New Research: Contact Centers Evolve with New Customer Demands and Solutions
Miercom, a testing lab partner with TMC, has performed an
extensive analysis of solutions aimed at meeting the demands
of customers for improved inbound and outbound live and
automated service through traditional channels: voice and e-mail and in
new ones: SMS, chat, and video.
Here is a synopsis, highlights, and
excerpts of this research, prepared by
Rob Smithers CEO of Miercom and
Ed Labanca, Senior Analyst for UC and
Contact Centers. The full paper is available
at www.tmcnet.com/2588.1.
– Customer satisfaction metrics and their
correlation with financial performance
Customer satisfaction is primarily a
measure of the customer experience.
Research has shown that this directly
correlates with financial performance:
the better the customer satisfaction, the
better the long term bottom line results
for the company.
Customer interaction via contact center
systems and applications has a direct
impact on customer satisfaction. Figuring
out ways to improve customer’s
phone and multi-media communications
experience including self-service with
the right personal touch can make all the
difference. Parallel and converged evolution
is occurring with computing and
telecom platforms and applications.
– Communication and media servers
and associated applications can now be
implemented virtually without limitation
to geographic placement
This enables an organization to:
• Pool technical and human resources
throughout the enterprise including
contact centers
• Use ‘Presence’ information to reach
personnel via the preferred mode of
communication based on knowing in
advance an individual’s accessibility
over multiple devices
• Improve the overall user and customer
experience, with personalization
and dynamic interactions or “treatments”
for better phone and synchronized
web applications
• Facilitate efficient and effective
collaboration including knowledge
experts throughout the organization
• Consolidate and extend application
and management systems
• Reduce carrier costs
• Enable executives to more readily
automate business processes, and
facilitate corporate initiatives such as
joint venture or merger and acquisition
activities
– Aspect (News - Alert) Software: Best Supervisor
and Real-time Monitoring / Reporting
Capabilities
Aspect® Unified IP™ 6.5.1 is aimed
at providing a migration from its legacy
and ACD, predictive dialing and Aspect
EnsemblePro™ systems. The Aspect Unified
IP product line incorporates universal
administration, queuing, reporting and
multi-media communications which
also includes web chat, e-mail, IVR, and
automated workflow distribution.
Aspect Unified IP offers unified management
and supervisor capabilities through
a recording and quality management
and unified command and control
(UCC) enterprise multi-platform/vendor
real-time data aggregator. It also offers
consolidated routing rules across multiple
communication channels through
a single set of business rules, enabling
administration and reporting across a
wide range of applications.
Supervisors have centralized multi-site,
enterprise-wide capabilities through
multi-system provisioning, enterprise
monitoring, enterprise reporting, enterprise
recording, and disaster recovery for
replicating data across multiple systems.
Supervisors can create custom real-time
displays or canvasses.
For companies seeking recording and
speech analytics, quality management,
performance management, and coaching
capabilities, Aspect Software offers
the PerformanceEdge (News - Alert)™ suite, bringing
together Aspect eWorkforce Management
™, Aspect Quality Management
™, Aspect Performance Management,
Aspect Campaign Management™
and coaching and eLearning capabilities.
Aspect has worked with a third-party
consulting company to optimize its userinterface
designs. One customizable userinterface
provides seating charts with system
information and statistics on specific agents
and groups at various sites providing the CIS ability to drill down for more granular information.
Executives can create dashboards
and tickers to monitor real-time activity for
the various contact center systems.
Aspect’s UCC leverages all fixed granular
data elements occurring in the contact
center environment and is used to launch
Aspect’s Unified Director to monitor and
manage changes in real-time. Unified
Director provides a customizable single
supervisor interface for all components.
For these reasons, including the fact that
Aspect’s UCC can operate stand-alone
with disparate systems, we feel that
Aspect does provide the best Supervisor
and Real-time Monitoring and Reporting
Capabilities, especially in large contact
center environments or those involved in
merger and acquisition activities.
– Avaya (News - Alert): Best Voice Portal / Interactive
Voice and Video Response (IVVR)
Avaya Call Center and Interaction Center
7.1 software, coupled with the Avaya
Communication Manager runs on a Linux
based appliance capable of all TDM or all
IP with media encryption and server isolation
– or a combination of TDM and IP.
