Contact Center

Unified Communications (UC) and its Role in the Contact Center

Wed, 19 Nov 2008 13:49:38 -0500

By Monique Bozeman

At the risk of alienating those drinking or selling the UC Kool-Aid, here's a rose-colored glasses-off summary of what I think, have heard and have read about Unified Communications: you can't define it; it's not new (hard to define in the early 90s too); the vendor landscape is confusing; it's hard to prove ROI and customers are not sure about the value; proof points in actual deployments are limited; most organizations have yet to develop best practices and vendors, analysts, consultants and press have jumped on the bandwagon like lemmings promoting and professing expertise.

What I do love about these jello-like monikers/acronyms - think CTI, CRM, VOIP, UC - and market focus shifts around voice and data, is that the contact center is never far away, given its dominant position as the core interaction touch point with customers. Thus the apt question in an industry panel discussion of representatives from Avaya, Nortel, Genesys, Siemens and Cisco at VoiceCon San Francisco 2008: What role will unified communications tools, systems, architectures play in the contact center?

Before I get into a summary of their answers to that question, what do we mean by Unified Communications? The best attempt I can muster is to echo what two stalwart analysts had to say about UC in various tutorials and market overview sessions earlier in the week. Collectively, these analysts, Gary Audin and Allan Sulkin, have over 50 years experience with voice and data, and you can count on them to call a spade such.

"There is no uniform definition of UC, and what is included depends on who wrote the definition," notes Audin. The many functions include PBX functions and features, IP Telephony, presence and presence management, unified messaging, voice and multimedia conferencing and collaboration. Sulkin, in some random thoughts about UC, points out that UC is a concept, not a technology or single product. He thinks of UC as CTI grown up, meaning telephony systems plus client/servers. And he also skeptically points out that while "the demand for fully-featured UC solutions is moderate, the media continues to hype UC in overdrive mode as if everyone is buying."

So back to the question of UC as it relates to contact centers. The panelists agree the primary role of UC is to have the contact center more hooked into the rest of the organization and vice versa, by making it easier to collaborate back and forth between agents and non-call center experts. Al Baker, of Siemens Enterprise Communications, says it's about bringing collaboration into the contact center and the enterprise online. Contact center agents need assistance, but not from just anyone. He says UC brings expertise, brain ware if you will, into the front line contact center. Jim Hickey of Avaya echoed this sentiment saying access to experts anywhere is the fundamental breakthrough that UC offers the contact center. Nicolas de Kouchkovsky of Genesys sees three things enabled by UC in the Contact Center: collaboration, presence to locate the expertise within the organization and the ability to pass interactions back and forth from the contact center to other experts or groups within the organization.

What didn't get answered for me in this contact-center focused session was a sense of actual penetration of IP in the contact center, which I think is the real precursor to any real traction of UC solutions in the contact center. I'm still on that moniker. What do you think the penetration rate is of IP-enabled formal contact centers?

Monique Bozeman is a contact center industry expert/analyst, marketing consultant, writer and speaker. She can be reached at monique@moniquebozeman.com

Ifbyphone lands $4.6M in funding

Pete Wylie — Mon, 17 Nov 2008 14:01:50 -0500

Ifbyphone, the Skokie, Ill.-based voice app company, announced the closing of $4.6 million in Series B funding. Origin Ventures and Apex Ventures, which both invested in Ifbyphone's first round of funding, led this round as well.

Ifbyphone CEO Irv Shapiro said the company planned to use the capital infusion to continue to expand its infrastructure, to more aggressively pursue the mid-market, and to market the company more actively.

"We want to improve our ability to handle the needs of the middle market," Shapiro said. "Ifbyphone technology can automate the answering of routine call center calls, like delivery dates and hours of operation, which can be up to 25 percent of total call volume."

Shapiro said the expanded marketing operations would help to reach potential customers who might find Ifbyphone's services very attractive in a recessionary environment. He said customer support remained a top priority for the company, and he claimed that the company doesn't have customers, it just has raving fans.

One such fan is Wayne Boulais, general partner of Apex Ventures, which led both fundraising rounds.

"Ifbyphone was an attractive investment because it's successfully capitalizing on two trends," Boulais said. "It's providing low-cost VoIP services very reliably, and its compatibility with Asterisk is changing the possibilities in exciting and flexible ways. Shapiro is an experienced entrepreneur, and we've been pleasantly surprised with the company's performance."

Boulais said Ifbyphone's customer retention and conversion rates were high, and the company was well suited in challenging economic times, because of good testing methods and low barriers of adoption by customers due to an aggressive pricing scheme.

For more:
- see ifbyphone's press page here

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Ifbyphone, Top VoIP Company 2008: FierceVoIP, Fierce 15
Ifbyphone mashes call data to Google Analytics

Fonality, Top VoIP Company 2008: FierceVoIP, Fierce 15

Mon, 03 Nov 2008 16:49:38 -0500

Fonality

Where it's based: Los Angeles, Calif.
When it was founded: 2003
Website: www.fonality.com

Why it's Fierce: VoIP out of the City of Angels? Founder Chris Lyman took Asterisk and put the pieces together for an affordable turn-key IP PBX solution for businesses based on off-the-shelf hardware and an variant of Asterisk. The company has continued to grow at a rapid clip once they started shipping PBXtra. Additional features rolled into Fonality's products include call/contact center support, auto-configuration of IP handsets across the LAN, some very cool dashboard/monitoring features, and the introduction of unified communication and mobility functions.

Fonality has grown at an average monthly rate of 10 percent, achieved profitability in 2006, and has been increasing call volumes at a rate of 400 percent per year for the past three years. And 16 successive quarters of record growth. Did we mention they established a partnership with Dell in early 2008 and locked up $12 million in venture money in September 2008? Seriously, Fierce, ba-be!

