| RT: Lately, it's very fashionable for industry analysts to claim that CRM was a huge failure. Do you agree? If not, where do you lay the blame for companies not experiencing what they thought they would with CRM implementations?
 EB:
At Telephony@Work, we believe that the extent to which many vendors' CRM and multichannel interaction management deployments have failed is directly tied to how these technologies were deployed up-front; with the ultimate impact of these early decisions on customer satisfaction materializing inevitably over time. Inflexible systems cobbled together via time-consuming and expensive integration are not the ideal vehicle for ongoing adaptation to changing customer needs and wants.
The point here is that customer satisfaction requirements aren't static. Needs change. So do desires. Systems that can't quickly and easily adapt (in the real world this means at no cost) are generally obsolete before they are even deployed. CRM and multichannel interaction management are moving targets ' where needs, desires and expectations are constantly changing. The problem is that most systems can't adapt quickly or easily and their outputs often ultimately resonate with customers as hollow attempts to address real-world problems with clich's ' instead of reflecting a genuine dialog between companies and the customers that support them.
At Telephony@Work, we recognized this back in the 1990s. Our response was a comprehensive 'productization' and 'democratization' of contact center technology to enable real-time change to be implemented by non-programmers on-demand and at no cost ' with democratized control of everything from suggested-response content to weighted skills-based routing algorithms. Our mission of empowering a 'real-time business vision' focused on eliminating the need for business response to customer stimulus to be delayed and ultimately filtered (i.e., watered down/changed/morphed) through the lens of budgetary constraints and the biases of a programming staff ' both of which naturally tend to focus on their own root concerns rather than on the customer-centric vision that was initially the catalyst for change. Of course, the bigger problem is that such traditional, time-consuming 'change processes' naturally result in the delivery of yesterday's answers to today's questions ' which does little to enhance customer relationships and ultimately serves only to undermine them. The problem is only compounded for outsourcers, whose clients want new campaigns to be up and running yesterday; with evaluation metrics that measure performance against the target of absolute customer satisfaction.
The need to empower real-time business visions for our carrier and outsourcer clients, two of our key markets, led Telephony@Work to develop and ultimately deliver a truly differentiated value proposition: pre-integrated contact center technology that is customized via browser-menus, field-filling and drop-down lists ' rather than via the traditional approach of custom programming, compiling and constant re-integration of script languages. The result is consistent quality and real-time change on-demand; without the costs, risks and delays of custom programming and systems integration. Of course, to be really effective, this menu-driven provisioning had to mirror the same needs analysis processes that top-tier integrators rely on prior to beginning the programming phases of their deployments, such that no sacrifice in flexibility is traded off in exchange for the ability to 'instantly provision' or implement real-time change.
RT: Though everyone seems to agree that a customer's contact information and history with a company should be linked across all media, we all know from our daily dealings with our banks, insurance companies, wireless providers, etc., that this is not the case. What do you think is the reason for the resistance many companies have toward transforming their call centers into multimedia knowledge centers?
EB: The real problem that these companies face lies in the inflexibility of their legacy environments ' in that they have become virtual prisoners of their past investments. Their 'resistance' is not so much an act of will as it is an act of resignation ' resigning themselves to mediocre service as prisoners of the fiscal life cycle of their legacy technologies. Since the life cycles of their various point solutions expire at different times, the implementation of comprehensive solutions that are integrated-by-design becomes that much more difficult. At Telephony@Work, we recognized that this reality could not be denied and we responded with a competitive upgrade program that gives our clients full credit for the balance of the lifecycles in their existing technology investments; and a comprehensive money-back performance guarantee ' thereby empowering call center managers to update their systems with both the consent and support of their CFOs.
RT: Why are so many companies and agencies reluctant to begin using home-based or virtual agents? It seems like such an ideal situation and a cost-cutting idea, but TMC research tells us that few teleservices providers are making use of home-based agents. What technologies need to come on board before companies will be tempted to take the 'center' out of 'call center'?
