Last week while attending The Burton Group's Catalyst conference in San Diego, I had the opportunity to hear Jay Batson speak. Batson is the current managing director and chairman of the SIP Forum board of directors. He's also one of the founders of PingTel, which provides open source SIP solutions for the enterprise, including call managers, soft phones and its SIPexchange IP PBX. If you haven't heard him speak, I recommend the experience. He's the sort of 500 words-a-minute cheerleader that can really get you excited - even when the subject at hand is a lowly protocol.

Batson made several interesting points about the standard, including its ability to largely support all of the features available on the typical TDM PBX. "Challenge the old guard PBX vendors to list the features SIP can't support", he says. But even more interesting than that was his discussion of the forum's interoperability plug-fest called SIPit. The "it" stands for interoperability test, and the next one will be held in Stockholm during the week of September 11th.

If you haven't heard of SIPit or haven't seen the published results, don't worry. There are no published results. The forum sees SIPit as a chance for vendors to test out their pre-production designs, and therefore it doesn't embarrass the membership by publishing the test results.

The crowd at the conference understood how vendors might not want to share data on the compliance of pre-production product, but questioner after questioner told Batson that the time had come for a logoed compatibility testing program. The crowd's suggestions weren't particularly well received by Batson, who pointed out that standards like those from ISO had largely failed - in his eyes, because of required testing. More than one attendee pointed out the success of wireless was largely spawned by the Wi-Fi alliance's compatibility testing. After arguing with three attendees on the point, Batson simply listened and nodded as the next few hand raisers agreed with previous questioners.

Batson has a point in saying that by its nature, SIP interoperability testing is a very different beast than Wi-Fi. SIP is a complex and evolving standard, so the question of what's compliant and what's not is something of a grey issue. However, that's exactly the sort of question that the SIP Forum should tackle - set a stake in the ground for base functionality and publish some results including certifying products to carry a Forum logo assuring compatibility.

Without such a program, vendors are left to their own methods - and not everyone is playing nice. Nortel, for example, requires third parties to pay for certification on Nortel equipment. That essentially closes Nortel's systems, which is probably Nortel's goal. The lack of a program also gives Cisco the ammunition it needs to push customers away from SIP and toward its proprietary SCCP protocol suite. Cisco allows SIP between call centers, but today still requires SCCP to the end user device.

SIP is now mature enough for meaningful interoperability testing. The Forum needs to recognize that for SIP-enabled end-user devices to flourish, the time is now to step up and offer transparent testing and certification logos.
Posted by luhmann at July 14, 2005 Bernie In the Big House

From one of our far-flung correspondents:

"...Now that Bernie Ebbers is going to the big house it would be interesting to see what jobs he'll be doing there. Wouldn't he be a logical candidate for UNICOR's [prison-based] call center? Bernie knows a few things about them. Also about how to connect into new area codes. Worth calling UNICOR and finding out...Is the 'new' MCI outsourcing to UNICOR? Here's a thought...Bernie calling your house in New Jersey to sell you long distance..." Posted by Keith Dawson at July 08, 2005 Too Many Calls, Continued...

We got a response to this item and from a reader (Lorraine Weyermann of Finning) that we thought was interesting:

"I manage a multicontact, multitasking Customer Service Center. I listen to calls, not as many as I would like to, but I listen. I listen for more than grammar and scripting. I listen to the tone of the customer. I listen to the mood of the agent. I listen for more of the "human" element than the mechanical elements.

"I also use my recordings to back up my agents. I have customers disputing invoices and claiming they didn't get what they requested. I can search the call, as we record 100%, and effectively diffuse an angry customer simply by playing the call. If the agent needs coaching he will get it, but if the customer needs coaching..the customer gets it too.

"Having an outside company listen to and evaluate our calls removes the connectivity between the agents and management. There are already enough barriers between the two. I prefer to understand the big picture about a call rather than limit the scope. I think limiting your scope sacrifices your ability to understand your agents, your customers and your role."
Posted by Keith Dawson at We're Surveyin'!

Call Center Magazine is in the middle of an important endeavor, and you can help! We're collecting data for an article on perceptions of call centers within centers - meaning the attitudes of managers, agents and customers. We want to see whether there's a disconnect between these different constituencies.

Can you spare a few minutes to take our survey? It's for the good of the industry, and you can do it anonymously, if you choose. We're not going to use the data to market to you; we are just trying to understand what's really going on in the modern global call center industry.

Thanks! Posted by Keith Dawson at 08:35 AM The New Knowledge Workers

In many companies, the role of a call center agent hasn't changed much during the past ten years. Most agents, like most white-collar professionals who aren't managers, still do their jobs within cubicles equipped with phones and computers. Aside from the occasional family photo or decoration, most of the cubicles look the same.

At times, sameness, or at least, consistency, is desirable. The benefit of an on-line knowledge base, for example, is that answers to questions are consistent, rather than subject to interpretation. When customers call with questions, they shouldn't have to hear different answers depending on which agents they reach.

But there is a stronger argument for knowledge management, and that argument has to do with the needs of those who consult knowledge bases. Precisely because agents, customers and other people within your company seek different kinds of information from a knowledge base, the knowledge base can have a unifying effect that extends beyond your call center and even beyond your company.

Unlike a call routing table or a schedule, a knowledge base is something to which people within your company, as well as the customers your company serves, can all contribute. The wider the constituency that not only consults a company's knowledge base, but also can contribute to it, the more influence the constituents have within the company.

In this respect, knowledge management is analogous to quality assurance. According to the top-down management model that many call centers follow, mere compliance, such as following a script, is a sufficient indicator of performance. In some cases, such as when a customer switches service from one phone company to another, there are legal reasons why agents have to say certain words. But most of the time, scripting undermines an agent's ability to communicate with a customer.

Given the number of customers a call center agent typically speaks with each day, it is the agent who often knows best what questions customers need help with, and how to answer them. Rather than listening to conversations with the sole goal of telling agents what they should have said, it's a good idea to try to glean from these conversations instances when agents convey information effectively.

Although some of what an agent communicates comes through in the agent's tone of voice, there are certain types of conversations, or portions of conversations, that call centers can translate from conversations to Web pages. These can include questions that customers ask agents most often, as well as questions that agents receive that are not already in your knowledge base.

We can go even further. Your customers comprise people who are among the most knowledgeable about your company's products and services. They, too, should have a role, especially with assisting other customers with challenging questions. Instead of dictating in advance what questions your company should answer, your company can discover, from the people who communicate most regularly with customers, and from customers themselves, what information your customers need.

It's unfortunate that one of the most common arguments for implementing knowledge bases is that they save companies time and money, ostensibly by eliminating the need for customers to wait on hold for agents. Implicit in this argument is that a knowledge base is a substitute for calling an agent. But because agents, like customers, are the people who are most likely to consult and contribute to knowledge bases, they're precisely the people companies can rely on to ensure that knowledge bases present answers that are easy to locate and easy to understand.

To be clear, when you set up a knowledge base, it's essential that you assign editorial responsibility to verify that contributions to the knowledge base are clear and accurate. Such an editorial role can emerge within your call center, especially for agents who aspire to grow in their careers but don't currently aspire to become supervisors. This role can also emerge outside your center, so that colleagues in your company who are experts on certain categories of products take responsibility for what information is available in your company's knowledge base, and for which audiences have access to the information.

The ability to answer questions is what distinguishes call center agents, call centers and companies from one another. But knowledge itself need not be unique to one person. Knowledge empowers and enriches people through its circulation. By offering agents and customers the opportunity to share what they know, you enable their collective knowledge to emerge as an asset for your company and for the people you serve.