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When I was a child growing up in rural Connecticut, there was a river near
my house that used to freeze over each winter. We would play for hours on
that glazed river, ice-skating, having snowball fights and just plain
having fun. In those days, I can't recall ever feeling cold. I remember
spending the whole day outside, or at least until dinnertime. I remember
praying for snow almost every night in the winter, which, of course, meant
no school the following day and more time on the river.
As I grew older, I moved away from that old river and forgot about it.
Recently, however, I moved back into that same house in which I grew up
near that same river. Interestingly, the river has never frozen in the
last few years since I've been back. Could this be global warming at work?
To be honest, I watch the occasional Discovery Channel program, but I
am not a scientist or a meteorologist, so I don't know if global warming
is responsible for the higher temperatures we now enjoy in New England or
if it's just a natural cyclical variance. I use the term "enjoy"
because I really do enjoy warm weather. Waking up to snowfall used to make
me ecstatic as a child, but as an adult, snow means you still must go to
work, only now you risk your life getting there. When you get home at the
end of the day, of course, there are the shoveling, sanding and salting
chores to be done. So even considering the warmer winters in my home town,
I am not completely happy...I truly hate snow, cold weather and ice. When
winter comes knocking on my front door, I look for any excuse to escape
through the back door.
Luckily, my job requires me to cover industry news as well as many
industry events such as trade shows. Thankfully, there have been many
expositions this past winter. All of these events have taken place far to
the south of Connecticut and, thankfully, I have yet to be invited to a
winter trade show in Boston, Canada or Alaska.
Right Naming
But climate isn't the only hot thing drawing me to communications industry
events; I've also discovered a wealth of products as hot as the climate
outside the convention centers. Before I discuss the products themselves,
however, I would like to dwell on the names of some of the exhibitors at
the latest shows I've attended. You are no doubt familiar with companies
that have memorable, if not downright bizarre, names like Blue Pumpkin.
Recently, I've seen other, equally interesting, names like Pink Elephant,
FrogJazz and Purple Mutt Enterprises. These names have become commonplace;
perhaps it was Yahoo that popularized the use of crazy names? Whatever
happened to the days of corporate-sounding names like Rockwell, Northern
Telecom and Aspect Communications?
We have seen that wild names aren't necessarily a problem for these
fast-growing companies. Unusual names can help a company gain mindshare in
a busy market like customer interaction technology. This is especially
true when the company name is tied into a visual that is just as unusual.
One example is White Pajama (www.whitepajama.com),
a new communications application service provider (CASP) focusing on the
CRM space. When I first saw this company at a trade show, I noticed what
appeared to be a large pair of flannel pajamas prominently displayed atop
the booth. How could anyone pass by such a display without stopping to
investigate? You have got to give these marketers credit for being so
daring.
Alternative Communications: CASPs
For those of you that haven't read the news for the last couple of years,
application service providers are the latest rage in telecom and
interaction centers. Simply stated, CASPs outsource the technology
infrastructure of your contact center. Interaction centers are a huge
focus of many CASPs because it is just so expensive to purchase customer
interaction technology and, in many cases, it makes sense to outsource
these expenditures. When you add the cost of a PBX, ACD, e-mail management
solution, Web call buttons, workforce management, predictive dialer, IVR
and other technologies, you could easily spend twenty to thirty thousand
dollars per agent! Outsourcing this technology makes tremendous sense, as
it allows you to purchase the exact number of seats and precise
functionality you require without the tremendous up-front hardware costs.
Using a communications ASP, you pay a monthly fee based on features and
the number of seats you require. One of the major benefits of outsourcing
your customer interaction technology is that you need not concern yourself
with upgrading your technology or obsolete equipment: that worry rests
squarely on your ASP.
White Pajama's service provides for many types of customer
interactions, though it requires that your agents have DID lines,
high-speed Internet access and MS Internet Explorer. Currently, the
service works only for inbound interactions, though the company plans to
expand into outbound in the future. They tell me they can get a business
up and running very quickly. I even had an opportunity to sit underneath
the pajamas and see a demo, which consisted of a sample tech support call.
Customers can use other interaction types as well, such as e-mail or chat.
These interactions can be routed to agents using skills-based routing,
which can be configured to deliver customer contacts depending on content
or channel. Service- level agreements can be set to monitor and escalate
inquiries, if desired. A supervisor can be notified if a customer has a
recurring problem or has contacted the company previously on the same case
number.
