A Call for VARs By Lisa Terry, Contributing Editor, VSR
Taking calls is so five minutes ago. Yesterday's call centers, which received and placed customer phone calls, are giving way to contact centers, where companies seek to strengthen their customer relationships and brand images using an exploding array of communications media. After decades of the same old stuff, contact center technologies are now evolving rapidly.
Today, consumers expect to interact with companies via email, Instant Messaging and Web chat in addition to calls. That list is expanding rapidly to include social media, desktop applications and even video.
And the contact center had better be able to deliver all of that with the same quality and reliability they could when it was just a traditional phone call.
Enter VARs. The big news in contact center technology is the ongoing transition to IP and SIP trunking, which acts as a converter between a legacy phone system and an Internet connection. Both are doing a lot of good, helping to contain costs while delivering more features, flexibility and open and standards-based platforms. Contact centers need VARs to help them harness the best of that technology, navigate among multiple vendors and ensure a quality experience on both ends of a customer encounter.
Counting Down the Hits
While contact center managers keep one eye on the road ahead, today's challenges include containing costs and maintaining customer and staff satisfaction. Here is where customer contact center managers are focused:
1.) Service and Retention: "Ten years ago, the most important metric was the average call handling time," says Nick Eisner, director of B2B solutions product management for Plantronics. Today, companies are more focused on satisfying the customer at the first contact, even if that initial call takes extra time.
"Every place a customer touches a company is a chance to optimize interaction," fostering loyalty, says Chris McGugan, vice president, product management and marketing for Avaya.
Even better, some encounters can be an opportunity to drive new revenue. "Senior level management is now recognizing the strategic importance of the P&L capability call centers bring to the table," says Bob Denman, president and CEO of AVTEX, a business communications solution provider.
To do all that, contact centers are looking to equip agents with high-quality communications, integration with backend applications and fast and reliable call management and workflows.
One way to ensure resolution on the first call is presence, the ability to see the status of staff with the skillsets required to resolve an issue if the initial agent cannot, in order to bring in the expert. "You're able to tie into call flow and workflow to greatly enhance the customer experience and cut costs dramatically," says AVTEX's Denman.
2.) Extending applications. Contact centers are seeking to reduce costs through use of remote agents and equipment sharing across locations. Migration to IP is a major stepping stone; according to an August, 2008 Forrester Research study, more than 30 percent of contact center decision-makers have deployed or are rolling out IP contact centers.
"One of the things that's particularly attractive to people today is the opportunity to extend the use of applications to anywhere you can extend the network," says AVTEX's Denman. "With the combination of platforms like IP and SIP Quality of Service networks, w're not bound by any geography or location. People are looking for ways to go green and be more flexible in where they find talent and the talent work hours. This lends itself well to that."
Another option, hosted IP communications, is now moving up to the enterprise level. Forrester's 2008 survey finds increased interest in services delivered as hosted or software-as-a-service (SaaS) to reduce upfront expenses.
"Hosted VoIP at the enterprise level is rising because organizations are looking for ways to cut costs and cut space," says Louis Hayner, VP of sales at Alteva, providing rich features and functions to agents whether they're at a call center, home or in an offshore facility. For example, local number portability means an outbound call center call can appear on the customer's caller ID as a local number no matter its point of origination. "If a local number shows up they're more likely to pick up,"says Hayner. "That's something you can only do with hosted."
3.) Application Integration. Providing a rich and fruitful customer experience means accessing as much as possible about that customer. Contact centers need to"leverage all the information you have about the consumer and use it in a sales situation to upsell or support and drive to first call resolution," says Avaya's McGugan. In that past, this has required costly computer-telephony integration.
"We have a lot of customers using third-party legacy CRM or order entry,"says John Ratliff, founder and CEO of Apple Tree Answers, a virtual receptionist and answering service provider.
"The ability to integrate with the database on our side is what people are most interested in and what they want to get the most knowledge on." Ratliff wants to see more standards to ease integration across applications.
Open platforms are helping. Avaya's Intelligent Customer Routing delivers customers and their essential information to the right agent using the quickest and most efficient route possible. Customers can use speech self service to provide key information and get connected to the best available resource, located anywhere. ICR replaces the concept of layering computer-telephony integration applications. "It gives you the ability to integrate with any business application that runs in the enterprise,"McGugan says. ICR is the first solution enabled by Avaya's new multi-vendor SIP communications platform, Avaya Aura.
