The Company
The Atlanta Journal Constitution (AJC) is a large newspaper in the Southern United States, reaching a total print and online audience of more than 2.3 million people each week. The company has one contact center managing inbound customer service calls and outbound sales and telemarketing calls.
The Business Challenge
Although the paper has seen extensive sales growth over the years, the AJC has to comply with stringent Do Not Call regulations, which has impacted the company’s sales initiatives because approximately 90 percent of the contact center’s outbound calls are cold calls to prospects.
With the restrictions of Do Not Call, AJC recognized that it needed an advanced solution that could help it better meet these requirements and improve outbound call campaign accuracy by effectively detecting answering machines, fax machines or busy signals. In addition, to maximize agent productivity, the company was also interested in advanced call blending capabilities so that sales agents would be able to manage inbound inquiries, when there is an influx of customer service calls. And, as it began to explore new contact center technology, AJC also wanted to reduce the costs and complexity of integrating disparate point solutions.
The Solution
Following strong recommendations and its own past experiences with an early version of Aspect(R) Conversations™ Predictive Dialer, the newspaper purchased 110 seats of Aspect Unified IP in its contact center.
Aspect Unified IP is a complete contact center solution that unites inbound, outbound and blended multichannel contact (voice, email, the web and fax), while also delivering voice portal, recording and quality management, and unified reporting and administration capabilities. In addition, it incorporates a set of core features that support contact strategies for both session initiation protocol (SIP)-based Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) platforms and traditional voice.
The unified solution offers call routing capabilities to intelligently transfer callers to AJC agents based on their skill sets and customer data gathered by back-end applications. The agents use the call blending capabilities to respond to incoming calls and customer questions on subscriptions, while also using the outbound capabilities to increase sales.
The company is also using LYRICall™, a browser-based application and scripting design tool providing agents with real-time access to multiple data sources, including host systems, legacy applications, the Internet, corporate intranets and extranets. Incoming calls trigger screen pops on the agent’s desktop, helping the AJC agents access company information and customer history and relay this information to the caller, as needed.
The Results
The AJC is seeing a significant improvement in the contact center’s productivity. With answering machine detection (AMD) accuracy of up to 95 percent, Aspect Unified IP allows agents to reach customers and prospects more effectively. As a result, agents are more adequately prepared to sell because they know when a call is connected, they will be talking to a person and not a machine.
In addition, the agents’ sales pitches are more productive with the assistance of LYRICall. The product provides easy-to-use scripting pop-ups on the agents’ desktop, enabling them to deliver a consistent and positive customer experience. As a result, sales per hour are up almost 15 percent for experienced sales agents, and by almost 50 percent for less-experienced agents.
"While we were researching different vendors and getting references, the best remarks and kudos were given from customers using Aspect Unified IP," said Pablo Patino, System Administrator, Atlanta Journal Constitution. "Since we wanted a cost-effective way to have several solutions in our contact center, Aspect Software was the right choice for us. We needed a little bit of everything, call blending, recording and high answering machine detection accuracy, and with Aspect Unified IP, every piece of the solution was very good."
About Alvaria:
Alvaria was founded through the merger of Aspect Software and Noble Systems, technology leaders in Customer Experience (CX) and Workforce Engagement solutions. Our name is derived from Latin for “hives” – nature’s perfect form for millions of years – bringing you solutions that are scalable, resilient and secure, with efficiency, speed and pinpoint accuracy.
About Alvaria:
Alvaria was founded through the merger of Aspect Software and Noble Systems, technology leaders in Customer Experience (CX) and Workforce Engagement solutions. Our name is derived from Latin for “hives” – nature’s perfect form for millions of years – bringing you solutions that are scalable, resilient and secure, with efficiency, speed and pinpoint accuracy.
Published: Thursday, April 10, 2008
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