CRM and contact centres?what?s the difference? Avaya seems to have decided that there is none. It has taken all its customer contact offerings and put them under a new umbrella, CRM.

It?s an interesting development for the company, spun off from Lucent last year.

CRM ? whether you mean the philosophy or the technology ? is a means to an end. The end is for businesses to put customers at the core of everything they do to make it easier to find new customers, keep the ones they already have on board and maximise the relationship they have with them. To achieve this, change in the way most companies think and operate is essential. Better communication with customers is also key and, clearly, it?s here that technology providers and their products can be of most help.

Three Trends Affecting Enterprise Communications
Avaya devotes all its energy to helping businesses communicate better and the company has identified three trends affecting enterprise communication at the moment.

The first of these, according to CEO Don Peterson, is anytime, anyplace, anywhere access. Customers now expect round-the-clock access on the medium of their choice to your people and information. ?You will be judged by your customers,? Peterson says, ?on how well you do this.?

The second trend is that the enterprise is becoming what he calls ? more virtual?, especially through the Internet. ?The whole Internet revolution,? he explains, ?is centred around the customer. Sure, people used to talk about ?feeds and speeds? but that?s no longer the point. The customer is at the centre of the virtual enterprise.?

The final trend should come as a surprise to no one: the demand for excellent business performance is going up all the time.

There can be no doubt then that doing business today presents a serious challenge to enterprise communications. Don Peterson acknowledges this, even though he says today?s technology providers are now delivering ?the best communication ever.?

Best Ever Contact Centres
The consequences of this situation for contact centres are far-reaching. The CEO of Avaya points out that we now have the best ever contact centres too. Starting with a good contact centres and a CRM initiative will, he claims, help businesses to move to ?relationship management across the enterprise?.

This would allow business to have the best possible communication with employees, partners, shareholders, suppliers and ? of course ? customers.

So Avaya feels it has already made progress in several key areas. It has run a successful marketing campaign, which included TV advertising in the States. This has helped it achieve what it claims to be number one position in the world of supplying ACD and IVR solutions and number one for IP-enhanced PBXs.

Lucent?s Mistake
The enterprise communications arena is Avaya?s lifeblood and Peterson is optimistic that it offers his company a healthy and successful future.

This is in contrast to the situation at parent company, Lucent. So far, 2001 has not been kind to Lucent. It may be facing as many as 20,000 job-cuts (according to Reuters), has suffered multi-billion dollar loses and has seen an attempted takeover of Alcatel fail.

But when we asked if Lucent made a mistake in spinning off his part of its business, Don Peterson says no. At first.

He explains that, with such a firm focus on the service provider market, Lucent didn?t have the appetite for the enterprise side of the business anymore. ?If we had stayed, it (the enterprise side) would have been atrophied,? he says, ?Lucent characterised this as a less attractive space and I believe that was a mistake; I believe we?re showing it?s a very attractive space.?

Nevertheless, Avaya?s poor sales results for May and June have led to an announcement of 3,000 job-cuts of its own. This is an attempt to reduce expenses and keep net income on the increase. It says it?s going to continue to invest in research and development and to push for increased sales outside the US.

Quintus For A Steal
Nothing Avaya has done since it broke away in October 2000 can compare ? for eye-for-a-bargain astuteness and sheer audacity ? with its acquisition of Quintus. Its purchase of Quintus in April was a steal that Bonnie and Clyde would have been proud of.

Last autumn, at around the same time as Avaya was popping champagne corks and decking employees out in T-shirts to promote the new name and celebrate its liberty from Lucent, one of its main rivals ? Siemens ? was already deep in discussion with Quintus. Eventually, at the end of October, Siemens Enterprises Networks announced it was investing $72 million in Quintus in a exchange for a 19.9 per cent stake in the company and a place on its board of directors. It saw the Quintus eContact Suite ? a universally admired customer contact technology package ? as the ideal complement to its own HiPath offering.

But during the weeks, that followed, Quintus went into crisis. The people running the company had been a little creative with their financial reporting and when this came to light, it produced a share-price crash, the sacking of the CEO (Alan Anderson), law-suits from shareholders and the demise of the deal with Siemens.

