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June 2000

 

The Next Wave: Internet Technology In The Call Center

BY MURRAY BOOKMAN, CISCO SYSTEMS

To meet growing customer expectations for multimedia interaction -- and remain competitive -- your company's call center operation must ride the wave of Internet technology change. Internet communication channels such as Web collaboration, Web callback, chat, e-mail and video kiosk are available today and fast becoming mainstream interaction channels.

As a result, traditional "brick and mortar" companies are scrambling to Web-enable themselves. At the same time, Internet-centric businesses with a Web site, but no call center, are quickly finding that the human touch of live agents is essential to ongoing market expansion and customer retention.

For your company to capitalize on the business opportunities made possible by the Internet -- and migrate your call center to a multimedia contact center -- you must first determine the degree to which you can leverage legacy systems versus embarking on a wholesale infrastructure rebuild. This process is known as "contact center engineering." Within this context, four principal areas need to be considered:

  • Whether core call center functionality such as ACD, IVR and CTI should remain premises-based as opposed to migrating these capabilities to the network;
  • A mechanism for establishing consistent business rules for contact handling across multiple channels;
  • Reevaluating your deployment of related applications such as workforce management (WFM) and customer relationship management (CRM) in a multimedia environment; and
  • Ensuring that contact center reporting and analysis capabilities keep pace as new interaction channels are introduced.

Contact Center Engineering
The traditional call center infrastructure includes ACD, IVR and CTI platforms as well as interfaces to back-office resources such as databases and to front-office applications such as CRM. In most cases, this infrastructure was not engineered up-front as a collective entity. Rather, various systems were brought together over time as a business introduced new technologies to reduce costs, improve customer service or both.

For example, communication between most ACD and IVR systems has been achieved via proprietary interfaces, APIs and messages, rather than through a common architecture. Likewise, the harsh reality of CTI is that data and voice were never designed to coexist; they have been made to work together only through significant development efforts over the past several years.

The advent of the multimedia contact center offers businesses a unique opportunity to rationalize and define the overall blueprint for customer interaction. Let's examine some of the more significant areas for consideration as your traditional call center migrates from stand-alone voice and IVR silos to multiple channels across multiple locations.

Premises Versus Network
Overall, premises-based contact-processing platforms are today being out-maneuvered by network-based solutions and deployments. As new media types are brought into the call center, as voice and data silos give way to an enterprise architecture and as agents become skilled in multiple channels, the traditional premises-based approach to ACD and IVR becomes cost-prohibitive and presents scaling challenges. For instance, when a legacy ACD or IVR is used for multimedia queuing, a dedicated port is required for each customer interaction. As Web chat, Web callback, Web collaboration and other Internet media are introduced, the transaction volume for agents skilled in multiple channels increases accordingly, requiring significantly more queue ports. Thus, Internet-based customer contact is driving the adoption of network-hosted ACD and IVR capabilities to ensure scalability and to deliver multimedia, enterprisewide prompting, routing and processing of customer contacts.

Likewise, network CTI moves the traditionally premises-based qualification and routing components of CTI to the network level, leaving only the screen-pop and agent telephony functions with a premises-based application. To determine call treatment, network CTI combines network-based qualification and routing -- including real-time ANI lookup and prompting on a per-call basis -- with real-time visibility into multiple agent queues across multiple locations.

Going forward, network CTI will provide qualification and routing across multiple contact channels from a network-based platform. As IP rapidly becomes the network protocol of choice, the voice/data integration complexities of the past will be eliminated. Results will include the seamless integration of IP-centric applications, unified back-end integration and reusability across multiple contact center platforms.

Consistent Contact Handling
As the traditional call center migrates to the multimedia contact center, companies should expect increased demand for select media types such as e-mail and Web collaboration, as well as a melding of delivery channels. For example, a Web chat session can move quickly into Web collaboration with the sharing of Web pages between agent and caller. Even more dramatic, Web collaboration and voice interaction can be initiated from e-mail sent to prospects and customers simply by including an appropriate link.

As customers increasingly expect to interact with your company via the channel of their choosing -- and in some cases, via multiple channels during a single session -- decisions must be made about database deployment and architecture. Traditionally, the call center has maintained a customer-profile database to support real-time profiling, treatment and routing of voice calls and IVR transactions. Data points typically include customer identification, transaction request identification, products and services previously purchased, cross-selling and upselling opportunities and "red flags" such as a collections or potential fraud situations.

