Special Section: Multimedia Products That Bring Customer Service To Life

Special Section: Multimedia Products That Bring Customer Service To Life
By Jeffrey R. Shapiro , CallCenter
Dec 5, 2000 (3:32 PM)
URL: http://www.callcentermagazine.com/article/printableArticle?doc_id=CCM20001205S0001
Integrating Internet multimedia products with the traditional telephony technology that brings customers and agents together is no longer an option. Earlier this year, the Gartner Group declared that almost 20% of call centers would have Internet integration in their call centers by 2002. They also predicted the figure would rise to 70% by 2005.
Promising stats for sure. More and more call centers are going cyber as fast as they can hire ASP programmers, but in most cases it's an extensive project, one that has for years led them to tread the waters slowly. There is a now a strong swing to use on-line consulting, self-help, and Internet or Web-based support and professional services. Any business with a call center knows the importance of allowing customers to communicate with them in a variety of ways.
In many ways dot.coms have educated brick and mortars on the importance of multiple communication channels. Dot.coms were some of the first businesses to invest in multimedia call center technology. It was much easier for them to so do early on than it was for brick and mortars. Dot.coms have little or no overhead costs. Because they are start-ups they also have little or no existing technology integration headaches to deal with. And since the Web is their primary means of doing business, they have to make it easy for customers to get quick answers to their e-mail or be able to pose questions and chat with agents in real-time on-line. But not all of them took the appropriate measures to satisfy customers, and along with a multitude of even more significant reasons, (such as venture capitalists passing out money like candy to dot.coms and stocks trading at 20 times or higher earnings), many dot.coms have withered away and died or are barely surviving.
While we are on the subject, take a look at www.keen.com. This is one outfit that doesn't look like it has reserved a plot in cyber-cemetery - their business model takes the traditional call center to the Web and this is their niche. The site hooks visitors up with experts on the Internet to ask advice of any kind. Visitors search for the right consultant for their question, and can get answers live via any available communications channel, including the telephone. A “call now” icon leads to a call to the expert. When the consultant answers the phone the system conferences all the parties and stays in the background. When you are done talking to the expert you can hang up or engage the IVR system for further service, such as reviewing the consultant.
The term “multimedia call center” may soon be absolute, since multimedia will become a given in every call center. Within a year from now, if your call center is not “blending” all its communications channels into one multi-media channel you might have to consider its cremation. Few people will visit your tombstone if you ignored the Internet economy.
Today we talk about the “contact center” which is a call center packed with all the latest technology to engage contacts in any medium chosen. Multi-channel allows a Web visitor to view information on a Web site and speak with an agent at the same time. A call center with an ACD and nothing else doesn't cut it any more. The following list of channels identifies some of what your contact center requires:
Multi-media “e-channels”: You must be able to engage (read, speak and hear) on any channel desired by the contact (notice we can't always use the word caller any more). Each channel has to be “blendable.” A T1 circuit brings voice and data together and technology routes the contact to the correct channel with which to engage the agent. The channel blends the contact media types. The agent is oblivious to the technology used to deliver a voice; it could be PSTN-based or Voice over IP (VoIP).
E-Channel blending: No matter whether the inbound format is voice or data, if the contact requires telephone engagement then the phone rings (PSTN or VoIP); if the contact has a need to “chat” a chat interface comes alive; if the contact sends e-mail, it must get routed to the correct agent.
A universal queue: Contacts must be routed to a pool of agents regardless of the channel chosen. The agents in this pool need to able to engage in all forms of communication at any time. For example, as soon as a contact has disconnected from the telephone, the agent must be able to respond to the next e-mail, Web chat, or the next call in queue. While such agents require specialized skills (such as good grammar, the ability to type and think quickly) you should at least have a group that's part of such a unified queue.
With all the fancy technology required, building a multi-media contact center is an expensive and daunting effort. It is usually for the very large company, which has a Fortune 500 budget, or an Internet company with a special mission, such as the aforementioned www.keen.com.
Systems integrators (SI) are also very expensive, contracts are often complex and time consuming and there is always the risk the SI is not going to come through with what you need. More often than not they simply do not keep their promises or live up to your expectations. There is overwhelming risk that you will spend six or seven figures, and the only “blended solution” you end up using is the one that mixes you a cocktail before you write your exit letter to the CEO.
One company I have been trying to help out of a mess has been through hell and back trying to create a Web portal linked to a contact center. They started more than a year ago hoping to have a multi-media contact center up and running inside of six months. More than 18 months have now passed and the company has had to fire two SI firms resulting in a considerable loss in time and resources. I arrived as the consultant in the middle of pending law suits. They are still nowhere near to having the e-contact center they dreamed about and recently fired the CTO.
Budget constraints and technical know how leads many companies to seek out a contact center that they can lease services from or share resources.