CONTACT CENTER CORNER: Wading Through the Quagmire That Is Reporting and Analytics

Thu, 30 Oct 2008 11:00:50 -0400

By Monique Bozeman

Analytics applications are hot, still emerging, mixed in with more mature applications and well, very confusing. Research analysts attempt to categorize, re-categorize and coin market segment terminology, niche vendors strive to extend beyond their core competency and claim functionality they may yet be growing into, and larger suite vendors move to add an analytics piece -all in search of market stature, wallet share and longevity.

In doing my own structural market analysis, I have a compiled a running list of over thirty-five different market segments for reporting and analytics that touch the contact center depending on which definition you use: channels covered, functions performed and analyst's origins of expertise. Contact Center Performance Management, Customer Experience Analytics, Interaction Analytics, Service Process Integration, Workforce Optimization, Operational Analytics, Web Analytics, Speech Analytics, Multi-Channel Campaign Management ... and the list goes on.

I'm not about to attempt to clarify the market structure in a mere 500-word column, in no small part because I myself am still wading through buzz words, market buckets and overlap. Stay tuned. What I will attempt to do is set up a very simplistic view and provide a few key questions you'll want to ask yourself and prospective vendors.

Lest we forget, at the heart of any analysis is a desire to gain an understanding of the data so that you can take some action to effect change. The goal is to get good data, see it in a visually pleasing report format, analyze it, understand it and act on it so that you can reduce costs and improve your customers' experience, your operations and ultimately your bottom line. My educated but unsubstantiated guess, taking into account my own first-hand experience as a consumer, is the majority of companies still don't know in any truly meaningful way who is contacting them, how often, for what reasons and by what combination of paths.

Here are a few key questions you need to ask yourself and vendor prospects during the evaluation of analytics applications:

Can we get good data and critical mass to support analysis? One of the biggest obstacles to good analysis is getting at good data. Organizations should also understand the requirements and dependencies a software solution may have on the data it's fed in order to actually make real use of the information.

How basic or sophisticated an application do we really need? Applications run the gamut from very basic to very sophisticated. Do you really need a sledgehammer to crack a walnut? Or do you want to buy a solution you can grow into, such as one that has the ability to do cross-channel analysis whether your focus is marketing campaign effectiveness or customer experience analysis?

When the vendor deployment team leaves, will we really be able to use the application ourselves with the skill set we have, or will we require ongoing vendor or outside consulting resources to make the application sing? Knowledge is power and historically, only a few experts within an organization, residing no doubt deep in the bowels of the company in a windowless office next to Milton in the basement, provide insights. One of the key benefit statements you will find on every other product data sheet you pick up is ease-of- use interfaces and roles-based views and reports--- in other words, extending the ability to gain insight across the organization to various user groups.

Do we want a software as service (SaaS), usually pronounced sass, or a premise-based deployment option? Some vendors offer both deployment models but usually lean more heavily towards one or the other or only offer one option. Many emerging analytics applications are trending towards the SaaS model with most web analytics vendors offering a SaaS solution. Any privacy and security concerns need to be addressed, as well as whether IT or business units will be the first line of support.

Do you need really require real-time or near real-time analysis for what you are trying to find out? This criterion is important to ask internally. Often real-time analysis is critical to point to changes you can actually make pretty quickly to affect operational performance. Analysis that will point to changes and recommendations that will take time to implement don't really require real-time reporting and analysis.

Finally and most importantly, if you find the right analytics application(s) and do the analysis, will you/can you really fix the issues highlighted by the insight? We've all worked in organizations where a flurry of activity is mistaken for productivity and effectiveness, where folks would rather move papers around on a desk rather than effect real, but sometimes painful change. Will your company really make the changes the analysis and insights point to? Believe it or not, many don't. If not, save your money and go ask Milton where that one analyst in your basement hides.

Monique Bozeman is a contact center industry expert/analyst, marketing consultant, writer and speaker. She can be reached at monique@moniquebozeman.com

CONTACT CENTER CORNER: Web 2.0 Apps – Better Than Call Center Support?

Wed, 15 Oct 2008 14:34:03 -0400

By Monique Bozeman

I'm a marketing person by nature, but I do have a manifest geek gene that pops up from time to time, driving me to late night surfing of sites billed as news for nerds. I guess that accounts for me being among the 3 percent of woman (I'm guessing) who listen to podcasts like Leo Laporte and his roundtable of techies waxing on about the latest technology trends. So emboldened, I try to tackle the odd technical problem such as installing a new sound card (I said I was a marketing person), or troubleshooting whether the issue is with the cable modem, wireless router or my computer LAN port connection. (I had almost forgotten about that nightmare and the finger-pointing responses, but I digress.)

I, like many of you, run into problems, not limited to technical support quests, and find myself calling into my vendor's call center and initiating a chat session, often simultaneously, to see which channel can solve my problem the fastest. Forget email, unless I'm sending it to another customer I've found on a discussion board or forum. That brings me to what I see as the yet untapped, unharnessed and still-gelling customer service potential of a relatively new set of applications. The world of Web 2.0 tools like wiki's, blogs, forums and online support communities, which usually fall under the umbrella term social media, are online applications that can foster sharing and discussing experiences with people in more efficient ways.

Wikis are just one form of collaborative social media - a type of website where visitors can easily share, edit, manage and expand online the knowledge of many. Wiki is the Hawaiian word for quick; the first wiki was created by American computer programmer Ward Cunningham in 1995, according to Wikipedia, the best know wiki to date. Blogs, short for web logs, are postings usually by a single person on a particular topic with folks commenting with posting organized with the most recent entry first.

