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What's the story behind the company?
Steve - The company was founded in 1995, I am
one of the co-founders along with 2 other colleagues -
we used to work together at Comverse Technology and
myself, Ari Sonesh and Steve Kowarsky got together to
start CosmoCom. The company was incorporated in 1996. We
were working from Ari's home from 1995 to 1996
developing the business plans, developing the products,
developing the prototypes of our product and working on
initial rounds of venture capital finance.
Where did the name come from?
Steve - Well we wanted to try and get a name
that incorporated a global or very far reaching scope
type mechanism of access. We thought about the fact that
people would be able to communicate with all different
points around the universe and we looked at words like
cosmopolitan and other wide reaching types of terms. We
came up with the term cosmos and we ultimately decided
to name the company CosmoCom and the product CosmoCall.
It's just enabling people, or different types of
communication, all around the cosmos to connect the
contact center to provide service.
Are you still a private company?
Steve - Yes we are still a privately held company,
venture capital financed. To date we have had four
rounds of venture capital financing. The most recent
round was done several months ago led by Technology
Crossover Ventures but also participating in the round
there were strategic partners such as Intel Corporation
and Marconi Communications. In that round we raised $40
million dollars.
What do you see as the main issues in the call
center industry today?
Steve - Businesses today are really taking a
good look at all the different ways their customers are
contacting them. Things are changing, it used to be that
their customers would really only contact them through
the telephone, but now their customers want to contact
them through the Internet, either with text chat or
through their computer using voice over IP or even
video. E-mail is becoming a more and more prevalent way
of contacting a company and there needs to be an
effective way to handle those e-mails that come in. And
of course there are things such as voice mail. It really
doesn't make sense to start to build a separate solution
for each of these different contact points - one
solution for calls, one solution for web chat, another
for voice over IP, another for e-mail and another for
voice mail. It's crazy - customers like to contact an
organization in a unified way and be treated as such so
that the agents they deal with can have a full view over
what's going on whether you initially contacted them by
phone or another method. You really need to have a
system with a unified way to contact the enterprise.
That's one of the things that we are enabling. With the
growth of the Internet, the growth of all these
different methods, there is going to be a real shaking
out in terms of the way these companies are going to be
approaching all these mediums that their customers are
using.
Do you think with all the channels you describe
that some companies are making it harder for their
customers to contact them?
Steve - I think so, how many times has it
happened to you where you are browsing a web site and
are about to make a purchase and you have one more
question about the product and you can't find the answer
anywhere on the website, what do you do? Most times you
walk away. A lot of companies have these transactions
where maybe a customer has spent 15 minutes but then
they get frustrated and walk away. A few people will say
'ok' and pick up the phone and sometimes that means that
they have to disconnect their Internet connection
because they are using one line for the Internet and the
phone. But you would like to be able to click right
there and get an agent that has a full screen pop, knows
what you've been looking at, can really help you answer
that remaining question and facilitate that sale.
We think that self service on the Internet is
fantastic and that's one of the big drivers on the
Internet but it doesn't usually work only by itself. You
need to have that human support behind it - that's the
way that sales work and will always work that way - you
need to be able to handle those situations gracefully.
One of the additional things I wanted to point out is
that we have a product for not only addressing the
communication on the web but many other types of
communications mechanisms - wireless technology is
becoming very popular today, interactive television etc
and although many businesses have been challenged by the
amount of customer service requests they get on their
various communication channels, a product like CosmoCall
helps them solve their comprehensive communications
needs through all these different access points.
We are basically empowering that company to let their
customers contact them at any time with using whatever
devices are most convenient for them at that point in
time. So, if for example, I am in my car on my way home
my mobile phone may be best, if I am home on my computer
in the evening the Internet may be the best. Whatever
way is best for that customer to communicate at the
point they have a question you can do that through
CosmoCall system.
What was the first product your company produced?
Steve - The original product we had was very
similar to the product that you see today. Some of the
original driving ideas for the product were borne out of
the need for enhanced customer service for tech support
environments - the president of our company was
responsible for providing world-wide customer support on
a very complex and highly technical product and always
wanted to find a way to enable the service
representatives to see what the customer is seeing - to
be able to remotely control the screen or send some data
to make it easier for the customer and those ideas
combined with the new telecom reality of doing things
over the IP network led to the development of what is
now called CosmoCall Universe - complete IP based
solution handling all forms of communication.
Tell me more about the product
Steve - The product is called CosmoCall
Universe - a complete IP based call center platform
intended for a service provider market. The product is
typically hosted by the service provider then sold on a
hosted service basis to the customers of that service
provider.
Have you seen any resistance from companies who
have had their technology hosted internally?
