July 1999

FOLLOW THE WORKFLOW ROAD
To Customer Satisfaction

BY ROD BUTTERS

The delivery of customer-centric services requires bringing the customer into the very center of the enterprise, where information is easily available, transactions are easily performed, and where the customer's transactions and preferences are remembered and acted upon. However, with a maze of business processes in place - and with the increasing complexity of this maze due to multiple customer contact methods - it becomes very easy for businesses to lose track of the customer while struggling to keep up with technology. Computer-telephony integration (CTI) is a key enabling technology of customer relationship solutions, integrating the front-office of the enterprise with its back-office operations. However, CTI only works within the context of a clear customer workflow, based on enterprise business rules.

Workflow refers to the way business tasks are distributed and performed within an organization that relies on multiple people, systems, resources, and processes. While it had its origins in the document processing business, workflow has gained the attention of customer relationship solution vendors and early adopter customers.

Today's heterogeneous environment makes it critical that CTI applications be open, to allow communication with all the popular ACDs as well as with a wide range of operating systems and application environments. CTI helps put the customer at the center of the business by binding together functionally specialized contact center applications. Such integration allows:

• Sharing of database information to improve the routing of tasks.
• Sharing of call processing in-formation between agents.
• Sharing of processing information so that all customer contact data can be collected, collated, and finally stored as an end-to-end account of what happened in the customer transaction.

Businesses that apply workflow concepts to the information gained through CTI systems in support of their entire customer relationship management strategy can reap substantial benefits to productivity, to customer satisfaction and loyalty, and to the bottom line. Complicated tasks can be completed more quickly and efficiently. Customers can make decisions or purchases faster because they are quickly routed to the right person with the right information.

UTILIZING A WORKFLOW SOLUTION
Each call coming into a contact center initiates a set of tasks associated with one or more specific business goals. In most cases, the call initiates a related sequence of tasks — for example, the call is routed to an appropriate agent, the agent supplies the caller with information, a transaction is completed, and information is recorded and stored. These tasks combine to form a workflow.
Effective workflow solutions are yielding substantial benefits in many businesses. Consider these two examples:

E-mail Workflow
A mass-market retailer recently experienced a dramatic increase in e-mail traffic, largely as a result of creating a Web site that solicited e-mail requests. As an interim solution, the company assigned a single agent to read and route all e-mail messages. When this approach quickly became unmanageable, the company worked with contact center experts to automate the distribution of e-mail, treating each message just like an incoming phone call.

Now, the message header and opening sentence are examined by software, priority decisions are made based on business logic, and the message is routed to the most appropriate resource. This integrated solution relies on cooperative processing by the ACDs, a dedicated e-mail server, a centralized workflow server, and multiple CTI servers.

Mutual Fund Call Routing
An investment firm that specializes in mutual funds uses sophisticated call routing to get customers in contact with the appropriate resource quickly. When an incoming caller enters an account number, the workflow server automatically locates and displays the caller’s account balance and recent transaction history. Based on this data, the system then determines the priority of the call and the type of broker to assign. (For example, if the caller is a premier customer, the system knows to route the call to the broker who has handled the customer’s previous transactions. If the caller is a new customer, the call goes to the first available agent.) All steps in the workflow occur within seconds of the call’s initiation and are transparent to the caller.

Call routing can be based on information carried by the phone call itself in a pre-call routing solution. This is critical where call volume is such that shaving seconds off each call can have a substantial impact on telecommunication costs. Post-call routing can be based on any number of business rules. These can be customer-based, skills-based, geography-based in a virtual call center setting, and so on. Past purchasing decisions can accompany the call to the agent’s desktop to identify up-selling and other relationship building opportunities.

MULTIMEDIA ROUTING
The Internet is fueling the interest in the mixed media contact center. For this reason, CTI servers should be able to handle mixed media. There is interest in having agents who can handle e-mail, Web, fax, and voice inquiries for blended media call handling. In multimedia routing, the same skill-based routing rules formerly reserved for voice only are now applied to all the customer contact methods (voice, Web, e-mail, IVR, and fax).

Routing and queuing of mixed media transaction is extremely complex. This task is an example of leading-edge technology being applied to an area that lacks universally accepted standards. In situations where the need for blended media call handling exists, the enterprise should look outside to experienced vendors.

For example, systems handling blended media must be highly scalable. In addition to handling heavy peak loads (for instance, 200,000 calls an hour), systems now deal with Web inquiries, fax, and e-mail. The extra load increases the demands on the system, and a lack of scalability can reduce the useful life of a blended media call handling solution and result in undue customer backlogs.

DATA ANALYSIS/DATA MINING
Customer contact centers have been data-rich environments for a long time — collecting and providing information on call duration, number of calls waiting, time in queue, agent activity, and much more. Data repositories associated with the CTI software also keep a running account of the customer’s workflow activity for use in providing more efficient service. Information can be used for the real-time servicing of the customer, and then stored for later analysis and customer mining.

The resulting information helps retain customers and identifies business opportunities that increase revenues. For instance, call flow elements and customer transactions can be passed on to the agent, when a caller decides to transition from self-service to live assistance. The information supplied to the agent’s desktop might be as simple as the account number the customer just entered, so he is spared the frustration of repeating the information, or it could be a record of the last several transactions recorded by the IVR system which will help the agent better understand the customer’s needs. In addition, when one agent transfers a call to another, CTI applications can transfer previously collected data with the call, reducing the duration of the call and saving money.

CONCLUSION
When combined with a clear customer workflow, CTI is an important enabling technology in customer relationship solutions. Today’s CTI applications provide the raw information and capablility for enterprises to implement workflow processes that bring about better customer service and increased productivity, customer satisfaction and loyalty, and improved bottom-line results.

Rod Butters is vice president of product strategy and marketing at Aspect Telecommunications. Aspect is a leading supplier of customer relationship solutions, providing an integrated family of enterprise software application suites, application services and tools, mission-critical platforms, and comprehensive professional services. For more information about Aspect, visit the company’s Web site at www.aspect.com or call 800-226-8441.