PLASST-Com® v.0.9

Dialog management and statistics collection system for call centers

Vladimir Dudchenko, Dmitry Komov

www.softbcom.com

22.04.2014

Introducing PLASST-Com: “About”

PLASST-Com: The main challenges

Conversations’ details are not collected during dialogs, which makes analysis of customers’ requests complicated or impossible: an important source of client related information is not used in effective way

Agents normally are only proficient in a limited number of areas. This constraint leads to a necessity of extra call centre staff, and results in longer dialogs. Call centre effectiveness and customer satisfaction level are decreased.

A lot of information is lost during each conversation. How all the details could be saved?

Recording calls is useless because retrieving relevant information takes too much time.

An agent’s comments to a conversation are not very useful as they are informal and depend on agent’s memory and good will.

Survey forms that the agents could fill in during conversations do not represent the ramifying nature of surveys, presenting the next question depending on the answers received previously.

PLASST-Com is a universal survey form for agent dialogs:

A screen form to be filled in;

An approach to pre-programming agents’ dialogs

This adds some specific features to dialog organization: • Making dialog data collection natural and easy; • Lowering agents’ stress; • Excluding agents’ errors; • Offering tips to agents; • Excluding duplication of questions to the client when more than one

agent is involved in the conversation.

Results of PLASST-Com implementation: • Analytics of the collected data is available for optimization of the

provided services; • Better call centre effectivity; • Higher customer satisfaction level.

The way to decrease operation expenditures

To decrease operation expenditures of a call centre we would like to:

- Widen the range that a given agent can cover;

- Decrease training time;

- Decrease the number of transferred calls from agents to experts;

- Decrease number of experts.

The key to lowering expenditures is better on-line informational support of the agents

The agent’s form start

• The form automatically opens as the agent takes a call. It includes caller phone number, call ID, time stamp, campaign ID

• The campaign ID is defined by a number of parameters: the number the client has dialed, IVR choices, etc. If the client has taken a wrong choice in the IVR, the agent can open another form in the drop-down menu.

PLASST-Com leads the dialog

PLASST-Com imposes a prebuilt structure on each agent’s conversation.

Such a structure represents a tree-shape scenario lead by the program and executed by an agent.

All the questions are offered by the system one by one.

Answers can be typed in, or selected from the drop-down menu.

PLASST-Com provides a built-in knowledge base

Content and structure of each survey depend on the subject area of a particular call, the specific form to be opened is determined automatically in the beginning of the call;

Agents can see the current question and possible answer choices;

Extensive information concerning each question is available to agents in a form of tips related to each question.

PLASST-COM programmed dialogs:

PLASST-Com: universal structure, quick response

Its forms are flexible and could be composed very easily and quickly.

Form construction is down to composing its content, not programming its representation.

PLASST-Com is not a CRM. It doesn’t have a database behind it, and reacts without the least delay.

The results of the dialog

Results of the conversations could be downloaded into CRM or a specific application, or into a special DB structure designed for the analysis purposes.

Such download is an off-line operation, it is conducted immediately after the call is completed

Making corrections in the input data

The agent can come back to the previous questions and make corrections in the answers.

If a correction influences the next questions in the dialog, all the further answers in the branch are deleted. If not, the recorded answers remain unchanged.

Call transfer, completing dialogs and saving interrupted calls

When needed, a call can be transferred to an expert or a manager by PBX means (attended or non-attended transfer). The dialog form is also automatically transferred, complete with all the filled-in data.

After completing a dialog, the agent closes the form manually by pushing the green button. The form disappears, and the agent is ready to take the next call.

If the dialog is not completed (connection is lost), the agent has the following options: – Call back (by pushing the small green button near the caller phone

number);

– Save filled-in info (by pushing the yellow button);

– Proceed without saving filled-in info (by pushing the red button; e.g., if the connection was lost in the very beginning of a dialog).

Handling non-completed forms

After the yellow button was pushed, the partially filled form is saved in a special directory. In case the same caller calls again, the form opens automatically and the conversation can be continued by any free agent from the same spot where it has ended.

After the red button was pushed, the form is be saved for statistics. No attempts to bind it to the consequent call of the same caller will be made.

Logic for treating the filled, partially filled and empty forms could be established in any particular case.

Interaction with CRM or any business application

PLASST-Com client

PLASST-Com Server

CRM- server

CRM call-related window

Filled form

Downloading filled-in data into DB

integration integration

Taking a call by agent opens a form

PLASST-Com form