One Queue, No Choking
By Robert Richardson , Communications Convergence
Jan 7, 2002 (10:04 AM)
URL: http://www.cconvergence.com/article/CTM20020103S0001

"The Internet bubble may have burst and stocks may be down, but customer expectations are not," argues Lawrence Byrd, CRM evangelist at Avaya. "We've left customers with the expectation that email and web collaboration and so on all work." Result: You have regular customers using alternate channels now, not just geeks.

It's not that you'll frustrate your customer if you can't deal with their email, according to Byrd. You will frustrate them, of course, but that's not the point. "The business driver today is not going to be that customers are unhappy. It's cost savings. Our argument is that it doesn't actually save you money to do it badly.

"Let's say I'm on the website," Byrd says. "I'm halfway through a transaction and I get stuck. If an agent showed up in a chat session, helped me, pushed a page, gave me some information and I went on my way, that would cost you a certain amount. If I gave up, went through the entire transaction again with a phone agent, repeated all the information I'd already typed in, that would be significantly more expensive. So it's not cheaper to do multichannel customer service badly. It's actually horrendously more expensive.

"So we ask," Byrd says, "what is it we will save if we get this right?"

Interaction Center

Avaya's offering, Interaction Center, is based on technologies acquired with the purchase of Quintus early last year. Avaya, of course, has had prior products in this arena as well, including a chat and email product (Internet Call Center) introduced back in 1997.

The current iteration of the product features a centralized data repository and modular components that allow channels to be added as needed. "What's important is not that each customer has full capabilities in each of the channels," Byrd says, "but that all of the mechanisms behind those channels work the same. There's one business rule engine, so that whether it's an incoming chat request, email, or phone call, an agent can get access to the same customer information and can make the same routing decisions." More to the point, contact centers save big money by not paying agents to repeat already asked-and-answered questions.

With all the channels in place, Avaya Interaction Center routes voice, IVR, fax, email, and web interactions. The product, which runs on Unix and NT servers, stores contact histories in DB2, SQL, and Oracle databases, and works with both new and legacy switch equipment from Aspect, Intecom, Nortel (Meridian and Symposium), Rockwell, Siemens, and, of course, Avaya.

"We are tracking all the interactions," Byrd says. "We can keep a database of every phone, chat, or email and we can show it to you along the bottom of the screen when we pop some other application. If you're deploying Siebel, then we take that same data and we push it into the Siebel database and GUI. But if it's not Siebel - let's say it's a 3270 emulator and the mainframe data model hasn't changed in a hundred years?. Then there's no way that there's room in that application for all the emails. So we keep track of that outside the legacy app."

Avaya clearly has a lot of traditional strength in management reporting and real-time tracking of call center activity. Byrd says the company is now working to generalize that reporting, "to take our point solutions that were reporting for the voice call center, and for email, and to turn that into a platform of common reporting and analysis tools that uses a single repository across our portfolio." The company plans to release the first version of this reporting product in the first half of this year.

Several other vendors either already support combined reporting (Telephony@ Work, Interactive Intelligence, and CosmoCom, for example). You can see the move toward common reporting edging all the way to reader boards: Symon's (Sugar Land, TX - 281-240-5555, www.symon.com) latest hardware, to take just one example, is not only IP-addressable (meaning, in essence, that the boards have become easily addressable by third-party vendors), but also is aware of email messaging queues. In fact, it's fair to say that Symon has rethought the old reader board paradigm (a custom-built LED display connected via serial line to a proprietary voice ACD) and recast it as a client-server system. A centralized monitoring server (running NT) collects data from all sorts of sources, recasts it as messages, and delivers these messages to various endpoints, including agent desktops as well as reader boards.

The Inner Queue

Avaya's Interaction Center reflects the fact that a queue is almost always implemented as a database of records. When someone calls or when an email arrives, a new database record is created. When a transaction is completed, the record is archived for reporting and for maintaining customer contact histories.

This process of creating a record and figuring out how to assign it to an agent or automated process is separate from the actual nuts and bolts of managing a call inside a switch, a fact which has not been lost on a number of vendors in this market, including Intel.

