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Proactive outreach, artificial intelligence, automation, predictive routing and calling are essential to connect with the most vulnerable small business customers.

COVID-19 is raging all over the world. The United States is one of the worst-hit countries. So far, it has more than 325,000 deaths (approximately 1% of the U.S. population) and confirmed more than 18 million COVID cases in the United States.
Many American hospitals’ intensive care units (ICU) are full, and many more are close to full.
Governors, mayors, and municipal leaders across the country are enforcing regional lockdowns and full-time orders that have devastating effects on small businesses (the lifeblood of the American economy).
In 2019, small businesses created 44% of U.S. economic activity. Overall, they created two-thirds of net new jobs and promoted U.S. innovation and competitiveness.
When small businesses are hurt, the entire economy is hurt.
Re-entry into the area and blockade may lead to mass layoffs and permanent closure.
However, just before Christmas, the U.S. Congress has reached an agreement on the bipartisan mutual aid bill, some people dare to call it a stimulus bill.

So far, what we know about the salary protection plan. The new $900 billion transactions include $284 billion in PPP, which was reopened after the first two payments: $367 billion in March 2020 and another 2,850 in April 2020.
Billion US dollars, totaling 652 billion US dollars.
Very similar to the first and second iterations of the plan, the third time will be in the form of interest-free loans to small companies, but in issues such as secondary applicants’ qualification loans and other expenses, it may
Significant changes will occur.
This is what we know so far.

Expansion of the scope of expenses: Starting from the first and second PPP (in March 2020 and April 2020), loan exemptions include more expenses.
New eligible expenditures may include operations, property damage costs, supplier costs and worker protection expenditures.

No new taxes: Interest-free loans cannot be taxed.

Easy to apply: Simplified loan application process, the cost does not exceed US$2 million.
Interest-free loans of less than US$150,000 require a one-page online or paper form with a certificate of borrower;

As mentioned earlier, a loan of US$150,000 to US$2 million may also simplify documentation requirements.
Distribution through financial centers: Banks, credit unions, and community lenders will receive applications, review, process, and distribute a new portion of the $267.5 billion PPP loan funds, and an additional 20 billion through the Small Business Administration (SBA)
The dollar’s ​​economy hurts disaster loans).

These are grants to low-income community enterprises.
If you are unsuccessful, please apply again: more eligible companies can apply for PPP funds.
Even if you received a PPP loan last time, you can apply for a so-called PPP2 loan again.
Funds set aside for small businesses, independent contractors and self-employed individuals: As of February 15, 2020, $25 billion of the total appropriation is dedicated to businesses with fewer than 10 employees.
New non-profit organizations and lobbying entities that are now eligible: 501(c)(6) organizations that previously did not qualify for the first round can now borrow in the second round of PPP.
These organizations are the “spokespersons” of chambers of commerce, trade associations, real estate committees, professional associations, certain sports leagues, trade and business alliances.
When the first and second rounds of the “Payroll Protection Program” (PPP) were launched in the spring of 2020, the call volume was too high, the call processing volume was too high, and the waiting time for small business owners to contact the bank for a lifeline were all compromised.
Some applications that were supposed to be processed within a few hours took weeks, but the employees did not have any fault and waited for work, waiting for relief checks.
The third round of PPP is in a very auspicious period: bank employees are still working remotely, many branches remain closed, many payments were stopped a few months ago, people have new concerns about the virus mutation, and Christmas and New Year are coming.
, The new US presidential government is taking shape.
Therefore, many problems for small businesses still exist.
Banks and lenders will need to make their agents and customers as clear as possible and direct the PPP process.

How to improve the process

Proactive outreach, artificial intelligence, automation, predictive routing and calling are essential for outreaching with the most vulnerable customers while ensuring proper staffing levels.
Since many banks have closed branches, they use contact centers as customer experience centers.
They are permanent, dedicated remote teams to facilitate the acquisition and review process of PPP applications to ensure fair, fast and effective processing for their small business customers.

In addition, 82% of financial services and insurance companies consider their contact centers to be strategic assets and unique.
They regard the contact center as the hub of the customer experience, delivering a full range of presentations through the Internet, chatbots, applications, email, SMS and social channels to provide a cohesive and enjoyable experience.
For some banks and lenders, the contact center replaces the retail footprint left by branch closures.

