The call center is at the heart of building strong customer relationships. Many of our
readers and trade show attendees tell me how they have leveraged their call centers to
keep their customers happy, before, during and after a sale. Sometimes I am lucky enough
to communicate with readers of C@LL CENTER Solutions and learn how they are implementing
call center products in concert with intelligent business ideas to achieve tremendous
success. Recently, I was fortunate enough to enjoy a long lunch with two of the most
pioneering and savvy entrepreneurs I know, Allen and Ken Alovis, founders of Lens Direct.
Lens Direct (800-772-LENS) is a call center-based company that sells contact lenses and
its founders are long-time readers of C@LL CENTER Solutions magazine. Coincidentally, I am
a Lens Direct customer and have been for more than eight years. I have witnessed this
company grow from a few people to more than 90 agents.
About seven years ago, I met Allen and Ken Alovis, two high-energy brothers who are
brimming with new business ideas, when they were attending one of TMC's TCCS (Technology
for Call Center Solutions) trade shows, which later became CTI EXPO. What is really
refreshing about these brothers is that they don't just come up with ideas, they implement
them -- and quickly. They seem to be doing very well -- establishing new businesses all
the time.
Over the years, I have had the opportunity to speak with them as they purchased various
pieces of hardware and software for their call center. These guys really did their
homework and have put together a state-of-the-art center. I have also had the opportunity
to watch them develop new business ideas -- all taking advantage of the strong call center
foundation of Lens Direct. The first new company they spun off is Sunglass America -- a
logical extension of the contact lens business. The Alovis brothers later formed Product
Launch USA, a company responsible for launching a host of new companies such as a
Telelinx, a call center service agency and more recently, elens.com, a company dedicated
to selling contact lenses through e-commerce.
I jumped at the opportunity to once again meet with these entrepreneurs who are
building business after business, all based on a very strong call center core. It was
fascinating to learn during our recent lunch that Lens Direct started out with a single
telephone and computer. Over time, they upgraded their single phone to a Panasonic DBS.
Once they outgrew the Panasonic, they purchased a Fujitsu F9600 -- an ideal product to
support the needs of the growing call center business. The Fujitsu switch is fully loaded
with IntelliCenter, providing full CTI and screen pop functionality and includes a whisper
function which provides the agent with information about the incoming call. The system is
augmented with a Sundial predictive dialer. In addition, they rely on Mail Order Wizard,
Haven Corporation's order entry program, for processing orders.
When you speak with both brothers, it is easy to understand why they have done so well.
They believe that a strong customer support back-end is critical, as is a seamless
blending of the customer relationship, regardless of medium. Most companies I e-mail,
regardless of size, answer my e-mail in two days; these businessmen strive to have e-mail
answered half an hour!
Ken Alovis summed up the perfect customer relationship by referring to the quality
service IBM provides for his Aptiva computer. Ken smiled and got very enthusiastic when he
told me that whenever he calls IBM's tech support center, they answer his questions
quickly and correctly. Ken will be an Aptiva customer for life -- a pretty strong
testimonial in a product category now considered a commodity business. This concept hasn't
been lost on either brother in terms of their own business -- e.g., I can already order
lenses on Saturday and will soon be able to do so on Sunday as well. Can your call center
do that?
Beyond using the call center to build customer relationships, it is used to leverage
one business unit's strengths and parlay them into another. When customers call to order
contact lenses, they are scheduled to receive a subsequent outbound call from Sunglass
America. Contact lens wearers are perfect candidates for sunglasses, as contacts make your
eyes especially sensitive to light. Through the years I have lost as many pairs of
sunglasses as anyone, but as luck would have it, the sunglasses I purchase are sold only
through authorized retail establishments. If this were not the case, I would be first in
line to buy my sunglasses through Sunglass America as I have always had great experiences
dealing with Lens Direct and, indeed, I often recommend them to others.
Ken and Allen feel very strongly that "A customer will order from you only one
time if you can't back up every sale with adequate service." This service must be in
the form of live agents who are readily available to answer customer questions quickly and
accurately. These representatives must also be able to quickly solve problems.