Erik - You are always going to see some
resistance - that's just the way things work when you
move from a legacy system to a new generation system but
we are seeing tremendous demand for the kind of stuff
that we are doing and it's really just a matter of time
until this happens. If you look at the growth of the
market for call center equipment and services, currently
the market, as estimated by a number of analysts, is in
the $12bn range annually. Over the next decade it's
going to grow at about 7% - a very conservative growth
rate - to about $25bn and it might even grow faster than
that. Some people say it's not going to grow so
conservatively especially if you look internationally,
but even if you take a conservative approach if you then
look at the percentage of the market that is new
generation versus legacy, today you will find only very
small percentage is new generation. However in about 10
years about 99% of new shipments are going to be new
generation equipment. So it's really just a matter of
time before enough people make the change over to new
generation, then conservative buyers and pragmatists and
so forth will also make that jump. We are starting to
see it happening already these days.
So what tips do you give somebody who is looking
at legacy versus IP systems?
Steve - There are a number of things they
should look at and one of them is the whole issue of
CTI. I mean CTI is this kind of glue that's been created
by an army of consultants to tie together systems that
inherently were never designed to work together -
computers and telephones. A lot of legacy systems still
require enormous investments in CTI and armies of
consultants to make things work and the beauty about new
generation is that it's all computer based and we don't
talk about CTI anymore, we talk about CCI - Computer To
Computer Integration, and CCI is a very simple,
inherently easy technology to deal with. Tying together
Microsoft COM objects to another application is almost a
non-event and basically I think you are going to see the
CTI industry suffer because of this change because there
is a real move to much greater efficiency and ultimately
much greater productivity. So I think one of the key
questions a company should ask is how much money do they
really want to spend on this CTI stuff if they don't
have to do it? And the other question is are they going
to have the architecture and flexibility for some of the
new contact methods that are going to become very key to
their organizations and success as a business?
What are the barriers you have come across going
from a legacy to new generation system?
Steve - It's all the usual reasons when you
are trying to sell new technology. There are a lot of
buyers out there who only buy what everyone else is
buying so if you have a bunch of conservative buyers who
are the late adopters, then they are going to wait until
everyone else does it first. You do have some of that
but that's natural and there is no way now that the new
generation companies would be able to meet those demands
if everybody said okay we are going to do this tomorrow,
so this is going to happen over the next few years and
its a process and we are starting to see more and more
companies buying in because they are getting the
competitive advantage or cost saving advantage and you
start to see the barriers break down one by one and
that's a process that we're very much in the middle of
it right now.
Where do you operate?
Steve - Today we have offices in all the major
economies around the world. We are represented by
partners in other parts of the world and we continue to
find that the real presence has been a tremendous bonus
for us - some areas of the world are quicker to adopt
new technologies and it's worked out well for us. I
would say that some of the hottest areas right now for
us are Europe as well as parts of Asia like Hong Kong,
Japan and China.
Erik - There will be a lot of the
growth in call center equipment and services in the next
couple of years from Europe. By far there are more call
centers in the US than anywhere else in the world, I
heard about 90,000. In Europe there are around 20,000
giving the US something like 70% of the share in the
world. That share is going to diminish over time, not
because call centers here are going away, but because
there is going to be a lot of growth in Europe and in
places where you haven't traditionally had a lot of call
centers. Just as many countries that haven't had much in
the way of telephone infrastructure are leapfrogging by
going directly to wireless technologies, many places
that didn't have call centers are going to bypass all
the legacy systems and go directly to the new generation
technology. So we are seeing a lot of our market
opportunity in Europe and Asia and we are very well
positioned to take advantage of it.
What trends do you see in the next few years?
Erik - For one there is going to be a big
trend towards network based call centers. Currently
today network based call centers are the minority. There
is a good reason for that, I mean network based call
centers today are essentially in the form of Centrex
ACD. In other words, today's network based call centers
are provided not by premise based equipment from the
legacy players, but instead by means of ACD features
provided on central office switches. The only problem is
that the central office switch is probably the most
complicated development environment you could possibly
imagine. It takes years of planning just to get basic
features such as remote call forwarding. So Centrex ACD,
even though it's been around for several years, hasn't
made much impact on the market.
By contrast, new generation call centers, which is
all IP and based on open computing systems like Windows
2000 really does allow for call centers to be deployed
in a network based or hosted modality. In fact, some
analysts are saying that by 2005 nearly 35% of customer
service representatives are going to be served by
network based equipment rather than premise based
equipment. Probably something like 98% today is served
by premise based. This shift in delivery model from
premise based to network based represents a tremendous
opportunity for companies like ours.
Where do you see the company going?
Steve - We are going to be building bigger
and bigger call centers and unifying them into contact
centers and I think in the past the only companies who
could offer network based call centers were telecom
operators, and more specifically, those that were
operating global services. Now pretty much anyone is
going to be able to offer a network based service. This
is going to be a great area for growth for us.
Who do you see as your competitors?
Steve - It's hard to say, a number of
companies are doing one piece of this and there are a
lot of companies who are trying to be the leaders in web
chat, voice over IP and nobody is really putting it all
together - that's what we are doing. There are lots of
legacy companies trying to bolt on new capabilities to
their platforms and we all know how difficult and
limited that is. We differentiate between integration
and unification. Integration is when you try to put all
these different systems together while Unification is a
system truly designed from the ground up to handle all
the different contact points.
So do you still need systems integrators?
