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Economists forecast that 2004 will bring much improved business
spending and much of that spending will have to do with new technology
that helps boost productivity. I have decided to do my part in helping
decision makers find the products that will help them in their quest to
fulfill the promise of that forecast. I have chosen two companies to
highlight this month ' any more and this column would become too long. I
have been overwhelmed as of late; companies in the CRM space are clamoring
for press, touting their new products. It seems like the pace of
technological innovation is once again picking up, and this is a good
thing for decision makers like you. Here is a smattering of the new and
exciting companies to look at in the new year. And in case I haven't had a
chance to tell you in person, have a happy new year and may all your
resolutions and dreams come true.
Data Collection Resources
Is there anything wrong with the Honda Accord? Most people would say no,
as this has been one of the most popular cars in America for the past
decade. You don't hear many people tell you that they want their product
to be the Honda Accord of the market, but that is exactly what
spokespeople from Data Collection Resources (www.monitoringmadeeasy.com)
told me about their quality monitoring and recording solutions on a recent
conference call. Their product is named CEMS (customer experience
management suite) and starting at under $25,000, it is even priced
similarly to Honda's popular Accord. For this amount you could outfit 65
agents and four supervisory stations, including training. You aren't
charged by the agent seat but by the number of channels. This can be quite
cost-effective because it allows a company that needs less monitoring per
agent to save money. Just as in the automotive market, where you could
spend much more on a car than a Honda, you could spend over $100,000 on
competitive products.
Even at this relatively low price, there are many benefits on which it is
worth elaborating. For example, this product includes the ability to be
quickly installed with little IT support. It also supports a spreadsheet
view allowing agents to easily be dragged and dropped into different
departments, which alters their recording parameters. Calls can be
recorded into .wav files and supervisors using the system can see how long
calls are placed on hold. This information can (and should, in my opinion)
be used in scoring criteria of agents' performance. You are afforded great
flexibility in design and scoring of performance templates as well.
Questions can be numeric, text-based, four-point scoring, etc.
The system allows the grading of calls while simultaneously seeing the
agent's screen. In addition, CEMS allows calls to be found very quickly so
managers can spend more time grading and less time finding calls to grade.
Other notable benefits include the option to spot long-term trends as well
as call-by-call analysis. The bottom line is that with CEMS, you can get
most of the features of more expensive packages and even some that the big
guys don't have. And you can do it all for much less. The company may have
a winning strategy on its hands, but its competitors are charging more and
spending more on marketing. In virtually every other industry, the best
marketers (think Dell, AFLAC, Siebel, Interactive Intelligence, etc.) do
the best. Still, my dealings with the company show their managers to have
a good understanding of the needs of the market and I suggest you give
this company a call when you are in the market for monitoring and
recording solutions.
Telephony@Work
We have been hearing a great deal about hosted CRM lately. While companies
like IBM and Siebel are doing a great job promoting this market, there are
many longer-term players in the space such as Telephony@Work (www.telephonyatwork.com),
a company selling a product called CallCenter@nywhere, which is resold by
service providers to contact centers as a service. This same technology is
available to your contact center as a CPE (customer premise equipment)
offering. MCI resells CallCenter@nywhere as a service to their customers
and if this isn't a testament to the reliability of this solution, I am
not sure what is.
What differentiates this customer interaction solution from many others is
that it is completely menu-driven, meaning custom programming is not
needed and you can therefore save a great deal of money. Better yet, you
achieve levels of flexibility not possible with systems that require
extensive customization. Enhanced flexibility could be crucial in the
mortgage business where rates can fluctuate or any other business where
real-time factors can alter your success. For example, if your greeting
generally includes an average time on hold announcement and due to an
influx of calls, your time on hold skyrockets to 30 minutes, you can
quickly instruct CallCenter@nywhere to stop announcing estimated hold
time.
A menu-driven system can drastically reduce costs and headaches associated
with CRM. This approach discussed above can really change the way CRM and
contract center products are deployed in the future. Telecom is too
mission-critical to have programmers mucking around with communications
servers and potentially adding instability into the mix. This company may
really be on to something. They feel the industry is artificially retarded
as systems integrators get rich while software takes longer to develop and
integrated solutions are much more expensive than they need to be.
Another feature inherent in this solution is weighted skills-based
routing, meaning an agent's proficiency in a skill such as speaking
Italian can be taken into account before routing calls. It is easy to
allow agents to telecommute as the program is browser-based using https://
for security as well as its ability to easily pass through firewalls.
It is worth noting that a system designed for carriers should be more
robust and resilient to failure than systems that are designed for
individual corporations. If we were to delve into this concept further,
you would see that service provider requirements are severe. Multiple
instances of applications must run simultaneously, while full redundancy
must be ensured with applications that are replicated across servers.
Furthermore, data must be kept isolated from each customer so one
individual user can't see (even via hacking) the data meant for another
customer. Finally, a crash in the system can't bring down communications.
This is referred to as multitenancy and is the architecture embedded in
CallCenter@nywhere and it further allows multiple instances of
applications to be replicated across a network or on the same machine
depending on your requirements.
Other strengths of this solution include the ability to have H.323 devices
talk to SIP-based devices, support for Linux, Windows 2000 and XP, as well
as Solaris. Machines can be mixed and matched if desired. Databases can be
native MS SQL Server or Oracle or you can use ODBC for connectivity to
other databases. The user interface is time-zone sensitive, and there is
proxy support for security. This is an IVR system, a predictive dialer, a
preview dialer, a monitoring system via PSTN or VoIP, a coaching system
with silent whisper, a highly flexible recording system and a reporting
system with 27,000 different reports (if you include all the permutations
available via drop-down boxes). Menu titles can easily be changed across
the enterprise, you can add hundreds of administrator classes, you can
push a slide show out to customers if agents are unavailable, and you can
access the internal database as it is published, you can connect the
system to a legacy PBX or take advantage of the built-in softswitch.
Amazingly, you are able to have unlimited queues and each queue (or
process) can support up to 50,000 people. Twenty seven thousand agents can
be supported in a 42 U rack. The company claims the ability to support
5,000,000 seats, but says the capacity is really unlimited. As you might
imagine, I didn't get a chance to verify this claim. The software supports
multiple entry points, meaning a PSTN call can be routed via IP, which
means the system can give SS7-like call routing functionality with the
benefits of skills-based routing. Cross-media licenses (e-mail, chat,
voice, fax, VoIP, voice mail), which are based on concurrent use, are
$2,500 per agent and can fall to $250 per agent based on volume. Full
customization and integration is $10,000 per location.
Looking Forward To 2004
For a tech-oriented person like myself, the fact that 2004 is likely to be
a renaissance for the technology market is incredibly exciting. From my
perspective, right now in January, the year is wide-open, the
possibilities are endless, and the market is hungry for the new and
enhanced technologies that are waiting in the wings. As always, I will
keep you on the very top of all things pertaining to contact center
technology breakthroughs. Watch this space!
Sincerely,
Rich Tehrani
Group Publisher,
Group Editor-in-Chief
[email protected]
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www.TMCnet.com or call
203-852-6800.
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