Stuart Granger, Informiam Product Line

By Nadji Tehrani, CEO, Technology Marketing Corp.

Stuart Granger NT: Please tell us about your company and type of business.

SG: Informiam, a business unit of Genesys Telecommunications Laboratories, helps business people implement a top-down strategic structure to understand and optimize their business performance in all areas of customer service and contact center operations. This enables users to better understand critical business issues in real-time related to customer interactions, so that they can improve or correct performance.

NT: What are the greatest challenges that you and your company are facing?

SG: Our greatest challenge is to educate a market about a new way of conducting business. Most organizations struggle with dynamic environments, but they have never had real-time customer information or the ability to make adjustments as quickly as they would like. Today they manage the customer experience through methods that depend on legacy reporting and history. As customer service evolves from call centers with a transactional focus, to become an integral part of the business, with a strategic revenue focus, it’s critical to manage differently. Ideally, legacy tactics can still be used for long term strategic forecasting and planning, but in the heat of the battle or in the middle of your business day, you need to be able to manage at the speed of the transaction and speed of the customer.

Senior management teams are hungry for new technologies that help them link strategy with execution. Our products allow organizations to baseline their operational data against the policies and rules of the business which breathes life into raw data. Then, these products can help the business effectively understand and communicate in their own business terms where they are succeeding or failing — as it is happening — when actions are meaningful. Managing in hindsight is great for planning, but it won’t help companies stop the bleeding when poor service can easily cause the loss of hundreds of customers or impact today’s sales goals.

NT: What do you feel are practical solutions to those challenges?

SG: We see that customer service organizations, contact centers for lack of a better word, are still striving to become integrated into the broader business enterprise. One of their primary challenges has been the lack of business-focused information so that contact center operations are part of the feedback loop within the larger organization that benefits both the contact center and the entire enterprise.

We feel we bring a set of practical solutions to solve this problem. First, we provide business focused data. We allow you to see your business and understand it the way your business is organized. Our meta-data architectures allow people to consolidate data points to understand and manage key success factors in a customer service environment the way they operate their business as opposed to typical transactional systems. For example, a credit card banking line-of-business executive can quickly see and understand the service being delivered for all his customer segments and be able to discuss service issues intelligently with contact center operations management.

Second, we allow organizations to move that information around the organization in real-time through a series of dynamic displays. Business and operational people can focus on the areas of the business for which they are responsible and can view customer interaction information according to business structure, such as by line of business, geography, customer type, or whatever organization makes sense to the business.

And finally, by offering real time information that is actionable, we help organizations understand business challenges as they are occurring throughout their business day. This enables them to take immediate and direct actions to resolve customer service issues while they are smoldering and well before they become raging fires. This a major difference between a real time and a traditional historical approach.

NT: In your opinion, what is the greatest need in our industry?

SG: We strongly believe that business executives today are seeking and need greater transparency into business operations. Transparency provides a linkage between strategic initiatives that are being decided at executive and boardroom levels and the ability to understand the execution of those strategies as they waterfall down through the organization to frontline management. The Informiam Product Line brings a uniform transparent view of information in real time that is as applicable to a C-level officer as it is to a front line supervisor managing agents.

We are seeing many examples of where customer service and its associated challenges are being recognized at the senior level. Based on impact to revenues, loyalty, retention, and the ability to up sell and cross sell existing customers, the strategies being carried out by customer service management and their teams are getting direct attention from senior management. New technologies can effectively link the ‘business’ with operational customer interaction initiatives.

NT: Tell us about new developments in your company.

SG: Informiam, located in Atlanta, Georgia, began as the pioneer of software that allows all levels of customer service personnel to see key performance indicators in real-time and take immediate corrective action to resolve issues before they impact the customer. Following the acquisition by Genesys in December of 2007, developments at Informiam are numerous. We continue to be on the leading edge to create new product features that allow organizations to effectively work, share and collaborate on issues that are effecting customer service operations in real time. Genesys extensively vetted the marketplace and found a match between Informiam’s organic initiatives prior to acquisition and Genesys’s Dynamic Contact Center strategy. As an established leader in customer service, Genesys via Informiam will provide analytics led action management capabilities for the virtual contact center. We believe the combination of Genesys and Informiam creates a very powerful and market leading set of products in the customer service business today.

NT: How would you describe the current status of the customer interaction CRM (or teleservices) business?

SG: In a word, disruptive. We’re seeing a fairly broad sea-change with the implementation of VoIP (voice over IP) technologies and related areas such as home-based agents. The technologies outlined throughout this magazine are creating tremendous pressures on the customer service management infrastructure to deliver on the service vision while obtaining the promised costs savings from the virtual contact center. In a day of home-based agents, virtualized IP environments, etc., the management styles that worked in the 80’s and 90’s when you were able to get up and walk around and talk to your agents and physically see them are gone. This model needs to be replaced with real time, focused business systems that allow companies to operate effectively on an enterprise virtual level. The Informiam product suite enables all management levels of the virtual contact center to work together in a collaborative manner, solve problems quickly, and understand the strategic vision through consistent top down business rules and information displays geared for each type of user.

NT: What is your vision for the trend and the future of our industry?

SG: Even in the current economic climate, the customer service industry continues to pick up speed. In other words, everything must be processed and delivered faster. Customers are looking for as close to instantaneous satisfaction or instant gratification of their experience as possible. Best-of-breed providers will continue to up-the-ante on the speed that their able to resolve or satisfy customer issues. This will continue to drive virtualization.

Many of the business practices that were originally developed for the contact center which were designed around everyone being in one building and teams being associated around managers and so forth will continue to dissolve and the business will move towards a virtualized environment of both organic, as well as, outsourced resources. Therefore, the management systems and strategies put in place to manage the old contact center model will continue to be less and less effective. As we move forward, solutions like the Informiam Product Line that enable next generation management models and support new roles such customer experience executive management will continue to rise in popularity in the marketplace.

NT: What significance do the following in the customer interaction industry (VoIP, Home Agents, Hosted Solutions Delivery)?

SG: VoIP – We talked about VoIP and the opportunities and new demands that are brought about by virtualization of resources. While there are great opportunities, there are as many challenges and technology can play a significant role in helping organizations to obtain and leverage the rewards promised during implementation of the virtual contact center.

Home Agents – Home agents present a related challenge that extends from the virtual contact center. With more flexible workforces also comes the challenges of understanding agent performance in realtime. Management must be able to ensure that appropriate resources are in place and are conducting business as planned.

Specifically, Informiam’s Frontline Advisor nd Agent Option modules allow real time management of all agents - whether they are home or center based – and not only manages state and performance based measurements but also has the ability to look at behavioral elements of the experience such as: long calls, short calls, abandons, transfers to improper extensions, all of the issues that if not measured can really degrade the customer experience.

Hosted Solutions Delivery – Hosted offering will dramatically rise in our industry over coming years. The Informiam Product Line is actively involved in offering itself to that environment. We are perfectly suited to a SaaS type deployment based on our web-based, ‘n’-tiered architecture and our corresponding mission to optimize the virtual contact center.

NT: Thank you for your time.

Stuart Granger, Informiam Product Line

By Nadji Tehrani, CEO, Technology Marketing Corp.

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