As companies today strive to
make customer service available to all customers at all times via all media,
a struggle is taking place to ensure that the best, most consistent service
can be offered across a variety of contact platforms. In addition to
offering these various contact channels, companies must also endeavor to
understand how their customers are using the different touch points, so they
can continually improve and refine their processes. To this end, Altitude
Software offers its uCI suite (Unified Customer Interaction). The uCI suite
was designed to allow users to manage not only the individual touch points
for both self-service and assisted interactions across voice, Web, e-mail
and traditional point-of-sale, but also to optimize the long-term value of
each customer relationship. Altitude uCI enables this goal by facilitating a
360-degree view of the customer by capturing and then consolidating
customer-driven business transactions in a single data repository.
The uCI repository also feeds unified contact management and reporting tools
so companies can maximize their understanding of how customers are
contacting them, and how often. uCI can also be integrated with enterprise
systems such as billing, CRM and financial applications, helping increase
the 360-degree view of the customer.
The uCI platform is primarily composed of one server, the Assisted
Server, which provides the core functionality of the suite. The Assisted
Server is a highly scalable platform that functions as an assisted
interaction dispatcher, supporting high volumes of voice calls, e-mail and
Web interactions. It includes gateways to e-mail servers (supporting both
POP3 and SMTP) and to major PABX platforms. The Assisted Server provides the
core functionality for leveraging uCI, to manage campaigns for the assisted
channel modules, or touch points, in the Altitude suite.
The uCI suite is comprised of several touch point managers, including
Altitude Voice, Altitude IVR, Altitude Email and Altitude Collaborator.
Altitude Voice provides a solution that synchronizes voice and data in
contact center environments through computer-telephony integration (CTI).
With optional dialing and recording functionality, it can automate tasks
such as outbound dialing and voice recording for quality assurance. Altitude
IVR enables customer self-service via voice menus and touch-tone phone
controls. It can help optimize assisted service levels when used as an
information collector upon which routing decisions can be made. Altitude
Email offers automated message filtering and intelligent routing. When
Altitude Email is implemented with Altitude Voice and Altitude Collaborator,
uCI offers blended, intelligent routing of e-mail with other customer
interaction types. Altitude Collaborator bridges the gap between self- and
assisted-service by offering human collaborative assistance to customers on
Web sites. Features of Collaborator include page pushing and pulling,
co-browsing and collaborative form filling. Collaboration activities can be
supported via either voice or Web chat.
An additional feature of the Altitude uCI solution is the Optimization
Toolkit. Altitude provides four such applications: uRouter (intelligent
routing capability), uSupervisor (managing and reporting function), uAgent
Windows & Web (interface that allows the agent to control interactions
from a single browser) and Development Toolkit (script developer).
Integration of disparate channels and data is one of the
goals of CRM, and FrontRange Solutions, Inc. has made great efforts to do so
in its release of GoldMine FrontOffice 2002 with GoldMine Sales &
Marketing 2002, which is designed to help small to mid-market organizations
improve sales and marketing processes such as campaign design, execution and
tracking, along with lead qualification, sales forecasting and
cross-selling.
GoldMine Sales & Marketing includes enhanced integration
and data sharing with Microsoft Exchange Server and Microsoft Outlook, as
well as Intuit QuickBooks Pro/Premier 2002. Through the tighter integration
with Microsoft Outlook, GoldMine Sales & Marketing users can link every
e-mail message to the customer contact, no matter if the e-mail was received
in Outlook or GoldMine software's own E-mail Center. Companies that have
standardized on Outlook can now integrate their existing e-mail messaging
standard with their CRM database. When sending messages from Outlook, users
can also send e-mail messages to any GoldMine Sales & Marketing contact
and have the mail automatically linked to the contact's history in
GoldMine. The integration with Microsoft Exchange allows support for
real-time calendar and contact synchronization with the Exchange server,
which provides real-time synchronization of new activities upon creation, as
well as edits and updates to activities upon save. Support for real-time
contact synchronization also means custom fields can be mapped to the
Exchange custom fields.
Additional features of GoldMine Sales & Marketing
include: integration with GoldMine Plus Accounting for QuickBooks
Pro/Premier 2002, which enables data sharing between front- and back-office
customer records; full integration with HEAT Service & Support,
FrontRange's customer service and support software; an updated user
interface, including re-designed toolbar icons, customizable work area
background settings and onscreen indicators, which facilitate learning and
navigation; one-button synchronization to simplify synchronization for
remote users to stay up to date on key contact and calendar information; and
Undocked Sites Installer, which provides administrators with the ability to
set up, configure and install multiple undocked sites for remote users.
Getting calls delivered to the right agent is of the utmost
importance in providing superior service. Intelligent routing has been a
feature of circuit-switched networks for some time, but offering it over IP
networks has sometimes proved difficult. CosmoCom, Inc. recently introduced
its Next Generation Intelligent Network (NGIN) offering, which is designed
to deliver a variety of intelligent routing features to IP-based
next-generation networks (NGNs).
With the NGIN solution, network operators can statically or
dynamically route calls among different locations within their customers'
multisite call center environment. This offering is available to contact
centers connected directly to the carrier's Next Generation Network via IP
or via access gateways, or indirectly via the legacy telephone network. The
NGIN offering can be deployed on the same infrastructure as CosmoCom's
Network-Based Call Center offering, enabling network operators to leverage a
single platform for multiple service offerings.
Intelligent routing enables calls to be automatically
directed to the appropriate location across a multisite contact center
environment, thus telcos can offer ACD as network-based services as well as
have the ability to let customers add hosted agents as well as traditional
agents. For example, one of CosmoCom's European clients will be offering a
global call center, which will allow them to deliver calls to any existing
call center. The selection of the most appropriate location is typically
based on interactive voice response (IVR) input from the caller. NGIN can be
used for setting static pre-routing, based on static rules, such as time of
day, time of week, percentage usage or dynamic pre-routing, which depends on
having some information about the destination, such as how many agents are
available and queue status. In legacy circuit-switched telephone networks,
these services require a series of circuit switches, service control points
(SCPs) and network-based IVR platforms.
Because the CosmoCom solution is IP-based, the intelligent
routing features are fully enabled through software solutions and do not
require circuit switch or SCP hardware. End users have more control over the
design of pre-routing (using CosmoDesigner, which has a GUI for changing
conditions and logic flows) and IVR prompts, which helps ease the burden on
its IT staff.
Bad customer service due to lack
of agent knowledge or training helps destroy profits. Agent turnover, one of
the major costs associated with call centers, can be driven by agents who
feel they are inadequate to handle the tasks assigned to them. The answer to
both of these related problems is to be found in training, but scheduling
classroom time and taking groups of agents at the same time can also lead to
problems. Hiring trainers is one solution, but unless they are used for
generic topics, they also have to take time to learn how that center
operates and familiarize themselves with the company's systems and
products before they can develop an effective training course that is
tailored to that particular company. Combating problems are online training
and simulation products, one of which is Simtrex's StarTrainer simulation
training software.
Simtrex's Express Author software is designed to give subject matter
experts the ability to design their own simulations and reduce development
time, as no programming skills are required. Using Express Author, subject
matter experts can develop call simulations that integrate voice, data and
time to replicate calls exactly as they occur in the end users' call
center so that agents will handle them in a true-to-life situation. Using a
simulated version of their systems, subject matter experts can design a call
flow following the company's best practice standards. Express Author
captures every action and automatically creates simulation lessons.
Express Author is included as part of the Version 4.0 release of Simtrex
StarTrainer. The upgrade also provides new Web-based administrative
capabilities, advanced screen capture technology and expanded script
management functionality.
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