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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