4.) Multimedia. Customers increasingly expect to contact companies via the communications media they use to converse with friends and family, and contact centers are steadily adding this capability. "Contact centers need to be able to offer multimedia capabilities just to be competitive in the marketplace,"says Patrick Ferriter, senior director of product management for Polycom Voice Communications Solutions.
Companies also want to monitor social networking, YouTube, Twitter and other media to better understand their customers. "here is an emerging need to try to really understand all that they can and make better decisions," says Avaya's McGugan. Today that monitoring is piecemeal, but "this is an area we're working actively on, the ability to create a contextual view of the consumer."
5.) Agent comfort. With routine questions now shifted to self-service, "the questions that do get to agents tend to be more complicated," says Plantronics' Eisner. "Therefore, you've got to increase training, and agent attrition levels become more important," particularly in financial and technical verticals where the subject matter is challenging. "Agent comfort becomes an increasing priority," so making work conditions pleasant is key. Some centers reward top performers with better headsets.
6.) Quality of Service. Call clarity is essential for making communication comfortable and accurate, particularly where accents are an issue. But VoIP can mean degradation in call quality, such as distortion, buzzing and echo. "It's a big issue for us, and one reason we're not totally VoIP," says Ratliff of Apple Tree Answers.
"The human voice becomes high value, for blue chip customers," says Mark Hemmert, vice president of sales and operations for Psytechnics. "They will not tolerate degradation in the quality of communication."
But with diagnostic and monitoring tools meant for data networks and multiple vendors in the picture, correctly determining the source of quality issues such as packet loss and jitter can be a challenge. According to Forrester's Market Overview: The IT Management Software Market In 2009, March 2009, 75 percent of calls lost at service desks cannot be matched to a problem that network services management has detected.
Tools such as Psytechnics' Experience Manager analyze both video and voice traffic over IP networks. "It helps manage call quality, and if there is a problem we provide detailed diagnostic info that allows users to pinpoint the cause and correct it," says Joe Frost, vice president, marketing for Psytechnics, considerably reducing downtime and costs and helping service providers meet service-level agreement specifications. "You have to look at call quality from mouth to ear."
HD voice is another technology coming within reach of more contact centers. Wide-band audio captures twice the audio band signal as a traditional network making conversations and even accented speech much easier to understand, but the G.722 codec technology requires more bandwidth (same as G.711 used on the PSTN) than the G.729 codec many contact centers are currently using. This has slowed HD voice adoption in the contact center as they want to allow as many calls as possible over the bandwidth they have purchased. "We plan on implementing additional wideband audio codecs in our products which will allow contact centers to leverage HD voice and take up much less bandwidth," says Polycom's Ferriter.
Technologies such as Plantronics' VistaPlus AP15 Digital Audio Processor use digital signal processing algorithms to increase intelligibility, such as boosting high frequencies, correcting for ambient noise and guarding against acoustic shock. Headsets can also boost quality.
It's increasingly incumbent upon the final inch to clean up the call," says Plantronics' Eisner.
7.) Video. It's early days for video in contact centers, but video is taking hold in niche markets. In healthcare, video-based call centers provide translation services for hospitals, facilitating communication when the patient and caregiver speak different languages. Video "helps you understand the state of mind, and adds value to the translation," says Stephen Epstein, CMO for Avistar Communications. Finance and insurance are also early adopters.
Video has traditionally been costly, unreliable and a bandwidth hog, but all that has changed, says Epstein. Dynamic bandwidth management technologies built into applications such as Avistar's separate audio and video signals and provide intelligence on how to address network anomalies. New codecs mean video is transmitted more efficiently. "We feel video is going to become very ubiquitous," Epstein adds, given its rapidly growing role on the consumer side.
After decades of little change, telecomm has busted out of its proprietary shell. Open, IP-based technologies are throwing the doors open for new capabilities. But with the complexity comes technical challenges and a ripe opportunity for VARs with the right skillsets.
Taking calls is so five minutes ago. Yesterday's call centers, which received and placed customer phone calls, are giving way to contact centers, where companies seek to strengthen their customer relationships and brand images using an exploding array of communications media. After decades of the same old stuff, contact center technologies are now evolving rapidly.