One company, Echopass (Burlingame, CA), is using the voice over IP channel as the primary means of routing any form of communication to an agent without traditional telephones. Echopass can handle contacts in any multi-media contact channel. You provide the agents in your corporate office or anywhere in the world. You also provide your agents with a PC and a dedicated network connection.
The company calls this a “phoneless” contact solution and says that as long as there is bandwidth, controlled by quality of services (QoS) parameters, channel quality between the customer and agent is as good as inter-office communication on a standard phone system or PBX.
In December 1999, Echopass got the approval it needed for its solution in the form of $28 million in venture capital funding. The company is creating its contact centers, called EchoCenters, through the US and has its eye on Europe as well.
Echopass' CEO, Art Coombs, and CTO, Keith Barr previously held the same titles at technical support outsourcer, Sento. “We took the best tools and technology out of Sento,” says Coombs, “and integrated the voice and e-media for contact centers in a hosted manner.”
The Echopass EchoCenters are like giant “blenders” that can take any collection of communication technologies, blend them together, and send a single media stream to the agent. “If the end user can send a fax and e-mail then we can blend those together, and if the customer calls in on the regular PSTN, then we can route that call to the best agent as well and send the voice and data over the IP connection to the agent station.”
As Barr explains, “If you set up a world class call center, say for 400 seats, with all forms of e-media technology, by the time you are done you will have spent six months building it, spent six millions dollars and endured a very painful rampup.
“But no [upfront] money is spent with Echopass. We offer skills-based routing, net-sourcing, and the core expertise to provide a robust solution tailored to your needs. And you pay us on a transaction basis for only the calls you actually receive,” says Barr.
“We enable our customers to totally own the call center environment, without the technology pain,” said Coombs. “The agents have access to a standard browser, which offers real-time monitoring, access to the CRM software, and all forms of PSTN communications and Internet communications, such as e-mail, text chat, co-browsing and so on.”
Echopass recently announced a strategic relationship with Qwest Communications International, which recently merged with heavyweight carrier US West, Inc. This was an important move that guarantees Echopass customers will have access to all the bandwidth they need. When Echopass customers need a connection, Echopass will draw on Qwest resources for service.
The combined companies are now a formidable competitor in the hosted cyber-business arena. The new Qwest will have an $85 billion market capitalization.
The merger produces a company featuring Qwest's broadband Internet data, video and voice communications capabilities with digital subscriber line (DSL), wireless services and local communications services in 14 states. They are creating “CyberCenters” throughout the US.
For the multi-media contact center hopeful, Qwest can put you in one of their CyberCenters and will bring whatever technical and system integrator expertise you need to the table.
Echopass' big competition, in the “phoneless” arena is CosmoCom (Melville, NY). This company recently raised $40 million in private equity financing, from top flight investors, such as the Intel Communications Fund, Marconi Ventures and Technology Crossover Ventures which was CosmoCom's previous bankroll.
Its premier product, the CosmoCall Universe uses open standards interfaces and runs on Windows NT and Windows 2000. The company has built an impressive array of multi-media contact center technologies. To see its stuff at work visit www.ByeByeNow.com, a travel franchise operation that connects agents from all over the world into the pure IP matrix that CosmoCom has woven.
The interesting aspect to CosmoCom's technology is that it has completely adopted Microsoft solutions, which only a year ago would have attracted harsh criticism and concern. But to Microsoft's credit its standards and solutions are fast gaining ground on the traditional Sun, Java, Oracle platforms. Its Universe products are extensive and cater to every form of media thrown at it from the PSTN and the Internet.
Internet callers come into Universe over chat, VoIP, e-mail and collaboration channels. On the PSTN, Universe can route phone calls to agents, too. The technology does not use any traditional ACD, circuit switched technology. Switching is accomplished via the managed IP backbone. The agents also do not need or use telephones. They exclusively interface with their multi-media PCs, which are equipped with headsets. All calls are answered or originated from the agent PCs.
Supervisors can also sit in the IP cloud and coach, monitor calls, and barge in when necessary. They can draw real time reports and gain access to histograms, analysis and a variety of decision-support information.
A big plus of Cosmocom's system is your ability to link a Microsoft BackOffice solution to the call center front end using CosmoCom's technologies. There is nothing worse, in my opinion, than having a vendor or solutions provider come in a try and tie a UNIX/Oracle/Java e-commerce front-end portal or contact center to a back office or corporate HQ already sown up in the Microsoft Solutions Framework.
Universe makes use of COM+ compliant technology and all interprocess communication is via Microsoft Message Queue (MSMQ) and the like. COM+ is highly scalable. Some technical wizards consider it now the most scalable technology in the world. Before COM+ if 50,000 Internet users needed to make a connection to the corporate knowledge base it would require 50,000 connections to the backend database servers. With COM+, the objects and business rule services in the portal are pooled. Instead of 50,000 connections the number is dropped to several hundred. It is the likes of COM+ technology that drives the world's largest Web sites and self-help and self service portals like Barnes & Noble.
