(The following is taken from Rich Tehrani’s (News - Alert) VoIP blog:)

I recently had the opportunity to ask Lori Angalich, director of Marketing, with Astute Solutions, about the evolution of the IP communications space and the direction his company is taking.

Astute Solutions helps consumer-focused companies leverage contact center, Internet, and telephony solutions for a completely integrated customer relationship and information management solution.

To learn more about the company, read this article published in TMCnet from earlier this year.

 

At Astute Solutions, we are currently building upon our RealDialog knowledge management and Web self-service solution to enable consistent, intelligent, and high-quality interactions across all communication channels. This includes enhancing the integration between RealDialog and our “core” ePowerCenter contact center/CRM application. The advancement provides our ePowerCenter customers an embedded knowledge engine for greatly improving the efficiency and effectiveness of their phone, e-mail, and chat interactions. Moreover, because RealDialog is the knowledge engine behind Web self service, this integration also enables seamless service and escalation between self-service and assisted service channels.

 

We also are in the process of integrating RealDialog with a variety of other systems (CRM, contact center, legacy systems, and data repositories) to extend our capabilities to companies that aren’t using our solutions today. 

 

Furthermore, we are striving to integrate our core ePowerCenter application with the interaction layer of multiple telephony platforms, ultimately providing a completely integrated, robust communication suite. We recognize that companies have made significant investments in their contact center infrastructure and telephony platforms.  We intend to make our application interoperable, so that companies can achieve numerous benefits through integration with our solution — regardless of their chosen platform.

 

Now that more infrastructure vendors are supporting true IP-based telephony, it is easier for us  to support and integrate with multiple environments without making a steep investment in hardware-based integration for each vendor. This opens up tremendous opportunities for us to offer companies powerful capabilities by integrating our core ePowerCenter application with the interaction layer of solutions from numerous vendors. 

SIP has allowed a companies’ communications infrastructure to evolve from a collection of disparate technologies — that were difficult to integrate — to one with a ‘common’ platform that that can be leveraged much more effectively. SIP frees companies from the complexity of managing numerous, individual, and discreet standards (or protocols) required by each hardware/software component. Additionally, SIP is opening up great opportunities to software vendors like us to help companies maximize their infrastructure investments. 

 

SIP enables companies to adapt to a new workforce and a new ‘breed’ of customers.  Today, contact center agents are among the youngest workforce. They expect to have the ability to chat; use keyboard and mouse shortcuts, use IM to get help, instantly access an online resource, and/or search for an answer “Google (News - Alert) style.”  They want to be able to look through co-worker directories to determine who is available, and to then initiate a communication session with the desired individual.  With SIP, a company can support all of this while enabling companies to support a growing base of customers who prefer IM over phone-based communication.

What is the biggest request coming from your customer base? 
Our customers are frequently asking for our help in combining two extremes. They want their customers/consumers to have personalized and differentiated experiences when they interact with the company.  In order to deliver this, these companies also want their contact center agent’s interface, knowledge base, and workflow to be fine-tuned and specialized for handling the interaction, issue, and customer at hand.  

 

They also want consistency and commonality within the application we provide.  Companies want their agents to have an interface with a very consistent look and feel to minimize the learning curve and maximize efficiency.  They want to be able to manage the application from a common interface and set of tools. 

We are helping our customers address these two extremes by building tremendous  flexibility into our applications,  and by leveraging the expertise of our professional services team. We can provide a user interface that is familiar and easy to navigate, but behind the scenes, we can adapt the application to multiple dimensions.  From a user perspective, we can configure the application to adapt based on whom they are talking to, what they are talking about, how they are talking, the stage of the process they are in, and their role in that process. While our customers have the capability to configure the solution to do all of this, they seek the expertise of our professional services team to ensure they are taking a ‘best practices’ approach.

 

First, we believe that we will see the overall performance gap widening between companies with contact centers focused on purely tactical, efficiency-related measures and those that striving to differentiate and achieve strategic benefits through their customer interactions.  Companies who haven’t realized this soon will increase their investments in enabling technologies.

 

This trend will also carry over to self-service interactions.  As the volume and usage rates of Web self-service and other self-service channels continue to increase, those companies that treat those interactions with the same priority as phone calls will outperform companies whose primary concern with self-service is call deflection. There will be an increasing emphasis on acquiring technology to support this.

 

Also, consumers are moving toward community environments to share feedback about companies, products, and services.  If they don’t have an efficient means to contact a company (or receive any real benefit from doing so), they won’t bother to contact a company directly. When an opportunity arises to interact directly with a consumer, it will become even more critical to ensure that interaction is a positive experience. This will serve to increase customer satisfaction, detect trends, and protect the brand. Realizing this, companies will be investing in solutions to optimize the interactions they handle directly, while at the same time, leveraging the information shared in community environments.

