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Feature Article
September 2000

 

From Intelligent Call Routing To Intelligent Contact Management

BY PAT KELLY, CISCO SYSTEMS, INC.

For most -- if not all -- enterprises and service agencies, the tsunami called e-commerce threatens to overwhelm call centers.

Business-to-business e-commerce, according to Forrester Research, will likely grow from more than $150 billion in 1999 to over $3 trillion by 2003. Forrester also predicts that online business-to-consumer transactions in the U.S. alone will mushroom from last year's $20 billion to $184 billion by 2004. Jupiter Communications estimates that 85 million people will shop online by 2003. By 2010, according to Goldman Sachs, business-to-consumer e-commerce could account for 20 percent of retail sales.

Every day, more Web sites offer "click-to-talk" or "click-to-chat" functionality, which permits real-time, live collaboration between call center agents and browsers. This, added to exponential growth in online commerce, means that call centers will have to handle -- will have to master, in fact -- huge spikes in contact volumes simply to enable enterprises to serve new and existing customers. Published in late 1999, a survey conducted by Jupiter Communications found that call centers ranked second (to fulfillment) in vulnerability to failure in the event of a rapid increase in transaction volumes.

"Sites have typically been focusing attention more on the front end of their Web ventures -- site design and Web server capacity," rather than on the fulfillment and call center functions, Jupiter noted.

Simply keeping the call center up and running effectively to maintain customer service levels is only the beginning; it does not take into account the new, value-added services contact centers will have to deploy to retain those customers on a consistent basis.

Therefore, functionality such as intelligent call routing (ICR) will play an ever more strategic role in maintaining the highest levels of service. As enterprises expand and distribute their call center operations -- with multiple locations, more agents and specialized agents -- they also increase the likelihood of misdirected calls, and the number of confused, impatient and irritated customers.

ICR will have to work hand-in-hand with emerging Internet-enabled forms of interaction such as Web collaboration, chat, e-mail and (especially) IP telephony. These varied media are turning the traditional call center into a multimedia customer contact center.

Managing this complexity is a highly critical issue facing contact center and service bureau managers. Their most pressing needs are solutions based on open standards (allowing the implementation of a best-of-breed solution), scalability (enabling it to support both new users and new applications), high reliability and fault tolerance, and investment protection.

The advent of network-based computing provides a platform for advanced ICR services: a solution we call intelligent contact management. These services will support "traditional" telephony-driven call centers as well as emerging multimedia-based contact management applications, along with the distributed architecture necessary to support a growing number of agents in geographically dispersed locations.

Intelligent contact management distributes data from multiple channels, such as IP networks, TDM (time division multiplexing) networks, fax and e-mail, to enterprise resources like ACD (automatic call distributor) and IVR (interactive voice response) systems, agents working in a distributed environment and desktop applications on an open, scalable infrastructure.

The ABCs Of ICR
For each incoming call, intelligent call routing software typically receives a route request from the carrier network. The software determines who is calling and why, using call-related data such as dialed number and calling line I.D., plus caller-entered digits and information obtained from a customer profile database look-up, if available. The software also identifies what answering resources are available to meet the caller's needs and where those resources are located based on real-time conditions such as agent skills, agent availability and queue lengths.

ICR software is flexible. As conditions change, it can be optimized to route each call to the optimum answering resource anywhere in the enterprise at any given moment. It enables caller segmentation, which improves call routing and handling effectiveness. Automatic caller identification matches each incoming caller to the most appropriate answering resource, then supports that resource with relevant customer information.

In addition, many ICR software systems include integrated IVR and CTI (computer-telephony integration) capabilities. IVR often acts as an additional answering resource, handling routine transactions without agent intervention and enabling call center staff to focus on more complex, revenue-generating calls. The screen pops of CTI harness information from a centralized, enterprise database or other applications to reduce call times and improve the quality of the agent-customer interaction.

Defining Intelligent Contact Management
Intelligent contact management is an enterprisewide customer-contact platform that integrates multivendor networks, automatic call distribution systems, IVR systems, Web servers, databases, desktop applications, agents and other resources.

It wraps ICR capabilities with new multimedia contact applications on an extensible, open network infrastructure that can forward scale to accommodate more users, more call centers and new value-added applications and services. There are eight basic components to an intelligent contact management solution:

1) Advanced Call Routing enables the intelligent contact management platform to effectively segment callers, balance calls across the enterprise and deliver each contact to the best enterprise resource the first time. This intelligent distribution capability can be delivered to calls originating from a carrier network connection or from peripherals such as ACDs, a PBX, an IVR system or a Web or e-mail server. It also optimizes each customer's entire transaction for contacts that flow between sites, among agents or skill groups, or into and out of IVR systems.

2) Customer-Profile Routing extends the sources of data available for making contact-routing decisions and for populating agent desktop applications. Intelligent contact management software can perform a customer profile database lookup during routing to more effectively segment customers and determine the optimal destination for each contact. Information obtained from customer relationship management (CRM) packages can be used to even more precisely match customers with agents and expand the data available to screen-pop applications. The information obtained is delivered to the selected agent with the contact, maximizing efficiency by eliminating data retrieval from the desktop.

