After two very dismal years, the economy is beginning to pick up, just in time happily enough for the holidays.
The National Retail Federation forecast last month that holiday retail sales are expected to increase 2.3 percent in 2010: to $447.1 billion, a turnaround from a disastrous 2008 and a so-so 2009.
To capture those growing sales requires contact centers to be on their best performance. Those that are stand a greater chance of being rewarded by repeat sales and equally if not more importantly through drawing more customers via existing ones who rave to the world of their experiences via social media. Those that don’t, well there are worse fates than receiving lumps of coal in one’s holiday stocking…
To that end Knoa Software, which makes end-user management software has announced, appropriately enough a list of best practices that retailers and hospitality and travel enterprises should implement to maximize sales, customer profitability and customer experience this holiday season.
1. Monitor employee use of retail and call center technology
Customer-facing processes won’t be executed efficiently and profitably if the tools provided aren’t being used appropriately. Many organizations underestimate the impact of poorly performing retail technology--or employees who are not fully trained--to handle an increasingly diverse set of retail transactions (sales, returns, service) that a sales associate or contact center agent is called upon to execute. By monitoring employee experience and performance, organizations can improve their effectiveness, which in turn provides a better overall customer experience.
2. Fix technology glitches fast
By monitoring the usage of technology, organizations can identify smaller technology glitches that may cause delays in transaction response times (e.g. waiting too long for an authorization, screens taking too long to refresh). Leveraging this data to proactively identify these minor glitches can have a major impact in reducing end-to-end transaction time, which improves employee productivity and customer experience.
3. Optimize training efforts
During the holiday season, customer service organizations expand operations and need to train new employees quickly. By measuring technology usage, from the end-user perspective, organizations can identify which employees are having issues and can focus training exercises on a smaller pool, rather than spending time and effort on the entire group.
4. Look for use of workarounds
Oftentimes, if an employee is experiencing difficulty with the retail or contact center technologies in place, they will find workarounds. While this is usually innocently done with the goal of satisfying the customer, this can cause revenue leaks, lost sales and slow down resolutions of customer issues. Identifying the use of workarounds enables the organization to ensure proper process implementation.
5. Implement better processes
In some cases, workarounds or alternative use of technology can improve the customer experience. As organizations are monitoring the use of technology, it can be as important to implement these best practices as it can be to identify those workarounds causing delays. Knowing where you don't have problems is as valuable as knowing where you do.
It is important, said Knoa (News - Alert) Software, that companies fully enable their front-line personnel, including retail sales associates, contact center sales agents and all customer service personnel. End-user management software gives organizations a new focus on end-user adoption, utilization and performance. It captures a complete picture of the end-user experience and behavior, including user-experienced response time for key system transactions; system and application error metrics as well as user-created errors; and application utilization. It reveals which transactions are used, in what sequence and for how long.
“An increase in store traffic, call center activity, transactions and interactions can stress customer-facing technologies and the employees who use them,” explained Lori Wizdo (News - Alert), vice president of marketing for Knoa Software, in a statement. “Companies who invest in optimizing employee performance realize gains in customer traffic, revenue per transaction and customer satisfaction with the retail experience.”
Brendan B. Read is TMCnet’s Senior Contributing Editor. To read more of Brendan’s articles, please visit his columnist page.Edited by
Jaclyn Allard