The adoption rate of our solutions is highest in the U.S., but we do not view the rest of the world as “behind.”  Our experience has shown us that they are not ‘organized’ around customer service the way we are in the U.S.  Generally, customer issues and expectations are similar throughout the U.S., and companies can benefit and grow from organizations like SOCAP. 

 

In Europe, on the other hand, answering a general question in England may be very different than the way it should be answered in Spain, Portugal, or Germany.  Supporting consumers across Europe may not only require localized service and personnel, but also greater infrastructure investments.

 

However, IP telephony is breaking down infrastructure barriers. Companies around the world are increasing their collaboration and organization around customer service. Additionally, these companies are not as entrenched in their ways of dealing with customer service as we are in the U.S.  They can be more adaptable to change.  We may soon see them leapfrogging the U.S. in growth rate. 

 

Google and Apple are indicative of the continued convergence of computing and telecom applications. The “blurring of the lines” between Internet, telephony, and mobile solutions continues to offer more opportunities for robust integrated solutions. As a result, communications companies and equipment vendors will continue to partner to deliver applications and devices that expand access to more information, from more places. This evolution will become increasingly valuable to consumers and businesses. 

 

Additionally, Google and Apple can leverage their brand notoriety.  Numerous end users already trust them.  Since they “own” the end user experience for countless consumers, they have ability to influence tools that consumer uses.

 

Microsoft has demonstrated expertise in integrated applications. From Web access, they moved to instant messaging and chat, Web conferencing, and now more collaborative office tools. As they have blended Internet access into their products, it only seems natural that they would extend the communications options for collaborative applications.

While Microsoft may not always have the best feature set, they have the most prominence. They tend to set the norm for what is expected in an application. Starting with TAPI and mobile computing, Microsoft’s next step is likely the integration of the desktop applications and the phone.

 

Additionally, by owning the operating system and user interface on a majority of computers (both at home and at work), Microsoft has the ability to greatly influence the tools of the end user.  Because they own the operating system, they have ability to make their applications appear easier and more tightly coupled than those of alternative solutions. They may not have the best converged application, but it will likely become the standard for comparison.

As wireless usage grows, users will have an unprecedented level of data access from just about anywhere. This will drive the proliferation of Web-based applications that will work on mobile devices. Users and administrators will not want their mobile devices burdened by application software. Moreover, they will want to collaborate with users on a wide variety of devices, so it is important that these applications “talk” to one another, seamlessly.

 

Wireless technologies are influencing a significant change in our behavior. We are connected no matter where we are, and accustomed to having everything on-demand.  It is defining the way we communicate, and our expectations of others. We have grown to expect immediate access to information and immediate responses — and have become less tolerant of waiting along the way.  At the same time — particularly because of text messaging — we have become accustomed to a new ‘language.’  Consumers will expect companies to be able to support this new ‘language.’ 

 

While the bulk of customer interactions are still phone-based, this is going to change rapidly. The younger generations of consumers have grown up using email, instant messaging, self-service, and wireless. They will have uniform service expectations, regardless of the channel. These expectations will change company priorities. They will take a much more ‘unified’ approach to communications. 

 

In addition, customers will increasingly strive to leverage the power of their communities.  Along with social networks, they will be having a much louder, collective voice versus that of the individual. Companies must adapt to, participate in and influence these communities.  They can’t own this function. 

 

At our session, we will discuss the fundamental benefits and barriers to getting your company on the VoIP bandwagon. This is an opportunity to learn from others the facts and features to look for in a VoIP system — as well as the obstacles to avoid.

If you haven’t moved to IP telephony, it’s time to consider it.

 

Astute Solutions enables companies to differentiate through service excellence across all channels.  We have built our contact center, interaction management, and knowledge management solutions with the flexibility and adaptability companies need to accommodate their unique and changing business processes and customer needs. We will adapt with technology and fully leverage it to solve the needs of our customers.  Innovation is our primary interest; we don’t promote technologies. 

 

E-mail customer service will be ‘dead.’ Despite investment in spam filters, spamming has thrown a wrench into what could have been an excellent customer service channel.  It has become too difficult to track and manage email effectively. 

 

However, in the next five years, instant messaging and Web self-service will have evolved enough to bypass this problem.  “Best-in-class” companies will be able deliver answers to customers using these channels better and faster than they could via e-mail. Customers will receive immediate and highly effective responses through these channels, versus waiting hours, even days for an email response as they often do now. The only use companies will have for the email channel is to handle the odds and ends that filter through other channels.

 

------