Innovation at ITExpo - Fonality

At ITExpo in Las Vegas, Blair Pleasant of UCStrategies is joined by Jeff Valentine, Executive Vice President, Products and Corporate Development, of Fonality. Jeff contends that many SMBs have contact centers but don't know it, and discusses how Fonality can help SMBs by providing many of the features and functionality found in fully staffed contact centers on a small scale to businesses.

Also on this topic on UCStrategies.com:

• Contact Center for SMB, by Blair Pleasant

Transcript for Innovation at ITExpo - Fonality

Blair Pleasant: Hi, this is Blair Pleasant and I am at IT Expo in Las Vegas. With me is Jeff Valentine, Executive VP Product and Corporate Development with Fonality. We are talking about the role of the contact center and SMB (small and medium-sized business). So what's going on? Why do SMBs need to think about the contact center?

Jeff Valentine: This is the way I think about it. Contact centers have been around for a long time. But they have really been confined to a stereotype of a contact center. In fact, there was a sitcom about contact centers, right? It's usually somebody sitting in a cube with a headset. For that type of contact center function, you generally need a dedicated contact center system.

And larger enterprises have made that investment. They've made that investment in equipment. And they have made the investment in training and people to provide that level of service. My contention is that SMBs have contact centers but they may not know it. The contact centers that SMBs have are probably helping to sell the customers new products or maybe they are servicing customers. That combination of sales and service exists in almost every SMB today. And it's something I think if you start running your SMB like a contact center, you might find some extra benefit from it.

Blair: Can you give me a couple of examples?

Jeff: How about an auto dealer that maybe today can make service appointments. These service writers that take auto dealer appointments for oil changes and other work, maybe they start taking calls at 7:00 a.m. This particular customer that I used to work with, they indeed have an opening time of 7:00 a.m. We showed them a contact center report showing that the abandon rate from their service queue was about 75 percent before 8:00 a.m. The owner looked at it and said that obviously we were wrong. Our system must be broken because this service department opens at 7:00 a.m. and why would we be abandoning calls? We went back to check just to be sure and indeed he was abandoning those calls. We confirmed three out of four were abandoned before 8:00 a.m.

He walked down there and said to the guys, why are you abandoning calls? Oh, well since they get there at 7:10, they have to get their coffee and all these other human factors that are contributing to people now when they call for a service appointment not getting an answer, hanging up and probably calling Jiffy Lube, and the dealership misses the opportunity to upsell them on other things like tire rotations or a 50,000-mile service or whatever it is that they sell besides oil changes.

So that is an example of how one particular company was able to use a contact center metric abandon rate, and because they had this contact center functionality built in, the ability to go change something about their business to help improve profit.

Blair: Now do they have queues? Do they have skills based routing? What kinds of things did they have?

Jeff: They did. The concept of having a queue is essential to a contact center. When a customer calls in, they will need to maybe press a button or maybe call a special phone number from your phone system to put them in a particular queue. That just means they are waiting in line, listening to hold music, waiting for someone to answer. An abandon is when that person decides to hang up and call somebody else, and they just give up on it before one of your employees answer.

So what was happening in this case was just they were set up properly with queues. Skills based routing means you are trying to send calls to people that were equipped to handle them. And in that case, at an auto dealer, it was a service writer. It was a just a human problem. Their people weren't trained. They did not recognize the importance of taking those calls, so they were not taking them. They were not even logging into the system and taking them.

Blair: That's probably pretty typical for an SMB.

Jeff: Right, and especially an SMB where every little efficiency matters a lot. If you are able to sell an extra five appointments, those people that you have on staff who are fixing cars, for example, you are paying them regardless if they are working or not. And if you are missing five appointments, you have a vacancy rate of an extra few percent in your service shop, that's a few percent of profit that you are missing every year. So it actually adds up pretty quickly, especially for the SMB.

Blair: So what does Fonality do to help the SMBs in this area?

Jeff: One of the things that we do really well is provide a contact center system for the non-contact center. These are companies that don't think they're contact centers. In fact, their employees, if you called them contact center agents, they would be offended. Our technology allows them to act like contact center agents in that you can distribute calls to them just as if they are from a contact center.

You can measure whether or not they are answering them, and how long it is taking them to answer those calls and perhaps how long they are spending on the phone after those calls are answered. All of those are critical contact center metrics. I maintain that you cannot improve, you cannot manage, what you do not measure. By measuring it, it allows the SMB for the first time now to go recognize that there might be a problem. In addition, ask the question, is there something going on within my sales or service department that is taking away from our bottom line?

Blair: So the key is use the tools, just don't call people contact center agents.

Jeff: That's right. And do not put headsets on them. Just let them do their job and maybe ask questions like why are you not answering the phone? Or how many calls did you make today if you are a sales guy, and things like that.

Blair: Great - thanks so much, Jeff.

Jeff: Sure, thank you.