Cone LLC, a Boston-based strategy and communications agency engaged in building brand trust, recently conducted a study on business in social media based on the findings of an online survey of just over a thousand American respondents completed in September of this year. Survey participants were over the age of 18 and almost equally split among men and women.

Sixty percent of those surveyed say they use social media, and, of those who do, 93 percent believe a company should have a presence in social media, and 85 percent believe a company should not only be present but interactive with its consumers via social media, according to Cone's results. Those responsible for customer service channel strategy should zero in on the fact that 43 percent of the social network users surveyed think companies should use social networks to solve their problems, and 56 percent reported they "feel both a stronger connection with and better served by companies when they can interact with them in a social media environment."

Contact Centers still struggling with core operational pains of high agent turnover and a shortage of well-trained agents could benefit from using social media applications as another customer service channel by leveraging customers as experts. There are well documented hurdles to establishing more formal, monitored and measured Web 2.0 applications, especially IT department and employee resistance and the lack of formal managing and monitoring or measuring. A recent report by Forrester Research says one in five firms have not measured the value of Web 2.0 deployments. However, as the Cone survey indicates, social media applications are being used today by customers. And to use Clay Shirky's analysis from Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations, "The invention of tools that facilitate group formation is less like ordinary technological change and more like an event, something that has already happened."

I wouldn't turn over customer service entirely to the natives, as some start-ups promoting social media customer service software solutions enthusiastically advocate, but customer knowledge and input can and should be harnessed with social media.

Viewing these Web 2.0 applications as mere consumer technologies is an underestimation by organizations. These forums, blogs and wikis can be great customer self-service assets for both customers and organizations, and they can form important feedback loops into the rest of the organization through product management, marketing and engineering.

Savvy companies will see the value sooner rather than later to both their service organization and customer base in promoting, managing and most importantly mining these social networking tools as yet another interaction channel to get and give useful information. Who knows? Customers may indeed provide better, faster, and more accurate answers that we are getting with live agent support.

Monique Bozeman is a contact center industry expert/analyst, marketing consultant, writer and speaker. She can be reached at monique@moniquebozeman.com

Planning and pondering UC

Doug Mohney — Wed, 08 Oct 2008 23:35:33 -0400

Adding mobility to the UC equation has only made life more interesting for enterprise planners. After all, planners already need to worry about business process improvement, individual end user requirements and technology implementation alternatives.

Art Rosenberg over at UCstrategies.com rolls out a lengthy analysis on how to set priorities in mapping out UC implementation planning. A "top-down" approach is recommended to get the best efficiencies out of applying UC practices and technologies, as UC affects not only internal business processes, but also touches partners and customers involved in a process.

Contact centers - the traditional haunt of CTI and UC practices - get a workout since UC technology is getting the best bang for buck spent by more efficiently handling customer calls and aiding in customer retention (i.e. get to the customer faster, customer is happier).

At the end of the piece, there's a list of eight questions worth circulating to your UC planning committee/team to stimulate discussion and debate.

For more:
- Art Rosenberg's blog on UC for the Enterprise at ucstrategies.com

FORD: Skype Me, Asterisk Us

Thu, 02 Oct 2008 09:53:42 -0400

by Carl Ford

Mark Spencer had been working on projects delivering drivers and writing code that was specific to boards. Being part of the open source experience, he saw that his work could be built into something bigger that would allow the extraction of call control into an open source project that could be used for anything.

When you ask people about Asterisk, the label of "PBX" is placed on it. But that is not accurate, since it's an open source system that has call control ability. Most developers I know use the Asterisk system as a PBX in their homes as a hobby and use it as an application platform at work for their carrier employers. While at Astricon, I met people who use the system as an IP-PBX, and others who use it specifically for its ability to enhance call centers.

With Skype, like Asterisk, the starting premise is not about connecting to the PSTN, but creating something new. Using the same peer-to-peer model that is in Kazaa, Skype proceeded to deliver a new model of call control that was self organizing and used Instant Messaging as the signaling method to communicate.

This brings us to Skype's main impact. The soft client can be used to connect to people on social networks, blogs and web sites. Regardless of your connection to Skype, you can connect to people on Skype. Some people say it is like having an 800 number for the Internet.

Now the same functionality will be available to connect through to call centers using Asterisk. Since Asterisk is capable of being more than just a PBX, it can be used as an Automatic Call Distributor or just as a gateway to support the "trunk/lines" coming in from Skype.

Want to have global reach? Skype with Asterisk allows a lot of new incoming calls -- calls that may require call center staff to develop new talents. I have a friend who teaches for American Accent who has taught me how to better understand people when they speak English with accents, which may become standard training as Skype with Asterisk is deployed in call centers.

Best of all, from my perspective, is the lack of the PSTN in this model. At a time when regulators are trying to see everything VoIP as a taxable item, I would like to think that the public good is seen in the ability to drive worldwide commerce to a business near you.

Carl Ford is Strategic Adviser and Community Developer for FierceMarkets. His words of wisdom can be found at www.carlford.net.

Fonality dials up HUD to 3.0

Doug Mohney — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 16:23:39 -0400

Fonality has released HUD 3.0, the latest upgrade to its unified communications platform.

HUD ties presence management and detection into a single interface. New features added include SMS support and Google Talk integration; Google Talk provides a federation capability to communicate with users outside of the standard business HUD group, so desktop and mobile (BlackBerry & iPhone) users are available for presence and messaging.

A mobile presence feature adds visual presence to other users when a cell phone is logged into the system; presence is extended into queues and conferencing. There's also a visual conference feature that enables drag and drop of calls into conferences, plus ways to create permissions for recording, muting, and removing calls - adding a photo to ID a caller is an option.

