ITEXPO West 2008 Review

ITEXPO West 2008 has proven be one of the most exciting, worthwhile, and informative conferences and events for contact centers. Feedback received from attendees, speakers, and exhibitors alike cited the overviews, analysis, inspiration, and insight from the keynoters, strong educational content in the sessions. There is a growing range of innovative new solutions launched and in the works that are aimed at making organizations more effective.

Best of Call Center 2.0

Call Center 2.0 is the portion of ITEXPO West designed to address the needs of contact center leaders as they transition to IP telephony based-call systems with both education and with products and services offered by exhibitors.

Here are the exhibiting firms that our editorial experts determined represent the Best of Call Center 2.0.

• CosmoCom
CosmoCom www.cosmocom.com is the global leader in Contact Center Consolidation 2.0, an all-IP contact center strategy that helps companies to be more reachable and more responsive in a cost effective way. It encompasses multiple locations including onshore, offshore, and home; formal and informal agents; captive and outsourced operations; multi-channel communication; and multiple applications. CosmoCom (News - Alert) technology enabling Consolidation 2.0 is available as a premise-based solution and as a service from top global service providers hosting it.

• Syntellect (News - Alert)
Syntellect www.syntellect.com is a premier provider of enterprise- class contact center solutions for the high-technology, financial services, help desk, utilities, government, and consumer products industries. It helps its customers create, maintain and continuously improve superior end-to-end service for their customers: personalized service that values their preferences from the way they contact a business, to the level of help desired.

• Vocalcom
Vocalcom www.vocalcom.com has provided world-class contact center solutions for the past 10 years. Within its product portfolio list there is the latest ACD, IVR, predictive dialing, hosted solutions, call recording, CTI (News - Alert), scripting, screen pop, speech engine, VoIP/HMP engines, reporting, supervision, and e-mail management. Vocalcom’s Hermes.Net integrated full-featured multichannel contact center solution addresses all industry sectors that directly target customer interactions including sales, marketing, collections, customer service, and telemarketing.

Individual Insights

Here is a selection of some of the insights gained from individuals met and engaged in discussions with at the conference:

– Paul King (News - Alert), President and COO, Aperio CI said there is a growing realization by firms that they need more than ever to retain and secondarily to cross-sell and upsell to existing customers rather than seeking new customers (more about this point in this issue’s Logout).

Growth can occur from selling more to existing customers by carefully analyzing all information sources such as details in calls to resolve hidden issues and to seek new needs that one’s products or services can meet. Growth can also happen by personalizing offers through understanding how each customer actually uses the phone and services.

– Lawrence Byrd, Director, Communications-Enabled Business Processes, Avaya (News - Alert) said that enterprises need to adjust their viewpoints from unified communications to unified organization, of serving the customer regardless where they are in the enterprise. He sees branches integrating desktop presence, potentially using IBM or Microsoft (News - Alert) desktop interfaces. This branch/contact-center integration has been especially important for organizations with small local office locations, such as in insurance, that want a consistent brand image to be presented no matter where a customer calls for assistance.

Increasingly companies must go to where the customers are and deliver service right there. That includes social networking and virtual community site such as Second Life and Facebook, because that is where customers often find out information on products and services.

– Francis Carden (News - Alert), Founder and Chief Evangelist, Open- Span, pointed out that why should organizations toss out existing applications and buy and install new ones at considerable cost when they do not have to? His firm’s application integration product lengthens the lifespan and functionality of older legacy software while saving money compared with buying and installing new systems by enabling virtually any program that runs in Windows

– A discussion following a session on ‘Enabling Home- Based Agents’ given by Mark Moore, Chief Technology Officer, TeleDirect (News - Alert), revealed a new issue: how to manage other data users in the home i.e. family members, friends, and guests from draining too much from the pipe when home agents are working.

Yet upon reflection afterward the answer may be as simple as buying extra capacity or two lines: one for business, the other for personal/home. Yes, this adds to the costs of working from home, but compared to the expense and hassle of commuting, with the dividend of maintaining domestic peace, the greater outlay is well worth it.

– Brian Spencer, president of OAISYS (News - Alert) made a very good point in his presentation on ‘Making Your Contact Center Smarter: Best Practices’ in that you don’t have to be live with customers to give excellent customer service. That it is OK to look into matters and get back to them, and in doing so reviewing call recordings to make sure that every issue customers raised and the importance they have given to them by language and tone of voice are followed up on. In an ideal world when we reach a contact center agent that individual should meet our needs. Yet that is not realistic. If given the choice of continued escalations and on-holds versus callbacks from individuals who can truly help us, which one would most of us pick?