The call center is the central cog that supports the customer relationship -- it also
nurtures this relationship. As e-commerce continues to grow in popularity, a strong call
center is necessary to field back-end service and support. In fact, this is where Product
Launch USA is headed. The Alovises have already secured a slew of catchy URLs: elens.com,
eshades.com, sportsspot.com and pcstore.com. These new businesses will have the central
support of the existing call center, which, of course, must evolve to manage e-mail and
chat.
The e-commerce race is on and the opportunities will be greater than ever. Of course,
e-commerce is more evolution than revolution. Commerce used to be conducted by traders who
bartered for goods and services and was limited to other traders. Traders evolved to
storefronts -- limited to local residents. Storefronts evolved to direct mailers and
catalogers -- limited to whomever was on their mailing list (typically within the same
country) -- and word of mouth. The first call centers spun off of the back-end of direct
mail and then evolved to a strong outbound arm as well -- also limited to the same
country. The latest evolution in this cycle is e-commerce and there are no natural limits.
The rules, however, remain the same
keep your customers happy by maintaining strong
relationships with them, and your business will always prosper.
Sincerely,
Rich Tehrani
Group Publisher
rtehrani@tmcnet.com
|
The Future Of Call
Center Telephony --The Voice/Data Switch -- Will Be On Display At CTI EXPO Spring '99 Call
center technology is evolving at Internet speeds (an Internet year is defined as 45 days)
and the Internet's effect on call centers will be fast and furious. In the last two years,
almost every company I have heard of has developed a Web site. No other technology has
ever forced so many to move so quickly. Some companies acted out of fear of being left
behind, while others saw tremendous opportunity in implementing a Web site where the whole
world could have access to their products and services.
The Internet's effect on the call center extends beyond the Web and e-commerce to the
very infrastructure of the call center. By infrastructure, I mean the actual phone lines
used to access your customer service agents. Telephone systems are typically bound by
proprietary digital lines and the associated proprietary equipment that works on these
lines. Voice/data switches are the next generation of PBX or ACD: these switches allow
agents to be connected to open, nonproprietary digital connections such as ATM or Internet
protocol (IP). (Click
here for CTI magazine's February 1999 roundup of 14 voice/data switches.) Although we
are not there yet, IP will become the new digital telephony standard and we will soon be
able to buy telephony equipment from multiple manufacturers that works with the open
voice/data switch.
Eventually, we will all have to implement a Web call button that connects Web surfers
directly to our call centers. This will happen sooner than you think -- when it does, we
will need to deal with IP telephony calls in our call centers. There are currently gateway
products from companies like NetSpeak (www.netspeak.com)
that bridge IP telephony calls to analog calls and back, but these are short-term fixes.
Why convert IP calls to analog so they can be switched by your extremely expensive and
proprietary call center hardware? Doesn't it make more sense to use software to switch
calls in software where possible? Of course it does, and in fact, one company, PakNetX (www.paknetx.com), sells a software-only ACD based on IP
telephony. PakNetX has a wonderful interactive demo of this technology on its Web site.
Software is much cheaper than hardware and more efficient as well. Many voice/data
switches can seamlessly handle IP telephony traffic and those with well-thought-out
architectures can handle an incredible amount of IP calls at a very inexpensive price --
orders of magnitude less expensive than traditional ACD prices!
CTI EXPO is the only place you can go to explore a learning center filled with six
vendors who will objectively educate you on the inner workings of the voice/data switch
and how this incredible new product category will affect the way you manage your call
center technology and products.
Three of the largest vendors in the voice/data switch category are Cisco (www.cisco.com -- their Selsius division, in particular),
Nortel Networks (www.nortelnetworks.com) and
Lucent (www.lucent.com -- their IP Exchange product
line). For the first time ever, all three of these companies will be at CTI EXPO
showcasing how the PBX and ACD will evolve. At least 10 other voice/data switch vendors
will be represented at CTI EXPO as well. You simply must come see what all the excitement
is about and compare the advanced features of these new products and see how they can make
short work of many of the tedious call center problems you are now faced with.
