NewVoiceMedia Shortlisted for Two Awards at Call Centre Expo

NewVoiceMedia technology has been shortlisted for two awards at the upcoming Call Centre Expo, September 16th – 17th at the NEC Birmingham. The first nomination is for the ‘Product of the Show’ Award for a new product to be launched at the show, the NewVoiceMedia MediaPop. The second nomination is for the SHL Group, a company selling psychometric testing services that, powered by NewVoiceMedia, has been nominated for ‘Best Virtual Call Centre’.

The MediaPop is used to provide contact centre agents with diverse information about the caller before the call is put through. MediaPop provides multiple tabs of user-definable information that can range from basic caller identification, address and customer reference number (as available in current screenpop technology in the market today), to one where each tab is used to present the agent with ever-increasing layers of additional information. At the simplest level this could be details of previous call history, through spending pattern analysis based on a loyalty card, through geographic mapping and socio-economic analysis found on the ‘open’ web, to sophisticated enterprise-wide searches which trawl inside the corporate firewall for any information held on the caller.

According to NewVoiceMedia Chief Architect, Richard Pickering, “The ability to retrieve information across multiple databases, some of which could be residing in multiple physical or hosted locations, and all with multiple levels of access security, will come as a revelation to even the largest of institutions.” Trials in the USA showed that this technology typically slashed 20 seconds off a call that would normally last three minutes. Because agents have more detailed information at their fingertips the chances of resolving the caller’s problem on the first call are radically improved. This dramatic improvement in business efficiency is matched by intangibles such as agent satisfaction and caller experience.

The second nomination is for a new NewVoiceMedia client, the SHL Group. SHL have developed a virtual call centre that operates worldwide and combines people working in a traditional office environment with people working from home if needed. Callers from anywhere in world use a Freephone number to dial into the system; the calls are then routed according to geography, time of day, agent skills and/or language to the appropriate agent wherever they me be (UK, USA, South Africa, Hong Kong...). NewVoiceMedia is a hosted service so SHL not only runs a virtual contact in a geographical sense, the whole operation is virtual. SHL manages the whole of its distributed call centre operation as if every agent were in the same room. It monitors traffic and key performance indicators centrally and is currently meeting its target of answering 85% of all calls within three rings.