Like everyone else these days, HUD adds a visual voice mail feature to allow users to search, sort, play, and save messages from a desktop.

To top it all off, HUD enables "visual queue" management for call center queues, providing a virtual wall board to show agents and managers all calls in queue. Managers can drag and drop calls onto agents and set alerts to notify when calls have been holding too long or when an abandoned call has occurred.

For more:
- Fonality announces HUD 3.0. Release.

CONTACT CENTER CORNER: Pro-active Customer Contact, Part 4 - Learning From the Leaders

Doug Mohney — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 11:22:39 -0400

By Joe Outlaw

There are countless stories of how enterprises have reduced their contact center operating costs by improving center and agent utilization with the additions of outbound and blending customer contact applications. There are also many stories of increased agent satisfaction and retention as a result of well-managed outbound campaigns, such as Avaya's Proactive Contact customer, The Altman Group's proxy solicitation service, and Interactive Intelligence's Interaction Dialer customer Health Benefits Direct, an independent health insurance broker.

Healthcare
One of Cisco's outbound contact applications customers, a healthcare insurance provider, has a successful disease management application. The application proactively reaches out to recently diagnosed persons to be sure they follow, or are at least aware of, their healthcare coverage and the protocols to get treatment. By actively treating diabetes, for example, the disease is better managed, progression is slowed and costs of treatment are reduced. The application is also used for early-stage heart disease patients.

Cable
Aspect Software has a cable company customer using its Unified IP contact center suite that has deployed a number of proactive customer contact applications. Among these applications are service appointment reminders, special service request status update notifications, outage notifications with status updates, and completed work order notifications with optional customer feedback surveys.

Utilities
Genesys' customer Tampa Electric serves over 650,000 residential and commercial customers in West Central Florida. They notify customers using a Genesys Voice Portal-based application for scheduled maintenance and emergency outages, such as those caused by hurricanes. They also provide proactive periodic updates of the status of efforts to restore power transmission services.

Gaming
Genesys customer Betfair is a UK-based sports betting company. It uses Genesys's Outbound Voice and Express Mail applications to dramatically increase the effectiveness of its customer outreach program. Having its agents better prepared with customers' betting history and preferences before proactively contacting them has been the key to driving new business growth with these customers.

Part 1 in this series introduced the business drivers for pro-active customer contact, Part 2 reviewed the leading-edge business uses of pro-active customer contact solutions and services, and Part 3 compared some of the leading pro-active customer contact solutions and services on the market.

Joe Outlaw is President and Chief Analyst of Outlaw Research, a firm that provides results-oriented analysis and consulting of the customer contact marketplace. The objective of Outlaw Research is building a community around the leading edges of customer contact -- the advanced strategies early-adopter companies are applying and the technologies and vendors they are working with.

CONTACT CENTER CORNER: Proactive Customer Contact, Leading-Edge Solutions

Wed, 03 Sep 2008 09:07:20 -0400

By Joe Outlaw

The available solutions to support proactive customer contact run the gamut from single function to multi-function, from stand-alone to fully integrated with other customer contact systems, and from premise-based to hosted. And, any combination of these capabilities and attributes is also available.

Single Function vs. Multi-Function

Single function solutions or, more accurately, solutions with a small number of features/functions are at one end of the spectrum. These can include basic alerting from most of the leading contact center vendors, including Avaya, Aspect Software, Cisco, Interactive Intelligence and Genesys as well as specialty or best-of-breed vendors, such as Envox for outbound IVR and MIR3, or Premiere Global, and Varolii for alerting.

Excellent multi-function solutions, those that support a broad range of proactive customer contact applications (outbound IVR-based, automated dialing, alerting, customer feedback), are also available from the leading contact center vendors, listed above.

Stand-alone vs. Fully-Integrated

There is still a healthy selection of stand-alone customer feedback solutions from vendors including: CDC Respond, Metatude, Qualtrics, Ransys, RatePoint, ResponseTEK, Statmetrics, Vovici and Zoomerang. There are also a few stand-alone IVR platforms and automated dialers available, such as from Envox and SER. But, as I mentioned earlier in this series, the demand for stand-alone or point solutions for proactive contact is fading as the recognition that more comprehensive approaches are more effective.

Fully integrated proactive customer contact solutions are available from the leading contact center vendors, as well as from systems integrators who build the linkages between a set of third party components.

Premise-based vs. Hosted

Almost all of the leading proactive customer contact solutions are either premise-based or hosted. The economic trade-offs of these two alternatives are well known. Other considerations for choosing hosted services include rapidly changing technology and relative scarcity of experienced speech application developers -- in the case of outbound IVR applications, and seasonality or extreme peaks in demand --- such as for alerting services.

Particularly Noteworthy

Interactive Intelligence's Interaction Dialer now supports "skills-based dialing" which analyzes the requirements of the customers on the target contact list and selects/calls only contacts that can be effectively handled by the available agent pool.
Aspect Software's Unified IP supports the broadest range of dialing options (preview, power, predictive, progressive and precision) and offers an optional Advanced List Management capability, which supports multi-tenant deployments and multiple dialers, at multiple sites, on multiple databases.

Part 1 in this series introduced the business drivers for proactive customer contact, Part 2 reviewed the leading-edge business uses of proactive customer contact solutions and services, and Part 4 will highlight proactive customer contact success stories.

Outlaw: News from SpeechTEK 2008

Thu, 21 Aug 2008 15:46:07 -0400

By Joe Outlaw

Historically, SpeechTEK has been a developer's conference, and I found that to be pretty much true at SpeechTEK 2008 in New York City. There was, perhaps, less talk about new state-of-the-art platforms and VXML than in the past couple of years and more emphasis on the business value of speech-enabled applications. The speech industry is maturing and the focus has moved beyond proving that speech technology is ready to deploy, to bringing down the complexity and cost of deployments. Announcements from Genesys and Nexidia exemplify the new movement .