Astercc is a market-leading secure customer banking solution designed to integrate every customer engagement across channels and business lines.
With Astercc’s cloud-native solutions, banks can quickly deploy integrated communications on a flexible and secure platform to provide a differentiated customer experience to build and maintain loyalty.

Speed: Design, implementation, and deployment only take days, not weeks.

Trust: more than 30 cybersecurity certifications, licenses and international data privacy compliance

Scale: Deployed in more than 1,800 enterprises in more than 75 countries/regions worldwide

Astercc can help financial institutions quickly establish a dedicated PPP contact center, manage emergency plans such as PPP in multiple iterations, or use the following advantages to integrate Astercc into your entire contact center platform:

Employee engagement management enables agents to provide excellent customer service at home

Predict dialing to reach three or four times the connection rate

Proactive notification to reduce the volume of incoming calls

The guide is an AI-based self-service knowledge base for agents and customers

The agent assists the supercharging agent through intelligent guidance

Live chat improves real-time customer engagement

Seamless management and configuration of call flow

Video conference integration

Omnichannel provides integrated communications across email, chat, messaging applications and social media remotely enabling your agents and customer relationship managers to work safely and reliably from any location on their mobile device, office, home or customer site.
Astercc can help reduce the average answering speed (ASA) of the agent, the average waiting time of the customer (AWT), improve the efficiency of the agent and increase the customer satisfaction (CSAT) score.
The impact of COVID-19 and the mortgage crisis and the subsequent Great Depression will be one of the greatest experiments of this generation.
Mobilizing bankers to manage these government-supported programs is an outstanding example of dozens, hundreds, and sometimes thousands of bank employees working together to tackle incredible challenges.
Banks and lenders said that the first PPP was issued by the government on a weekend in March, and they had to start accepting applications within 72 hours without much warning, training or recourse.
In the first and second periods of purchasing power parity, banks and lenders must be self-reliant and do their best with specific circumstances in mind.
There are many mistakes, some are forgivable, some are not.
However, banks and lenders have had nearly eight months to lick wounds and are better prepared to serve customers.

To learn more about how Astercc helps banks streamline services and a vertical enterprise-level omni-channel contact center, learn more here.

In this blog post, we discussed the importance of questionnaires after phone interaction and how astercc can help you create the perfect questionnaire.

Feedback is an important part of the process.
Without feedback, we just shoot in the dark and act with blind faith.

For any business, customer feedback is essential.
We know that there can be no business without customers.
In the future, 89% of enterprises will compete mainly based on customer experience.
In such a world, it is important for every company to collect customer feedback on a regular basis to ensure that its customers are satisfied with its products and services.

What is a customer satisfaction (CSAT) survey?

Customer satisfaction survey is a method of collecting feedback from customers, usually in a ratio of 1-5 or 1-10 (1 with the lowest satisfaction and 10 with the highest satisfaction).

For telephone calls, this is usually done through IVR menu options-a message will be played after the call, prompting the caller to choose from a list of menu options based on their satisfaction with the service.

Why is customer satisfaction survey important to the phone?

Voice is a key part of interaction with customers.
By phone, you can establish contact with customers on a personal level.
At the same time, it also poses a challenge-it is difficult to collect feedback on phone interactions.

How to calculate customer satisfaction?

Your customer satisfaction score can be calculated using the following formula:

If your CSAT survey scores 1-5, 1 of them is the most dissatisfied and 5 are very satisfied: 1-2 is a negative answer, and 3 is a neutral answer of 4-5 for affirmative.
For example: if 30 customers out of 50 customers have a score of 4 or 5, your satisfaction score is: 30/50 * 100 = 60%

Use IVR for satisfaction surveys

Some examples of customer satisfaction surveys are:

Are you satisfied with our service today?

If you are satisfied, please press 1, if you are not satisfied, please press 2.

Can we help solve your problem?

If yes, please press 1, otherwise, please press 2.

On a scale of 1-5, where 1 is difficult and 5 is easy, how easy is it for [company name] to deal with the problem?

