Back in February, I met much too briefly with Andy
Mattes, Member of the Group Board, Siemens
Information and Communication Networks, at Siemens'
Opinion Leader Conference in Seville, Spain. Mattes
covered a range of topics, such as IP applications and
phones, the increase in customer interactions as a
result of e-commerce and how corporate GSM will cut
down on the number of devices and phone numbers one
must have. As our conversation was fairly short and
given the fact that Siemens has been in the forefront
of communications for over a century, I felt compelled
to ask him a few more questions on the changing
contact center and Siemens' perspective of how new
initiatives in mobile communications are part of those
changes.
EL: The mission
of call centers has evolved as they have become
contact centers with new technologies and new
responsibilities. What changes have you seen in the
call center over the past few years?
AM: The two most
widespread changes that we have seen in the contact
center are (1) the adoption of customer relationship
management principles and the applications to support
them, and (2) the incorporation of new customer
contact media, such as e-mail and Web chat.
With regard to customer relationship management (CRM)...
In the e-business world, competitors are only a mouse
click away. Now more than ever, business success
hinges on attracting and retaining loyal customers. To
build loyalty, it's no longer sufficient for the
agents in the call center to know a few key facts
about their customers. Enterprises need to employ CRM --
both a business philosophy and the strategic
applications to support it -- throughout the
organization to capture information about their
customers and leverage it during every interaction,
whether in sales, service, support or the back office.
By knowing more about their customers, enterprises
make it easier for their customers to do business with
them, which increases their loyalty. According to
Reichheld and Schefter, increasing customer retention
rates (loyalty) by only 5 percent can increase profits
by 25 percent to 95 percent.1
With regard to multimedia... A few years ago,
state-of-the-art e-service entailed providing an
e-mail address for customer contact. Today, not only
do customers expect to be able to contact the
enterprise through a variety of media, such as e-mail,
Web, fax and video, as well as the telephone, they
expect a consistent, high-quality service experience
regardless of the media they are using. Enterprises
need the ability to routinely direct customer
inquiries to the best possible resource, whether that
is a service representative, an automated system or a
self-help application. Irrespective of the media the
customer chooses, the enterprise needs to manage and
report from one comprehensive management system and
use this information to further streamline processes
and improve the customer experience.
EL: How has IP
convergence made a difference in the contact center?
AM: IP convergence
is a major driver to make these requirements a
reality. The modern contact center has to offer rich
call center features independent of the underlying IP
or TDM technology. Siemens HiPath ProCenter Standard
and Advanced suites, for example, offer the capability
of being integrated into either a PBX or a native
business over IP Solution such as the HiPath 5000
communications platform. Using an IP converged
solution within a call center environment offers the
advantages of both rich applications and a very
flexible IP infrastructure.
What this means to a business is the potential to
dramatically increase agent productivity. Studies show
that multimedia contact center agents are more
productive agents. Not only does a customer expect
contact center agents to be aware of his purchase
history, he also expects them to know, for example,
which Internet page he is looking at while on the
telephone with the contact center. The causal link
between IP in the contact center, agent productivity
and, most importantly, customer satisfaction is
becoming more and more compelling.
EL: Three or
four years ago, many people thought the Internet and
e-commerce would completely end the need for live
interaction between a business and its customers. Why
do you think that did not come to pass?
AM: At the end of
the day, all business transactions are about
relationships, and relationships are about people. The
Internet and e-commerce are wonderful tools for
accelerating business transactions between two
businesses or between businesses and consumers, but to
keep any relationship flourishing requires
human-to-human contact. That's why we see voice
interactions in the contact center increasing, not
decreasing, with the advent of the Internet,
e-commerce and other new forms of customer contact.
EL: Siemens'
HiPath architecture is focusing on three areas: work
points, eCRM and mobile business apps. How do you see
business processes changing in each of these areas?
AM: In the area of
work points, the technology trend is toward
cross-platform accessible telephone handsets and soft
clients. A user can literally choose and customize his
work point to match his personal working style. This
means no less than redefining the way a user relates
to his telephone. In the area of eCRM, we are seeing
that customer relationship management is no longer
relegated to the physical contact center. Here, I am
speaking not just about having home-based agents,
itself a boon for the industry. I am also speaking
about the trend toward highly skilled agents. Think,
for example, of the pharmaceutical industry, where a
company might have one agent sitting in California to
whom all calls of a highly specialized nature are fed.
This also ties in very well with mobile business
applications in general, where we are seeing dramatic
changes in the way enterprise employees expect to be
able to use and leverage mobile communications and
information-sharing applications, accessing both
real-time and non-real-time information and resources.