Genesys announced the availability of the latest version of its Genesys Voice Platform (GVP) release 8. Release 8 is the first fully converged version of its voice platform, combining the best of the acquired VoiceGenie platform and the previous GVP releases. Among the enhancements in GVP 8 are: increased scale, tighter integration with the Genesys contact center suite and an enhanced development environment. Applications written for either the VoiceGenie platform or the previous GVP release will operate on the new GVP 8. In addition to making the Eclipse-based applications development environment more visual and intuitive, Genesys announced they are making steady progress toward making it the development environment for the full Genesys Suite.

Nexidia announced the latest version of its speech analytics solution, the Nexidia Enterprise Speech Intelligence (ESI) 7.0. ESI 7.0 brings improvements in performance, scalability and usability. As mentioned above about GVP 8, ESI 7.0 is more visual and intuitive than previous versions and supports new dashboards for more quickly identifying trends and anomalies in contact center-customer interactions. Nexidia also announced Quickstart libraries of customizable pre-defined search routines that both speeds the creation and lowers the cost of speech searches. Nexidia has created Quickstart libraries for regulatory compliance, competitive strategy and business process improvement.

Case Studies Presentated at SpeechTEK

Boston Medical Center deployed a speech-based application for monitoring the health of patients with chronic conditions such as diabetes and obesity. The over-the-telephone speech recognition application running on the Envox 7 platform conducts patient interviews to determine their condition, and then provides information, advice and coaching. The capability to monitor patients over-the-telephone instead of in an office visit enables more frequent monitoring and makes recommendations more affordable and less strenuous and stressful for patients.

AAA of Washington state is Washington's largest emergency road service provider, insurance provider and travel agency. It supports its one million members through its 350-person contact center. Recently it invested in a new voice recording system from Verint Witness Actionable Solutions (WAS) and also began to use the speech analytics functionality of the Impact 360 suite.

Like many other contact centers, in addition to system reports, it gathers anecdotal insights into how the center is operating from its agents and supervisors. Often these informal insights are enough to find and correct problems. AAA Washington found the value of adding a more scientific approach with speech analytics. Verint WAS's speech analytics is now being used to analyze the center's recorded interactions with its members. So far, it has found root causes for spikes in call volumes, long duration calls and occasionally, agent misbehavior. In addition to finding hidden center inefficiencies or root causes of member dissatisfaction, the analytics application has provided detailed support for anecdotally reported issues, which has been useful to gain management support necessary to fix the issues.

SpeechTEK: The Bottom Line

Having tracked speech technology's application for customer contact and attended speech conferences for more than 10 years, I conclude that:

Speech technology is ready for deployment in support of enterprise businesses.
IVR and voice portal platforms have become reliable, scalable and affordable and, if not completely based on industry standard hardware and software, much less proprietary than in the past.
Application languages and development environments have become more standards-based, intuitive and accessible.
Actual speech-enabled application development, while steadily improving, can still be as much art as science.
The cost of custom speech-enabled application development and support, while gradually decreasing, is still relatively high.
Both the number of speech-enabled application developers and the variety of industry-specific applications are growing steadily.

These are all signs of a healthy growing industry; good for the industry -- good for its customers.

CONTACT CENTER CORNER: Pro-active Customer Contact - Much More Than Tele-Marketing

Doug Mohney — Thu, 14 Aug 2008 10:27:53 -0400

By Joe Outlaw

Traditionally, pro-active customer contact has meant tele-marketing, tele-sales and outbound calling for debt collection. These activities are still a large part of most business' uses of pro-active contact. However, driven by growing competitive and economic pressures, leading enterprises across many industries are turning to pro-active contact to cement and grow profitable customer relationships. They are using a wide variety of business applications supported by an equally wide variety of technologies.

Applications of Pro-Active Customer Contact

Among the growing uses of pro-active customer contact are:

Calling or messaging customers directly based on customer lists for customer service or sales purposes.
Outbound manual and automated calling or messaging customers
- one way messaging - to deliver a message such as, "This is a message from Yuki's Flowers. Your flowers were delivered at 1:25 PM on Monday, April 4. Thank you for your business".
- interactive messaging - to deliver a message with optional additional information or assisted service such as, "This is a courtesy message from BigCo. All our canoes will be on sale this weekend. Press 1 or stay on the line to hear more details about this sale." Or, "This is to confirm your appointment on Tuesday at 9 AM with Dr. Smith; press 1 or stay on the line to be connected with Dr. Smith's office to change your appointment."
Calling or messaging customers to obtain feedback on their products/services or customers' recent interactions with the company.
- these surveys can be based on recent interactions, such as immediately after a customer call to customer service or soon after a purchase, delivery or installation.
- these surveys can also be related to a company event, such as a marketing campaign or customer segment analysis, or they can be randomly solicited.

Technologies Which Support Pro-active Customer Contact

Just as there are many uses of pro-active customer contact there are many technologies and solutions to support these contacts. They include:

automated dialing applications, which can be operated in various states of automation, such as power, preview and predictive
automated interactive voice response platform-based outbound applications
notification or alerting applications, which can be event-driven or based on pre-defined schedules and which can support various modes and media, including e-mail, text messaging and pre-recorded speech
automated survey and customer feedback applications
widgets, which are Web-based applications to offer either live chat or live-person telephone-based service

Pro-active customer contact solutions can run the gamut from single function, point solutions such as simple alerts to comprehensive programs that would be fully integrated with inbound customer contact solutions, customer information systems and contact center applications. The point solutions, as well as the more comprehensive inbound/outbound contact center systems, can be deployed as either in-house or customer-premises based, outsourced as hosted services or a combination of in-house and outsourced.

