Contact Solutions provides customer self-service to over 16 million prepaid cardholders

On Tuesday at 2pm, Contact Solutions CEO Paul Logan will participate in the panel discussion “Building Loyalty in Times of Tight Margins.”  Through our experience providing customer self-service to over 16 million prepaid cardholders, Contact Solutions has developed best practices for optimizing prepaid card customer service. Improving self-service can have a direct impact on prepaid card margins in this highly competitive industry.

If you can’t attend Prepaid Expo, follow us on twitter (@cntactsolutions) for live updates and insights from the show.

Contact Solutions has been recognized as one of the fastest-growing companies in the greater Washington DC area.  SmartCEO Magazine’s annual Future 50 awards celebrate the region’s 50 fastest-growing companies based on employee and revenue growth over the past three years.  Over 350 nominations were submitted for this prestigious award.  Contact Solutions was the only contact automation company among the winners.

Making a difference together

While we are delighted to have the recognition, I think there’s a bigger story behind this Future 50 award as well as our recent press release about our 2011 growth and the performance milestones we achieved.  I believe this is a sign that we and our customers are doing something right together.  When we deploy a new customer self-service solution, millions of people have a better experience than they did before.   If we keep working together to make customer service more efficient so it eliminates frustration and saves everyone money, we will all benefit from that success.

Read the Future 50 article about Contact Solutions

Check out the full issue of SmartCEO Magazine

Many consumers embrace the value of self-service in today’s society.  Most people would much rather use an ATM than stand in line for a bank teller.  It’s not unusual to see people use the self-checkout at the grocery store while a cashier stands idle at an empty express lane.  Almost everyone pays a lower price at the self-service pump instead of paying a premium for an attendant to pump gas for them… except in New Jersey where self-service is prohibited and consumers are forced to pay a higher price per gallon.

If Doc is like most consumers, he doesn’t hate ATMs, self-serve checkouts, or pumping his own gas.  He probably chooses self-service more often than not because it’s fast, convenient, and it keeps costs down for the consumer.  Why has Doc lost his faith in IVR self-service?

Because he never had faith in the first place.  This industry has never given him a reason to believe.  So many IVR systems deliver a poor customer experience, it seems like they’re everywhere.   As a result, millions of callers have been conditioned to expect a poor experience every time they encounter an IVR.

This is a problem we can fix, and it’s a problem worth fixing.  We invested a lot of our resources to develop a way to measure customer experience accurately and a methodology to manage and improve it. We brought science to the art of customer experience, and that drives predictable results that make good sense for business.

We’re raising the bar on customer experience in the IVR, and we know from the data we’ve collected that callers have memory that affects their behavior.  If they have a good experience with an automated system, they’re a little more likely to use an automated system on their next transaction.  We can measure this effect, and we know that we can improve customer expectations one call at a time. It won’t happen overnight, but in time we’ll give Doc and many others like him a reason to believe.

 Get your IVR customer experience rating.

Unlike our competitors, we realize that the IVR can actually be a tool for improving customer experience (CX). For almost a decade, we have been singularly focused on continually improving our hosted IVR solutions in the areas of CX, contact center efficiencies, and cost savings.  We have known for years that people don’t hate IVR… they hate bad IVR.

We are proud to help our customers monitor, improve, and manage IVR solutions to create a positive CX. Through our service, we also are helping our clients foster better customer relations and opportunities for increased brand and customer loyalty.

This award is an indication that the industry is taking notice of potential in the IVR. Why dump millions into a system that actually makes your customers angry when you can work with an expert IVR provider that will make sure you receive a return on that investment with a platform that is efficient, cost-effective, and customer friendly?

If you’re losing money and customers with your existing IVR platform, maybe it is time to evaluate your provider. Download the Frost & Sullivan white paper about our CX framework to learn more about a solution that could help you stop losing and start gaining through your IVR.

This is no small endeavor, given the growing number of Americans on Medicaid and the fact that states have fewer and fewer dollars to spare for programs such as this. Our expertise helps us create systems that keep beneficiaries happy without straining state budgets. In fact, we recently upgraded an IVR for a state-run MMIS program and were the only bidder that was able to offer an immediate switch to an IVR solution with more automation and caller self-service abilities. We believe we were the only company able to make that offer because of our solid history providing expert MMIS systems to states across the country.

We have created a system that includes computer telephony integration (CTI) so a Medicaid beneficiary can authenticate himself or herself in the IVR and rely on the system to collect and pass that information to an agent if the need arises. This saves time and money for the MMIS provider because the beneficiary does not need to waste time repeating information.