Advantages of surveys

Through IVR questionnaire survey customers can gain insight into customer satisfaction and analyze the performance of their telephone team.
The satisfaction survey provides you with the overall direction of changes in corporate services and can help you understand the quality of customer service.

Benefits after telephone survey:

Receive real-time customer feedback

Identify areas for improvement in your business or products

Analyze agent performance

Here are some best practices for customer satisfaction surveys:

Answer questions concisely: After the call, your caller will not have the patience to listen to long and complex questions.
Determine exactly what you are asking, and use as few words as possible.
Include a brief introduction: It is usually a good habit to add a brief introduction before your survey question, such as: “Your feedback is important to us” or “Your feedback helps us improve.”
This way, your customers can be confident that their feedback is important and are more likely to give a true answer.

Analyze customer feedback: Now that you have collected feedback, you should focus on customers who are dissatisfied or dissatisfied with the product or service.
Customers will appreciate it when you personally contact them and understand why they are not satisfied.
This insight will also help your business avoid mistakes and improve the customer experience in the future.

How to conduct a satisfaction survey?

Telephone systems such as astercc can help you complete IVR satisfaction surveys within minutes.
Asterccr enables you to customize IVR messages.
You can take advantage of our text-to-speech converter and even record or upload your own message to play to the caller.

Using the astercc call center system, you can enable IVR satisfaction surveys for each incoming and outgoing call.
After each call, the agent is provided with the option to trigger a satisfaction survey.
After the investigation is triggered, an IVR message will be played to the caller and his keystrokes will be recorded.
You can also view the response rate of customer satisfaction surveys, and these results will be attached to their phone calls.
You can also choose to export customer responses, so you can really drill down and analyze customer satisfaction.

What is call drop?
How to calculate the call abandonment rate?
What is the acceptable abandonment rate for call centers?
All of your questions can now be answered.

First of all, let’s understand what is an abandoned call?
As the name suggests, calls that the agent does not answer are calls that the agent gives up.
The call may be abandoned due to the following situations: the caller hangs up before the call is connected to the agent, while waiting in the IVR queue, or they hang up the phone without leaving a voice mail.
There may also be other reasons for the call to be abandoned.
For example, connection problems, phone calls after get off work, etc.

A short and boring definition of call center abandonment rate is as follows:

In the terms of a call center, an abandoned call is a call initiated by the caller to the call center, but ends abruptly before any conversation has occurred.
If you are a customer support manager, call center manager or a business where telephone support is a vital channel, you must constantly monitor the call abandonment rate of the call center.

The call abandonment rate is one of the key call center indicators that help measure the efficiency of the call center.

This is also a standard of the customer experience you present to the caller.
A low call abandonment rate means that most of your callers will be answered.
A high call abandonment rate means you must rethink your call center strategy.

But how do you know if the call abandonment rate is normal?
What is the acceptable abandonment rate for call centers?

This constitutes the premise of this article.
Before proceeding with the discussion, one must understand how to calculate the abandonment rate of a call center.

How to calculate the abandonment rate of a call center

Calculating the correct call abandonment rate helps to evaluate the effectiveness of the call center.
Divide the number of abandoned calls by the total number of calls.
For example, if your contact center receives 1,000 calls and 50 are abandoned, your abandonment rate is 5%.
What is a good abandonment rate for a call center? Considering the reduction of call centers, your call center abandonment rate will inevitably be between 5% and 80%.
However, under special circumstances, it may rise to 20%.
Recent research also shows that one-fifth of calls made from mobile phones are abandoned.
To determine whether the abandonment rate is good or bad, the rule of thumb is to keep the abandonment rate as low as possible.

Several factors affect the rate from time to time, including:

Average answer speed

Service level target

Accuracy of prediction

Workforce management

Call center contraction

Call after get off work

First call resolution rate

Average answer speed

The low average answering speed means that the call center can resolve as many calls as possible in a given time.
However, when it is high, it may be due to the complexity of the problem or shortage of personnel, and the call abandonment rate will change accordingly.

The service level target refers to the proportion of calls answered within a given time period.
For example, an 80/20 service level goal means that 80% of calls are answered within 20 seconds.
High service level targets help minimize call abandonment rates.