As new contact channels are introduced, you will need to decide whether it makes better business sense to maintain niche databases by media type or a general-purpose data repository across channels. Decision criteria should include the volume of transactions by media type as well as your response time/service level objectives by type. For instance, while voice calls typically need to be profiled and routed in less than 250 milliseconds, e-mail does not have this real-time constraint. Also, don't forget the architectural and support ramifications of maintaining a separate database for each channel versus the economies of scale made possible by a single, enterprisewide, multimedia profiling solution potentially comprised of media-specific data repositories when needed.

Customer Relationship Management/Workforce Management
E-CRM is rapidly emerging as a key component of customer contact strategy, especially as it pertains to customer lifecycle management. To ensure success in a multimedia, enterprisewide contact center environment, a solution must support real-time profiling for qualification, routing and treatment based on up-to-date information housed in a common data repository. As the multimedia contact center takes hold, businesses have the opportunity to rationalize and reengineer the disparate profiling techniques and approaches to information storage, access and retrieval that have arisen across their IVR, ACD, CTI and CRM applications.

Likewise, WFM deployments need to be reevaluated based on their ability to address multiple media types and multiskilled agents spread across a broad range of facilities, including traditional call centers, branch offices, home offices and service agencies.

Reporting And Analysis
It is critical that your contact center engineering process includes an evaluation of reporting and analysis capabilities early on in the overall technology design. Industry-standard, non-proprietary, real-time and historical reporting tools including OLAP and DataMart should be made available to your business end users. Data points provided should include all key information per interaction such as start time, contact media channel(s), customer segment, agent identifier, contact center location, transaction type(s) and time per delivery channel/agent. Ultimately, the data provided by the reporting/analysis application will enable you to generate business metrics including acquisition cost, percent retention or loss, cross-selling, upselling and channel performance.

Contact Center Architecture
Once you have addressed the issues reflected in the contact center engineering process, you will need to assess the infrastructure implications of the decisions you have made.

As mentioned earlier, the customer contact network will increasingly be IP-based for all media types including voice. This means that real-time, multimedia qualification can now take place at a single point in the network with real-time routing to your entire base of live agents and other answering resources. Likewise, staffing models for forecasting and adherence reporting can now address more media types and a larger pool of distributed personnel. Finally, service levels can be dramatically improved and costs reduced by using resources across your entire enterprise.

The enterprise can also be dramatically expanded through the ubiquity of the IP network and the standards-based nature of IP applications. Going forward, the multimedia contact center can easily include traditional "brick and mortar" contact centers; e-centers that handle e-mail, chat and fax transactions but do not provide voice contact; branch and regional offices; home agents; service agencies; and even field personnel via wireless voice services. In terms of applications, a service agency can be used for overflow and niche campaigns while a branch office with a non-toll-free number can provide local presence and personalization. Calls coming into the branch can be routed to the formal contact centers during off-hours. Likewise, toll-free calls initially routed to the contact centers can be overflowed in real-time to branch and regional offices during peak periods.

Not surprisingly, these various nodes entail infrastructure differences in such areas as bandwidth and back-end integration -- sometimes even by media type! For example, voice and multimedia contact centers typically have excellent bandwidth and good back-end systems integration, while branches may have lower bandwidth and more limited back-end integration. Alternatively, your regional offices may have been overhauled and now have better multimedia capabilities than your traditional call centers that have not yet been multimedia enabled.

Next Steps
Develop a comprehensive plan for implementing your multimedia contact center enterprise, including a roadmap for technology upgrades. For instance, decide if you will rapidly deploy the new technology at one location initially on a test basis, or if it makes more sense to migrate the entire current infrastructure over a defined period of time. Making sure the contact center plan is consistent with your company's overall business objectives will help to answer these questions. Also, remember that the plan is a "living, breathing" document -- don't be reluctant to make modifications as changes occur and information is obtained.

Establish an interdisciplinary project team with a demonstrated track record. Be sure to include contact center agents -- the people who will ultimately implement the plan! Equally important, secure management commitment up front for your new initiative.

Manage And Measure
Establish metrics specific to your company and a corresponding cost/benefit analysis model. Tie the contact center project to sales and marketing objectives and demonstrate results. Ensure that your plan is not merely a cost-reduction initiative, but is firmly tied to fundamental change. Finally, audit the plan, both during the project and post-implementation.

Start by evaluating your current technology infrastructure honestly. Remember -- it may have developed organically, but now you have the opportunity to truly engineer the new infrastructure. Do it right, and your business can begin reaping the customer loyalty and profitability benefits that come with riding the Internet wave.

Murray Bookman is the manager of the Services Engagement Applications Technology Group for Cisco Systems, Inc.







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