3) Computer-Telephony Integration (CTI) offers a rich set of data to business applications, providing enterprisewide call-event and customer-profile information to a targeted agent desktop or business server. At the server level, real-time and historical information can be provided by multiple networks, ACDs, IVRs, Web servers, business applications, databases and the system itself. Industry-standard interfaces allow companies to more effectively use their corporate resources with minimal custom development or systems integration to implement CTI quickly and cost-effectively. An open software architecture easily integrates server or desktop solutions -- whether existing or new -- and enables users to choose applications that best meet their business needs. Scalability is possible to support an unlimited number of client connections, and delivers distributed fault tolerance across the enterprise.

4) Consolidated, Enterprisewide Reporting collects real-time and historical data necessary for mission-critical contact center reporting. An open architecture allows for the consolidation of timely and accurate information from carrier networks, the Internet, ACDs, IVRs, Web servers, databases, business applications, individual agent desktops and other resources. Contact, customer and peripheral data can be collected and stored. Data regarding individual agents in the contact center enterprise can also be collected, eliminating the need to gather this information from individual switches while providing increased reporting flexibility and a comprehensive picture of agent activity.

5) Web Interaction gives immediate assistance to customers who need information above and beyond what is provided on the corporate Web site. These real-time Web requests can be routed using the same business rules applied to contacts arriving from a carrier network. Every request -- with the accompanying customer profile data collected over the Web -- is delivered to the most appropriate agent anywhere in the enterprise. As voice applications move from circuit-switched to IP networks and as phone-based and Web-based customer support merge and blend, the convergence of media types is enabling richer interactions and greater personalization of applications and services. The next-generation customer contact center will be characterized by multimedia contacts (customer choice), integrate seamlessly with Web presence and migrate from switched to IP infrastructures. It will combine the value of personal interaction solutions with the information value of the latest automated interaction systems as both experienced personnel and up-to-the-second, integrated information resources are brought intelligently to bear on individual customers to maximize the value of each contact.

On an implementation level, this requires:

Adding customer service functionality to a Web presence. Some customers show that cross-sell and upsell rates, typically in the 4 to 6 percent range, jump up to 40 to 60 percent when live collaboration is added to a company's Web presence.

Adding Internet presence to call centers. The Web-enabled call center market is projected by Frost & Sullivan to reach U.S. $1.3 billion by 2006. This will be the result of forward-looking companies integrating their e-commerce activities, on all levels, with traditional customer service activities in order to maximize staff efficiency, minimize wasted customer time, eliminate inconsistent information and so on.

Applying the optimal resource to every customer interaction. Flexible business intelligence is required to continually match the optimal resources to every customer contact and request, be it a highly trained specialist to close a major sale or an IVR capability to handle simple requests such as account balances.

Putting in place the infrastructure necessary to project a holistic brand image across all channels of customer interaction. As contact channels proliferate and consumers' competitive choices multiply, it is essential that a unified customer experience underlies all customer interactions across all channels. This requires exchanges (personal, informational and application) to flow easily through the network to reduce friction, compress time, present a unified brand with unified values to increase loyalty and, ultimately, anticipate individual consumer needs.

6) Remote Agent Support extends the call center environment by providing CTI, contact distribution and reporting capabilities to branch office and small office/home office (SOHO) agents, as well as to knowledge workers throughout the enterprise. In addition to skills-based routing, it can provide soft-phone, screen pop and third-party call control functionality for remote agents, delivering a single, network-to-desktop CTI solution for the enterprise. By incorporating agents from beyond a contact center's physical location, companies can better use existing and on-demand resources, fully extend CTI functionality across an entire enterprise regardless of agent location and eliminate the need for ACD extension products. Remote agent support also expands hiring options, improves agent retention and lowers the costs associated with turnover by increasing agent location options.

7) IVR Integration supports customer identification and segmentation, skills-based routing and IVR load balancing, and also can extend the value of IVR investments. An open interface allows any IVR application to communicate with the intelligent contact management platform, enabling the IVR to act as a routing client, as a managed resource, as a queue point and as an information source for consolidated real-time and historical reports. A service control interface controls IVR scripting, providing a single, unified scripting environment to which business rules can be applied. This also supports call queuing at a premises- or network-based IVR and pulls calls from queue when an appropriate agent becomes available anywhere in the enterprise.

8) Workforce Management Integration leverages contact-volume forecast data and agent schedules generated by workforce management systems, enabling a company to more effectively allocate daily resources while facilitating long-term planning. For example, scheduling data can be used in routing decisions and to generate adherence reports comparing forecasts versus actual performance.

Deployed And In Operation Today
Intelligent contact management solutions are being deployed today and positive results are unmistakable. For example, in 1995, one large insurance company had one call center to handle all of its operations. In the five years since, the same company has opened two additional call centers and now employs more than 850 agents who handle more than ten million annual calls. By implementing intelligent contact management -- particularly advanced CTI capabilities -- the company has been able to lower its average speed of answer by 40 percent and reduce abandoned calls by 30 percent.

Results such as that ultimately translate to superior customer service and competitive advantage.

Pat Kelly is director of product marketing in Cisco Systems' Internet Communications Software Group.

[ Return To The September 2000 Table Of Contents ]







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