Steve - You will always need them but in some
ways we are going to make their jobs easier. That's
because they are not going to have spend so much effort
getting the computer system to communicate with the
telephone system which is a very complicated thing to do
and it essentially limits them to basic functionality.
Systems integrators today are going to be able to do
things they really haven't been able to do in the past -
they have been to tied down with all this complex CTI.
Talking about customer service for a moment, have
you had any bad experiences recently?
Steve - I think we have all had these
problems of poor customer service on the telephone where
you are placed in a queue forever and then you talk to
an agent who has no idea who you are or what your are
interested in. You might have told the story before and
then you have to tell it again, it's not only a terrible
experience for you, it's also unproductive for the call
center. We have all sent e-mails to a company requiring
a response only to have a response 3 days later or not
at all because the company is not really set up to
handle e-mail enquiries. We have all experienced it.
What's happening is that call and contact centers are
becoming more and more important as business tools and
competitive differentiators for business. I think what
we are seeing is business saying 'a good experience in
the call center is very important to keeping the
customer's business'. It's very important to make sure
that experience is a good one because if not, customers
will go and talk to the competition. It's a great way to
differentiate from the competition.
Will we see technology ultimately replacing the
agent in the near future?
Steve - I don't think we are going to get to
that point. There's always the human touch that makes
communications simpler. You could be browsing through a
web site and have all the tools available to you but you
still can't get what you are looking for and it's this
human approach to solving problems makes people happy.
They like to interact with self service applications
when it's convenient but when they can't find what they
are looking for it's the human touch that can make the
difference. So you really need to be able to provide all
the tools, all forms of contact and still need to have
that person there to make that positive experience for
the customer.
Erik - To pick up on that, IVR the
original self-service was originally supposed to reduce
the number of agents needed, but it hasn't, in fact the
number of agents has grown quite dramatically to the
point where there are currently between 5 and 7 million
agents in the US alone. Just because the IVR is there
doesn't mean you don't need call center agents. In fact
you really need more agents. This is because IVR enables
transactions that weren't possible previously, but IVR
can go only so far, and agents are always needed as back
up to IVR. I think the same thing is going to happen
with the kind of stuff we are doing. e-Commerce holds
tremendous promise, but in the past year the bursting of
the Internet bubble happened in part because e-Commerce
was unable to live up to the incredible expectations
everyone had for it. E-Commerce came up short in part
because many sites didn't make the purchasing experience
as easy as it could have been. On top of that, most
sites provided inadequate customer care for the
customers they did manage to acquire.
We strongly believe that one of the keys that will
enable e-commerce to flourish is live agent back-up to
these self service sites. As an analogy, for years
people have been saying that telecommunications, fax,
videoconferencing and all these things were supposed to
reduce travel. I don't know if you've been to LaGuardia
airport recently or not, but it's busier than it's ever
been. The simple fact is that the telephone and
videoconferencing don't reduce the need to travel, but
instead they create more demand for travel. Since we all
communicate much more these days with people who are
geographically distant from us, we create a need to see
them more often, and hence travel increases. The same
thing is true with the self-service trend. Self service
makes it easier for companies to do business with more
people, but that creates a need for more people to
interact with agents.
About Stephen E. Dellutri
Steve is Chief Technology Officer, co-founder and
developer of the CosmoCall Universe technology, is a
distinguished professional in the fields of information
technology and networking and is the co-inventor of the
unified IP-based call center. Mr. Dellutri has developed
software and implemented global Internet Protocol
networks for Fortune 100 companies and co-founded
CosmoCom after serving as Assistant Vice President in
charge of the design of global inter-networking at
Citicorp International Communications Inc. He also
served as IT Director at Comverse Technology and as
senior inter-networking engineer at Merrill Lynch and
Smith Barney.
About Erik Laurence
Erik is Vice President of Business Development, has
over 14 years of experience in the telecommunications
and Internet industries and has a broad functional
background that includes general management, business
development, sales, marketing, consulting, operations
management and engineering. Prior to joining CosmoCom,
Mr. Laurence was the Chief Operating Officer, North
America for Easy Glider, Inc. NY, an Internet technology
company providing an innovative multimedia navigation
engine. His prior experience includes senior management
positions with Trivnet, Inc. NY, as Vice President,
Business Development and eight years in various
management capacities with Comverse Technology, Inc. NY.
Earlier in his career, Erik held management positions
with Sonera, Finland and GTE Laboratories, Inc. MA. He
has an MBA from the Columbia Graduate School of
Business, NY, and obtained his BSEE degree from Tufts
University, MA which included a year of overseas studies
at the University of Sussex, in England.
About CosmoCom
CosmoCom was founded in 1996 to create a new
generation of call center technology for a world in
which the Internet and e-mail are at least as important
as the telephone, and businesses want systems that are
not simply "integrated," but genuinely
unified. CosmoCom offers its unified, all-IP approach as
a complete alternative to a traditional approach that
has become impractically complex and prohibitively
expensive. The mission of CosmoCom is to become a global
market leader in providing a new generation of call
center platforms that are all-IP based and fully unified
in supporting both standard voice telephony and
Internet-based multimedia communications.
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