"The sequencing that has always been built into the telephone switch can't be there anymore, because that's not where all the work is coming from," says Carl Strathmeyer, senior director in the Strategic Marketing CT Consulting Services division at Intel. "That sequencing work has got to happen outside the phone switch, which probably means a general-purpose computing server of some kind. It also has to manage communications coming from all these different media."

The move to general-purpose servers, of course, opens the marketplace to vendors who come from data networking software backgrounds, rather than the traditional niche of telecom equipment vendors. "And so it's no accident," Strathmeyer notes, "that Intel is becoming much more active in the communications business in the last couple of years. These are the kinds of partners that Intel is very comfortable with."

Says Strathmeyer: "One of the things we believe people will need is a software module that does the basic chores of queue management." The idea, consistent with Intel's general business approach, is to provide a building block, not a finished application.

In fact, Intel didn't even create this building block from scratch, but instead licensed the underlying technology in a queuing product from Lightning Rod Software, a Minneapolis- based company that has since fallen on such hard times that it may no longer exist by the time you read this.

"We've been taking that turnkey application technology," Strathmeyer says, "and we've been chopping it down and extracting that kernel, that queue management functionality, and providing some very nice, well-documented APIs that allow people to write applications."

The Intel queue manager is basically in charge of what Strathmeyer calls work piles. It doesn't manage the media - doesn't transfer phone calls or forward emails - but instead manages records of who's waiting for service. To make it work, developers have to create two modules of their own, a media interaction module and an agent module.

The media interaction module "records the fact that there's something awaiting service, passes that on to the queue manager, holds the media, keeps the guy busy while it's awaiting service; and then when the queue manager finally comes back and says, 'Okay, time for this guy to get serviced,' the media interaction module pushes that media to whatever service point is ready to take it."

Note that basically any process can, in its own module, add media interaction and become part of the unified queue's workflow. So a standard phone switch can add the capabilities found in the media interaction module, but so can Microsoft Exchange. And this means that the handoff between a traditional IVR system and the ACD it hands off to can be made considerably smarter. "We can go to an IVR vendor," Strathmeyer says, "and tell them, hey, last decade you started with a simple dumb IVR, then people asked you for screen pops. So you had to integrate your IVR with a CTI server, so you knew which desktop this call was being transferred to. Now, you can turn your IVR into one of these media interaction modules. When you're handling a call, rather than doing a hook flash transfer and dumping it into an ACD, maybe this is a converged system and you haven't got an ACD. You hold that guy at your IVR port, but while you're holding him there, you tell the universal queue server that you've got somebody who needs service, and you keep talking to him while you wait."

If the media interaction module is the piece that puts work on the queue, it should surprise no one that the other module Intel expects the developer to provide - the agent module - takes work back off the queue. Strathmeyer stresses that this module isn't the actual agent-facing software (though this, too, is something the developer will have to provide), but is rather just the code needed to interface with the queue itself, telling the queue that the agent process is available, what the agent's skill set is, what the agent's current status is ("busy," "wrapping up," and so on), and returning final dispositions on each interaction if the application demands it.

Though it wasn't part of the original Lightning Rod Software application, Intel has opted to base communications among the modules on XML. This lets developers decide what kind of transaction-related information is handed back and forth along with basic API requests ("Put this on the queue" or "I'm ready for new work"). Indeed, it's possible to query the interaction manager on the fly and proactively modify the schema for work items in process.

Other Queues

Although Intel is the only vendor we've seen that makes a modular queue specifically designed as a software development kit for integration into third-party finished products, certainly a number of vendors have drawn lines around this functionality in a similar way. The approach, logically enough, resembles the architectural layering one finds in the world of softswitches, with the softswitch playing a role similar to the queue. The queue, in other words, is a different entity from the components that actually handle the media.

