Every Week Is Customer Service Week With Verizon Contact Center Services

BASKING RIDGE, N.J. – First impressions are lasting. That’s why customer contact centers are critical to the success of so many large businesses. Verizon Business offers a winning combination of products and professional consulting services that help to strengthen contact center solutions for its enterprise customers.

In recognition of National Customer Service Week, an annual event that celebrates the importance of customer service and support professionals, Verizon Business offers the following tips on developing customer contact centers that create the right impression:

• Consider allowing agents to work remotely: It is often said that the happiest workers are the most productive ones. That’s why work-at-home agents are becoming a more popular option for companies that want to encourage a healthy work/life balance as well as environmental conservation. Work-at-home agents do not require specific facilities and associated power, which can help companies reduce their overall carbon footprint, including the gas associated with travel to and from the office. With Verizon Web Center, companies can enable anytime/anywhere agents to serve customers, using the essential tools of the trade -- a PC, an Internet connection and a phone.
• Prepare for the unexpected: To maintain customer communications in the event of unforeseen circumstances like a natural disaster, companies need a backup plan. Network-based contact center solutions such as Verizon Web Center and Hosted Interactive Voice Response (IVR) offer a flexible, fully redundant platform that allows for business continuity when other contact centers may be impacted. Customer enablement tools such as Verizon’s Integrated Call Tree enable enterprises to reroute calls in a matter of minutes. And, through advanced routing technologies such as Hosted Intelligent Contact Routing (HICR), calls can be prioritized for quickest response.
• Help customers help themselves: Quality self-service is quickly becoming the new gold standard. Customers are becoming increasingly receptive to self-service applications as an alternative to working with a live agent, especially when automated responses can quickly and efficiently meet their specific needs. Verizon’s Hosted IVR – Speech Services use automated speech technology to deliver intuitive and user-friendly speech solutions. Callers can choose to go straight to self-service, rather than waiting for an available agent, which shortens call queues and reduces hold times for all callers.
• Communicate on their terms: Many consumers may prefer to speak with a live agent by phone, but more and more customers are now seeking other options. Interestingly, customers don’t even need to be speaking to employ speech technology. Verizon’s text-to-speech applications convert text, such as Web-page content, to intelligible spoken language that can be delivered over the phone. And click-to-chat and e-mail are among the more popular methods of communicating via Web Center.
• Don’t make them say it twice: It can be irritating for customers to repeat the same information multiple times on one service call. Computer Telephony Integration (CTI) can bring a customer’s service history directly to an agent’s computer screen. CTI is the discipline of making PBXs and ACDs work with IVR, the Internet, networks, databases and workstations, allowing contacts to be routed with the customer information. CTI also automates a number of call center functions, which helps to increase efficiency and caller satisfaction.
• Contact Center Services that fit your company and your customers: There’s no single contact center technology solution that meets the needs of all enterprises or their customers. Many enterprises choose to purchase their own equipment and deploy it on site. Some have the expertise and resources to manage their own infrastructure, while others select a trusted partner to do so. Additionally, in order to meet their highest-priority customer service objectives while at the same time staying within tight budgets, a number of organizations are utilizing hosted services. This option enables businesses to implement contact center solutions to better serve their customers, without requiring large capital outlays.

“If our customers maintain successful relationships with their customers because of our contact center technology then we’ve done our job,” said Mike Marcellin, vice president of global product marketing for Verizon Business. “We have made investments in strategic contact center offerings that deliver superior service and support to our customers and help them to control costs while they improve efficiency.”

Verizon Contact Center Services help companies manage inbound and outbound customer communications while controlling costs and improving service. The Hosted IVR product line, which uses speech technology and touch-tone commands to provide information to callers or to route calls to representatives, includes Enhanced Call Routing (ECR), Global ECR, Speech Services and Internet Protocol (IP) IVR. In addition to Hosted IVR, Verizon Business offers a range of contact center services, such as Automatic Call Distribution (ACD) and Intelligent Contact Routing (ICR), to manage the distribution of voice and data traffic to agents, based on business rules, agent skills and real-time priorities.

Verizon Business’ expert professional services team can assist customers in building or redesigning contact centers, developing effective business processes, training agents, and ensuring that contact centers have the best technology to suit their needs. This team can provide hosted, managed and premises-based contact center solutions, as well as tailored combinations of all three.

For more information regarding Verizon Business’ Contact Center offerings, please visit http://www.verizonbusiness.com/products/contactcenter/.

About Verizon Business
Verizon Business, a unit of Verizon Communications (NYSE: VZ), operates the world's most connected public IP network and uses its industry-leading global-network capabilities to offer large-business and government customers an unmatched combination of security, reliability and speed. The company integrates advanced IP communications and information technology (IT) products and services to deliver leading enterprise solutions including managed services, security, mobility, collaboration and professional services. These solutions power innovation and enable the company’s customers to do business better. For more information, visit www.verizonbusiness.com.

VERIZON'S ONLINE NEWS CENTER: Verizon news releases, executive speeches and biographies, media contacts, high-quality video and images, and other information are available at Verizon's News Center on the World Wide Web at www.verizon.com/news. To receive news releases by e-mail, visit the News Center and register for customized automatic delivery of Verizon news releases.