Interaction Center is the Avaya customer
suite platform for enterprise class management
of multi-media communications:
voice, video, e-mail, web chat and IPtelephony.
It includes SIP services and introduces
several enhancements that optimize
contact management and offer greater agent
effectiveness. Voice, e-mail, web chat are
managed based on a single set of business
rules to ensure consistent service
One of Avaya’s competitive differentiators
is massive scalability: the ability to support
10,000 agents on a single server. With this
what Avaya calls ‘flatten, consolidate, and
extend’ or FCE model it is easier to provide
the right agent “on demand”. Contact
center-based agents can provide expertise
and overflow for branch-based customer
service personnel. Inbound customer
contacts can be routed to branch-based
personnel according to skill set, availability
or prior contact history. Organizations
are able to use a common business model,
yet maintain personalized identities at the
branch offices.
By using a global “single queue”, personnel
at other locations can be leveraged as
expert resources. With FCE companies
can do more with decreased infrastructure,
thereby reducing the total cost of
ownership. Organizations are able to
support consistent processes and brand
images across the enterprise.
Avaya is paving the way with interactive
video, including the use of 3G video
cell phones, Internet videophones, and
video-enabled personal computers. By
using video in addition to the voice
portal’s speech recognition capabilities,
application developers can show callers
menu choices, product options, instructional
video clips, as well as dynamic
information such as personal account
information, airline flight options, and
current stock prices.
Avaya has extended its Eclipse-based application
authoring tool, Dialog Designer,
to support the creation of voice and video
applications directly, including full voice and
video application testing on the developer’s
workstation. This makes it easy for a voice
application developer to extend his skills into
voice and video application development.
We believe Avaya’s IVVR is the best voice
portal based on these extended capabilities.
– Interactive Intelligence (News - Alert): Best All-in-
One Multi-Media IP Contact Center
Interactive Intelligence’s Customer
Interaction Center (CIC) 3.0 product
suite leverages standard servers and SOA
while increasing reliability, security and
scalability. It removes the need for costly
voice cards and improves reliability by
eliminating multiple points of failure.
CIC 3.0 scales up to several thousand
agents and between 5,000 and 15,000
enterprise users per server. The product
suite is localized in 18 different languages.
Interactive Intelligence products include
reduced integration requirements, centralized
multi-channel processing and inbound
/ outbound blending, and single point of
administration for all of their components.
CIC 3.0 is offered in both premisesinstalled
and hosted versions. It supplies
ACD multimedia queuing, CTI (News - Alert), IVR/
speech recognition, outbound dialing in
preview, power, predictive, precise, and
agentless [automated] modes, and workforce
management. It also offers many
other products, among them:
• Business Process Automation (BPA)
BPA extends from the Interactive Intelligence
single-platform architecture, which
incorporates multi-channel queue management
services for workflow automation
• e-FAQ®: a tool that incorporates
linguistic analysis, semantic word-net,
or keyword searches as opposed to
more complex case-base reasoning
(tree mechanism).
• Interaction Administrator®: a single
administrative interface to configure
local and remote users, lines, stations,
IP networks, SIP device and digital
phone connections, security access,
make moves/adds /changes
• Interaction Designer®: an extensive
tool set for designing applications
such as IVR, workflows, and ACD
multimedia queuing
• Interaction Director®: provides pre
and post-call routing and load balancing
across multiple sites
• Interaction Feedback®: an automated,
configurable customer satisfaction survey
module that enables organizations
to accurately measure customer service
levels in a timely and cost-effective way
• Interaction Gateway (News - Alert)™: a 1U rackmountable
SIP appliance
• Interaction Recorder® – provides
a non call-blocking environment
vs. integrated 3rd party products. It
includes multi-channel recording,
screen recording, and agent scoring
for all media types. The Interaction
Tracker™ application can archive
complete contact and interaction
histories with individuals.
Due to the fact mentioned at the
outset, namely all of the above applications
are an integral part of the
Customer Interaction Center 3.0
foundation; we feel that Interactive
Intelligence does provide the Best All in-
One Multi-media
Contact Center.
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