In today’s world, there is a lot more to
inbound or outbound marketing than
simply handling phone calls. In fact, a proactive partner with a good view of
information technology can add a whole
new dimension to a company’s call center
efforts.
Michael Van Scyoc is responsible for all
IT client services at InfoCision. He plays a
pivotal role in deploying new technology to
meet internal and client needs.
Smart Business asked him to share some
innovative IT ideas.
What is hot today in IT for your clients?
One of the hottest topics has become
business intelligence. Retail and financial
industries have led the way with great success. Supporting the call center with business intelligence will provide improvements in both productivity and performance. By analyzing past patterns, you can
better predict the future.
We are experiencing productivity improvements from our best-time-to-call
business intelligence. Past outbound call
results indicate when to call a certain individual in order to increase the likelihood of
successfully connecting with the right
party decision-maker.
We also see performance improvements
with increased response rates by advanced
data augmentation and more precise segmentation and data modeling. Advanced
data modeling on a prospecting list works
in two ways: First, you are able to identify
and focus on leads that statistically have a
higher propensity to respond to a given
appeal, and second, you can remove with a
higher degree of precision those leads that
aren’t cost effective to pursue. Both have a
very positive affect on the overall response
rate while retaining the maximum number
of leads in your list.
Can IT really make a difference in a world
that revolves around plain old telephone
service (POTS)?
Absolutely. Plain old telephone service is
merely one form of the media used in a
marketing or customer service program.
Business intelligence and sophisticated
customer database management systems
can add great value without being hindered by POTS. Also, just because you are limited by POTS to your end customers, doesn’t
mean that you cannot implement creative
telephony strategies in conjunction with
the carrier networks or the latest premise-based telephony systems.
What are some of the new things in IT software for call center clients?
It’s not really new, but I’m surprised by
how many call centers haven’t implemented a fully automated inbound/outbound
blending solution. Many call centers running both inbound and outbound operations utilize disparate call center systems
for each operation. You can gain greater
staff utilization and productivity if call center staff transitioned automatically and
seamlessly from inbound to outbound, and
vice versa, as the changing needs dictate. If
you are doing this manually, you experience downtime during manual transitions
as well as lower customer service levels.
Are there hardware innovations, too?
Perhaps the most exciting thing happening with hardware is virtualization. We are
able to reduce the overall number of
servers needed to support a business or
call center process because of operating system advancements that enable us to
have multiple virtual servers on a single
physical server. Server processing power
and capacity continues to grow, and we are
able to take advantage of that with virtualization, which leads to long-term lower
cost of ownership.
Can you share a success story or two where
a new use of IT paid off?
Several come to mind. For one of our
fundraising clients, we applied a demographic data overlay to its lapsed donor
file. Sometimes we look at things like age,
length of residence, race, religion, etc. In
this case, we used business intelligence
that places individuals into one of 24 different consumer groups, which we used to
segment the file. Again, we were able to
focus on the best prospects and increase
the dollars raised per completed call.
We can also perform more intelligent
routing of inbound calls by recognizing a
customer before he or she is connected
with someone in the call center. For one
client, we compare the ANI [the phone
number the caller is calling from] to a current customer database. Current customers are routed to our client’s call center,
while we handle new prospects.
Do you come to clients with ideas, or should
they approach you?
We are always open to our clients’ ideas,
but typically we present new ideas to our
clients. Many ideas can be implemented in
a few weeks or even days. We start out
with relatively simple ideas that can be
implemented quickly. As we continue to
raise the bar, things get more and more
complex, which takes more time.
MICHAEL VAN SCYOC is senior vice president of IT client services. Reach him at [email protected] or (330) 668-1400. In
business for 25 years, InfoCision Management Corporation is the
second largest privately held teleservices company and a leading
provider of customer care services, commercial sales and marketing for a variety of Fortune 500 companies and smaller businesses. InfoCision is also a leader of inbound and outbound marketing for nonprofit, religious and political organizations.
InfoCision operates 28 call centers at 12 locations throughout
Ohio, Pennsylvania and West Virginia. For more information, visit
www.infocision.com.