More For Less
After some of the dust had settled, Avaya stepped in and managed to buy more (the whole company with its 900 customers if you don?t mind) for less (a mere $40m plus some compensation to Quintus? litigious shareholders.) Not a bad piece of business at all. Of course, Avaya already had customer contact solutions of its own, but with Quintus eContact in its product portfolio, Avaya can now supply technology to contact centres which run on platforms from Nortel, Siemens, Mitel and so oninstead of being anchored to its own Definity platform. Don Peterson says Avaya is on course to achieve ?industry leadership in CRM trough acquisition of Quintus.?

Legs On The Stool
His VP for the whole new CRM side of the business, Keith Larson, points to the launch of Avaya?s own CRM Central suite in April as another ?important leg to the stool? but he acknowledges that the Quintus purchase brought Avaya to market in the CRM space 12 or 15 months sooner than it hoped. To develop these things on your own takes time, even when you have all the contact centre expertise that Avaya has.

Having a contact centre ? even a really modern one ? is not the same as having a customer-centric company. In fact, some contact centres seem as cut off from the CRM vision as people who have just awoken from an enchanted 100-year sleep.

But it grows on you, this notion that Peterson, Larson and colleagues are pushing now: that the contact centre is synonymous with CRM; or should be at any rate. Toon Van Parys of Sitel ? one of this industry?s wisest commentators ? told us last year that something close to 85 per cent of a company?s communication with its customers may involve the contact centre. This suggests that the contact centre should be the focus for much of the business?s CRM effort and investment and that Avaya could be right to bundle them both together.

Larson confirms that the contact centre is a ?key place? for CRM activity. He reckons that all the contact centres on the world today, 80 per cent support no channel other than voice. ?Voice isn?t going to go away,? he says, ?because it?s so natural. But the need to offer ?anytime, anywhere? on any medium is real. Our technology is in 18,000 contact centres across the world already and it may take years for them to add new things such as voice portal capability onto the front end of IVR, to support customer contact over PDAs, cell phones and so on. There?s years of market opportunity ahead in the contact centre space.?

Larson?s Hierarchy of CRM Needs
As for CRM, he says it reminds him of the ?hierarchy of needs? drawn up by the founder of humanistic psychology, Abraham Maslow, to explain our personalities.

Larson says the CRM hierarchial pyramid used to start with answering th ephone in a fast and friendly manner. ?Not now, If you can?t do that, you?re not even in the game now.?

These days, he says, the pyramid wills tart at the base with ?allow me to reach a knowledgable resource any time from anywhere using the tool of my choice? and move through service and delivery needs to having, ?know me and tailor your offering to me? at the pinnacle.

New technology will help. He argues that it will allow every person in your organisation to be customer-facing when and how they need to be.

The days of some senior people in business believing they were too important ever to go in front of customers have, he hopes, gone forever.

How Not To Do It
Genesys is in no doubt about the future of multimedia contact centres or that there will be a place for them. So much so that its international user group in Prague attended by around 600 customers and international press ? it felt confident enough to joke with attendees about how not to communicate with customers.

At the opening address, delegates heard a voice recording giving a customer some options. It went something like this: ?Press one if you?d like us to put you through to our competitor who is better equipped than us to handle your enquiry. Press two if you would like us to be transferred to an operator in the Antarctic. Press three if you?d like to speak to an agent who can?t be bothered to help.?

Genesys understands that this isn?t the way for organisations to get closer to their customers.

President and CEO, Ad Nederlof, explains that we?re living in a ?customer economy? and if organisations want to keep their customers they?ve go to ?Make it easy for customers to do business?. He says that modern technology is helping consumers to be more critical.

?E-business is not a reality,? he says, ?everyone?s doing it and if they?re not, they?ll have a poor future.? But things aren?t quite this straightforward. While technology has advanced and consumers have been busy familiarising themselves with the latest communications channels, Nederlof feels the market isn?t ready yet. He says that it takes time for larger enterprises to make the necessary internal changes to databases and infrastructure in order to support these new contact channels. He stresses that the average global company has 14.5 different databases and that 73 per cent of companies have no integrated voice or data offering. Of course, this won?t always be the case. While Genesys statistics suggest that only 11-12 per cent of customer contact is made cia new channels ? with just three per cent of customer contact made via VoIP. Nederlof says that in a few years ?30-35 per cent of contact will be done electronically?, but for no w ?most organisations aren?t ready for this.? He says that many have underestimated the challenge of implementing a CRM strategy. According to Nederlof this is where Genesys can help ? by offering the ?integration to make them ready.?

