March 1999

Improve Your Customer Contact Management - Now

BY RICH TEHRANI,
GROUP PUBLISHER, TMC

The race is on among call center vendors to formulate solutions that allow call centers to provide the utmost in service and customer satisfaction. Now more than ever, companies must make sure their call centers are operating at peak efficiency. Why, you ask? The Web has added yet another contact mechanism for your customers. Between your field sales force, your retail stores, call centers and the Web, customers can choose to contact your company in any way they please. Many times customers will contact you on all fronts, fully expecting each point of contact to have instant knowledge of prior contacts (I especially do). So every aspect of your customer relationship must be streamlined, allowing your limited workforce to handle customer relationships regardless of the mechanism through which customers choose to contact you. It is plain to see that making your call center more efficient frees up your agents to handle e-mail responses. I e-mail more and more companies every day as an alternative to calling. Recently I have found that some of the largest companies in the world send back a form letter response to my e-mail and ask me to call them during regular business hours. Get real. This is not customer service, it is customer antagonism. I will stop doing business with vendors that can't respond to my e-mail efficiently, not to mention those that send me back a form letter asking me to call…at their convenience!

If your company is not answering e-mail from your customers in one day at the most, please rectify the situation before you lose all your business to your competition. A good place to start looking for a solution is in the routing products roundup in our February 1999 issue under e-mail routing/management software. There are more than 20 vendors to choose from in these categories.

Many technology vendors are addressing the need to improve customer service in their latest offerings. In fact, Nortel recently announced enhancements to its Symposium Agent call center product precisely for this reason. The product delivers more information to agents and guides them through the call process. The new release, dubbed 1.1, incorporates a new feature called "agentTriggers" that enables customers to integrate applications from multiple vendors into their call center. Microsoft, Siebel, Clarify and Remedy are just a few of the companies whose applications will work with Symposium Agent 1.1.

To help call center agents even further in sifting through voluminous quantities of information to effectively help customers in real-time, another feature of Symposium Agent 1.1, called "agentCompass," uses Microsoft FrontPage to help automate information access. Microsoft's FrontPage is an excellent application that allows you to quickly generate HTML pages. As a side note, please use caution when deploying FrontPage applications on the Internet - there are security precautions (beyond the scope of this column) you should take to ensure that surfers cannot gain access to vital database information you may be collecting on your site. For more information on Symposium, please visit www.nortelnetworks.com.

Siemens is also busy augmenting its products to allow enhanced customer service. Siemens has recently teamed up with help desk leader Remedy (www.remedy.com) to launch Help Desk Express, which integrates Remedy's help desk application with Siemens' CTI functionality. By working together, Siemens and Remedy hope to reduce complex implementation cycles associated with call center and CTI implementations. The package includes Remedy software and Siemens' Call Bridge CTI link and licenses and all associated software for integration with databases/servers and packaged professional services. Siemens ProCenter MX Email Express routes incoming e-mail to the properly skilled agents with auto-response (no form letters please), auto-confirmation of receipt, as well as queuing, reporting and administration functions similar to those used in ACD reporting. If your e-mail response mechanism is lacking these features, please purchase a package like this to rectify the situation. To see what Siemens has to offer, please visit www.icn.siemens.com/express and also check our February round up on the Web.

Finally, Aspect is hoping to increase agent productivity by introducing a new version of its WinSet for Windows - version 2.0. WinSet 2.0 provides call center agents with a GUI interface that affords them the ability to handle calls, exchange information and transact business.

By providing a single platform and interface, WinSet 2.0 eliminates the need for agents to shift their attention back and forth between the telephone and the PC. WinSet 2.0 is TAPI-based and works seamlessly with laptop or desktop PCs with the aid of a WinSet adapter which is about the size of a modem and plugs into the Aspect ACD.

By providing a WinSet SDK (software developer's kit), developers can easily develop CTI applications for agent desktops that integrate with whatever applications required. Agent desktops need to work with more and more diverse types of media and need access to even larger quantities of instantaneous information. Tools such as SDKs that allow rapid call center application development will be vital in allowing companies to tailor their agents' screens to take advantage of the vast information stores and media types needed close by to more efficiently help customers. For more information, please visit www.aspect.com.

The race is on to help our customers - every call center vendor has thrown its hat in the ring and new products allowing the utmost in customer satisfaction are developed on a daily basis.

Recently, our parent company, TMC, launched two newsletters - one on CTI and one on call centers - to help you sort out the latest product advancements and announcements on a weekly basis. If you would like to subscribe to these free newsletters, click here.

Sincerely,

Rich Tehrani
Group Publisher
rtehrani@tmcnet.com

It's official! Due to overwhelming demand, the CT Institute will be returning to CTI EXPO Spring '99 to offer its popular CTE Boot Camp during the show's Pre-Conference proceedings.

The Computer Telephony Engineer (CTE) credential is an industrywide certification program developed and presented by the CT Institute. Certified CTE professionals are in great demand as computer-telephony products flood the IT landscape. The Computer Telephony Engineer (CTE) Boot Camp provides a comprehensive overview of the CTE curriculum, including Core courses, solution tracks, certification objectives, testing tips and a Web-based demonstration. It is an invaluable tutorial for anyone interested in becoming a Computer Telephony Engineer.

In the spirit of CNE and MCSE certification, the CTE begins with a strong foundation of three Core courses, and then diverges into various solution and product Elective tracks. CTE Core courses stress the convergence of telephone and data networking, while the Elective tracks focus on administration and support of select CTI solutions and products, including Call Center CTI, Small Business CTI, Internet Telephony, IVR and Unified Messaging. The CTE Boot Camp is ideal for telephone and data engineers, administrators, resellers and MIS managers who are interested in CTI technology and certification.

Attendees will gain a comprehensive understanding of the technologies and objectives required for Computer Telephony Engineer (CTE) certification. In addition, attendees will receive a $500 rebate coupon from the CT Institute toward CTE courseware and exams, a 250-page overview of the Core courses and a certificate of completion of the Boot Camp. For more information, visit the CT Institute's Web site at http://ctinstitute.com.