End of Year Deals

I get a lot of "end of year deal" offers where software and services vendors offer specials if I conduct business with them before the end of the year. I'm sure you get these offers, too - this is not a new sales technique.

But in a down economy there are real potential savings that can be obtained by taking-up such an offer from a vendor. 

Of course you have to go through the same vetting process to confirm feature and benefits align with your business and technical requirements, but if you're freezing the budget until the new year, make the most of this opportunity while you can.

ATA vs. SOCAP

While at the American Teleservices Association's annual convention & expo, held this year in San Antonio, I couldn't help but notice that the crowd was much, much smaller than previous years. I'm sure the troubled US economy played a role in making it a leaner affair, not to mention the fact that SOCAP's annual convention was taking place at the same time! But I did hear quite a few conversations where folks are considering increased participation in SOCAP instead of the ATA in the future.

Now, I am a member of both organizations, though I am more involved in the ATA where I serve as a board member of a regional ATA chapter. And I think that many other call center professionals take the same approach of participating in both organizations.

My company has attended two ATA conventions and we've had considerable success from each. But we've not yet attended SOCAP's shows, and we'd like to give them a try. With budget constraints ever-present, we'll probably chose one to participate in next year. That said, I'm looking for advice. Any of you who have been to both and have a frame of reference, please be a dear and let me know your opinion.

Chrome Already Tarnished

Chrome, Google's new browser, has not delivered a very shiny performance for me so far. In fact, it doesn't work. At all!

I eagerly installed Chrome as soon as it was available (after Google 'mistakenly' announced it a day ahead of its intended release), and all I have ever seen of it is the "Aw, snap!" error message.

I expected a lot better from Google, and this is a major disappointment.

Dialogic is the ONE!

Everyone knows that Dialogic is the defacto standard for call processing technology. Their "ONE EVENT" - which will occur October 20 to 22, 2008, in San Diego, California - is a great opportunity for call center folks to network with Dialogic executives and product specialists to gain technical knowledge, to obtain insights into technology transitions, and more.


Here are details for the event:
October 20 - 22, 2008
Location: San Diego, CA

The Hotel Del Coronado
1500 Orange Avenue,
Coronado, CA 92118
Registration Link

Save the Date for Avaya PDS Users Group Conference

Hey kids! The Avaya PDS User's Group is gearing up for their training summit and vendor expo coming in September.

My company will be there to inform Avaya PDS users how they can maximize their dialer and other technology investments through integration made possible by our software.

Hopefully soon I'll get a chance to interview one of the Avaya PDS Users Group board members and will publish a podcast. In the meantime, learn more about the event.

The Unified Desktop Isn't Just for Customer Service Agents

Contact centers are now beginning to realize the value of a single interface through which their various team members (agents, supervisors, executives, even IT) can do their jobs, or at least significant portions of their jobs. This single interface is known as the unified desktop, as I previously blogged.

The difference between my initial post and this new one is that previously I was focusing on the unified desktop solely for the agent - the person(s) interacting with the customer on a telephone call or via email or chat sessions. The unified desktop was a single, central place where data from disparate sources, and functionality from different systems, came together in an easy-to-use, recognizable screen that made customer interactions easier and faster to achieve.

I now realize that the unified desktop is really more like a unified interaction application which can be relevant for any and all users within a contact center operation. Supervisors can use this same interface, albeit with different capabilities based on their role as a supervisor, to perform their supervisory duties. Executives, too, should be able to use this same interface, again with information and capabilities that are specific to their user role and permissions. In this way, a well-developed unified desktop can provide a sort-of centralized operating system (OS) that literally allows everyone within a contact center to work within the same application.

More on this in future posts...

Contact Center Trends

CP Wire recently published an article outlining 10 trends in the contact center. They do a decent job of describing the activities of forward-thinking contact centers, and the ideas here are very similar to my own posts.

Contact Center Technology to Help Collections Cut Costs

Along the lines of what I described in my recent posts, Collection Advisor Magazine's columnist Brian Cutler lists voice broadcasting (basically the same as outbound IVR) as one of the top three methods for cutting the cost of generating collections in this troubled economy. The article, "Cutting Costs of Collection Using Technology During Hard Times" is a PDF, so you'll be viewing it in a separate window.

