January 1999

A New Frontier: Contact And Process Management Automate Customer Service Delivery

BY ROBERT ALLEY

Increasing competition - especially in deregulated industries - is making companies more acutely aware of the importance of the differentiation provided by quality customer service through call centers. As a result, call center personnel are striving to respond accurately and as quickly as possible to customer queries, regardless of whether customers initiate contact by phone, fax, e-mail, or other channels. What can companies do to help ensure that call centers fulfill their increasingly important role? One option is integrating both contact management and process management software with the existing software that controls call-center operations, to create a comprehensive, enterprise-wide customer contact center. Process management, or process automation software, is the newest frontier for customer service delivery - and it provides a wellspring of substantial benefits for call centers as well as companies.

Any failure in the complex interdependency between call center staff and information systems can stall customer service. From a telecommunications standpoint, it is the ability to react to a customer request for complex service offerings, as well as the time necessary to activate a requested service, that directly affects bottom line revenue generation. Thus, problems involving the call center can be as troublesome for companies as any snafu that shuts down a production line.

Awareness is growing among call centers as to the tremendous potential of process management. And software developers, systems integrators, and VARs are beginning to leap into the fray, harnessing this powerful new tool to provide solutions for customer-service delivery.

FROM MAINFRAME TO PROCESS MANAGEMENT
The call center was one of the last areas within most major companies to be automated, but it has garnered a lot of attention - and a lot of technology spending - over the last few years. Call center solutions based on mainframes and dumb terminals have largely gone the way of the dinosaur, to be replaced by front-end systems with custom graphical user interfaces for automating customer service and sales.

Contact Management
The big wave in customer service delivery today is contact management integration software. Today's contact management integration software does a good job of making connections between the multi-vendor hardware and software systems that must be linked for coordinated customer service delivery. Contact management solutions solve the vexing problem of integrating the customer communications coming from many different channels - Web, e-mail, phone, fax - into a cohesive solution.

Contact management software is a critical piece when it comes to putting together the puzzle of a complete customer-service delivery solution. It excels at handling real-time interaction with customers across a variety of contact channels. It also ties together switches, IVR software, and other components into a complete customer-service delivery solution. No matter what technologies a call center deploys today, they are likely to change tomorrow. Contact management software allows enterprises to select best-in-breed components and tie them together into a seamless whole - without writing a lot of expensive custom code.

Process Management
While a solid contact management infrastructure can dramatically boost call center productivity, its benefits can be greatly extended using process management software. Process management software provides assistance, either human or automated, to complete the customer interaction, such as ensuring that the literature the customer requested was sent or that the customer's complaint was handled by the book.

THE BEAUTY OF PROCESS MANAGEMENT
Ensuring precise and timely interaction with each customer from start to finish is where process management software shines. With process management software, each interaction with a particular customer in a particular instance is defined as a "case." Each case is a series of steps, or business processes, that are defined within the process management software. The software, in turn, ensures that each case is handled precisely as it is defined.

The whole process is fully automated, because the process management software calls upon the necessary resources and triggers the appropriate events to ensure accurate and timely follow-through. It also can interact seamlessly with other applications anywhere in the enterprise, including Web front-ends, sales and marketing software, or legacy back-end systems. The software could initiate a case, for example, when a customer visits a Web page and fills out a form. It could automatically forward the information entered into the form to a sales and marketing system. From there, the software could alert a customer service rep and kick off an automatic outbound call, ensuring follow-up on the lead. Automating and tracking each case over time ensures appropriate, on-time follow-through with every customer interaction, contributing to higher customer satisfaction.

Flexibility
While automating and tracking individual cases is a gigantic boon, by far the most powerful benefit of solutions that utilize both contact management and process management is the ability for enterprises to turn on a dime, to respond literally overnight to changing market conditions, regulatory issues, or customer demands. Using process management software, a business can redefine a business process and immediately put it into use.

Imagine that a securities firm wants to comply more easily with Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) regulations that require special authorization on certain types of trades. Rules for compliance regulations could be entered into the process management engine, which would automatically route the necessary trades to authorized individuals for approval. The firm could comply with changes to SEC regulations in a matter of minutes.

