“Informal” Virtual Contact
Centers – “Putting the CC Cart Before the UC Horse”
After starting to write this article, I decided to
hold off and sit in on a most pertinent CommWeb
webinar discussion, “Beyond ACDs: From Expert Agents to Converged Call
Centers,” conducted by industry analyst Blair Pleasant and Joe Fleischer
from Call Center Magazine. The actual webinar, which should be commended for
judiciously allowing a significant amount of time for interesting Q&A from
the audience, highlighted the emergence of enterprise-wide customer contact
center operations and the need to converge the traditional “formal call
center” functions and the flexibility of “informal,” multi-modal contact
centers through IP-based infrastructure. While the speakers addressed a
number of practical issues regarding the role of non-dedicated “contact
center agents” and how IP (define
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alert) networking supports enterprise-wide call routing, I was
particularly concerned about how these new capabilities would fit into an
enterprise migration plan for converged communications.
Customer Contact Routing and Types of “Agents”
Joe
Fleischer rightfully emphasized that traditional “call center agents” will
still be defined by their dedicated responsibility to take real-time,
conversational voice calls, wherever they may be located.
VoIP (define
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and managed over an IP network, extending to branch offices or individual
agent homes.
“Contact
center agents,” on the other hand, will add in responsibilities for
communicating with customers in other modalities, which may or may not be
real-time, e.g., text chat, e-mail, voice mail, etc. Although their “skill”
set may allow an individual agent to handle all types of contacts, I have
long held Fleischer’s view that scheduling the various contact modality
assignments separately will prove to be most effective for a busy contact
center operation. Throwing e-mail, voice mail, instant messaging, and voice
calls randomly at a busy agent is not going to provide a comfortable or
efficient rhythm for that agent.
Blair
Pleasant focused on another class of customer-facing personnel within an
enterprise that will not be necessarily dedicated to just handling incoming
customer contacts, but, because of particular job responsibilities and
expertise, they must be included as a critical resource for the
enterprise-wide “virtual” contact center operation. Such “experts” or
specialists will still have to make themselves “accessible” to take customer
calls or messages that require their expertise, and schedules may be a
practical tool for exploiting their availability. Such “experts” fall into
the category of traditional “second-level” or “third-level” customer support
staff, but now must be able to manage their communication accessibility more
flexibly with multi-modal converged communications..
Blair cited
financial service advisors and mobile retail sales personnel as examples of
customer-facing staff who can selectively handle customer contact
assignments when their normal job activity permits. Another general
situation involves a salesperson or field service “ownership” of individual
prospects or customers, where such mobile individuals need to be the primary
point of contact in any form to support their customers’ needs.
This
“virtual” contact center approach expands the availability of enterprise
staff resources and can be efficiently implemented within IP-based networks
that will converge individual communication accessibility with multi-modal
customer contact routing. The key here will be a broader view of “skills
based routing” (SBR) (news
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alert) that includes all customer-facing staff in the enterprise, not
just the “formal” call center agents. This routing technology will work most
cost-effectively when coupled with Web or voice self-service applications
that can efficiently identify the customer’s needs for selective live
assistance.
This
convergence of different types of customer-facing enterprise personnel will
present new challenges for contact center management, who must reconcile the
differences in policies, training, incentives, performance monitoring, and
task scheduling for these various staff resources (“skills”) to support the
needs of a common set of customers with a variety of contact channel
alternatives. So, its not simply a matter of putting in an IP network
infrastructure, installing new application servers or network services, and
desktop devices; the “virtual” multi-modal contact “center” is going to
require new kinds of operational management for both its customer contact
activities and its mix of customer-facing staff.
Looking
at Contact Center Convergence From A Migration Perspective
The big push
for converged communications in the enterprise is touching all forms of IP
Telephony application servers, including enterprise IP
PBXs, (define -
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alert) unified messaging (alias voice mail), wireless devices, and
multi-modal contact center servers. However, the migration strategy for all
IP-based communications technologies needs to be carefully and logically
planned together, not as separate, unrelated applications, and certainly not
continuing the separated silo of incoming telephone calls for customer
contacts. As a matter of fact, we see increasingly critical communication
dependencies between customer-facing enterprise staff and customer contacts
and not just for traditional “formal” call center operations either.
Because
simple toll-bypass payoffs have been eroding significantly as carrier
offerings competitively exploit the lower costs of VoIP, the main
ROI (define
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alert) targets for contact center telecommunications convergence are
shifting towards functional areas of contact center communication
technology, including:
·
Familiar “CTI” (Computer
Telephony Integration) (news
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and/or expensive to implement for legacy proprietary
TDM (define -
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Intelligent routing of incoming calls across the enterprise network,
based upon staff availability and customer information
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Synchronized “screen pops” of pertinent customer information
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Customer contact activity data collection and reporting
·
Consolidation, centralized control, and management of
distributed, but consistent, contact center activities, including branch
office groups and home agents, across an IP network
·
Multi-modal communications flexibility for both customers and
customer-facing enterprise personnel to enable voice calls, instant
messaging (text chat), and asynchronous text and voice messaging to be
dynamically activated as appropriate for customer needs and available staff
resources. (Although non-telephony real-time contacts require similar kinds
of routing logic and customer context information, it really is
inappropriate to still refer to them as “CTI!”)
·
Exploitation of new presence management technology to
determine availability of skills-based, multi-modal customer contact routing
assignments.
·
Consolidation of new development tools and languages for
consistency, interoperability, and flexibility between visual and
speech-based interfaces for self-service applications. These will enable
telephone and Web-based customers, as well as multi-modal mobile device
users, to be serviced by common, network-based, application servers. More
importantly, such effective self-service applications will handle a greater
share of simple customer needs, but generating increasing demand for greater
multi-modal communication skills from live assistance.
The
enterprise IP Telephony migration for contact center applications will
involve VoIP network transport implementations, including new
QoS (news
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alert) and Security management functions and PSTN
(define -
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alert) gateways, as well as PC-based “softphone” implementations at
“formal” contact center agent desktops.
Part 2
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