Voice/data switches are incredible. They can easily and inexpensively connect remote
agents and distributed call centers. They are infinitely programmable and more
customizable than any previous telephony equipment we have ever witnessed. The voice/data
switch demos I have seen are bewildering. I can't wait to get one here at TMC. If only the
TMC Labs guys weren't so busy taking products apart all the time, we might have had one
here already.
So the Internet keeps growing and its technology permeates everything we do and
purchase. The latest benefactors are the PBX and ACD -- believe me, you must come to CTI
EXPO and see these products for yourself. My words alone cannot do justice to the new
technologies that will be on display at CTI EXPO. Come in person to kick the tires and
look under the hoods to see the incredible innovations that will make our call centers
more productive and allow you to finally take advantage of the advancements Internet
technology has brought to the call center telephony world.
|
TMC Labs: Integrity
Comes First BY RICH TEHRANI, GROUP PUBLISHER, TMC
Many of you already know the history of TMC Labs. You'll recall that as a Computer
Engineering student, I used to read each and every computer publication I could find. I
would devour these magazines from cover to cover, paying special attention to the products
they reviewed in their testing facilities. Upon graduation, I became the director of MIS
at Technology Marketing Corporation (TMC). I would scour computer magazine test drives
before purchasing any product. I was obsessed, sometimes reading hundreds of pages of
reviews before making a purchasing decision.
Over the years, I realized that some of the magazines really devoted time and energy to
developing a laboratory that tested products objectively and based their opinions purely
on technological merit, while other magazines chose to cater their reviews to their
advertisers. These magazines would simply write glowing reviews about any product
submitted by a vendor who happened to advertise in the magazine! At the same time, I was
spending hard earned company money and believe me, every penny was precious. The
purchasing decisions I made could have broken the company if they were wrong.
Having grown up in this environment, I felt it was imperative to establish the telecom
industry's first objective and in-depth telecom testing lab, and when I became Group
Publisher of TMC's magazines, that's exactly what I did. TMC Labs serves the needs of our
readers, not our advertisers. Many industry vendors use our Labs as the benchmark of
success. Many products we start out to review don't even make it into our publications
because, frankly, they don't meet our standards or yours.
Lately, we have received complaints from a few vendors that our reviews of their
products are too harsh or that we don't give them enough credit for this feature or for
that one. Most recently, we received a complaint from a large and reputable computer
company. I always take customer complaints very seriously. Let me add that this product
was reviewed by a leading PC magazine around the same time as TMC Labs reviewed it.
I reread the TMC Labs review in question and that of the PC publication and I couldn't
believe how much more realistic the TMC Labs review was compared to the one from the other
magazine. Can you believe the other review found no flaws with the product: no
installation snafus; no room for improvement; no suggestions at all? In their eyes, the
product was perfect.
I assume that as a reader of this magazine you actually use a computer and as such, you
know that nothing ever works perfectly - EVER - under any circumstance. Let's face it.
Every product has room for improvement and doesn't always install correctly.
In the last few years, many publishing companies have become publicly traded or have
been acquired by publicly traded companies and this has had a major effect on their
editorial quality. As a public company, your first loyalty must be to your public
shareholders and not your readers. If your review states that an advertiser's product is
inadequate and that advertiser decides to pull their advertising from your publication,
you miss your earnings estimates and Wall Street hammers your stock - it's that simple.
At TMC Labs we have no such fear. We are a privately held publishing company and we
depend on our reputation of providing you with the most objective, in-depth editorial
coverage. We take our time with each and every review and we report on every nuance of the
testing procedure. If the product fails during the installation process, we report that to
you. If there's a problem, we report it. If the documentation seems to have been
improperly translated from Martian, we tell you.
Our first and only loyalty is to our readers. We know that the reason for the success
of TMC publications is due to readers like yourself who depend on objective and in-depth
reviews you can trust to make product purchase decisions. |