COST-CUTTERS

Cost-cutters seek to make ends meet by passing pressure down the line - raising agent-productivity targets and doing more with conventional metrics to fine-tune performance and insure adherence. Products like Aspect's Performance Optimization serve the needs of this group in several ways - by packaging authoritative metrics, by simplifying integration and data acquisition from infrastructure, and by providing "big-picture-to-details" comparative analytics, leading to quick problem-fixes.

Cost-cutters are interested in IP because TCO is significantly less than with legacy products. Buildout can cost a lot less, particularly if companies are willing to explore PC-based telephony solutions that eliminate the station set in favor of a PC softphone and headset. Core components tend to cost a little less, and scale better than their TDM equivalents - though the large number of trunks required in a full-on contact center mandates use of higher-density gateway and line interface gear than an equivalently-staffed enterprise would typically employ.

Products like Shoreline's Shoreline4 Contact Centers let cost-cutters build virtual contact centers across multiple sites connected by IP network, reducing management burden and eliminating inter-center toll charges. The Shoreline product - among others - lets you reasonably combine contact center functionality with general enterprise telephony in flexible ways - ideal for building a small center in the bosom of a larger company, then scaling as needed. These "general productivity IP telephony" features can be extremely helpful to contact center managers. The Shoreline4 multimedia conferencing system, for example, is a perfect tool for sharing reports, stats, collaborating to plan campaigns, etc.

These days, some cost-cutters are even experimenting with completely virtualizing their operations, moving over to hosted contact center solutions on platforms such as CosmoCom's Universe. In the US, recurring charges for "IP contact center in a box" tend (right now, early times) to end up slightly higher than costs for equivalent functionality in CPE forms, so at present, hosted contact centers are growing slowly (though we think it's inexorable). In more volatile environments, as in the fast-growing contact center service outsourcing industry in India and other parts of Asia, however, hosted contact centers offer the flexibility providers need to stay competitive, quickly expanding capacity to support new client engagements, and focusing on core business, instead of contact center technical details. CosmoCom is playing big time in this market, too (see case study) in recently-announced partnerships with the Indian subsidiary of German PASS IT Consulting and service provider Vebtel.

By reducing the staggering cost of modulating US telephone traffic halfway around the world and back, IP telephony is obviously key to the whole phenomenon of offshore contact centers. Most of the contact center managers we've spoken to, however, seem to realize that while offshoring can save money and even improve customer satisfaction in the short term, long-term sales, the success of cross-sell/up-sell efforts, and customer loyalty are negatively impacted by the practice. IP makes powerful good sense, however, when aggregating similar traffic from across a wide region, within that region. This is particularly true in pan-Asia, where conventional telephone networks range from next-gen to awful, but long-haul data pipes are now readily available.

FORWARD-LOOKERS

Forward-lookers respond to economic and workload pressures in more creative ways. Their dominant goal is to convert the contact center from a cost-center, isolated from core business and strategy, to a profit-center with deep filial connections to product/service development, sales, executive management and other departments. Forward-lookers seek to streamline operations and prevent waste. They want to improve agent productivity and "hit their numbers." But they take a more progressive route to these goals: for example, by using workforce management, agent-training, recording/monitoring and call automation technology to increase flexibility of agent assignments, match agent skills with tasks, train and educate, monitor for promotion, accumulate knowledge-bases in actionable forms, automate routine stuff and leave agents more free to interact authentically (and profitably) with customers.

One key to the success of forward-looker endeavors, we think, involves proactive customer experience management. You need to implement a QA program reflecting your company's real goals, obtain sign-off (and buy-in) from managers, build business rules to describe what you want to achieve, and create a closed-loop structure for acquiring data about what agents and customers are doing (in multiple media and contexts), analyzing this info, and making recommendations to improve performance.

The market leader in this particular space seems to be Witness Systems, whose eQuality product is founded in years of experience doing synchronized voice and screen activity recording. Over the past two years, eQuality has been extended to comprehend email and web-based self-service as well. Implementing a full QA program with Witness involves a real commitment of time and effort from executives, supervisors, and agents - Witness has set up an internal consulting division that helps clients get such complex programs codified and running. The payoff is significant, however: ROI on the application itself is obtained in a matter of months, in a combination of increased sales, more efficient use of resources, shortened handle-times, etc. And it's reflected in happier, better-abled agents - secure that performance goals have been set realistically, that progress is being noted, and that rewards and promotions will follow on success.

Knowledge Management, or KM, is also part of the forward-looking armory. But the trend, nowadays, isn't to wall off KM as a separate application, but to use an integrated solution that ties the knowledge-base to communications media on the front end (email, chat, web self-service), and CRM and analytics on the back end. RightNow Technologies - in use by Cisco and other major players - help customers accumulate knowledge from in-house experts, codify it, and present it in multiple media in consistent ways.