Right Party Contact Podcast

I hosted my first podcast for The Evolving Contact Center. This episode (about 5 minutes total) is all about right party contact for the collections industry. I interviewed Rick Novak, a long-time contact center consultant, and he offers some great info about how companies use RPC as a strategy to collect more debt. He also talks about integration with Avaya PDS (predictive dialer) systems.

Proactive Customer Service

Here's an interesting idea for companies to notch-up customer service efforts using their existing call center investments: proactive customer service using outbound IVR. When you bring on a new customer account, send an automated outbound call with a pre-recorded "thank you" message, and give the customer a menu of options to further interact with your company. If one option is to speak with a customer service representative, the new customer can either inquire further about other products, answer survey questions, or even voice a complaint.

Along the same lines of

Outbound IVR delivers automated collections and Right Party Contact during economic slow-downs

Times may be tough for many businesses in the current economic downturn, but collections agencies are thriving as delinquencies no doubt increase. And as debt collectors mobilize to collect from their delinquent accounts, the competition will be keen. Smart collections agencies can gain the competitive edge if they automate the collections process and adopt a Right Party Contact strategy.

Naturally, collections companies attempt to collect debt from all their delinquent accounts. But a priority is placed on collecting from accounts with high balances, as opposed to smaller balance accounts that are less cost-effective to pursue. By using an outbound IVR to automate their recovery process, collectors can deliver a self-service option to lower priority accounts so that live agents can focus on the big fish.

Outbound IVR can deliver personalized and pre-recorded messages to delinquent contacts and offer a variety of self-service options including payment or promise to pay or to connect with a live operator.

And because the outbound IVR allows the call recipient to verify their identity, when they request connection with a live agent, the right party has been contacted and lends to significantly increased efficiency.

I couldn't have said it better myself...

...so, I've copied the text straight from Fred's blog, FredonTech.

In effect, when a business organization is presented with a solution from their technology team which appears to be a proposal to build an entire infrastructure and not a proposal to start solving their business needs immediately, they need to be concerned about the total time to solution and the hidden costs associated with the foundation-building efforts.

Call centers aren't software development shops. They're... call centers!

Instead of building a call center operating system from the ground up, focus on customer service, increasing sales, retaining employees, maximizing revenue per paid hour, first call resolution, average handle time and whatever else truly drives your center.


Type rest of the post here

A Bias Towards Hosted Call Centers

Honestly, I have no particular horse in the race when it comes to hosted vs. premise-based solutions. My recommendation of one over the other would come from evaluating the business need and making a decision based on that. But there seems to be a bias for this model as evidenced by pro-hosting articles and research like this one that only refer to the hosted option, and repeat, ad nauseam, the same old benefits: lowered up-front cost and minimized system maintenance.

Now, those benefits are nothing to sneeze at, but to say the hosted option always costs less to start-up is not necessarily true. Hosting can be a more expensive option!

I think it was in the movie Fight Club that actor Edward Norton said, "On a long enough time line, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero." Similarly, given enough time (a year, maybe two) hosted options exceed the cost of premise-based solutions. Well, not always - but it does happen!

So let me reiterate. I'm not against hosting. I'm for it, when the business need determines it. But to not even mention premise solutions in such an article, I think demonstrates a bias towards one method over the other.

Call Centers: Hosted or On-Premise

In an article about hosted or on-premise call centers, Cindy Waxer at InsideCRM posed a handful of considerations for comparing the two methods.

While Cindy does a decent job of laying out the pros for each type of call center solution, there are some additional advantages to a premise-based solution that are not mentioned in her article, and call center managers should seriously consider these when weighing options.

1. Premise-based solutions do, in fact, typically carry a higher up-front investment, and therefore companies who go this route can avoid the capital expenditure. However, the purchase of a premise-based system allows your company to take advantage of depreciation of such an asset, which hosted models do not provide.


2. For small companies, Section 179 of the US tax code allows those small business owners - who acquire equipment for their business - to deduct the cost of such hardware in a single business year rather than over time. Companies that spend less than $450,000 a year on qualified equipment can write off a certain amount in the year in which the equipment purchase is made.