Your Company?s Biggest Challenge To Date
Ad Nederlot talks about providing multi-channel to date. He believes that most multi-channel strategy is driven by cost ? the cost of contact for each phone cal, e-mail, fax or Web self-service transaction. ?Everyone expected a revolution,? he says. People expected things to change overnight because the technology was there. According to Nederlof, the reason people find CRM hard to get right is because they forget that ?It is about people.?

Nederlof stresses how important it is for organisations to prepare themselves ? not just for the contact they have with their customers today, but for the contact they will have with them in the future. ?They (organisations) must invest in the future,? he says.

You can?t stop progress,? he says, ?all this is just the beginning.? Nederlof acknowledges that the implementation of the new technology will mean a great deal of change for everyone, but it also means we will enjoy a great deal more choice too. ?When the TV came along we didn?t throw out our radios,? he says. It is going to take time for the market to integrate new technologies (such as VoIP) into the contact centre. Asked to put a timeframe on this change he says it will be like most things: ?Slower than the optimists predict and faster than the pessimists want.?

IP Is The Future
Genesys?s chief technology officer, Larent Philonenko has his own clear ideas about the future of the multimedia contact centre. There?s no doubt in his mind that ?someday, somehow everything will be IP.?

He says this is because the technology exists and it?s cheaper, ?Most large enterprises are moving from voice to VoIP because there are significant cost savings, he adds.

Genesys extended its G6 Suite to Internet Protocol networks towards the end of 2000. This means that businesses can manager interactions across a distributed enterprise, ensuring that customers are delivered to the right resource regardless of where that resource is located. (Genesys has an open platform approach so businesses can still make use of their existing circuit-switched contact centre infrastructure if they want to.)

?With increased bandwidth availability we can do more,? Philonenko says. Despite this, he concedes that Genesys still has very few European customers using IP ? about 500 IP seats in Europe at the moment ? but he expects this figure to grow in coming years. Asked to put a timeframe on increased take-up of IP, he gives a safe answer: ?Two years from now there will be more VoIP deployed.?

While he has a clear interest in the benefits of IP and believes it will happen, he feels certain organisations are guilty of hyping it up. He says that some ? including Cisco ? are pushing IP because they don?t have circuit-switch technology, so they offer VoIP instead to gain ground over telephony manufacturers.

He says that when Genesys asks its customers what they want, they say that they want VoIP but with traditional PBX features. With a number of companies introducing IP contact centre suites (Cisco and Aspect, for example) people will get what they wished for.

In the Genesys scheme of things, customer contact will be diffused across the organisation so that special agents deal with special tasks. IP has an important part to play in doing this effectively.

One of the many advantages of IP is that it can support a network of remote agents or virtual contact centres. If a customer has an enquiry this can be picked up by a remote expert and dealt with quickly and efficiently.

First-Class Customer Contact For Everyone
Of course, Genesys isn?t just interested in IP. It predicts a shift in the way people will contact their customers. The term ?knowledge workers? has crept into the Genesys contact centre vocabulary.

Philonenko believes that everyone within an organisation is, and should be, customer-facing. What he means by this is that when a customer makes contact with an organisation, the enquiry should be dealt with by the most appropriate person. Each person within the organisation should be able to access the necessary information to meet individual customers? needs.

Philonenko says people are only really beginning to scratch the surface of what customer contact is all about. He admits that Genesys doesn?t have ?all the feet on the streets? but they?re working on it. The Prague user group saw the launch of Genesys packages solutions or ?Ready to run? multimedia contact centres. This will offer pre-configures, pre-installed contact centres, providing out-of-the-box functionality to enterprises as well as SMEs. As large enterprises have got better at communicating with their customers it has undermined the SME?s advantage. With the help of CRM solutions, large enterprises can get to know their customers as well ? if not better ? than the local shop keepers of yesterday.

Genesys believes first-class customer contact is for everyone. Ad Nederlof says: ?Businesses of all sizes from all over the world are beginning to understand the true value of multimedia contact centres and the positive impact they can have on customer relationships and revenue growth.?