This unified communications trend is strong in the
U.S., where one coast is always nearly half a business
day ahead or behind the other coast, making
time-shifting communications applications, such as
voice messaging, play a larger part of meeting
enterprises' communications needs. The rest of the
major markets throughout the world are following suit.
No matter where you are or what kind of business you
are in, the key is to ensure that solutions address
the specific needs and workflow of a business.
EL: Mobile
applications seem to be much more prevalent in Europe
and Japan than in the United States. Do you believe
this will change?
AM: The sheer size
of the U.S. market has slowed adoption of mobile
communications, but the trend is clearly toward more
mobility in the U.S. as well. The key driver for
mobility here and elsewhere is simple business
necessity. Studies show that most e-business
transactions are not accomplished during the first
interaction between a customer and a business. More
and more, the almost inevitable changes in color,
size, shipping address, etc., will be completed when
either the agent or the customer is mobile. Therefore,
in order for businesses to thrive, they must be able
to interact successfully with mobile customers and to
employ mobility solutions themselves.
EL: How will an
increasing number of mobile applications affect the
contact center?
AM: Two main
trends can be observed here. First is that many end
customers become more and more mobile. They do not
want to miss the advantages of the Internet, e-mail
access or other services that bring them in direct
contact with partners or enterprises. A mobile
end-customer requires the same services and quality of
service from an enterprise independent of his
location, time of contact and individual access media.
Enterprises have to take these trends into
consideration when offering services via call or
contact centers.
On the other hand, enterprises are in the same
situation. For many employees, there are no more
reasons to work in the office. Often they offer a much
higher efficiency when working on the road or at home.
Mobile applications today offer multiple means to
deliver all data needed to these mobile workers. This
trend also has an impact on the call center design:
The necessity to integrate mobile or home agents into
call centers will increase in the future.
Here again, Siemens HiPath ProCenter Standard or
Advanced suites are solutions that -- together with
the HiPath mobile solutions, such as HiPath
Teleworking or HiPath Xpressions unified messaging
solution -- meet these trends and requirements.
A Practical Application
The mobile in mobile communications implies travel,
and as anyone who has been in an airport terminal in
the past few years can attest, one of the biggest time
wasters and hindrances to mobility is standing in line
at both the counter and then at the gate. I recently
spoke with Malik Mamdani, CEO of Aeritas,
Inc., about a solution Aeritas has developed to
address long lines in airports. Mamdani explained that
Aeritas Express For Travel (running on the underlying
J2EE-compliant, XML-enabled Aeritas Mobile Platform)
combines voice and text interaction in a single user
session, allowing airline passengers to conveniently
handle flight check-in and receive a barcode-based
boarding pass directly on their mobile phone or PDA.
The boarding pass is then scanned at the gate using
the airline's existing equipment, allowing passengers
to bypass the ticket counter or gate counter for a
boarding pass.
After a quick, one-time registration process,
combining speech and text to make the experience as
easy as possible, travelers can use the service for
all future check-ins. The service supports leading
mobile networks and works with existing Web-enabled
phones and PDAs, enabling airline carriers to reach a
vast majority of their frequent flyers. The service
utilizes state-of-the-art voice verification
technology to securely verify the traveler's identity
prior to issuing a boarding pass to the wireless
device.
Aeritas recently announced that, in partnership
with Siemens
Business Services (SBS), Division Transportation
and German airline Lufthansa,
it has begun trials using the Aeritas system for a
mobile check-in and boarding project called m-Barq.
m-Barq allows frequent travelers holding etix, an
electronic ticket, to check-in and receive an
electronic, barcode-based boarding pass on the display
of their WAP-enabled mobile phone. The barcode will
then be verified via scanners at security and boarding
control points prior to boarding the flight.
Siemens assisted Lufthansa in identifying the
technology required for this offering and plays a
crucial role in the implementation and deployment of
Lufthansa's m-Barq service. The trial service will be
rolled out by the end of the year to Lufthansa's
Frequent Travellers on route within Germany. Upon the
successful implementation, Lufthansa will expand m-Barq
to other routes.
Mamdani told me that Aeritas will target the travel
industries first, and then plans to expand into the
retail applications market. He also intimated that
Aeritas will be working on another airport pain point,
baggage location.
1Frederick
Reichheld and Phil Schefter: "E-Loyalty: Your Secret
Weapon on the Web," Harvard Business Review,
July-August, 2000.
The author may be contacted at elounsbury@tmcnet.com.
[ Return
To The July 2001 Table Of Contents ]
|