One primary feature of White Pajama's service is ease of use. Managers
can quickly see agent status and queue information. Agents can enjoy
Web-based call control with hold and other functionality. Screen pops can
be completed using caller I.D. or case number information. White Pajama
has implemented IP telephony access, allowing customers another channel
through which to contact you. The cost for this service is $800 per month
per named agent.
Echopass (www.echopass.com) is
another CASP that I have encountered at a few industry events this year
and last. They focus on high-volume call center needs for enterprise
customer interactions. They are quick to point out that Echopass is
aggressively making strategic alliances and has a partnership program
established to lead this initiative. This is not unlike what the big
switch vendors have done with programs such as "Siemens Ready."
Echopass told me they are about to break a big deal with a major telco and
are working toward partnerships with four or five other landmark
companies. This is the first time I have heard of a CASP actively seeking
major partnerships. I think this will prove to be a win/win situation, as
it lends credibility to the CASPs themselves and allows their partners to
associate themselves with leading-edge outsourcing technology.
The people at Echopass tell me their strategy is not necessarily to
replace existing corporate infrastructure, but that their service can also
coexist with current technologies. They cite shrinking capital expenditure
budgets in a time when every company must have optimal customer service as
a great reason to outsource. Another reason to improve Web response time
is the oft-quoted adage that on the Internet, your competitor is just a
click away. This reminds me of "Tehrani's Law of Customer
Service," which I coined in the January
2001 issue of this publication. It states, "In the Internet era,
it takes 100 times more money to attract a new customer than it does to
keep an old one." The people from Echopass proceeded to tell me a
story of a person in their company's management who had bought a printer
from a large manufacturer and spent days trying to get the right driver
installed because the tech support departments of the printer company did
not have an integrated means of tracking trouble tickets and the
corresponding e-mail and calls that went with each ticket. Had every tech
support worker been able to access all tech support interactions, they
would have left him a much more satisfied customer and solved his problem
in 24 hours instead of the week it actually took.
Echopass claims it can install in 30 to 60 days at the enterprise level
and will supply you with a customer advocate. It also promises that every
major customer (50-plus seats) will have a customer advocate onsite, as
needed. Advocates become involved before implementation and learn their
clients' needs and work with customers to ensure smooth service. Echopass
employees explained to me they believe "the war will be won on
service" and, as such, they promise to reimburse clients triple what
they owe Echopass if their service goes down for any length of time. I
wish our ISP did this!
Voice Portals And Speech Rec
To make this technology work, you must have a broadband connection (they
suggest 20 agents per T1) and a gateway they supply, as well as IP
telephony-enabled phones supplied by Nortel Networks.
It is interesting to hear talk of CASPs as a new phenomenon when
InterVoice-Brite (www.intervoicebrite.com)
would argue that they have been at it for about four years. Indeed, they
call it managed services and they can act as a network operations center (NOC)
or, in today's language, provide application services infrastructure. In
addition, they are able to meet service-level agreements (SLAs) for both
service providers and enterprises. The company's services can be used as a
convenient backup in overflow situations. InterVoice-Brite emphasized that
they consider themselves much more than an IVR company. They are a voice
portal that can handle text-to-speech and Web interfaces. They offer 15
years of development experience. In the speech recognition arena, the
company works with both Nuance (www.nuance.com)
and SpeechWorks International (www.speechworks.com),
two of the leading vendors. Interestingly, one of InterVoice-Brite's
customers, a regional bank, has decided to eliminate touch-tone altogether
and write an app that takes advantage of voice recognition exclusively.
Typically, account numbers and passwords are still entered using
touch-tone. One of the advantages of this method is that you can add
personality to your application; you can have a navy-blue-suited banker or
a bubbly personality in your application.
We have heard about speech recognition for years, and those in the know
say this technology is on the cusp of major adoption, citing a number of
reasons. In public service implementations, speech rec can be used to
enable mobility, such as finding the nearest bus or train station. I have
also read about a trend toward very short-term car rentals in urban areas;
voice rec technology coupled with a cell phone is great for locating and
immediately procuring a car in your area. One challenge has been to
develop this technology in a way that it can recognize accented speech. It
turns out applications can be tuned for specific regions. Most people born
in the U.S. should have no problem being recognized, and thankfully,
speech recognition is available in multiple languages so this technology
can be offered to much of the globe. The bottom line is that
InterVoice-Brite is an old player in a new technology and has the
experience to help you get involved with the leading-edge of self-service
technologies.