To illustrate, Noble Systems Corporation (Atlanta, GA - 404-851-1331, www.noblesys.com), has just added a Universal Queue component to its Linux-based ATOMS suite of contact center applications. With the addition of the queue, ATOMS customers (there are some 15,000 agents at over 500 installations worldwide) can blend what were formerly largely point solutions for phone, email, fax, and web into a single queue.

eOn Communications (see the sidebar for contact information) offers its universal queue in the form of open source code running on Linux, a touch we admired enough (along with the strength of their overall application set) to give it Product of the Year honors elsewhere in this issue.

Interactive Intelligence has always had a unified multi-channel queue at the core of its Customer Interaction Center (CIC) offering. What's interesting, though, is that customers are pushing the notion of what constitutes a channel beyond the normal bounds. Case in point: CIC customer Bell Tech.logix (Indianapolis, IN -317-227-6700, www.belltechlogix.com), an IT service provider since 1978. They adopted CIC over a traditional ACD setup back in April of last year, says Marc Flood, the company's director of strategic sourcing.

The company's contact center needs are complicated, Flood says, because "when we provide a client our managed services solution, we support their end users, whether that's their employees, their customers, really any category of end user that has IT or technology issues."

Prior to April, Flood says, "we were a multichannel operation in the sense that people could send us email and we would muddle through managing those types of interactions. But we had analysts on the phone using the traditional ACD, and oh, by the way, they had to monitor these email inboxes. While we were supporting it, it wasn't in an environment that would give us an innate level of scalability. Because they were different systems, it made it very difficult to get your arms around measuring the volume of interactions."

Beyond the Center

In addition to getting a better sense of contact volume, Flood says the unified queue has allowed them to build additional services, like network monitoring, into their queues as if they were just more contacts from the customer, rather than automated input from end points on the customer's network. The point here isn't so much that you can send network alerts through to agents, but that any product that can "talk" on the Internet could essentially function as an automated proxy for the actual customer and request service through the contact center. In the case of Bell Tech.Logix, network services are the product, so it's the network-as-product that squawks its discontents to the contact center. Other products - restaurant refrigerators, say - will presumably find their voice over time and, in a sense, product communication may become its own channel.

Meanwhile, not only are the kinds and volumes of channels growing, but the range of people we consider to be "contact center" staff is spreading a bit. Credit for this goes to converged communication servers, in which all the ACD functionality assigned to a contact center workstation is just as easily assigned to an executive's extension. You can see this in the way that, for instance, Interactive Intelligence uses the same underlying engine for its general-purpose Enterprise Interaction Center and for CIC. It makes sense: Once you use PCs and networks for your phone system, there's a much greater temptation to push call center features out into the enterprise at large.

Furthermore, as Avaya's Lawrence Byrd points out, "Transactions that originally come into the contact center don't stay there. They may have to be referred to an expert engineer or a registered nurse for case review. That person may not be a fulltime contact center employee, but you still want them hooked into the work management and media management processes. So how do I route the email to them? We strongly see this technology beginning in the contact center because that's where the highest-density communications are taking place, but we see it then gradually spreading throughout the workplace and beyond."

Carrier Contact

While unified queue vendors have the task of integrating the mechanics of media channels with queue control, the marketplace is still somewhat undecided about who's supposed to unite business applications (such as CRM) with the underlying multimedia contact queue.

Fewer and fewer businesses may decide to combine communications and business logic applications on their own, but will instead look to outsourcing or pre-integrated options. Both areas have seen a great deal of activity lately.

For example, there's what might be called the "conventional" sort of outsourced multichannel contact center, as offered by White Pajama (Hayward, CA - 877-725-2621, www.whitepajama.com). The company recently opted to offer an "Outsourcer's Edition" of its product, targeted at service providers.

The latest round of integration and outsourcing activity comes not from dot-coms like White Pajama, but from telecom carriers. Big ones. This past year saw Telephony@ Work (La Jolla, CA - 858-410-1600, www.telephonyatwork.com) cut a deal with WorldCom, for instance. T@W is working on other carrier deals it's not discussing openly and has also recently released version 5.0 of its CallCenter@nywhere with a number of extensions targeted at carrier-class providers. "Architectural Extensions," for instance, provide carrier-class reliability for third-party web and email servers deployed by T@W-powered contact centers. Other enhancements allow carrier administrators to customize multi-channel campaigns and routing algorithms without custom programming, through a point-and-click, browser-based interface.