– Is Belize the next contact center location? Two attendees from that unique Central American country think so, and for good reason.

Belize is bilingual English/Spanish thanks to having been a British colony, formerly named British Honduras, and is nestled next to Mexico and Guatemala. It has over 300,000 residents and a customer service culture thanks to a thriving eco-tourism sector, and high labor availability, plus a budding offshore financial sector. Belize City, the largest municipality, is home to roughly 20 percent of the population.

Belize may need an upgraded voice/data communications network. Yet as with many other parts of the world, including in Central America and the adjacent Caribbean region, the resources to enable it may come once a business case, such as to attract contract centers, has been made.

New Products/Services

There were several new products, services aimed at, and can be used by contact centers announced and released at ITEXPO West. Among the firms and solutions are:

Voxbone (News - Alert) (inbound IP-based carrier) www.voxbone.com
Voxbone now has licenses to operate in all 27 European countries. This enables contact centers to cost-effectively route calls to agents with specific language skills including those home-based, subject matter experts, informal centers without contracting with individual telcos. Buying Voxbone’s services is scalable, which affordably permits connecting callers who prefer to speak uncommon languages, such as Finnish, to those agents who are fluent in them.

Zeacom (Unified Communications (News - Alert)) www.zeacom.com Zeacom acquired Mi-Audio and Mi-Eval from New Zealandbased Talking Computers which will gives Zeacom (News - Alert) Communications Center 5.1 call recording/voice logging, quality monitoring, and coaching and training capabilities. Zeacom also showcased its Executive Mobile module, which gives managers and professionals the freedom to manage their presence and availability status on their Black- Berry and Windows Mobile devices. With it a general manager attending ITEXPO could be reached and respond to a service level issue with instructions to supervisors.

Zehu (Speaker Authentication) www.zehu.com
Zehu’s Zehu Authenticator 3.0, its new white label voice-based biometric authentication solution, provides an ideal tool for time-andattendance at contact centers. It can also authenticate the identities of home agents: essential because these individuals are working sight unseen. This tool provides an important layer of security to critical and sensitive applications such as financial services and healthcare. Zehu’s solution uses voice templates that mathematically represent voice features but do not contain actual voice samples. These techniques should address the security concerns raised about the ability of others to gain access by mimicking speakers.

Future Products

Several firms gave heads-up on new releases that are in the works, some may have been released by the time these words are read. They include:

Aperio CI (News - Alert) www.aperioci.com
Aperio CI will have a new product aimed at tapping social networks. SNAP (Social Networks Analysis & Propensities) is a revolutionary use of data analytics that identifies social networks within a mobile operator’s customer base. It will be released later in 2008. SNAP will allow firms to better understand the dynamics that exist among its users, enabling them to sell new services and products, provide a higher degree of service, and increase customer retention.

Envision Telephony www.envisiontelephony.com
Envision Telephony is putting the final touches on a new speech analytics solution that will offer lower-cost, high ROI fundamental functionality for enterprises. The new application, which is programmed to launch in January 2009, will have critical features such as word and phrase spotting for critical terms such as ‘cancel’ but will not have some of the complex, expensive and often underutilized tools such as emotion detection.

The strategy for the product, which will cost significantly less than full-featured similar solutions is to remove the typical barriers of entry to the benefits of speech analytics for both enterprise and mid-market companies, explains marketing director Jim Shulkin.

Fonolo (News - Alert) www.fonolo.com
Fonolo is a new firm that is beta testing a new web-based fast deep-dialing solution, akin to website bookmarking, which will enable callers to directly reach exactly who they need to contact on repeat calls without digging through and being stopped at each layer in an organization. The solution, expected to be on the market in early 2009, will remember numbers dialed before to the same individuals. It can also record calls: a great customer service feature that enables customers, not just contact centers, to recall what was said in the interactions.

Fonolo will also release about the same time an automated customer satisfaction solution. As soon as a consumer hangs up a dialogue box appears, allowing them provide feedback via text.

OAISYS www.oaisys.com
OAISYS is expecting to release an integrated live call monitoring solution for Tracer by year end that will permit easier access to recordings, and have and enable saved filters. It will also have more flexible live call auto-monitoring, integrated live coaching that will enable the creation of text-based annotations, live call evaluations and live call commenting using instant messaging.

OAISYS also plans to launch an automated e-mail solution in first quarter 2009. The tool, to be featured in both the Talkument and Tracer applications, will permit users to select if they want new voice documents delivered to their e-mail accounts.

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