Part 1 in this series introduced the business drivers for pro-active customer contact, Part 3 in this series will compare some of the leading pro-active customer contact solutions and services on the market, and Part 4 will highlight pro-active customer contact success stories.

CONTACT CENTER CORNER: Pro-active Customer Contact, Part 1: Why The Time Is Right

Wed, 06 Aug 2008 16:06:43 -0400

By Joe Outlaw

Given my focus on the leading edges of customer contact you might wonder why I would be writing a series of articles about pro-active customer contact. Haven't outbound calling, auto dialers, and tele-marketing been around for years? Yes, but despite the obvious value of outbound contact for some businesses and the maturity of the technologies, most companies still do not employ service-related pro-active customer contact. Instead, almost 80 percent rely entirely on their customers to contact them for questions, problems, and even, in the case of many Internet-based businesses, for sales.

So, calling customers, per se, is not new. What is new is that leading companies, are discovering the strategic business value of comprehensive approaches to pro-active customer contact. They are leveraging customer and product information from across the enterprise to reach out to their customers with personalized service messages and sales offers to cement and grow profitable relationships. For the real leading-edge companies their pro-active customer contact initiatives are an integral part of their unified communications strategies, i.e. their internal and external communications strategies are intertwined and synergistic.

Reactive-only Customer Contact Is Not Good Enough Anymore

Depending upon the industry your company competes in you may already be feeling the competitive pressures to be more pro-active with your customers. Historically, the more commoditized industries have relied disproportionately on services for differentiation to create/maintain competitive advantage. And, not surprisingly, these same industries are leading the pro-activity movement. Increasingly global competition and a weak North American economy are two of the macro business drivers for pro-active customer contact, but there are also micro drivers, including:

to improve the efficiency of the customer contact organization;
to increase customer retention and loyalty;
to increase revenues and expand business with current customers; and
to add new customers.

Pro-Active Customer Contact: Improving Call Center Operations

Improving the efficiency of the customer contact organization for most companies, means the doing more with less in their customer service group and call centers. Due to the inherent peaks and valley in incoming customer call traffic, making pro-active customer calls during the lulls for incoming calls makes use of previously unused people's and systems' capacity. Other benefits include:

reductions in inbound calls -- e.g. shipping notifications eliminate the need shipment status calls from customers;
job diversity for call center agents -- often, but I appreciate not always, viewed as positive and job enriching by agents; and
reduction of customer complaints -- again, pro-active notification of problems can eliminate complaint calls, which I think I can safely say always has a positive impact on agents' job satisfaction and usually on turnover.

Pro-Active Customer Contact: Increasing Customer Retention and Loyalty

Pro-actively contacting customers with service information useful to them or with personalized sales offers is generally viewed by customers as positive and brand reinforcing. These positive effects have been shown to contribute to customer loyalty and increased purchases from the pro-active company over time. Frederick Reicheld, author of The Loyalty Effect, in researching successful companies, discovered the longer they retained a customer the more profitable that customer become for them. Likewise, I am sure everyone is tired of hearing that it is significantly less costly to retain current customers than to acquire new ones. Although, based on how many companies treat their customers its clear not everyone believes those economics.

A related topic, much in the news these days, is first contact resolution, which is also promoted as a way call centers can improve its customers' positive attitudes toward the company and thereby their loyalty. By pro-actively contacting customers with valuable service information, you cannot just resolve their questions/problems/concerns more effectively you can eliminate the need for their calls in the first place. The fourth article in this series will be all about leading customer examples, but one that fits here is the flower delivery company, which eliminated 80 percent of its incoming calls by pro-actively contacting customers to let them know their flowers had been delivered.

Pro-Active Customer Contact: Increasing Revenues

Pro-actively contacting customers should have as minimum goals to reduce your expenses and increase your customers' positive attitudes toward your company and its products/services. Increasingly, enterprises are adding revenue goals for their call centers and pro-active contact is becoming the leading way to achieve these. Call centers with these new revenue goals quickly discover that customers calling with problems and complaints are not as likely to respond positively to sales offers as pro-actively contacted customers are. In addition, when working with B2B customers the person calling with a problem is often not the appropriate person in the organization to respond to a sales offer.

Pro-Active Customer Contact: Adding New Customers

Adding new customers, usually the primary responsibility of the sales and marketing groups can be impacted by the call center through pro-active customer contact. And, I don't mean by calling prospects in the classic tele-marketing sense. It is of course a generalization, but happy customers tell their friends and pro-active customer contact can, as mentioned above, have a positive effect on customers and brand loyalty. There are many other strategies and technologies for supporting customer communities, such as forums, and social networking, which I will discuss in future articles, but the point here is that pro-active customer contact can play a part in generating positive customer recommendations.

Part 2 in this series will explore the components of pro-active customer contact programs, Part 3 will compare some of the leading pro-active customer contact solutions on the market, and Part 4 will highlight pro-active customer contact success stories.

CONTACT CENTER CORNER: RADVISION Adds Video to Cisco Contact Center

Doug Mohney — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 14:34:33 -0400

RADVISION is providing integrated voice communications for Cisco's Unified Customer Voice Portal (CVP).

With the new solution, RADVISION's SCORPIA Integrated Video Platform (IVP) and iCONTACT content center video-enabling software component provide Cisco's CVP with the capability for video interactions, including self-service, queuing, and agents.

Video enabling the call center provides a number of features and benefits, including video menus for a more intuitive caller experience, video self-service with prerecorded or live videos, video queuing (think videos instead of music on hold), and video agent support allowing agents to push additional pre-recorded or live video content to callers. Support is provided for 3G video-enabled mobile devices and video kiosks for broad user access and reach.