Late this past year, British Telecom tapped CosmoCom (Melville, NY - 631-940-4200, www.cosmocom.com) to provide the contact center component of a new Contact Central product that British Telecom is selling as premise equipment to small-to-medium-sized businesses. CosmoCom had done plenty of previous integrations with Siebel, but Erik Laurence, vice president of marketing and business development at CosmoCom, says BT did their own integration for this product. "When we saw it, the degree to which they'd integrated our core functionality with Siebel's really knocked our socks off."

The BT offering is not, as noted, an outsourcing model. There are discussions ongoing with BT, however, about adding a hosted approach as well, Laurence says. In its current "call center in a box" approach, costs run between four and ten thousand dollars per agent seat.

The BT deal is not CosmoCom's first encounter with the carrier-integrated contact center model, either. AT&T announced a Virtual Contact Center service during the first half of last year - the service uses CosmoCom for its IP ACD. Like T@W, CosmoCom has other carrier deals in the works in which it's not allowed to name names.

Of course, it doesn't have to be a carrier that ties the business app layer to a multichannel routing system - there's also some incentive for business app vendors to gain multichannel viability through integration through an OEM'd queue. SAP, for example, has been OEMming the Multi-Channel Management Suite (MCMS) from AMC Technology (Richmond, VA - 804-327-0170, www.amctechnology.com). "SAP is on the business apps side," says Anthony Uliano, AMC's president and CTO. "They don't have expertise in linking to multiple communications channels-that's why they OEM our software. At the same time, when they go into a customer, they need to be able to deliver an end-to-end solution."

Contact Center vendors

Players of note who deliver full routing and queuing for multiple contact channels.

Altitude Software Milpitas, CA 408-965-1700 http://www.altitude.com/
AMC Technology LLC Richmond, VA 804-327-0170 www.amctechnology.com
Apropos Technology Oakbrook Terrace, IL 630-472-9600 http://www.apropos.com/
Aspect San Jose, CA 408-325-2200 http://www.aspect.com/
Avaya Basking Ridge, NJ 908-953-6000 http://www.avaya.com/
Braxtel Communications Boxborough, MA 978-264-1992 http://www.braxtel.com/
CELLIT Technologies Miami, FL 305-436-2350 http://www.cellit.com/
Cisco Systems San Jose, CA 408-526-4000 http://www.cisco.com/
CosmoCom Melville, NY 631-940-4200 http://www.cosmocom.com/
Davox Westford, MA 978-952-0200 http://www.davox.com/
Divine (recently acquired eshare) Chicago, IL 773-394-6600 http://www.divine.com/
eGain Sunnyvale, CA 408-212-3400 http://www.egain.com/
eOn Communications Kennesaw, GA 770-423-2200 http://www.eoncc.com/
E.piphany San Mateo, CA 650-356-3800 http://www.epiphany.com/
Genesys Labs San Francisco, CA 415-437-1100 http://www.genesyslabs.com/
IBM White Plains, NY 914-499-1900 http://www.ibm.com/
Intel Santa Clara, CA 480-554-8080 http://www.intel.com/
Interactive Intelligence Indianapolis, IN 317-872-3000 http://www.inin.com/
Nortel Networks Brampton, Ontario, Canada 905-863-0000 http://www.nortelnetworks.com/
Rockwell Electronic Commerce Wood Dale, IL 630-227-8000 http://www.ec.rockwell.com/
Talisma Kirkland, WA 425- 897-2900 http://www.talisma.com/
Telephony@Work La Jolla, CA 858-410-1600 http://www.telephonyatwork.com/
Teltronics Inc. Sarasota, FL 941-753-5000 http://www.teltronics.com/
White Pajama Hayward, CA 877-725-2621 http://www.whitepajama.com/