Call density prediction. Call center managers use call density prediction to determine peak times during which they will need the largest number of personnel to reach service level goals.
The call abandonment rate will vary based on the call density forecast and the number of seats available to handle it.

Labor management is basically a process used by call center managers to plan seat schedules, determine vacation strategies, set IVR menus, or call routing after get off work.

Call center reduction can be defined as: “The number of seats actively serving customers divided by the number of seats unavailable at the time.” The shrinkage may be due to interruptions, absences or even unplanned downtime.
Needless to say, when the call center shrinkage rate is also higher, the abandonment rate will be higher.

Calls after get off work, in the call center, calls made after get off work are basically abandoned.
The IVR menu can help to a large extent, but customers who are eager to wait in the IVR or want to talk to an agent usually abandon their call.

First call resolution rate, IVR and its self-service menu help to maximize the first call resolution rate (FCR).

Only when FCR is not implemented, the call differs depending on the agent extension.
In other words, a higher FCR means a lower call abandonment rate.

These are some of the factors that affect the call abandonment rate of the call center.
Now, how can call centers maintain a healthy abandonment rate?
The best way to solve the problem is to find the root cause of the problem.

Let’s try to understand the main reasons for the high rate of phone abandonment.

Reasons for high call abandonment rate

Complex IVR menu, navigation time is too long

Invalid call routing cannot enable customers to get solutions faster

The shortage of call center staff makes callers need to wait for a long time

If you want to maintain a normal call abandonment rate, here are what you should and should not do.

How to reduce call abandonment rate

Even with these measures, your call center cannot reduce the call abandonment rate, and these measures can also help.

Inform customers of estimated waiting time

The time the customer waits to play music

Provide self-service (IVR)

Use a team wall or dashboard

Reallocation hours (WFM)

Overflow calls with too long waiting time (callback queue)

Provide self-service (IVR)

The IVR menu has options for obtaining information that users want to ask agents, which can help reduce the abandonment rate.
In effect, they eliminate the need for callers to talk to agents.
The result is that fewer calls will be abandoned.
For example, a bank customer service number with an IVR option can get the latest account balance.

Announce estimated waiting time

The main reason customers disconnect the call while they are on hold is because they don’t know how long they must stay.
Announcing the estimated wasted time can make the caller decide not to disconnect the call.
They will disconnect the call only when the waiting time is too long.

Take up customer time

It is very annoying that the caller can only hear the beep while waiting for a call.
And this only intensifies the caller’s urge to disconnect.
On the other hand, letting them listen to music, latest offers, announcements, etc. during hold time can help reduce call abandonment.
However, even music and announcements that keep time should be used with caution, as their misplacement can lead to a poor customer experience.Reallocation hours (WFM)Call centers usually work according to the time zone of the country or region where they provide support.
However, this may not exactly match the number of hours with the highest call density.Use the team’s dashboard or wall panel

Dashboards or wall panels that display real-time information on key call center indicators can help improve overall team morale.
They can be used as indicators to keep the entire call center in sync with service level goals.
If too many abandoned calls exceed the acceptable threshold, the call center manager can take remedial measures.

Final advice

No call center can avoid giving up the call.
They are natural phenomena in the call center environment.
However, you can control and reduce the call abandonment rate and ensure that appropriate services are provided to all callers.
You can take many steps to achieve this goal.
However, sometimes you need more than just the process but also effective call center software to help you manage things better.

If you want to learn more about our work, please visit www.cn.astercc.com

Build trust with customers and employees through an effective risk communication plan

In today’s fast-changing social development, companies can actively prepare for emergencies, not only can bring minimal risk losses to the company, but can also bring rich returns to the company.

The best feedback on the company’s capabilities is the behavior and response that the company makes when dealing with risks.
If done well, companies will get the opportunity to build long-term trust with customers.
Developing a reviewed risk communication plan will ensure that your organization is prepared to respond to any risks quickly and decisively.

What is the risk?