RightNow is also one of the companies helping forward-lookers "de-telephone" the contact center, by providing improved tools for managing campaigns based in email. Their new thin-client based email campaign manager is a thing of beauty, capable of turning what might otherwise be "blast and pray" into a more empirical process of sample-group testing, response measurement and optimization.

In general, moving agents away from phones and onto other media makes good financial sense. First, the infrastructure costs for doing email and chat are really negligible: PCs (which we assume are there, already, in a modern blended contact center), and a little software. Second, text-based media lend themselves much better than telephone to semi-automation - using techniques and strategies ranging from library boilerplate insertion to web-automated info retrieval prior to agent access. Third - in chat and IM customer service - a trained agent (with automated assists) can handle up to five simultaneous transactions.

In progressive contact centers, IP telephony begins to play as a tool for eliminating the massive overhead and hardware concentrations associated with old-line call centers. Using distributed IP ACDs, you can build a center across multiple locations, letting people work in smaller groups, closer to home. Or you can let people work at home, using advanced workforce management to schedule their time flexibly. The freedom to work at home opens up new avenues for contact center staffing: if the area around your center is all hired out, move one state in any direction, find qualified people, and use IP to connect them. Staff retention is another reason centers are fast mastering IP remote work technologies. If you've spent five years training a key supervisor, you don't necessarily have to lose them as an asset if a spouse relocates or if family responsibilities or simple wanderlust drives them to move away.

The bleeding edge, for forward-lookers, involves extending call center duties, responsibilities, and tools outside the agent-pool, harnessing the intelligence and expertise of specialists, or adapting to special circumstances by drafting extraneous employees for short periods of time. We've recently reported (see Muraskin File, September) on an 'experts' consultancy that uses centralized IP/web contact center infrastructure from VirtualPBX to log remote experts in and out, identify the unique requirements of client callers, and make sure these calls reach experts who can provide fast answers.

NEW ERA CAP HITS HOME RUN WITH ALTIGEN

Altigen (510-252-9712 - www.altigen.com) make the AltiServ phone system, a great PC-based PBX. For the past several years, they've also been marketing an increasingly "pro-grade" set of contact center solutions, based on that platform. Latest in the series is AltiContact Manager. The ACM system was designed to support inbound, outbound or blended contact centers and is targeted at contact centers of 12 to 500 agents. It's a turnkey IP hardware/software system that supports up to 128 active agents on a single chassis - up to 500 active agents in a multiple chassis or distributed implementation. Lots of customers use the system's IP trunking capability to tie together multiple centers - a few (see Muraskin File, August) are even using the product to tie call centers together with upstream vendors, in innovative supply-chain enhanced communications scenarios.

One recent Altigen customer is New Era Cap, official maker of baseball caps for all 186 pro baseball teams in the US. In business over eighty years, the company has grown to employ 1700 people in five manufacturing facilities in New York and Alabama (plus additional locations); and now ships over 20 million caps a year. But communications between facilities was inefficient, and New Era was spending too much money doing MACs and maintenance on legacy PBXs. Problems intensified three and a half years ago, when the company expanded into Alabama. In addition to maintenance costs, New Era felt that its relations with customers were being strained as calls were transferred (and sometimes lost) between far-flung facilities. They needed a solution that would tie all their communications into a single system, reducing costs and facilitating efficient customer service across their increasingly complex enterprise.

AltiGen's IP-PBX was ideal in meeting New Era Cap's expansion, self-maintenance and customer service requirements. New Era Cap has the AltiGen solution implemented at five of their seven locations across the United States, Canada, and now Europe. Each location utilizes AltiGen's T1/PRI capabilities and is seamlessly integrated with the other office locations and manufacturing plants via AltiGen's VoIP technology. Connectivity between locations is accomplished on a VPN via WEB DS1 circuits with Cisco routers.

According to Dan Marmion, New Era Cap's Chief Information Officer and Vice President of IS, "An average cost to activate a port, move an extension, make a change to a prompt or greeting for the operator from our old vendor was $100 every time we made a call. We made 21 of those calls in the year 2000 ranging from $100 to $400 a call. Since we implemented the AltiGen solution, New Era is now self sufficient with making these simple moves, adds, and changes and it is estimated that we have saved over $5000 in the past year alone as a result." Dan Marmion outlined their cost savings indicating that, "With our old system, one year of maintenance on phones, at just one facility, was $12,814. Now, one year of maintenance for parts at five facilities and parts/labor at our two local facilities, is only $8,736."