Industry Has Reached a 'Tipping Point'

Craig Mento, president and chief operating officer at Atlanta-based M1 Global Solutions, Inc., believes contact center management and executives have reached a tipping point. The danger: they could just tip over.

"Each one of [their] decisions further puts them into a … product road map or feature functionality road map that, if they do it wrong … [and] if they cannot get the right type of talented people to support their systems correctly, they could actually find themselves either being obviated … or the companies themselves say, 'Hey, we need to go get a new supplier that has the tool, talent and
technology to get ahead of the curve because we don't have the flexibility that our competitor has."

On-demand Platform Offered

The company offers a network-resident, on-demand communications platform for contact centers. Business users can develop applications using a simple drag-and-drop visual tool to power M1's delivery infrastructure that offers call control, voice self-service, e-mail, fax, chat and collaboration.

"[The] IT world never looks at the contact center as something it must support and as a nuisance. That has to change. We're trying to break through the world of complex technologies that … have either a black magic or a voodoo "[The] IT world never looks at the contact center as something it must support and as a nuisance. That has to change."shield around them that requires a special handshake to understand how you deploy [these systems] effectively. I don’t want a person trying to drive customer satisfaction and trying to drive costs down to really be tied up with how complex the technology is to purchase, integrate and maintain."<

When asked about the challenges his company faces, Mento admitted that the proposition being brought to the marketplace is significant.

"We're building a software capability that allows, from a very business-oriented way, a business manager to customize and operate through a visual model all this complex hardware and software that lies underneath."

Marketing Challenges

When asked about marketing his firm, Mento responded: "I want to make sure we can gain those couple of anchor accounts, fully document the business value that is empirically tied together with customer testimonials, and get marketing engaged with taking that message out to the marketplace. "At the end of the day, the people actually doing our marketing are the clients using our service solution and not just me touting it.""At the end of the day, the people actually doing our marketing are the clients using our service solution and not just me
touting it."

He added that his company must manage the end-user community's expectations regarding such questions as: How do I deploy a service-oriented architecture? How can I get all my service creation environment tools to work effectively together?

Consolidating Industry Needs

Regarding the question of the industry's challenges, Mento mentioned maintaining a focus on consolidating industry needs compared with just following some vendor's product road map.

"The future is about process and results, not products. To this end, I see a day when companies of all sizes embrace 'transaction arbitrage.' A transaction enters into a virtual system, and inside the M1 network there are business rules and capabilities for that transaction to be satisfied. If we don't get to that point, I think customer care and technical support [are] always going to come under fire of 'it's too expensive to do a good job.'

"Once we get to 'transaction arbitrage,' that transaction will have a price performance based on where it fits into the cost stack of the company that's offering that service. That's still a bit out there, but we have a bright management team with a vision of the future. We want people to share our vision, so we offer a way for organizations to easily engage us on a progressive basis."

When asked about the firm's growth, Mento said the private company expects to be cash-flow positive by the first quarter of 2006. Revenues this year are expected to total about $2.5 million with a pro forma outlook of approximately $14 million next year, skyrocketing to the "mid-to-high 30s" in the following year.

"I see 80 percent of the transactions over the next five years going to a very sophisticated automated process, and a growing 20 percent of high-touch live agents, and I see the middle dissipating. The middle is actually self help. If I can get on my own Web browser to go figure it out, chances are what we consider the middle … I say that that shrinks."

Two Very Different Trends to Emerge

Mento sees two distinct trends regarding the future of the industry.

"Offshoring to me was a temporary labor phenomenon. It looked like a cheap option [because] 65 percent of your costs are always tied to labor. If my labor can cost me 50 cents an hour versus $8 an hour, don’t I make money?"

The results of this approach included mediocre results and sub-optimized profits, according to Mento.

"There's going to be an absolute high-touch need for premium customers of any enterprise to get exactly what they want. If I'm a Platinum American Express [customer] and I put on my profile, 'I only want to talk to a person,' then they'll have the technology to only let me talk to people. Don't put me through an IVR. Don’t send me a bunch of e-mail stuff. Just talk to me when I call, whenever I call.

"And that’s going to be done onshore and that's where we're going to get over the bubble of right-shoring. That will [include] a lot of sales and very high-end service characteristics. [These people want] to be treated differently because they're paying a premium."

The other trend will be "as high-quality automated" as possible.

"I see 80 percent of the transactions over the next five years going to a very sophisticated automated process, and a growing 20 percent of high-touch live agents, and I see the middle dissipating. The middle is actually self help. If I can get on my own Web browser to go figure it out, chances are what we consider the middle … I say that that shrinks."