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How We Do What We Do

Deliver Better Service and Lower Costs

SmartConnect helps unified interaction centers deliver exceptional customer experiences while simultaneously reducing costs. We do this by building multi-channel interaction centers “that provide world class service at an optimal cost”. While there is no industry standard definition of world class service, SmartConnect defines it as “exceeding customers’ expectations in all interactions”. The foundation of our solution is best-in-class interaction management software which provides the following powerful applications:

IVR/SPEECH RECOGNITION: Properly designed IVR/speech recognition applications can enable customers to perform self service transactions such as account inquiry, order entry, and order status, for as little as one tenth the cost of an agent. They also provide customers with better service by avoiding any wait time and being available 24/7. These applications off-load agents of routine, repetitive calls and can give them additional time to handle more complex interactions.
ADVANCED ROUTING: Dramatic improvements over traditional PBX routing are available and they offer many more options for how interactions are treated. Significant results can be achieved in customer service and efficiency by increasing the percentage of customers whose calls get routed to the right agents at the right time. In addition to voice calls, the technology also routes emails, chat and other interactions, and work items such as back office tasks.
AGENT DESKTOP: Rich agent desktop software can significantly improve agent efficiency and enable higher levels of first call resolution by giving agents more comprehensive tools and information with which to serve customers. This can be achieved by displaying caller data from an IVR application, popping the customer’s account, and allowing for more simplified navigation of back end IT systems. Additionally, agent desktop software provides a user friendly interface for multi-media interaction control and interaction history. It also enables agents to track the types of interactions they process so that management can recognize patterns and trends to make the right changes to improve customer service. Lasly, new customer relationship management (CRM) solutions provide more affordable and flexible solutions to store customer data and experiences than ever before.
ADVANCED REPORTING AND ANALYTICS: Integrated reporting on all customer interaction management applications in the contact center is now possible. More detailed data is also available and in many forms. For example, consolidated real time, historical, ad hoc, dashboard and end-to-end reports can be produced for IVR/speech, routing, multi-media, agent activity, outbound, workforce management and many other applications. Analytics tools enable contact center staff to perform trend analysis and ad hoc inquiries, which in turn can help them to identify valuable operational improvements.
WORKFORCE MANAGEMENT SYSTEMS: Gone are the days when basic forecasting and scheduling programs would suffice. There are now powerful programs that can enable a workforce manager to forecast and schedule much more accurately and with less effort. Tools also exist which off-load workforce managers of time consuming and repetitive tasks, and improve agent morale by giving them options for greater empowerment.
OTHER APPLICATIONS: Other powerful applications are possible such as highly flexible software for creating predictive, progressive and other outbound calling campaigns, including integration with inbound applications. Workforce management software now provides improved scheduling and forecasting programs, integration with routing, and enables more agent empowerment. Solutions are now available that can automatically route business processes and can greatly improve agent productivity.

Extend Your Current Investments, Upgrade Your Capabilities

Contact centers often have legacy systems which are at or near their end of life, and are costly and difficult to maintain and grow. SmartConnect provides solutions for these types of environments, regardless of the equipment, applications, legacy systems or complexity. We can create technology roadmaps to enable a customer to transition out their legacy systems over time, protect existing investments where required, and avoiding major disruptions. Here are examples of some common solutions:

LEGACY PBX’S: Traditional PBX’s can be costly to operate and upgrade, and are often inflexible with respect to adding new applications and sites. New software application solutions based on voice-over-IP technology (including SIP) can reduce operations costs, offer much more application flexibility and make it easy and cost effective to upgrade and add sites or home agents. The solutions can be added to existing legacy PBX’s without disruption, integrated with state of the art voice-over-IP PBX’s or operate as standalone systems.
LEGACY IVR SYSTEMS: Old or end of life IVR systems are often hard to maintain, use Touch Tone input (which results in modest caller acceptance), and can restrict application growth. These systems may play a key part in a contact center’s operation by identifying call types and / or off-loading traffic from agents - which means a system failure could cause a major interruption. New systems are now available which allow for applications to be rapidly developed and modified using common web programming languages, provide interfaces to new and old back end IT systems, and are easier to maintain. They also offer the option for speech recognition, which can dramatically improve caller acceptance levels.
AGENT DESKTOP: Typically, old screen pop and soft phone applications are difficult to maintain and the developers of the software can’t keep up with a contact center’s changing requirements. New software products allow for extensive tailoring and additional functionality, such as multi-media and outbound, contact history and more granular reporting on agent activity. They also can be interfaced to legacy or more current IT or CRM systems, and much more.

Do More with Less Complexity

Some companies have complex contact center environments that require more advanced technology solutions. Examples include:

Multiple sites
Branch offices and home agents
Multiple corporate divisions and departments
Use of third party outsourcers
Multiple PBX manufacturers
Complex and/or numerous routing strategies
Integrated voice, video, email and chat
Call blending
Legacy and new back end IT systems
Disparate reporting applications

Contact center environments can become even more complex through their company’s acquisition of other firms, or rapidly expanding product and services offerings.

SmartConnect has a great deal of experience at providing unified software solutions for complex contact centers environments. By unifying disparate systems together with seamless applications and reporting, a contact center can more easily achieve its business goals. IT organizations can also benefit by having one overall system to manage and operate, which can in turn reduce support costs and improve system availability.

Genesys – Portfolio of Offering

Using Genesys Customer Interaction Management software, we can integrate multiple sites, third party outsourcers, branch offices and home agents. The Genesys suite fully supports products from over 40 PBX manufacturers. This solves the problem of integrating sites with different telephony platforms, while protecting a customer’s application investments if their PBX’s change.

In addition, once the Genesys platform is in place SmartConnect’s team can provide a full range of customer interaction management applications. For example, we can create routing solutions to meet almost any need using data driven, service level, business priority, last agent, multi-site and multi-media mechanisms. Our SmartAgent agent desktop software offers soft phone controls, CRM integration and screen pop functionality to new and old back-end IT systems. A common reporting platform can provide real time, historical and other applications for inbound, outbound, multi-media and many other contact center applications.

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