that it’s reduced their call times by 30%, which is fantastic and be able to reduce the amount of, and not that anybody wants to reduce the amount of people in a call center when we think about wait times, but if you have enough you can start to do that and say, okay, well before it was inefficient so I needed 20 people to do the job, now I can do it with 15 because there’s so much more efficient-.

Pete Wright:

And still increase our first call resolution.

Denis Francoeur:

That’s right. That’s right. Maximize the first call resolutions, maximize response times. We don’t have people waiting on hold for a long time because the calls are faster. And if you are on hold you don’t have to wait too long. So that’s great.

Pete Wright:

This is wonderful and just I hope people listening to this are hearing if not one single thing that’s going to trigger them to look for more information, but this bouquet of fantastic data points that you’ve laid out for us. Your knowledge of the space is encyclopedic, Dennis, where would you send people to if they wanted to learn more about InGenius, about the space that we’re in?

Denis Francoeur:

Yeah, if you want to learn a little more about InGenius, and are welcome to do so is the uplandsoftware.com website. That’s a great place to check us out. Also, we are listed on all of the popular apps stores for the CRM. So we’re on the Salesforce app exchange, we’re on Microsoft App Source and the ServiceNow store as well. So that’s definitely a place to check us out.

Pete Wright:

Absolutely. And we will put all of the links in the show notes for this very episode. So if you’re listening on your very favorite podcast app, just scroll down in the show notes, you’ll see links where you can get more information as well. And thank you, Dennis Francoeur, for joining me for this conversation. I sure appreciate getting to know your space a little bit better.

Denis Francoeur:

Thank you so much again for having me. It was great.

Pete Wright:

And thank you everybody for downloading and listening to this show. We sure appreciate your time and your attention. Don’t forget you can share the show. We’d love it if you share it with colleague you think might be interested in the space that we’re in, or heck, say you call a call center and you have a lousy experience, forward this to them. We’ll see if we can help them out too. Thanks for joining us right here on Connected Knowledge, the podcast from Upland Software.