EB: One major roadblock to the deployment of home-based agents is the actual viability of many of the technologies that purport to address this objective. In pilot trials, contact centers quickly discover the pitfalls associated with implementing virtual contact center initiatives ' and there are many. First among these is the security issue, as many vendor solutions expect contact centers to make Swiss cheese out of their firewalls to maintain connections with offsite agents. To be secure, everything must work through port 80 (http) or port 443 (https) ' without accepting TCP/IP communications through those ports that compromise security. Add to this that most vendors also don't support firewall penetration technology that enables data to flow seamlessly through firewalls in order to poll databases or deposit content. In addition, the inability of many solutions to simultaneously support both circuit and packet switching makes it difficult for such technologies to reach agents whose network connections lack the bandwidth to guarantee toll-quality voice. Of course, most vendors don't even provide browser-based, thin-client agent interfaces to eliminate home desktop administration costs and enable agents, supervisors and administrators to log on from anywhere ' and some don't even empower remote agents with the ability to conference in supervisors or do warm transfers. Another example of a thoughtless approach to this problem is that most solutions lack time-zone sensitivity in both reports and real-time information ' such that agents and supervisors in multiple time zones are expected to 'do the math' when viewing this information. Reliability of the solution is another key pitfall in that most solutions do not support real-time process mirroring that can keep communications alive even if individual servers at the data center fail. They also typically lack real-time disaster recovery capabilities. These are all issues that we had to address when deploying our CallCenter@nywhere solution for our large carrier clients at their data centers. Contact centers need to understand that validated, cost-saving technology solutions exist today and have been deployed at scale ' but they also need to do their homework on whether the technology they're actually reviewing is really designed for their purpose.
Another fundamental roadblock to virtual call center viability has always been the comfort level of management regarding the implementation and maintenance of quality control processes for a geographically distributed agent-workforce ' processes which must be integrated-by-design to work properly. With our solution, remote supervisors maintain absolute real-time control over quality, such that they can remotely view the real-time status of all members of their groups, set alarms for every form of customer interaction and respond to alarms by listening to agent calls, whisper coaching agents so that agents can hear the supervisor but callers can't, joining or taking over calls as needed while disconnecting rude agents and locking them out of the system, recording calls, remotely viewing or taking over agent screens from the supervisor's browser-based interface, opening a chat window on the agent screen, and a variety of other capabilities that provide quality control for home-based agents that is effective and superior to that generally found in physical call centers.
RT: Collaborative browsing, form sharing and integrated push technology are very sexy technologies, but are they more flash than substance? Are call centers really dedicated to using them (and using them well) or are they the kind of feature that appeals initially but fades to the back of the shelf after a few months?
EB: Unlike push technology, where agents typically refer clients to self-service information in order to generate cost savings, co-browsing and form-sharing tend to be more labor-intensive technologies that have to be cost-justified relative to the added economic benefit derived from their deployment. Companies that sell big-ticket items clearly have the most to gain by deploying the technology. Historically, however, these same companies were reluctant to deploy co-browsing and form sharing because of the risk that customers could later charge-back credit card or financial services transactions by simply taking the position that they did not accept the transaction and that it was the form-sharing agent who actually clicked on the 'I accept' button. This was a key issue for many of our clients, particularly those in the financial services sector, because fluctuating interest rates can sometimes provide compelling incentives for people to seek an invalidation of recent mortgage transactions.
Driven by these considerations, three years ago Telephony@Work developed our 'Order Secure' Form-Sharing technology, which eliminated the major roadblock to agent-assisted e-commerce by ensuring that only the customer is able to execute the order confirmation button in a form-sharing collaboration session. 'Order Secure' Form-Sharing empowers contact centers to either authorize or block any field in any Web form in order to prevent agent intervention for specific fields in form-sharing sessions. As a result, vendors are no longer vulnerable to claims of improper agent intervention during form-sharing Web-assistance sessions. 'Order Secure' form-sharing empowers companies to provide form-sharing agent-assistance for big-ticket Web transactions ' the kinds of complex, revenue-producing transactions that merit dedicated co-browsing assistance ' without fear that those transactions will be invalidated due to any limitations in their Web-assistance technology.
As a result of this innovation, we've seen collaborative browsing and form sharing enjoy widespread acceptance among our contact center clients ' with compelling revenue-producing results.
Telephony@Work's CEO, Eli Borodow, is an attorney-by-training with diverse experience in managing tech companies. His focus since 1989 has been in the computer telephony and call center arenas, with industry-related experience that includes managing companies, software design, sales, legal and marketing communications. Mr. Borodow is a longstanding and popular speaker at a variety of industry trade events and is widely regarded as an 'industry guru' whose opinions and writings appear frequently in the industry press.
Telephony@Work was founded in 1997 with the mission of creating the first 'carrier-class' contact center platform for enterprises and service providers. The company's vision is to drive the democratization of contact center capabilities by helping all companies, regardless of whether they choose to deploy on-premise systems or 'rent' virtual infrastructure from their telco or service provider, provide world-class service to their customers over the phone, fax and Internet. This vision is manifested in technology that is integrated by design to provide benefits far beyond the reliability, scalability and efficiency limitations of the multi-vendor/ systems integration approach ' benefits that help companies increase efficiency and customer satisfaction, reduce technology adoption costs and operating expenses, increase revenue and enjoy carrier-class scalability and up-time.
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