Video support for the call center might sound a little "out there," but it ties in nicely with Cisco's ongoing theme/push of visual networking and video becoming ubiquitous. Dialogic has also touted the potential for bringing video into the IVR and call center environments, so it's not just Cisco that's promoting the concept.

For more:
- RADVISION release on video-enabling Cisco Contact Center

Related articles:
Dialogic goes video hog wild
Comcast buys Plaxo for ... video?

Outlaw: Is Your Call Center Killing Your Business?

Mon, 21 Jul 2008 14:59:10 -0400

By Joe Outlaw

"Of course not!" you say. Don't be so sure.

First, let me say I appreciate there are many call centers filled with enthusiastic, knowledgeable, and customer-focused people doing their very best to address customers' questions and problems. I also know there are many call centers applying the latest techniques and technologies to make their people both efficient and effective in support of their missions. But having positive attitudes and working hard while necessary are not sufficient to ensure your call center is helping your business not hurting it.

One very significant question to ask yourself about your organization and its call centers is how aligned with the core business strategies of the organization are they? Dimension Data, in its past several year's annual global contact center survey of large enterprises, found that less than half viewed their customer service organizations and call centers as strategic to their businesses. If your enterprise's call centers are fully aligned with your business strategies consider yourself lucky, but don't stop there in determining if your call centers are doing all they can to help your business.

Your Call Centers: Helping or Hurting --- 10 Questions to Consider

1. How open for business are you?

Is your call center operated only from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday throgh Friday, or is it open 24 hours a day, 7 days a week? The key here is not how many hours your call center is open, but whether your customers can access people or applications for help when they need it or when it is convenient for them. The right answer is not necessarily 7x24, but whatever is appropriate for your target market customers.

2. How easy to do business with are you?

This is a topic for several books, but some of the customer service and call center considerations include:

Do your people speak your customers' languages--actual language (English, Spanish, French ...) as well as the specific language of your products/services (plumbing parts, cell phones, landscaping)?
Do your applications (voice and web) speak your customers' languages and are they intuitive and easy-to-use?
Do you always offer live-person help as an option in your automated customer applications?
Are your call centers adequately staffed to provide minimal wait times to speak with an agent?
Are your agents trained, equipped, and organized to provide prompt service? This raises several important topics in addition to ensuring agents are properly trained and experienced in the use of the tools provided, including: Do your call center systems have sufficient capacity to operate with sub-second response even under their peak loads? Are your agent processes streamlined and all bottlenecks and redundancies removed, such as duplicate data entry and logging on/off multiple applications to access information or to make changes?
Are your automated customer applications available, fast, and responsive?

3. Can your customers get answers to their questions and problems?

I am not talking about the customer is always right or whether your company should always give customers the answers they want. That would be determined by your business strategy. In your call centers, the question is just whether you are providing your customers with any answers to their questions and resolutions to their problems. For this, the issues include:

Are your call center people fully trained to do their jobs, such as how to operate the necessary systems and how to interact with customers?
Are your call center people and applications supported by the necessary customer and product information to answer questions and resolve problems?
Are your call center people empowered to resolve customers' problems, at least the majority of those that reach the center?
How successful are you at resolving customers' questions/issues during their first contact?
For questions/issues you cannot answer during the first contact, do you have escalation and follow-up processes to close the loop in time frames acceptable to your customers?
Are you able to effectively deal with questions about the "off-label" uses of your products or interactions with your products and 3rd-party products?
Are you providing customers with consistent answers and resolutions across all of your customer interaction points, in-person at your stores or branch offices, calls to your call centers, on your web site?

4. Are you providing personalized service to your customers?

When customers contact your call centers, can you quickly access information about them and provide services and offering which are tailored to that customer? Can you do this across all of your customer interaction points?

5. If your products/services are sold through partners and resellers how well are those customers supported? Are your partners and resellers using the same systems or are their systems fully linked with yours in order to provide seamless service?

6. Do you provide pro-active service to your customers? Do you reach out to your customers to provide useful information and offerings or do you wait for them to contact you?

7. How closely are you monitoring your customers' satisfaction with your products/services? Do you know whether your customers' questions/issues are being addressed successfully by your call center? Really, based on actual responses from those customers or something else, like a report that lists closed tickets?

8. Does your call center support both customer service and sales? Of course, it depends upon your business strategies, but if your call centers only interact with your customers for service while a separate organization only interacts with them for sales, how can you even hope to provide your customers with consistent, let alone accurate information during those interactions. Likewise, if your company is not in some way leveraging its call centers' customer interactions for sales purposes it is missing a great many opportunities.

9. Have you struck the right balance between effectiveness and efficiency in the management of your centers? Are you still operating your call centers primarily as cost center with a heavy emphasis on efficiency? Alternatively, have you found a balance between how well and how cost-effectively they provide services to your customers? While this balance point may move depending on the company's success and market dynamics, it should not swing wildly back and forth.

10. How well do your call centers support your brands? All of the other questions are about the mechanics of staffing and operating your enterprise's call centers. This question is more of a style question for those enterprises whose call centers are strategic. Do your call centers, and your other points of customer interaction, deliver a consistent reinforcing branded-experience to your customers, the Nordstrom's experience, for example?

And Now -- The Answers

You already know there are no one-size-fits-all answers to these questions. You need to do what is right for your businesses. The questions themselves as well as a few hints shed some light on what I think is important. However, otherwise I apologize for raising so many questions and providing so few recommendations. You also know the answers to most of these questions are not to be found solely in new solutions or technologies. There are, however, insights to be gained from the successes of leading enterprises and also increasingly new techniques and technologies that are being applied in support of customer contact strategies. My next column will be about proactive customer contact and will contain more insights and recommendations than questions, I promise.

