ReferralCenter: Issue Management for Superior Field-Level Service Recovery

Overview

The Challenge

Some customer recovery opportunities are best handled at the point of customer contact. While forward-thinking organizations have developed processes to extend the service recovery from the contact center to the field, they still struggle to track, investigate, and follow these issues through to completion.

Without the right technologies in place, these processes are cumbersome and time-consuming for contact center agents and managers to execute. They must identify the right person to contact, determine how they should be contacted, communicate the problem (via phone, fax or email), confirm they have received the details, and follow up to find out if/how an issue was addressed.

The use of non-integrated phone, fax, and email systems to refer issues to the field makes these processes even more cumbersome.

These inefficiencies result in longer hold times, slow issue resolution, high labor and communication costs, and customer dissatisfaction. And without a system in place to capture and track the status and outcome of field-level recovery efforts, companies cannot monitor quality and consistency. They are leaving their customer relationships to chance.

Enabling more efficient and effective service recovery requires an issue management solution capable of delivering timely, streamlined communication and coordination between the contact center and the field. It should enable contact center agents to quickly communicate a customer’s situation and their contact information to the right field representative with minimal effort or error.

The solution should provide field representatives a means to directly communicate the status and resolution back to the contact center for reporting and closure.

For companies that currently leverage Astute Solutions’ ePowerCenter™, that solution is ReferralCenter™.

The Perfect Solution for Field-Level Service Recovery

With ReferralCenter, field representatives and business users access and update case information from just about anywhere—remote offices, retail locations, restaurants, and mobile/handheld devices. It dramatically improves the efficiency and effectiveness of the customer recovery process, while enabling highly responsive service that differentiates your brand.

Through ReferralCenter, contact center agents quickly and easily send customer communications directly from ePowerCenter to the field location or representative best able to address and resolve the issue at hand. Field representatives and managers view the issues through a simple browser-based interface. They can drill down into the specific case and customer details they need to handle the issue.

Once they have contacted the customer and addressed the issue, field representatives simply enter the status and details around the outcome of issue resolution into ReferralCenter. These details update the central ePowerCenter database, and contact center agents and managers can verify that the customer’s interaction was resolved. This “closes the loop” on each customer issue.

Furthermore, for situations where the telephone is the preferred mode of communication with the field, ReferralCenter can leverage Interactive Voice Response (IVR) and speech recognition to automate the referral process.

Multiple Applications

ReferralCenter offers numerous applications for manufacturers, retailers and restaurants, including:

• Quality assurance. A remote manufacturing quality lab can use ReferralCenter to view case details, perform an investigation on the root cause of a problem, and communicate the details back to the contact center for customer resolution.
• Store/restaurant-level service recovery. For retail or restaurant organizations, complaints about a store are collected via the centralized contact center and pushed to a specific store manager. He or she can then take action, resolve the issue, input their activities into the case record, and notify the contact center that the issue has been resolved.
• Order fulfillment. For order referrals, all of the pertinent details are collected in the contact center and sent to the appropriate location for fulfillment.

Capabilities

ReferralCenter's capabilities include:

• Targeted, Automatic Notification — ReferralCenter leverages ePowerCenter’s Notifier feature to send an email, page, or text message to the appropriate manager. Agents don’t need to waste time searching for the right individual or pertinent contact information.
• Definable Scope of Responsibility — With hierarchical visibility of issues (i.e. region, district, or store), a manager is enabled to view only the details of cases for their particular location, while a regional manager can be enabled view the details or run reports on all of the stores they manage.
• Activity Logging and Coordination — Users can log activities and notes as they address issues. This provides an audit trail of activity, while improving collaboration between the contact center and the field. Once a field representative is finished, they either transfer responsibility back to the contact center for closure, or close the issue from their location.
• Automatic Escalation — Ensure field resources are meeting responsiveness standards. ReferralCenter automatically escalates issues to specified individuals if not closed within a defined timeframe.
• Field-level Issue and Trend Reports — Provide field resources the ability to run reports on issues that fall within their area of responsibility. Users can interactively drill down into reports to investigate trends in more detail.

Benefits

ReferralCenter brings numerous benefits, including:

• Highly effective service recovery efforts — Because ReferralCenter involves representatives who are closest to the customer and/or those with specialized skills in the recovery process, service recovery efforts are more successful.
• Improved communications and collaboration between the contact center and the field — With ReferralCenter, it’s easy for field representatives and business users to access and update case information from just about anywhere—remote offices, retail locations, restaurants, and mobile/handheld devices.
• Increased customer satisfaction and positive word of mouth — Customers receive rapid, highly personalized service that increases their loyalty to your brand—along with their positive word-of-mouth.
• Improved agent and employee efficiency and productivity — ReferralCenter reduces reliance on manual processes that can impact contact center efficiency and reduce agent availability.
• Increased field employee empowerment and accountability — ReferralCenter provides the details needed to effectively resolve issues, while also providing corporate management with greater visibility into the status of issues and actions taken at each location.
• Improved products, services and processes at all levels of the organization — Referral Center captures detailed, actionable insights for improving products, services and processes—from the corporate headquarters down to the field employee level.