In addition, we streamlined the system, specifically targeting the most frequently made calls and prioritizing those in the IVR option menu. We combined four different IVR systems into one so Medicaid providers no longer have to call different numbers to access the information required to serve beneficiaries.

This differentiator in our system is the ability to provide IVR service to healthcare providers, allowing them to:

• Check a member’s enrollment status
• Check on the status of a claim
• Determine the level of a member’s co-pays
• Determine a member’s maximum benefit
• Review drug and procedure codes
• Review payment status and history

The bottom line for this state is a better system that improves the Customer Experience for both Medicaid beneficiaries and providers.

This week, we announced the first-ever methodology designed to allow for data collected about our cloud-based IVR solutions to benchmark, analyze, and optimize the IVR. Our new Customer Experience (CX) initiative empowers our clients to make informed data-driven decisions that lead to better optimization of their IVR and better business results. We do it through a comprehensive rating process based on actual caller experiences to score and report an IVR system’s CX performance.  This rating system utilizes both surveys and analytical information to accurately measure whether the caller believes the experience was useful, easy to use and enjoyable while trying to achieve a goal.

Frost & Sullivan said, “Enterprises struggle to benchmark and improve customer experience in the contact center, and don’t always get the results they want when they take action. With this new capability from Contact Solutions, executives will be able to accurately benchmark their IVR performance against similar applications across the industry.  Once they know where they stand, they will have the data and analytics to guide and support decisions that affect customer experience and business results.”

Don’t know whether your customers find your IVR useful? Stop by our booth (#10) to take a 5-minute survey that will help you determine your ability to keep customers satisfied through the IVR and benchmark your services against others in your industry.

Visit us at Booth #10 at Call Center Week!

People who receive these benefits are highly dependent on these debit-card administered funds and often contact states through IVR systems to find out how much they have available to them, when their next deposit is available, etc.  In states where millions of people participate, this can put a huge strain on the call center.

We have recently helped one state, which has more than 1.5 million who receive benefits, relieve pressure on its EBT program call centers by creating an outbound IVR that will proactively notify EBT cardholders when a credit adjustment of $10 or more has been made to an account.   Credit adjustments can occur at any time and are related to issues such as grocer errors, ATM errors or other system problems that resulted in incorrect debits.  By using this proactive outbound notification system, the state is able to not only relieve the pressure on the call center, but also the stress and pressure on EBT recipients who need to be kept apprised of the status of the funds they critically need.

“EBT programs create great cost savings for both state and federal governments, and, as taxpayers, we are proud to play such a critical role in this process. In addition, we are constantly looking for ways to help our customers streamline their processes, save money and relieve pressure on call center agents so they can deal with complex issues callers may have,” said Paul Logan, CEO. “By creating this outbound notification system, we are not only helping our customer, but also creating a better experience for the EBT recipients by keeping them informed on a timely basis.”

Does your contact automation solutions provider proactively create IVR services that will help your customers and save you money?

We anticipate more growth in the coming months and knew that we needed to expand our infrastructure to be able to offer our customers high-performance service delivery, security, and business continuity of their contact automation solutions.

“As a cloud provider, we are pleased to offer the reliability, performance and scale that Platform Equinix offers,” said Mark Whittle, COO. “We believe that Equinix is on par with every major telecom and Internet provider in terms of that reliability and performance. With them, we can offer a smoother, faster time to deployment to our customers with a name that they know and trust.”

We have a deep trust in Equinix and look forward to our continued growth with this incredible company.

Scheduling a service appointment doesn’t have to cause so much pain, particularly if the repair company has a sophisticated scheduling solution. Contact Solutions recently created a specially designed, hosted cloud IVR solution that allows for customers to schedule and coordinate appointments quickly and efficiently through the IVR.  The solution introduces the capability to cancel or change appointments over the IVR, as well as to find the status of an existing service call.  In the first iteration of this IVR solution, callers could select these options, but were transferred to a live agent for help.  Real-time host interactions have now been enabled to manage these requests for multiple warranty service providers across the country to further decrease the needs for callers to speak directly with an agent.

“This is another great example of how our cloud-based solution can be easily configured to meet the needs of a particular customer and supports our philosophy of Continuous Improvement,” said Mark Whittle, COO. “By delivering cloud-based contact solutions in the cloud, we have greater flexibility to create tailored solutions to help our service customers offer their end users more control over appointment scheduling. This helps our clients ensure that those end users stay loyal and will return. It also frees up live agents to handle the extremely difficult repair questions and other customer service needs.”

Is you service and repair solution using 2011 technology or are your customers still on hold waiting for a live agent to help schedule a call?