November 2000

BY LUKE TONACHEL

Thanks to the Internet, companies are conducting business in a new global economy in which customer services must be available 24/7 in order for businesses to remain competitive. Delivering quality customer service has dramatically increased as a result of globalization, and large-scale mergers and acquisitions. As a result, many customer care divisions today face serious integration issues as valuable resources are dispersed across wide geographical areas.

At the same time, customers expect faster, more intelligent interactions. These expectations place even more pressure on contact center managers to deliver superior customer care. Anything less can mean the difference between customers gained and customers lost.

To address this dispersed labor pool, customer care divisions are expanding into distributed worldwide customer service operations, and managing consistent and appropriate levels of service is a necessity. The diversity of customer segments, worldwide market factors (including local language support), and the need to deliver highly targeted, personalized communications now requires customer contact centers that have agents with varying proficiencies and specialized skill sets.

The goal for businesses is to manage lasting and profitable customer relationships. It begins by delivering the customer to the most appropriate agent to meet their immediate and individual needs -- each and every time they contact your business. In a global economy, that can mean routing a customer interaction down the hall, across the country, and even around the world.

MEETING CUSTOMER NEEDS... GLOBALLY
Intelligent routing of customer interactions to this global distributed or "virtual" contact center is challenging because of the physical distance between remote units and the different infrastructure environments at each site.

For years, telecommunications carriers have offered simplistic methods for distributing call traffic among different contact center sites. A percentage of traffic was distributed to multiple sites without considering what types of agents and skill sets reside at each site. In this environment, contact center managers were required to manually change call volume percentage allocation to affect call flow. This reactive process was labor-intensive and often too slow to effectively balance the incoming calls across all sites.

Inevitably, an improper balance of calls between dispersed sites and resources results in some non-productive agents, and other agents who are inundated with calls that they cannot effectively handle. Telecommunications costs for businesses also increase in this scenario as trunks at some sites are idle, while calls wait in long queues at other sites.

As a result, distributed contact center sites become islands of inefficiency instead of single virtual contact centers. The carrier distribution methods fail to utilize available customer data for directing call distribution to the appropriate site and skilled agent.

What customer care managers need is centralized, dynamic control of their entire virtual contact center. This requires highly intelligent routing, real-time management, and reporting and analysis of contact center systems, agents, and calls in the virtual contact center -- at all times. The right solution must not only be easily and quickly deployed, but it also must be easy to use in helping meet business objectives and desired profitability levels.

The solution must be based on a framework that tightly integrates with all current and future media channels, as well as with other contact center applications such as workforce management. Finally, customer care managers need a system that will deliver interactions and customer histories directly to the agent in the context of a customers' most recent interaction, so they can effectively solve the caller's problem or engage them in a new opportunity.

FROM "THE CLOUD" TO THE DESKTOP
Effective network routing solutions must make call routing decisions while the call is still in the carrier's network or "the cloud" -- all on a call-by-call basis and based on information collected with the call or gathered via an instant database look-up. The software solution may be installed at the customer premise where it interacts with the carrier's network to provide call routing instructions. Customers are routed to an agent with the skill sets best suited to meet their specific needs, and to the contact center site which can best handle the additional call volume.

Network routing solutions must maintain a constant status of all contact center resources, including agents, groups of agents, customer queues, and IVR ports. With this centralized view, virtual contact center solutions can effectively balance the load of incoming traffic among multiple contact center sites. Call distribution can be based on a variety of statistics, including any combination of estimated caller wait time, number of available agents, longest agent-readiness time, number of calls answered, number of calls in queue, and specific service level objectives. Additionally, an even distribution of calls across sites also means that individual contact centers do not experience peaks and valleys in call traffic, and agents are more productive throughout the day.

Network routing solutions typically make an intelligent routing decision rapidly in the network by performing an instant database look-up or by leveraging the network carrier's capability to prompt a caller for information, such as a menu selection or account number. Calls are routed from the network to the right agent the first time, eliminating the need to route calls from premise to premise. Additionally, all data collected from the network IVR and enterprise databases during the routing process is passed to the agent application or desktop.

EASY-TO-MANAGE ROUTING STRATEGIES
Effective network routing also must allow contact center managers to build and customize individual routing strategies as simply and quickly as possible to maintain service levels under all circumstances. Some companies deliver these benefits through point-and-click graphical user interfaces. Contact center managers can continuously update routing strategies based on current customer data, service-level objectives, and contact center resources, as well as internal and external business factors such as promotions and competitive pressure. This flexibility ensures that routing strategies stay aligned with a company's business objectives, even as they change over time. It also allows the contact center to react immediately by loading new strategies during real-time contact center operations.

Network routing solutions must give managers a view into the current status of their agents and queues across the virtual, multi-site contact center. Real-time monitoring provides the ability to view and analyze statistics such as the number of interactions in queue, average wait times, service level adherence, and current activity for agents and groups of agents. Statistics can be based on business parameters, such as a customer type or service type. This enables managers to see, for example, how long it takes for an agent to issue a new personal loan to a "gold" tier customer vs. a "silver" tier customer.

HISTORICAL REPORTING
Finally, network routing solutions must support comprehensive information analysis with intelligent, business-oriented historical reporting. Historical reporting applications track all necessary data related to contact center activity and records it in a database. It creates a historical record for each customer and each interaction, tracing its path from inception to completion.

Again, the ability to customize and maintain flexibility is a requirement for effective reporting. Managers need the ability to analyze the effectiveness of their resources by creating reports to display information, such as the number of calls received concerning product "X" or revenue generated by agent group "Y." With this type of capability, managers can make information-driven decisions to improve interactions with customers and identify opportunities for cross-selling and up-selling, ultimately driving revenue opportunities in the contact center.

BUSINESSES AND CUSTOMERS WIN
Network routing continues to bring the concept of virtual contact centers to a reality. As telephone carriers and service providers begin to offer network routing solutions as part of a managed services package for their customers, enterprises today have several choices in the way they implement the capabilities of a network routing solution. The solution can be installed within the boundaries of their IT infrastructure or an enterprise can have the network routing capabilities managed by a service provider. In the end, consumers gain the benefit of seamless service, regardless of which agent, group, or site they communicate with, while businesses can maintain the most appropriate levels of service based on cost saving and revenue generating factors.

Luke Tonachel is senior product manager, network routing for Genesys Telecommunications Laboratories. 

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