More Than Recording
Let's change gears from new company names to renames. Racal Recorders (www.racalrecord.com)
had some interesting news of its own. The company has just renamed itself
Thales Contact Solutions (pronounced "Tahl-es"). I recently had
a chance to sit with executives of the company. They explained that one of
their major differentiators in the logging and monitoring field is their
environmental factor analysis, which captures variables such as calls
made, number of leads generated, number of sales made, etc. If, for
example, an agent is faster than usual on a call and skips steps, this
information needs to be taken in context of whether there were many calls
waiting in queue. Managers can also determine if the data network was busy
and screen pop data were not coming up quickly enough. This is especially
important to know when an agent appears to have been stalling.
Data Delivery With Discretion
My next stop was a company called BackWeb (www.backweb.com),
which provides a software product billed as an "e-accelerator"
for contact centers. BackWeb's product was designed to give users the
ability to deliver critical information to CSRs without distracting them.
These alerts can be used for a variety of purposes, such as delivering
instantaneous sales product updates and promotional material. A CLEC could
use this type of alert system to let an agent know that a DSL connection
is down in the Northeast, for example. Agents can click on alerts for more
information, if needed, and these alerts can be targeted to individual
representatives or groups.
Another innovative feature of BackWeb's product is the online
multimedia training application. This application allows agents to click
on an animated icon that brings up a live presentation, which can be
paused when agents need to interact with customers. The presentations can
include feedback and can integrate a quiz at the end of the session.
Managers can see tabulated results of the feedback or review quiz results.
Other functionality provided by this product is the ability to search a
document archive. This can be used to provide product comparisons at the
request of a customer. BackWeb has designed this application to store data
locally on each machine so agents can still function in the event of a
network outage. One terrific function is the ability to send messages to
CSRs at a low priority level, which won't interrupt them, or at a high
priority level, so they are required to deal with the communication
immediately. This technology can be used to create an atmosphere that
agents will appreciate, such as sending an inspirational video to all
agents and then prompting them for feedback at the end of the video. This
is much more personal than just sending an e-mail. For example, a user
could send a video thanking the company's agents for a great job this year
and asking them where they would like their next holiday party to be held.
One of the biggest issues with video is determining how to deliver it.
Employees on the road may not have access to high-speed Internet
connections. I regularly travel to hotels and usually can't connect at
faster than 22k per second. BackWeb informed me that streaming video
quality can't be relied on for effective communication, and they are
correct. So their application can be set to begin downloading a large
video file days before the video is set to display on agents' screens.
They call this technology "polite delivery" as it downloads only
when it senses inactivity in the connection.
Raising The Lowly Reader Board
Now let's go from one of the more dynamic products in this market to some
of the "old reliables." One of the most static groups of
products in the contact center market is furniture, which doesn't change
much over the years. Furniture's stasis is quickly followed by wall
boards. Even if you accept the industry nomenclature "real-time
visual messaging and alerting systems," it is a boring
technology...or so I thought. I am happy to report that I stand corrected
on this notion. The technology behind these systems has advanced to a
point where Symon Communications (www.symon.com)
manufactures boards that are TCP/IP-compatible, meaning they can be
managed like any other device on the network. One thing this affords you
is the ability to ping these boards to ascertain whether they are
connected to the network and operating properly.
The latest twist on these boards is the ability to monitor statistics
off a variety of switches from disparate manufacturers. Publisher 6.0 is a
Symon application that provides this functionality. The people at Symon
showed me an application that could take 250 stats off an Aspect ACD and
31 data elements off of a Nortel switch (the maximum number of data
elements available to be read from both respective manufacturers in this
application). In addition, the program is capable of reading XML as well
as ODBC, so data can be located anywhere and still be accessed by the
publisher application and displayed on the boards. The application
consists of a composer, where business rules can be applied on the raw
data. A simple example is the ability for a manager to have data elements
change from green to red whenever the average on-hold time per caller
reaches 90 seconds. This can be done across a variety of ACD types. A more
complicated example can take into account wait time, longest hold time,
time of day, workforce management data and more. It's good to see every
aspect of a contact center keeping up with technology. Reader boards will
never be the same again, and are certainly no longer boring!
I would love to write for days regarding all the latest technologies
that will help improve your customer interactions and keep your CRM moving
forward at maximum velocity. My editors, however, see it differently. I am
on deadline, this magazine needs to get to the printer and I now have some
free time on my hands.
I just wish someone had invited me to cover a trade show in Hawaii this
week.
Sincerely,
Rich Tehrani
Group Publisher
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