Risk is everything your business encounters that will hinder the normal development of the business.
This risk can be real or pre-perceived.
It may be caused by global epidemics, natural disasters or human error.
In some cases, the risk should be an event that you can expect, even in this case, it will be beyond your control.
Risks can have a lasting impact on a company’s reputation, brand and profitability.
With proper planning, risk communication plans can mitigate or completely avoid the damage caused by risks.

What is a risk communication plan?

The risk communication plan is a comprehensive and detailed plan that outlines the organization’s communication strategy for dealing with risks.

Why develop a risk communication plan?

Recognizing the potential vulnerabilities of the enterprise and preparing corresponding emergency strategies will enable you to respond quickly and effectively to the risk situation, thereby reducing the long-term damage of the risk.
A good risk communication plan will build trust between your business and customers, employees and investors.

For your employees, risk may bring uncertainty and confusion, which may have multiple impacts on your customers and ultimately on your business.
By clearly communicating the organization’s risk communication plan to employees, they can become the risky public relations army and become your biggest online messenger.

Checklist of effective risk communication plans:

1. Know your weaknesses

Work with business leaders and key stakeholders to determine a list of potential risks. This is called a risk review. These are potential situations that may affect your income and/or reputation.

For example, if you are a financial institution, there may be a risk of data leakage.
If you are a catering company, there is a risk of food poisoning caused by improper food handling.

Many risks can be prevented-by conducting exercises you can highlight areas that need improvement and/or training.
As the saying goes, prevention is better than cure.

2. Who is responsible for control?

Establish a risk management team and outline the chain of command to deal with risks.
Employees and customers will seek answers and guidance from authorities.

3. Who do you want to contact?

Determine the audience groups you need to reach (customer groups, distributors, investors, employees) and the best channels to reach these audiences (phone, email, social media, media).

4. Draft draft

Use senior executives to prepare communication and press release templates based on the blanks and multiple choices that need to be edited.
This will save you valuable time when actual risks occur.

5. Train employees

As part of this planning process, you should provide call center or customer service employees with training on suggested scripts, including what to say and how to respond to inquiries from customers, the media, and other related parties.

6. Obtain legal and management support

Make sure you have the support of the legal and management team.
This will help eliminate any form of misunderstanding that may again cause another risk.

7. Communicate early

Respond quickly and incrementally through a continuous flow of information.
This will prevent the risk from growing out of control and will allow you to control the narrative in the media.
Don’t underestimate the power of social media in shaping public perceptions.

8. Ensure consistent messaging

Ensure that the organization’s messaging on your website, social media, and other platforms is consistent and consistent with your risk communication plan.

9. Establish a risk communication command center

Depending on the situation, you may not be able to access your office.
Ensure that your command center has alternate communications access (phone, email access, etc.) available at all times.

The most effective risk communication plan includes active outreach activities that enable you to build trust with your customers before risks occur.
Then, you build trust with these customers, and they are more likely to forgive any preventable mistakes.
The longer the risk lasts, the greater the impact on your company.
If done well, your organization’s response to risk will help strengthen your organization’s established values.

Having a clearly outlined risk communication plan allows your organization to respond quickly and effectively, thereby mitigating the long-term negative impact on the company’s reputation and profitability.
Likewise, it can bring your employees together and adjust them to support your mission.
Most importantly, it can ensure the health of customers and employees

asterCC has been well received in the past few years for its ease of use, ease of installation, and professionalism in after-sales support. asterCC redesigned our daily telephone system for customer support, sales, IT and HR teams.
It can serve as a central hub for all phone-related activities in the organization, allowing companies to easily activate their call centers in minutes. In addition, asterCC is easy to use and implement reviews, and is touted for its quick response customer support.”AsterCC allows you to customize the service exactly the way you want, and it doesn’t restrict how you use the system.Allowing end users to be creative and build phone systems in their own way will continue to make asterCC a leader in the industry. ”

“I really like the simple setup system, phone numbers, rules, messages. The design of asterCC is very user-friendly. I am very happy because it will provide our customers with professional solutions and let them call us by phone It not only keeps call records, but also enables us to convert to tickets and record notes for each call, thus keeping us organized.We are not in China, asterCC enables us to have a Chinese number abroad so that our Chinese customers can contact us. As we grow, being able to grow into capabilities with more functions is a huge benefit. ”

“The design is simple … we have used the system for teleconferences for agents across the country. It is very easy to download and make calls.”

