Everything we do for business today revolves around technology. Companies use systems like Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) for managing and planning for success. These areas generally include financial, order processing, logistics, manufacturing, supply chain planning, procurement, and project management. At times business needs will require a solution that is outside their IT core competencies. When this occurs, they have two options:
- Allocate resources to build it internally, which can be timely and expensive
- Outsource to a company that has already done the heavy lifting and can provide the required functions
When we decide to outsource, there is another crucial factor to consider; integration or not.
For this exercise, let’s consider that it’s time to take customer satisfaction seriously. I promise that I won’t ask why you waited so long. Like many companies, you have no internal competency for creating and managing a CSAT survey. After assessing internal needs and reviewing several survey platforms, it’s time to think about what you’re going to do with the data. Do you want it sitting in the cloud with a survey vendor, or do you need it on your systems so that your teams can run on-demand reporting? Let’s think about this.
What is a Non-Integrated?
A non-integrated solution works outside of your internal business systems, typically as a self-contained cloud solution. The outsourced system you are leveraging will show the results in their dashboard, with the option to download a CSV if you want the raw data. Manual intervention would be necessary to retrieve the data, prepare it for use and distribute it to your various teams. Non-integrated as it relates to data for survey results would require an analyst to review data and input manually into internal systems.
Your survey results and analysis in a non-integrated option could never be real-time. As such, your response to urgent findings might end up being too late. The result is a manual process of reviewing the data later to determine your course of action, potentially losing valuable time optimizing your customers’ experience. This delay can create a distractor from your companies’ customer service level in today’s electronic world, and new’s travels fast!
What is Integrated?
In choosing an integrated solution for your survey, the process is more automated. The results are fed directly into your business intelligence system. Now you can respond to insights quickly by reaching out to your customer and the agent to learn about the issues and address them right away, in real-time. This option allows you the flexibility to modify your current survey or launch new ones based on your newfound insights as your needs grow.
Security
A big part of choosing to outsource and an even more significant part of deciding if you want to have a non-integrated or integrated solution is Security. Depending on the nature of your business, healthcare, finance, or government, caller information needs to be kept secret and secure.
If you’re a healthcare provider, the company you choose must have high levels of HIPAA compliance and any other requirements of your enterprise.
We can Help
The ability for tasks to be automated through integration saves time and money with customer service surveys, automated IVR payments, or simply offering callers 24/7 self-service options.
What types of business issues are you dealing with today? Would an integrated automated solution help you achieve the results you need? Contact us to learn more about our process of understanding your needs and solving your problems.
about the author
Amy Kazarian
Client Relationship Specialist, IVR Technology Group
Focused on the customer experience, Amy is a Client Relationship Specialist with IVR Technology Group. In her role, Amy is responsible for growing automation solutions with our customers to help them improve business performance.