3. Premise-based solution providers can often offer leasing options, allowing the company to stretch payment over time and negating the up-front cost concern.

4. Ongoing maintenance and upgrade costs for hosted solutions can add-up over time, and can ultimately result in costing more - sometimes significantly more - than a premise-based solution.

So, while hosted options are certainly less expensive up-front, time can negate this benefit.

Interactions: You Can't Do Business Without Them

Business is about making money. But revenue cannot be generated, nor can profits be achieved, without interactions—the essential and diverse business interchanges that facilitate every aspect of the buying, selling and delivery of goods and services. So a truer statement would be to say that business is about having interactions which, when done correctly, result in the generation of revenue and profits.

But when we think of interactions, we often take only a surface view of them and oversimplify—even potentially undervalue—their role in the process of business and commerce. In fact, many business leaders do not recognize that there are different types of interactions, some apparent and some ambiguous.


The most obvious interactions are those that involve traditional, direct communication between people—the customer interacting with the sales or service representative, the purchasing agent collaborating with the supplier, or the supervisor mentoring the employee.

And while we may recognize that these interactions are being enabled by technology-oriented communications vehicles, such as a telephone or the internet, we do not typically think of the act of using these vehicles as an interaction itself—it certainly is.

So within person-to-person interactions are more interactions still, the interactions between a person and systems—the help desk agent seeking answers from a knowledgebase or the bank teller querying a terminal application for an account balance or instructions for processing a loan request.

These person-to-system interactions help us recognize yet another type of interaction, the ensuing system-to-system interactions that occur when user interfaces interact with databases and applications, where applications call upon and interact with other applications by exchanging data, or launching specific processes, combining to function in ways that are unique and relevant to a specific business model. Even the presentation surfaces (the very screens that compose the user interface) can and often do represent interactions between multiple entities.

The larger and never-ending dialogue that is made-up of these individual and numerous interactions occurs in every business sector, from multinational conglomerates with sophisticated business operations and an array of business affiliates down to the most rudimentary “mom & pop” organizations.

This global and all-encompassing business “conversation” has long since started between participants of every stripe and has been enhanced and enabled by numerous technology advances—supposedly simplified through standards and guided by development philosophies from numerous software and service providers—that have attempted to provide, in one way or another, at least some aspect of managing and delivering these myriad interactions.

But complexity, rather than simplicity, and clumsiness, instead of agility, has been the result. Today’s typical business ecosystem includes a heterogeneous mix of IT and communications systems, home-grown and packaged software applications, (legacy, proprietary, external and internal), voluminous business processes and documentation, personnel with varying job functions and levels of skill, often distributed into disparate physical locations, and each playing some role within the interactions.

Coordinating all of these assets and the vast quantities of interactions that emanate from them is complicated enough. But to deliver consistent and contextually relevant interactions to the intended audience—for the duration of the business relationship—proves a significant challenge that has introduced the need for an interaction delivery model—a model that can effectively harness the capabilities of human and technology assets, and provide a single, unified solution that gives business leaders a centralized method of delivering the right interaction to the right person (or system) at the right time.

International Contact Center Week

Raj Wadhwani, president of Contact Center World, and his team have launched International Contact Center Week – a week of celebration and appreciation of the contact center industry at all levels scheduled to occur September 1st thru 8th.

According to the website and an email campaign from Wadwhani & Co., CCW launched International Contact Center Week to promote the hard work and commitment put forth by contact center professionals, to elevate excellence and team work, and to provide a boost to morale.

This all seems fine to me - I appreciate being appreciated as much as anyone.

Not sure what impact this has, if any, on the contact center world but, hey, let's celebrate.

Revolution Resolutions

Happy New Year! (10 days late, admittedly, but a happy one to you nonetheless).

In 2008, the ContactCenteRevolution resolves to post more often, with relevant and timely information that can truly help and inform you contact center professionals out there. We also resolve to update the blog and start using some multimedia capabilities to make it more interesting (we're in the process of creating an Utterz account and possibly moving to a different blog platform).

And your resolutions? Let 2008 be the year that your contact center truly evolves. The technology is out there. So is the expertise. Be smart and seriously consider optimizing that operation of yours. Evolve from a call center to a contact center.