“AsterCC allows you to set up a complex, intelligent entire contact center for teams, departments and customers from a simple contact channel for customers.It also has a very friendly and beautiful UI.This is a very simple solution, it only takes a few minutes to complete the setup, which is the biggest difference from the competition. ”

The era of cloud PBX

In the cloud era, the business phone system industry has been going through a revolution, and the days of hosting PBXs and physical phone lines are gone. More and more enterprises choose to use cloud PBX systems because they are easy to use, easy to set up, low in cost, and give users a lot of leeway in terms of flexibility.asterCC combines the best traditional managed PBX functions (such as IVR) and advanced functions (such as intelligent upgrades, custom call center analysis) to help companies build the most advanced business call center.asterCC provides virtual phone numbers in more than 90 countries / regions and provides refreshing call center solutions for keen-sighted enterprises.The mission of the asterCC team is to build a modern telephone system that is easy to use and suitable for the needs of enterprises of all sizes and sizes.

Leave your comments here and help us help you better.

Managing a small business is not easy.
Larger companies usually have the advantage of focusing specialized departments on one aspect of the business.If you are running a small business, you may have a lot of titles in financial,marketing, sales, logistics and many other fields.

I know this because I saw my friend running his small company.This was his first venture, and he learned some lessons from his mistakes.However, you do not have to make the same mistake.In this blog, we will introduce some convenient small business management tips.

1. Separate personal and corporate finances

When operating a small business, your personal and business finances may start to get mixed up.Please separate them as soon as possible, which will become a big problem in the future.When you submit a return or apply for a business loan, your financial situation will be reviewed.In this case, you must maintain a strict distinction between corporate and personal accounts, which is very important-this will also save you some trouble in the future.

2. You need a good accountant

I must emphasize this point, hiring a good accountant is absolutely crucial, or if you are outsourcing, make sure you are outsourcing a good accounting firm.When my friend first started a business, it can be said that he hired a less competent accounting firm to manage finances. The company used free financial templates and charged excessive fees for its services.
Substandard.
He eventually evaded the country’s tax declaration.In the end, when he decided to change the company, he encountered many difficultiesIt is best to investigate first to make sure that there are no problems, because if the previous company or accountant’s work is not done well, it may be troublesome to sort out the financial situation.

3. Train employees

You cannot continue to run your own business alone, which is unsustainable and you will be exhausted.Correspondingly, you need to hire the right employees and train them.

Take my friend as an example.
I saw that he did a lot of work simply because he felt that his employees did not meet the requirements.
He will undertake many challenging tasks himself.
After a while, he realized that this was not sustainable.
Because in the end he did not help his employees learn and grow.

When you first start hiring, your workload may not decrease immediately.In fact, the workload will increase over time because you must train new employees.However, this is a reasonable effort, because in the long run, it will make your life easier in the future.

4. Get the right tool

Equipping your team with the right tools can have a major impact on your business.”There are two aspects that distinguish companies from competitors: selling in a modern way that goes beyond traditional sales techniques, and providing excellent customer support. Remember to provide your team with the best tools to achieve these goals!” With the right tools, they can expand smoothly and provide a better customer experience.

As a small business, you cannot maintain finances unorganized, track sales leads or support notices.Using the right technology and tools can save you money and time, and can greatly improve the way you do business.

5. Investment marketing

As a small business, you may not be as famous as a large business.You must let people know the types of products or services you provide.You may provide the best products or services, but people wo n’t line up to buy.They must know your existence.

You should also find the right market channel according to your industry, which channel is best for you-social event or booth?Will digital marketing be better?You must determine which channel is suitable for your audience.

If you ask my friend, he will say that this is one of the earliest mistakes he made-he thinks customers will come knocking on the door.In fact: they don’t.
He also spent a lot of money on digital marketing, and later learned face-to-face meeting prospects and participate in activities, which is much better for his business.Having an employee or team that specializes in marketing may also not be hurt, which is a crucial part of any business-it will help your business gain visibility, attract customers and ultimately generate revenue.