A New Model for Customer Engagement

A new white paper from my company, Interactive Softworks, discusses a new model for customer engagement that is increasingly relevant for call centers of every size and focus.

Download it.

This white paper will discuss the six steps to effective customer engagement, including embracing a true multichannel strategy, having smarter conversations, delivering seamless experiences for delighted customers, enabling business collaboration, leveraging affiliates, partners and bundled offerings, and measuring customer retention, loyalty and revenue potential through real-time business analytics.

Additionally, this paper will take a closer look at ‘relationship architecture’ – the technology foundation that streamlines and helps manage all aspects of customer-facing business initiatives. Establishing a relationship architecture will provide lasting benefits to the company, partners and the customer, ultimately leading to success for the business.

Smart New Year’s Resolutions for Your Call Center (First of Three)

1. Expect more from your dialer

For companies that place a premium on outbound calls, a predictive dialer makes agents more productive by auto-dialing, detecting answering machines, and connecting live agents to the right party. And while many call centers already have some type of system to accomplish these tasks, they must resolve to ensure they are using a system that cost-effectively meets their business requirements today and well into the future. 

Ask yourself, “Is my dialer…”

a. …all-inclusive, giving me all the needed features for a single price?”

b. …able to integrate easily with other business applications?”

c. …capable of providing true real-time access to data without IT involvement or downtime?

d. …open and flexible to accommodate frequent change and intensive customization without relying on costly and time-consuming professional services?”

e. …paying for itself in a reasonable timeframe?”

If, after taking a sober assessment of your current dialer investment, you answer “no” to any of these questions, then you should seriously consider other available options. This may seem draconian at first blush, but the crippled economy has given rise to numerous incentives and price reduction programs by hungry call center software vendors that, in many cases, can offer you a brand-new system for a lower price than you’re currently paying for your deficient one.

And for those contact centers who have hitched their wagon to “industry leaders,” make sure you are receiving a legitimate ROI, and not just the comfort of ‘being with a brand name.’ When you fairly assess multiple vendors, you are likely to find that some of the so-called leaders are offering products that are years behind in innovation, require additional hardware and software purchases, and all for a price much steeper than competing products.

Remember, it’s about expecting more from your dialer, not more from your wallet.

An Oldie But A Goodie - The Top 20 Contact Center Metrics

Penny Reynolds of the Call Center School is one smart cookie. Even though her list of the Top 20 Contact Center Metrics was originally published waaaaay back in 2006, it still holds water today and is worth a refresher here in early January, 2009. 

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

On-Premise vs. Hosted Technologies for the Contact Center

Software as a Service (SaaS) is all the rage these days mostly because of the purported cost-savings and scalability aspects of contact center technologies. In my opinion, there are several SaaS contact center solutions that make perfect sense for any size call center: speech analytics (Nexidia is first on my list) , CRM (think salesforce.com, Siebel et al) are a few that come to mind.

But the core components of the contact center—the predictive dialer (outbound) and the ACD (inbound)—are critical tools that should remain on-premise because they are better suited for systems integrations and are less expensive than hosting options—with a few exceptions.

Existing centers that already have invested in facilities and infrastructure may be able to benefit from the hosted model when they need to add more seats in busy, seasonal peaks and dial-down after the rush. Brand new contact centers, on the other hand—those who are in start-up mode and don't yet have facilities and infrastructure—should be diligent in their consideration when comparing SaaS vs. on-premise call center technologies. Hosted solutions are positioned as cost-effective alternatives to premise solutions, but that's simply not always true.

Just ask CRM expert Steve Hayes, President and Co-Founder of eVergance, who stated a similar belief in his SearchCRM.com post comparing SaaS vs. on-premise applications (Note: you have to be logged in to SearchCRM.com to read this article - but registration is free)

In case you decide against subscribing to SearchCRM.com, here's what Steve said:

"If you already have an established call center systems infrastructure, I don't believe there is anything unique about SaaS offerings that would make delivering self service any easier. In fact, you may be better off with more specialized on-premise applications... These enterprise-grade packages would better support your integration requirements and would provide more flexibility in working with disparate content sources."

Granted, Steve is talking about self-service applications with a focus on CRM, as he is a CRM expert and consultant, but the message is the same: some applications are better suited for SaaS delivery than others.

The real skinny is this: if your contact center needs to integrate with back-office systems or third party applications (think green screens, AS400s, or anything outside your four walls), then an on-premise contact center is the only way to go. And furthermore, it is a complete untruth that hosted options cost less than on-premise systems.

Don't believe me? I'll post more about this soon, and offer some pricing examples, that will debunk the myth about supposedly lower cost hosting options (other than those I mention above) as opposed the more expensive (not!) on-premise option.

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.

Maximizing Contact Center Productivity: A few clever ideas

Over at the Evolving Contact Center, a podcast series that I produce for Interactive Softworks, we do a monthly segment with The Call Center School on topics like IVR menu design, staff management, and verbal makeovers.

In the most recent episode, Penny Reynolds, one of the founders of the The Call Center School, offers some crafty ideas for maximizing contact center productivity. This is a good listen for those anyone who manages contact center staff or technology.

Some Pros and Cons About Virtual or Hosted Contact Centers

Virtual contact centers, also known as hosted contact centers, are being considered by more and more companies these days - either as replacement systems, seasonal/overflow solutions, or as a temporary solution while migrating to an on-premise platform.

Decision-makers are attracted to the hosted model for very good reasons, a few of which are described here.

First and foremost, Hosted solutions don't have the same up-front investment required by on-premise systems. Monthly payments ease the strain on cash flow, and you're only paying for what you need. The virtual option appeals to small businesses because of the ability to avoid protracted periods of time installing, testing and training.

A second key reason for considering a virtual solution is independence from IT. Because it is not uncommon for an adversarial relationship to exist between business and IT personnel, the idea of jobbing out IT's involvement could mean quicker turnaround and less operational headaches and contractual SLAs to hold over the head of the hosting service.

The virtual contact center is on the rise for these and many more reasons. And, in my opinion, the hosted model is a smart way to go - if it suits the business need. There are plenty of reasons why an on-premise solution works best.

I'll address each of these in my next post.

Until then, peace.