October 2003

By Rich Tehrani, 
Group Editor-In-Chief, Technology Marketing Corporation

Before I continue, I should point out that I believe the reason for the lack of new announcements is due to the fact that research and development budgets were decimated during the recent downturn. An obvious rebound is occurring in the tech market. I believe if it maintains traction, we can expect to see a slew of new offerings by Q2 of next year.

In any case, I'd like to highlight a few of the technologies at ICCM that did manage to catch my eye and my enthusiasm.

Witness Systems
Thankfully, I had a chance to catch up with the people at Witness Systems who were showing off their Contact Center Performance Optimization Suite. Their recent acquisition of Eyretel, a company that made high-volume recording and compliance equipment, has helped Witness enhance its eQuality software suite with features like new templates that allow easier detection of performance peaks and valleys among agents or agent groups.

The eQuality suite further allows all customer interactions to be recorded; but, more important, organizes these transactions based on your business rules into different folders for later playback. A question that comes up frequently in contact centers is whether it is acceptable to allow agents to speak with customers for more than a preset amount of time. In other words, how do you go about comparing length of agent talk time on a call versus sales/service performance? Should you allow agents to spend more time than average talking with customers? The answer is likely to be different depending on the industry and offer, which is why I am happy to tell you that you can make use of included correlation tools to find out how handle times affect closure rates, if at all, in your business.

For those outsourcers reading this, you'll be happy to know that this suite of applications now supports SSL, meaning these agencies can allow their clients to view confidential performance data over the Internet more securely.

Prosodie Interactive
Here is a company from which we are beginning to hear more in the U.S., and they have a big story to tell. Prosodie is the largest hosting company in France. They have a stake in a UK-based CLEC and have purchased a business intelligence provider, a Web hosting company and a unified messaging provider in the U.S. The company also has colocated facilities around the U.S.

Using this arsenal of advanced communications products allows Prosodie to provide a fairly bulletproof hosted ACD service and IVR service. Another business the company engages in is making calls on behalf of politicians. Essentially, we are looking at what may be the world's largest communications ASP or hosting company. The company can also provide overflow capacity if that is your need. I believe we'll see a lot more from this company in the U.S. very soon.

Positive Software Systems, Inc.
Let's say you have a number of call centers and are looking to connect these centers to a single server for more effective management and control. Positive Software has products that allow you to do just this. The company evolved from doing consulting to developing products and now focuses on allowing businesses to manage their centers from a single secure server connecting agents, multiple dialers and data repositories.

One of the benefits of using a central server is that it gives you the ability to move a campaign from dialer to dialer, which can be an important issue in disaster recovery situations. There is also the option to replicate servers to ensure redundancy as well as the ability to import business rules. In many cases, business rules are dictated by regulations. In the collections market, for example, you cannot call a person more frequently than allowed by law.

Other features include real-time business intelligence reports as well as the ability to comply with all manner of do-not-call laws and new privacy laws such as California's recent SB 1386, which dictates that if you have customers in California or are based in that state, and you have a computer security breach where confidential and personal customer information is accessed, and this information isn't already readily available on the Internet, you must notify customers that their data were compromised. As always, I suggest you consult with legal council regarding compliance with government regulations.

Intervoice
Good news'Intervoice has dropped the 'Brite' suffix that was added a few years back. I always found this combined name awkward and I'm glad they changed it back to their original name. It may be counterintuitive, but even though the company name is shorter, the breadth of products the company offers has increased dramatically. I spent hours in their booth at ICCM, but it felt like days. Not because what I saw was boring, but because there was so much to touch and feel and see that I took copious notes and asked lots of questions. I actually toyed with making a separate article out of what I saw, but time and space often interfere with the best editorial intentions.

Perhaps most important, Intervoice has eschewed the proprietary nature of its past in favor of open systems. They did this in part due to the fact that 50 percent of their RFPs are asking for VoiceXML or SALT. Perhaps Microsoft's SALT is farther along than I originally thought?

The Omvia Voice Framework allows the design of speech apps with full logic and design flows using a GUI-based design program. Once designed, these applications can be ported to VoiceXML, SALT or IQTalk, if desired. The point here is that you can use the proprietary development environment that is more developer friendly now and port your apps to the 'industry standard' language of your choice. I liken this development environment to a compiler, as you can export your application into the source code that runs on a given machine. In this case, the machines are VoiceXML, SALT and IQTalk. A case can be made that this approach is more open than either of the two more recent open voice languages, VoiceXML and SALT. This is, of course, because Omvia applications can be potentially ported to other languages in the future, if need be.

Whether this approach is more open, like all things in life, depends on your perspective. In case you don't know, I have been called a lover of Microsoft because I once mentioned in an article that their operating system constituted an 'industry standard' OS.

Intervoice has been in the market for 20 years and supports almost every CTI interface from Aspect to Dialogic CT-Connect to Cisco ICM CTI with Service Control Interface (2.6 spec).

Another great product is the Invision design tool that lets designers concentrate on creating superior applications with the user in mind without worrying about the development language. Using a GUI allows easy development as components can be easily 'dropped into' applications. You could drop in a component that allows a credit card number or expiration date to be acquired.

Using Intervoice tools, you can define variables and grammars and can even have multiple active grammars if desired.

You can use a mixed-initiative-style user interface, allowing the user to lead the interaction. This is something that makes applications much more flexible by allowing the user to interrupt the current operation, if need be, to make a query. This can be very useful in a funds transfer situation where the user decides in the middle of the transaction to ask for an account balance or even multiple account balances.

Any Bacon With That?
Using the Omlet (Omvia Servlet) Interface, you can access URLs which contain VoiceXML or anything else on the Web. What's more, parameters can be passed to and from these pages through named lists. You can also build expressions that a Web browser can point to for testing. Intervoice also has a developer portal where you can test your applications. You have the option to download a debugger and set breakpoints.

eOn
eOn Communications surprised me by launching outbound dialing capabilities for its contact center solution, including algorithms that comply with the new FTC Telemarketing Sales Rule (TSR).

The benefit of a solution from eOn over a standalone dialing solution is that contact center managers can use common call routing, performance monitoring and management reporting tools for both inbound and outbound blending capabilities. Many standalone dialers need expensive integration to achieve this feat.

Skills-based routing that most associate with inbound can be applied to outbound as well, allowing the most qualified agent to take the call. eQueue Outbound is flexible in supporting many different outbound dialing modes such as preview dialing, progressive dialing and, of course, predictive dialing. You can pace the dialer for performance and compliance. These outbound capabilities can be added to as few as 10 agents and up to thousands and are supported by eQueue Release 5 software.

While I started off by complaining about a lack of new things to write about, I guess I should amend that opinion. I filled this column with just enough material ' any more, and I would have had to wait another month to accommodate all of it. Perhaps this whole tech slowdown is a blessing in disguise for us editors. As the market continues it upswing (keep your fingers crossed with me), in the next few issues, I am looking forward to writing about Siebel as well as some of the competitors nipping at its heels such as Salesforce.com and Saratoga Systems. Drop me a line if you'd like to see other topics in this column or in the magazine as a whole.

Sincerely,

Rich Tehrani
Group Publisher, Group Editor-in-Chief
[email protected]

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