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.

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.

Call Center Vendor Checklist

Here are but a few useful tips to consider when purchasing contact center software:

• Carefully consider the differences between hosted and on-premise solutions. Each has their own merits depending on the business need, but dig deeper than the prevailing hype. Conventional wisdom seems to be that hosted solutions are attractive due to the supposed low-cost, up-front investment. However, when calculating the total cost of ownership, on-premise solutions can be more cost-effective investments than hosted offerings—sometimes even as quickly as within the first or second years of ownership.
• Consider purchasing a call center software solution that allows you the ability to establish integrations between your dialer and other, existing third-party applications or custom, internal applications—without the purchase of additional software and equipment.
• Purchase a software solution that provides you, in a single license, all of the functionality you need to sufficiently operate your contact center. Pay-per application (agent applications, supervisor applications, etc.) can become cost prohibitive.
• Make sure your call center software vendor offers free subsequent software upgrades or otherwise does not force you to upgrade to (and pay for) future releases.
• Seriously consider the fact that many call center software vendors offer “bolted-on” systems with disparate products that were acquired through mergers. Holistic software offerings may represent the better bet since they were designed, from the ground-up, to work together harmoniously and don’t require complex workarounds, proprietary APIs, and additional professional services expertise to implement.

Technology: Does It Work On YOUR Terms?

Would you buy a car if it provided everything you wanted—powerful engine, fuel efficiency, sleek body, slick paint job and a CD player with 6-disc changer—but that required you and the other passengers to sit on the roof?

Probably not.

Of course these are ridiculous examples, but they make an important point for contact center managers to consider: technology should work in the way you need it to, and you should never adjust the way you do business to accommodate the limitations of any technology.

Certainly no business ever intends to be in this situation, yet far too many contact centers today find themselves slaves to technology—and they’re losing business opportunities to competitors who recognize that the status quo represents stagnation, not success. In short, the successful contact center is one that is enabled by technology, and not hindered because of it.


The core components of your contact center technology infrastructure—predictive dialer, ACD, IVR—should not be so obtuse and unfriendly as to force you to bend to their will, so to speak. These systems should be flexible enough to easily and intelligently connect to and interoperate with the other critical applications that power your business such as workforce management, speech recognition and quality assurance, to name but a few.

The all-important data that flows between these internal systems should do so freely, based on the rules you define and in the ways that you decide. These technologies should provide an easy way to make simple or complex changes (update a call script, change a data source, replace vendor A with vendor B, or provide a different agent application). And, once changes are made, your technology should allow instant, real-time updating and not force downtime during peak activity or require after-hours system pushes.

Practical managers are fond of saying, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” But just because a technology component works doesn’t mean it works well, or that it works in the ways you want and need it to. When practical managers add insight to their thought process, they will successfully avoid the trap of mistaking practicality for the acceptance of the status quo, and they will optimize their IT investments for the sake of their business.

Take the time to honestly and soberly assess your IT landscape. If, after doing so, you can confidently state that your current technology investment has your business poised for future growth and success, then congratulations are in order. However, if you discover that you’re sacrificing efficiency for the sake of technology, you need to reconsider your business priorities. Your position in the marketplace will be dictated by how well you meet market demand, and failure to recognize the need for adaptation can yield disastrous results for your contact center.

Be practical. Be insightful. And be careful. If you’re not, you may find yourself driving your car from the roof, or using a diesel-powered laptop!

Some Additional Insight Into ContactBabel's US Contact Center Operational Review

In "The US Contact Center Operational Review", a free study of over 200 contact center operations carried out by ContactBabel in association with the American Teleservices Association (ATA), they report some interesting reasons why outsourcers are, or are not, adopting hosted vs. premise-based solutions.

Drivers for adopting hosted solution
According to the report, the main drivers for adopting a hosted solution are:

...decreased capital expenditure that such a model brings, as well as the possibility of increasing functionality quickly and cost-effectively, allowing them to try new applications without having to commit massive resources of time and money. More than half of respondents report that they strongly feel that hosted solutions can provide these two advantages.

The report also indicates that other drivers for hosted solutions include managing call fluctuations, reducing ongoing costs and saving on technical support costs.

Concerns about adopting a hosted solution
Reason for concern, according to survey participants, in adopting a hosted solution included 1). a lack of justification for replacing an existing system and 2). the loss of control as it related to getting problems fixed quickly.

I tend to agree with Contact Babel on all of these points, but a glaring omission in their report, as far as reasons NOT to adopt a hosted solution, have to do with inflexibility for integration.

Increasingly contact centers have to connect with multiple and numerous disparate systems, both internal and external to their enterprise. Once you've hosted your contact center capabilities, you no longer have direct, immediate access to the architecture that must be exposed in order to facilitate integrations with mission-critical systems like CRM packages, ERP systems, and a whole host of other business applications and systems that play an integral part in every interaction.

I completely understand a contact center's need to manage and reduce costs and to expand functionality quickly and selectively based on customer demand and seasonality. And I am a fan of the SaaS model when appropriate. But it's important to keep in mind that, because the contact center is becoming more and more a major part of the enterprise and thus requires comprehensive integration into the rest of the business, the ability to achieve integrations should be as lofty a consideration as price.

Make sure your contact center solution provider can give you the best of all worlds. Many vendors offer leasing options for premise-based systems to create the "feel" of a hosted solution. Large up-front capital investments can be repurposed as monthly payment that prevent cash flow crunches while enabling the scalability for connectivity that your center will undoubtedly need.

The report, created in association with ATA (The American Teleservices Association) is entirely free and can be downloaded from www.contactbabel.com.

The Consolidated (or Unified) Desktop

Contact centers are subjected to constant change: clients are forever updating, modifying and changing scripts, adding new projects, and introducing new sources of data that must be accessed to make an interaction be successful.

And while it might seem the IT team would be victimized by such continuous fluctuation, its the agent who may suffer the worst. Without a unified, or consolidated desktop, agents are clicking through multiple screens, copying and pasting data from one place to another, and otherwise engaging in effective tasks when they need to be focused on customer service and quality.

The consolidated desktop is one that, within a single interface, data from different sources (and even in completely different physical locations) can be assembled for easier access by the agent. Contact centers of all sizes are beginning to move towards this vision.

I was interviewed by The Evolving Contact Center podcast about this very subject. Check it out and let me know what you think.

Steve - don't wait to integrate and automate

I was recently speaking to a friend of mine who is an IT professional at an outsourcing firm. To protect his anonymity, I’ll call him “Steve.” Steve’s company has multiple contact center facilities here in the US, and each of those centers has different telephony platforms and a bouillabaisse of partner, legacy and proprietary applications to connect with.

I wasn’t surprised when Steve told me that new projects took too long to launch, that changes required him to take down during business hours, and that the company was constantly hiring new agents to replace those who left out of frustration due to constant changes and difficult-to-use systems.

But I was surprised to hear him tell me – after suggesting to him the adoption of an SOA integration platform for standardization and BPM tools to orchestrate web services – that introducing one more computing system was the last thing he needed.

Huh? What?

Steve told me he and his peers agreed that a zero tolerance policy had been put in-place with regard to new systems. “Make due with we have – make it work,” was the edict he and his co-workers had placed on themselves. Folks, this simply doesn’t make sense.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I like Steve. He’s a nice guy, and I think he’s a pretty smart fellow too. But in this case, Steve is missing the boat: SOA and BPM are exactly what his company needs to optimize their processes and to maximize their current IT investments.

Steve… if you’re reading this… don’t wait to integrate and automate. I’m telling you this as a friend!