BUSINESS CONTEXT

An important part of the company’s product success is excellent customer support service. They receive many different appeals and questions, and it is critical that each of them is processed properly and at the earliest possible date, increasing customer satisfaction. A widely accepted way of customer communication is maintaining phone support with qualified people always ready to assist. It is easier today since IP telephony is common and available, with few successful solutions on the market. But it is not quite enough since point A connected with point B is just a first step in a series of events that has to happen to receive one happy customer

In the early stages of the business life cycle, our client was satisfied with a set of fragmented software solutions, but with new challenges, growing user base, and planned expansion into new countries and continents, it became clearly visible that more integrated implementation has to be created to maintain a high level of customer communication quality

CHALLENGE

Customers realized they want a central place for both individual support specialists and their managers to handle all support cases. Workers should have a comfortable environment to optimize their daily routine, and managers should have clear visibility on call centers performance in different countries, to analyze and make decisions for possible adjustments

• Call processing has to be completely automated, guiding users through the initial menu to ensure that frequent questions can be answered instantly, and the best matching specialist is selected for this specific issue
• The system should be seamlessly integrated with other software widely accepted in a customer organization, including staff management, single authentication mechanism, and other business management solutions in this institution
• An important place is a manager’s dashboard where he could have a bird’s eye view on existing call centers’ performance, and quickly detect problems. Being an entry point, a few other tools are available from here for an authorized person
• Support specialist needs just a single place for all his activities: receive perfectly targeted calls, get assistance from other specialists, instantly re-routing calls to them, or even creating a conference. Zendesk platform is used to manage support tickets, which clients didn’t want to change for a custom solution since it’s already rich enough and long-established. He requested instead of a deep integration mechanism, inserting essential parts from Zendesk into a call center, managing usual operations automatically, simplifying work, and saving time
• Many calls require the participation of several specialists, skilled in different intersecting fields, therefore conferencing was an essential requirement for a perfect solution. Instantly finding one or several available specialists with matching skills, inviting them to join a call and manage transparent communication is critical. A significant part of this functionality depended on real-time updates when for example status change for a co-worker contact should be instantly visible to everyone else in the system

A considerable part of utility operations had to be managed in order to support all of the described above. Managing phone lines, setting up business rules for call flow, supporting accurate workers shifts information, perfecting message recordings, adjusting routing parameters – all of this and much more is available for tuning to an authorized within the system person

Another important part of the system is an Analytics Interface. All gathered statistics are available here for acquaintance. This is a point where decisions are made: which technology or language skills are behind or overstaffed. How to call center performance changes over time. How do individuals perform. Which bolts can be rotated to increase the main value for a customer – a great impression and end satisfaction number their products receive from their buyers

SOLUTION

Afterward analysis and implementation period in close communication with a customer, Aterise created a solution, integrating few different systems into a central point. Managers, support staff, and their clients were connected in a single place, providing a perfectly fitting workplace for each party. This dramatically increased whole process simplicity, not only saving time and resources but also increasing the overall quality of the whole support process, reducing issue resolution time and removing unnecessary steps from it. Most importantly, this process now is completely visible and transparent, which made it ultimately manageable. The customer company is now able to open new call centers in new locations, immediately ensuring they support high standards they accepted to suit the needs of their business