Feedback from Self Audit

The self audit survey has proved a great success with clients and is the most popular page on the web site. Please have a go if you have yet to try the test. Clients welcomed its simple and straightforward approach.

http://www.lpasconsultancy.co.uk/self_audit.php

Useful Contacts and Links

The Business Systems conference (27th November) was excellent and opened my eyes to a whole new set of opportunities available with hosted sites and effective use of voice recording.


Egain continues to offer good and effective business advice via its web casts. The diagram shown later came from a Egain workshop


CACI consultancy offers some excellent IT/voice/web integration services


I have added a links page to the web site with some comments from myself - http://www.lpasconsultancy.co.uk/links.htm

Highlighted Trends in contact centres this month


Some brief thoughts and ideas of changes in contact centres

• Moved to hosted sites
  
• The move away from site based infrastructure offers great opportunities to reduce costs and provide better contingency planning.
  
• The other benefits of this are that you can buy what you want when you want plus you have the flexibility to build a solutions for business goals not any technology.
  
• The host telephony infrastructure can combine web and voice in to a single contact tool, which means much smaller enterprises can support a large communications infrastructure.
  

Integration of voice recording and knowledge management tools

• Historically web and voice tools have been managed separately within many organisations and there has been little cross over. With customers becoming more comfortable with the web it is critical to have a single communications method and platform
  
• The majority of web sites remain passive tools that provide relatively good information service i.e. opening times, but poor problem solving tools. The diagram shows the 3 reasons for contacting an organisation (whether sales or service).

• What is? type question: classic basic requests for information such as opening hours
  
• I want to? type question: requests to complete a transaction i.e. purchase an item
  
• How do I? type question: a reasoning question. Classically either a request for advice or high level problem solving assistance. The reality is that the majority of these contacts are generated by discontent or complain

The % numbers show the predicted spread of these contacts on average. Caution should be used as there are no "average" businesses.


The majority of clients seem to have "what is" and "I want" questions answered by the web whilst "how do I" questions answered by phone in theory. In theory 90% of contacts would be by the web if this model was implemented successfully but in practice phone contacts remain high in most organisations. In practice phone contacts still remain much higher than projected for most organisations