On a broader scale, entire marketing campaigns could be efficiently managed using process automation-enabled solutions. Process management software - coordinated with business applications - could automatically analyze and segment the customer database, leverage predictive dialing to proactively reach customers who meet specified criteria, send out follow-up literature or e-mail as appropriate, and manage further interaction with each customer across a variety of channels. If it is determined that a campaign is not working, it can be immediately altered based on an improved strategy.

This technology is critical to ensure that communications providers can identify potential churn candidates and build a proactive campaign to contact them and discuss their change in usage patterns. It also can be used to map specific usage dynamics of key corporate customers, with the information then being provided to the appropriate account managers.

BUYER BEWARE
But not all process management/contact management solutions enable this kind of dynamic change. Some software developers and systems integrators are taking the tack of hard-coding the process or the system links directly into their applications or solutions, causing serious limitations in terms of flexibility.

First, if a business process needs to change, then the software code must be rewritten. This is expensive and increases a company's reaction time. Second, hard-coding business processes or links to various information systems in an application can limit the scope of the application, confining its usefulness to a particular department or to the call center. When a business process changes, the necessary interaction with the various information silos throughout the company is likely to change as well. Hard-coding the links to other information systems hampers the dynamic passage of information to and from a company's information systems. Rather than spanning departmental boundaries by tying together information and processes across the enterprise, hard-coding means that every change requires a change in software code.

The big win in process automation will come from a powerful combination of contact management and process automation software that allows overnight change as well as enabling various applications - billing, contact management, service provisioning - to interact seamlessly and dynamically.

THE UPSIDE FOR DEVELOPERS AND INTEGRATORS
The key to success for software developers, systems integrators, and VARs will be to embrace contact and process automation integration software - which sits between front/back-end applications and information stores - that is capable of funneling information wherever and whenever it is needed throughout the enterprise. Process management integration software should also provide a simple graphical interface for changing business rules. With businesses moving at Internet speed, the only way to compete is to be more nimble than the competition. Embracing open, preferably object-oriented process management integration software may require an initial sacrifice on the part of integrators or developers who have already integrated process management functionality into their applications or solutions. But the upside potential is huge.

By developing customer-service delivery solutions based on a combination of contact and process management integration software, developers and integrators can be part of a much larger solution that encompasses the entire enterprise and facilitates change. Process automation that enables business rules to be changed quickly supports rapid change and helps corporations - and CIOs - do their jobs more successfully.

ENTERING THE FRONTIER
Once contact management is widely deployed, VARs and integrators will spend less time integrating the various multi-vendor hardware and software systems needed to make a customer service delivery solution into a cohesive whole. Instead of struggling to integrate back- and front-office systems and make information flow throughout the enterprise, systems integrators and VARs will likely be called upon in the near future to help formalize business processes and to enter them into process automation engines. Because business changes at a rapid pace, the effort to support changing business rules will be continuous. VARs and systems integrators will have the opportunity to develop more far-reaching solutions involving end-to-end processes. And, they will be able to deliver more to customers in a shorter timeframe.

Software developers, too, stand to benefit from adopting process automation software into their solutions. They need to be able to change their applications and solutions rapidly to stay competitive. By leveraging process management software, developers can keep core code functionality the same, while customizing functionality for different customers by mapping business processes into a process management engine. Implementing applications with a process management engine at the core provides flexibility that was never possible before.

In the coming years, the combination of contact management and process automation integration software will fundamentally change the way technology is applied to customer service delivery. The solution providers capable of delivering end-to-end solutions that automate the customer interaction from start to finish will be the winners. As interactions with customers become more complex and communication channels proliferate, enterprises will find process management the key to building a solid base of customers who come back time after time.

Bob Alley is the strategic planning manager of Hewlett-Packard's Smart Contact Program. Smart Contact is Hewlett-Packard's product-and-marketing program that addresses the customer-service delivery marketplace. For more information, contact Hewlett-Packard at 1-800-637-7740, or visit their Web site at www.hp.com.