If you do decide to roll your own, one of the problems that will burden every CTO is that there is a lot of new technology arriving every day, making it harder to choose, and taking longer to evaluate all of them. Here are more companies and products that could take you in the right direction.
CellIt (Miami, FL) is one company to watch. It offers a comprehensive and affordable package for managing customer interactions. Its offering, Contact Center Professional (now in version 4), enables companies to manage e-business interactions efficiently while providing a consistent customer interface across all contact media.
Their product incorporates enhanced Web chat and Web collaboration and the ability to synchronize agent and customer browsers for collaborative sessions over the Internet. Agents are able to offer assistance over the Internet while handling inbound and outbound phone calls, e-mails and faxes.
CellIt has been around since 1996 and strove from the beginning to help companies deploying multi-media contact centers avoid that single malady that can wreck any project - the finger pointing that can come when too many parties are brought to the table. Their goal was to offer all the functionality of a traditional call center, but eliminate the difficulties associated with a multi-vendor environment.
Brightware (San Rafael, CA) and ASI Solutions Incorporated have teamed up in a marketing alliance aimed at getting the most out of both the technical element and the human resource element of the contact center. The two companies will jointly market each other's products, which include ASI's Web administered assessment and development tool, REPeValuator and Brightware's contact center software.
The ASI offering serves as a selection or certification tool used to ensure the appropriate hiring or advancement of sales and service representatives. What Brightware brings to the table includes its intelligent Web, e-mail and Live Assistance products. This means that going with Brightware or ASI will allow you to not only hire the most skilled customer service and sales representatives, but also ensures that the individuals hired are the most appropriate.
Brightware's product, Brightware 2000 links your Website with your contact center. With prior knowledge about inquiries, customer history and business rules, their product ensures customers receive responses to inquiries in a timely and appropriate manner across all touch points. Agents always have access to customer information, and are kept up to speed with suggested responses for inbound inquiries, access to response templates and an intuitive desktop that improves productivity.
eGain Communications' (Sunnyvale, CA) Commerce platform boasts a completely integrated platform for on-line customer service. It is built using Web-native technology and the platform delivers exceptional scalability, rapid deployment, global access and seamless integration with existing eBusiness and call center systems.
You also do not have to buy all the components at once. As you expand, you can easily add the other eGain applications. These include eGain Mail (a high volume e-mail management system), eGain Live (a live Web collaboration tool), eGain Voice (voice over the Internet), eGain Inform (Web FAQ self-service), eGain Assistant (for conversational self-service), eGain Campaign (proactive digital marketing) and eGain k-Commerce Support (comprehensive self-service and knowledge management).
The company's product line is popular with Internet ISPs. Their customer base includes three of the top five US ISPs. These companies chose the eGain Commerce platform to power on-line customer service programs critical to efforts aimed at increasing customer loyalty, maximizing existing resources and achieving targeted cost savings.
Nexchange Corporation credits eGain Assistant with lowering shopping cart abandonment rates by 30% over the past year. eGain Assistant, which offers shoppers an opportunity to interact with a lifelike customer service agent on-line, is just one component of the eGain Commerce platform.
To customers visiting Web sites, eGain Assistant offers an opportunity to ask questions in plain English and receive answers, guidance and even connections to a live human being in real-time. Behind the on-line friendly face, however, is an innovative technology offering natural language comprehension, decision support, conversion logging and analysis as well as back-end data support.
Another leading provider of Internet customer service solutions, RightNow Technologies (Bozeman, MT), recently scored big time with a contract from the Social Security Administration (SSA). The administration decided to deploy RightNow Web as its on-line customer support system. It receives more than 68 million phone calls a year and over 11,000 e-mails a month, and implemented RightNow Web to provide the public with a quick and easy way to find answers to their most important questions.
The SSA's public service system is extensive, and includes about 1,400 field offices and the largest toll-free number system in the country. RightNow Web complements SSA call centers because the system makes it easy for people to find instant answers to their questions via the Internet.
Its Web product is RightNow Technologies' flagship Web customer service suite. The product combines self-help, e-mail management and live chat features.
The product goes beyond static FAQ pages by providing users with a dynamic, searchable knowledge base of FAQs. As users interact with the system, they rate the effectiveness of the answers provided to them so that when future users access the system, they will be presented with the best answers first. For questions not addressed by the published knowledge base, RightNow Web makes it easy for users to submit new questions. When support personnel respond to the questions, they can publish the question and the answer into the public knowledge base, making the solution easily accessible to future visitors.
There are many more solutions and companies to consider. There are also alternative technologies to the Microsoft solutions I have mentioned, specifically CORBA technology, and the Java pursuits of the Sun community. Get yourself a good consultant who knows the multi-media contact center business before you make uniformed decisions you will later regret.
Jeffrey Shapiro is a consultant specializing in contact center solutions. He has written several books on general IT, software development and computer telephony. He can be reached at jeffrey.shapiro@mcity.org.
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