Unified-View (Part 2)

By Art Rosenberg

“Informal” Virtual Contact Centers – “Putting the CC Cart Before the UC Horse”

Back | (Part 2)

The Impact of Self-service Applications

As customer self-service applications, through both voice and visual interfaces, increase the number of simple tasks that customers can do on their own, ranging from information retrieval to data entry, the demand for live assistance will shift away from those kinds of simple tasks. In effect, “first-level” agents will become automated self-service applications that will both service customers directly and or screen calls/contacts for routing to other forms of assistance.

Such self-service applications, both through on-line Web sites and through telephone access (speech recognition, voice response), will cause the role of live assistance to escalate in favor of specialized expertise for complex tasks, more in-depth knowledge, or greater authority for decision making and action. Furthermore, since such self-services will be available through multi-modal interfaces, not just via a telephone call, live assistance response will also have to become multi-modal as well.

Our definition of “multi-modal” means that users will initiate contacts or expect responses through both speech and/or text interfaces, in real-time (voice calls, text chat) or through asynchronous messaging (e-mail, voice mail, wireless text messaging, etc.). For “informal” customer-facing personnel with specialized skills, the power of individually personalized, converged communications will have to be brought into play, especially for customer-facing staff that is frequently mobile. In other words, a prerequisite for exploiting IP flexibility for contact center applications is to:

1. Provide IP network infrastructure for IP-Telephony application servers and communication devices
2. Provide flexible, multi-modal communication services and devices to all individual customer-facing staff
3. Enable a contact center server to selectively route customer calls, “text chat” connections, and messages to customer-facing staff, including CTI-based functions (“screen pops,” customer contact activity data collection). Such routing will be based upon customer needs, staff availability, and mutual communication modality requirements. 
4. Where necessary, any contact center agent handling a customer contact must be able to:

a.      Consult multi-modally with an available enterprise “authority”

b.      Conference in an “authority” to a real-time customer contact

c.      Transfer the customer contact to an “authority” for immediate resolution.

d.      Transfer the customer contact to “deferred handling”.  (When an “authority” is not immediately available, as in the above, this alternative will provide priority-based follow-up when staff resources can be notified and made available.)

Is “First Contact” Resolution Realistic?

Multi-modal communications have introduced new forms of real-time contacts beyond traditional voice telephone calls. While telephone contacts will always remain important, voice conversations won’t always originate from a wired telephone and real-time contacts won’t all be in voice. “Click to talk” and text chat from online Web sites are real-time contacts that need immediate resolution as much as incoming phone calls. However, with IP-based converged telecommunications and presence management, such real-time contacts can be easily switched from one modality to another and still maintain “first contact” continuity. This would allow an e-mail contact to escalate to an instant messaging exchange or to a voice conversation (“click-to-talk”).

On the other hand, because of expanded self-service applications (Web, IVR), (define - news - alert)  live assistance may increasingly require unavailable expert staff resources and the case for call/message return options becomes even stronger. To deal with the realities of “first contact resolution,” customer support objectives may have to focus on reducing the response times for such call/message returns from individual customer-facing staff. This will have to exploit personalized contact technologies such as presence management, “one number access,” and device-independent immediate call/message notification. 

The growth in wireless phone mobility will also have an impact on the way we deal with customer contacts. The fact that many customers may be initiating calls from mobile handsets means that the option for leaving a message for a return call/message may be more practical than staying on the phone, waiting in a queue, and racking up usage minutes. Even the utility of self-service applications will change if the application interface is too complex and time-consuming for handheld wireless use.

IP Migration Planning For The “Virtual” Contact Center

Planning for the “virtual” enterprise-wide contact center and the use of both “formal” agents and “informal” experts needs to be done together. It is obvious that benefits of IP Telephony for contact center operations will be realized in the ease and lower costs of implementing open, standards-based “CTI” functionality. However, while we can assume that “call center” agents will always be sitting down at their desktop, the same won’t necessarily be true for “informal” customer-facing specialists.

The differences will be manifested in the planning for VoIP migration. The dedicated “call center agent” will best perform their tasks from a PC desktop equipped with an IP broadband connection, a  “softphone” client, and a headset, regardless of their physical location. This will take care of their telephony needs, multi-modal communications, “screen pops”, and any business application interfaces.  We see no real need to supply them with new IP station sets.

On the other hand, the “informal” experts, who are not always at their desks or even sitting down, will have to be additionally provisioned for “one-number” service and handheld communications mobility that will provide “always on” priority call/message notification, along with availability management rules. To the extent that a condensed “screen pop” display will be needed for handling customer contacts using handheld devices, a similar software interface client can be supported by desktop SIP “hard” screenphones instead of a PC “softphone.” 

It should be obvious from this discussion, that “informal” enterprise experts can be involved in customer-facing activities without necessarily being treated as dedicated “agents.” This will be particularly important for smaller enterprises, which may never even have “dedicated” contact center staff. It is also obvious that convergence migration planning for the contact center will require such users to be first provided with presence-based, multi-modal personal communications facilities via the capabilities of an IP-PBX, unified communications/ messaging, and presence/availability management. After that, IP-based “virtual” contact center routing can exploit individual multi-modal accessibility, including support of cross-modal customer voice and text messaging contacts and presence-based, instant messaging exchanges. 

Some leading providers are already offering enterprise-wide contact center products that support the critical evolutionary IP migration convergence we are talking about. Most notable at the moment are Siemens (news - alert) HiPath ProCenter Agile, which exploits Siemens Openscape presence management software and Nortel Networks Symposium Call Center Server, which can interwork with their SIP-based Multimedia Communications Server (MCS 5100).  However, more players are joining the game.

What Do You Think?

Do you agree that contact center migration planning should be based upon supporting all forms of customer-facing communications not just telephone call handling? How should “informal” contact center experts’ activity and performance be tracked and evaluated? How should they be “trained” and by whom? Should customer contacts be routed to handheld devices? If so, with what kinds of constraints? Should “informal” contact activity, both inbound and outbound, be tracked from the perspective of overall customer contact activity? How will presence technology impact skills-based routing logic for “informal” experts? What kind of performance metrics would be appropriate for informal experts? How should priority escalation rules impact call/message routing to ‘informal” contact center experts? 

Let us know your opinions by sending them to [email protected]

Art Rosenberg is a veteran of the computer and communications industry and formed The Unified-View to provide strategic consulting to technology and service providers, as well as to enterprise organizations, in migrating towards converged wired and wireless unified communications. He focuses on practical user requirements, implementation issues, and new benefits of multi-modal communication technologies for individual end users, both as consumers and as members of enterprise working groups. The latter includes identifying new responsibilities for enterprise communications management to support changing operational usage needs most cost-effectively.

Considered to be an objective industry thought leader, Art Rosenberg has been publishing their highly-acclaimed syndicated column on unified messaging and unified communications for over four years to a worldwide audience of consultancies, technology providers, service providers, and enterprise technology managers. He is a popular speaker at leading technology conferences and organized the first programs in the industry focused on the subject of unified messaging/communications. The Unified-View's website (www.unified-view.com) is also considered to be a leading source for information on the evolution of unified communications.

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