CONTACT CENTER CORNER: CallCopy Records Credit Unions

Doug Mohney — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 11:00:04 -0400

CallCopy has announced it has added two new credit unions to its growing base of financial customers.

Evangelical Christian Credit Union (ECCU), based in Brea, Calif. and PrimeWay Federal Credit Union, with headquarters in Houston, have deployed several of CallCopy's call recording and quality management solutions within their contact centers. The solutions have been deployed to help the credit unions meet legal and compliance requirements and support their quality management and agent training initiatives.

ECCU has added a call recording solution to enhance and protect their existing infrastructure investment and is in the process of delivering a quality management program that allows them to deliver one-on-one coaching to agents and continually refine their training program.

PrimeWay needed a cost-effective and dependable solution for compliance, able to record calls for legal issues and quality assurance. CallCopy solutions are being used in the call center for agent training and quality management, as well as in the collections department for call logging and to help PrimeWay satisfy compliance requirements.

For more:
- CallCopy's announces financial call center wins

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Aspect Software Snaps Up BlueNote

Doug Mohney — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 12:57:16 -0400

In a Boston-area merger, Aspect Software is acquiring "substantially all" of the assets of BlueNote Networks. Aspect adds SOA and more of an enterprise UC spin with the acquisition of BlueNote.

Terms of the deal weren't disclosed. Aspect is spinning the acquisition as an extension of its "UC for the contact center" strategy with BlueNote bringing "IT ready" software products for enabling business process communications. Aspect Software says its customers will be able to extend SIP-based services to enterprise users as an integral part of a service oriented architecture (SOA) and will get such goodies as interactive multichannel communications, globally-reachable communications services and integrated workflow applications.

Aspect has invested considerable energy into building a unified communications contact center solution around Digium's Asterisk open source software. BlueNote, started in 2005 as a spin-off out of Fidelity Investment IP communications development efforts, has pounded the table from day one with SOA and being able to integrate into enterprise network architectures.

SIP is the point where the two companies touch, but it will be interesting to see if the BlueNote SOA philosophy is carried forward into enterprise and contact center applications. BlueNote only uses a small portion of Asterisk to support voicemail recording and delivery. Aspect and BlueNote have already demonstrated interoperability of their products through SIP, specifically putting BlueNote's "click to call" and presence engine into a proof of concept for Aspect customers.

An Aspect spokesperson said the company has a "particular focus" on BlueNote's firewall/NAT traversal and audio quality monitoring capabilities for SIP communication for remote agent support, as well looking at BlueNote's "excellent" web service enablement for tighter integration between CRN systems and the contact center.

For more:
- Aspect announces purchase of BlueNote

Related articles:
Aspect Software Gets High Marks
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CONTACT CENTER CORNER: Springboard Gets UC Call Center Solution

Doug Mohney — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 13:57:35 -0400

INX is designing and deploying a Cisco unified communications solution for Springboard Non-Profit Consumer Credit Management's national call center.

As a part of the federally funded Hope Now Alliance, Springboard is providing free credit counseling and is seeing increasing demand by consumers and homeowners for credit, budget and housing counseling services. The new Cisco UC solution will be deployed throughout Springboard's current facilities and includes its new 14,400 square foot building. INX says the project is valued at $466,000 between hardware and services.

Springboard currently gets around 4,500 calls a day and expects the added capacity of the UC solution to allow them to handle more call volume as more people seek assistance with consumer debit and to prevent housing foreclosure; the national credit counseling agency is adding more financial counselors to meet call demand.

For more:
- INX announces Springboard UC Call Center contract.

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CONTACT CENTER CORNER: Dickinson Financial Adds Intervoice

Doug Mohney — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 09:18:00 -0400

Dickinson Financial Corporation (DFC) has selected Intervoice's IP Contact Center (IPCC) solution to extend its current IVR transactions to live agents; DFC has been an existing Intervoice IVR customer.

Headquartered in Kansas City, Mo. DFC is the holding company for Bank Midwest and five affiliated banks. DFC has a multiple site customer care contact center and expects to benefit from IPCC's built-in CTI and SIP-based architecture for informed contact routing decisions. The built-in CTI capability allows customer data collected during a self-service IVR session to be retained throughout the customer's entire call so customers don't have to repeat their information to a live agent. Customer data is presented to DFC agents via screen pops and because the IPCC solution is switch independent, DFC will be able to leverage the architecture without the need to upgrade their current phone system.

In addition to the screen pop capability, DFC agents will also be able to handle multiple media channels beyond voice, including email, web collaboration, fax call back requests and voice mail messages.

For more:
- DFC adds Intervoice IP Contact Center release

Related article:
Doing More With Less: Just Add Software

CONTACT CENTER CORNER: SER & VPI Partner Up For Call Recording and Workforce Optimization

Doug Mohney — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 22:26:17 -0400

SER has signed an OEM agreement with VPI (Voice Print International) to put call recording, quality management, and agent coaching capabilities as a part of the SER contact management solution suite.

VPI's workforce optimization capabilities will be incorporated into SER's inbound, outbound and blended call center solutions. SER has already integrated VPI's Activ! Performance Suite with call and screen recording, agent evaluation and agent coaching and elearning capabilities into its ENSERCLE product suite. Later this summer, the new offering will be made available as part of SER's CPS E2 solution.

Additionally, VPR is integrating SER's speech analytics technology to get a high level of automation and business intelligence into its full-time recording solution. The combination will enable organizations to perform analysis on their call recordings, converting the content into business knowledge applicable to ensure compliance, obtain customer insight, and increase workforce performance.

For more
- SER VPI partnering announcement

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