I’ve been working with standards-based technologies and session initiation protocol (SIP) platforms for years, and I’m grateful to the luminaries for letting me share my experience at the SIPit conference for my first blog post!

Aspect Software was one of about 50 companies that attended SIPit 22 on 14-18 April 2008. The event was held at the New Hampshire Interoperability Laboratory at theUniversity of New Hampshire. The purpose of the SIPit event is to allow organizations to test product or device interoperability for SIP implementations, determine the source of incompatibilities, and if the SIP specification is at fault, prepare a “fix” for the draft revision. Overall, it was a great success. And when I say success, I don’t just mean we made successful SIP calls, but we were able to verify interoperability of newly added features such as transmission control protocol (TCP) capability and other SIP-related Request for Comments (RFCs) that will provide better support for SIP enterprise environments. While the SIPit event is sometimes perceived as being an ad-hoc type of event, in fact it’s very well organized. Basically, a week before the event, participants begin making contacts with other participants to propose scheduling hour time slots to perform testing.

Aspect arrived with our schedule completely booked. Our testing varied depending on the type of SIP implementation, such as a SIP endpoint or another SIP Proxy or B2BUA. This was a great opportunity to have an environment to perform real-world testing on implementations, get a gauge of how well our products are meeting standards, and pinpoint what areas need improvement. The show helps enhance the SIP standard because it uncovers any ambiguities in the standard as written and helps SIP to become a more globally interoperable protocol. Attending the SIPit event is one of the many steps Aspect Software has taken to demonstrate SIP interoperability and educate the industry on the benefits of SIP in the contact center, such as lowered costs, improved flexibility, and increased interoperability. In addition, this participation at SIPit helps validate our commitment to the SIP Power Through Choice program , which issued a challenge to the contact center industry to adopt SIP interoperability policies.

Aspect Software has attended previous SIPit events, but it is very important to see how well the products are interoperating with our peers based on the current SIP Standard RFC 3261, and to demonstrate to our customers and prospects that we are continuing to enhance the SIP capabilities of our solutions.

One of the perks of attending the SIPit event is the social portion, where we can get to know some of our peers in the telephony industry. This year it was at the Christa McAuliffe Planetarium where we were treated to a buffet and a show that took us on a journey through space 100,000 light years from planet Earth. The next SIPit 23 won’t be so quite far away. It is scheduled for 13-17 Oct 2008 in Lannion, France.

More companies are seeing the value of standards and SIP telephony in general. I’d like to hear about the steps your company is taking to ensure your products are SIP compliant and services-based.

When Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Bank recently postponed their concert dates in Ft. Lauderdale and Orlando, FL, Ticketmaster proactively reached out to concertgoers to let them know. 

There was, of course, the public notification. Someone shared the information with the media who then communicated it to the public-at-large.  But, what if a ticket holder was busy with their everyday life and just didn’t happen to catch the news for a day or two?  Could they have driven all the way to the concert only to be disappointed and have to turn around and head home?  That’s not particularly appealing, especially if the concertgoer traveled a long way to get there.

My friend Cathy could have been in that situation. She works a demanding, full-time job and has a small child.  Cathy had been looking forward to the concert for months and had arranged for a baby-sitter weeks in advance.  Cathy was disappointed when her insomniac friend, who heard the news of the postponement in the wee hours of the morning preceding the concert, called her the day of the event to say she’d learned that the concert was temporarily off.

But Cathy’s friend wasn’t her only source of information. Cathy also heard directly from Ticketmaster, where she had purchased her tickets online.  The ticketing company sent her a brief, but important email.  In the correspondence, they notified Cathy of the postponement, said that the tickets would be honored for the new concert date, provided the reason for the delay, and gave a link to an online form so that she could submit comments or questions. 

The great news is that Ticketmaster is clearly embracing proactive customer care and with today’s modern contact center technology, they had a lot of choices in how they could have provided that service.  Not only could they take the proactive email approach, they could have also used a proactive outbound calling campaign using a dialer and an IVR to deliver targeted, automated messages containing this important information.  And there are a number of variables available there as well:  they could use the dialer and IVR with the option to speak to an agent or they could just use the outbound dialer to automatically connect the agent with the customer when they answer the phone.  They even could have leveraged speech recognition in addition to touch tone.  And of course all of these options are very easy and straightforward when using a unified platform. 

Other customer service organizations should take note of Ticketmaster’s proactive approach.  It made Cathy a much more satisfied customer.  If you were a ticketholder to this event, wouldn’t you have appreciated Ticketmaster’s proactive customer service?

In my last posting, I spoke in detail about why I strongly believe your contact center should be leading the unified communications (UC) effort within your enterprise.  Simply put, your center already has the technology, expertise and experience your company needs to successfully connect its people. 

I think it’s important for me to define a “comprehensive UC strategy”.  Rather than focusing exclusively on presence and availability-awareness, a comprehensive strategy reaches further to include elements of meta-information about each person’s skill set and knowledge base.  It also involves certain contact center technologies, such as those related to performance optimization. 

Take, for example, the idea of workforce management as part of your company’s unified communications strategy.  Using this technology can give your company direct, real-time validation that agents and subject matter experts are where managers have scheduled them to be based on their specific skills or knowledge.  This type of knowledge provides your overall organization with the ability to direct specific types of customers towards specific agents or toward specialized knowledge workers who are based outside of your contact center.

Your company can also use workforce management to schedule subject matter experts in short timeslots based on expected call volumes.  By proactively incorporating this capability into your company’s overall UC strategy, you can reduce the overuse of knowledge workers who are still trying to do their “day job” - a big concern of anyone thinking about how to successfully implement a UC strategy.

I’ve talked a lot about workforce management today, but it isn’t the only performance optimization tool that should be incorporated into your company’s UC strategy.  Quality monitoring and recording, speech analytics, eLearning and performance management applications are just as valuable. These applications give your enterprise a way to easily extend quality management capabilities to your enterprise so that you can track the overall customer experience, gain a better understanding about when and why your customers are calling, identify knowledge gaps that can be improved through coaching and training, take action to close those gaps, and ensure that all interactions are meeting pre-determined business objectives.

Reporting is the last essential component of an enterprise-wide UC strategy.  Organizations need a way to effectively track and report on the frequency of knowledge worker interactions, the type of interactions and ultimately the success of those interactions.  This can be done simply by extending reporting tools from your contact center to your enterprise so that the rest of your company can use and access the detailed real-time and historical reports that are currently limited to your contact center.

Whether you realize it or not, your contact center is already a real-time test case for unified communications.  Your enterprise-wide UC strategy will see greater success if it incorporates established best practices for improving performance in contact centers, and applies those existing applications and processes to workers in other parts of the business.  Why reinvent the wheel?

Do you think your enterprise is learning all that it can from your contact center?

I recently spent several days in Atlanta with more than 600 of our customers, attending our annual user conference, the Aspect Customer Experience (ACE).  Despite the fact that I was greeted by snow when I arrived (I was hoping for a radical departure from this year’s blustery Chicago winter), I learned a lot from listening to our customers and had a great time at the event.  I heard about organizational successes, learned more about contact center pain points, and also was able to brainstorm with many of our customers about innovative ways to solve unique problems. 

For those of you who were unable to join us at ACE, I thought today would be a great time to fill you in on some of the highlights.  As you can probably tell from Mike and Gary’s recent blogs, unified communications (UC) for the contact center was top-of-mind at this year’s event. While some companies aren’t quite ready to implement UC for their contact centers, they are definitely thinking about it and seeing that it is a tangible option for improving customer experiences.  In fact, nearly every customer I met with at ACE asked me for more details about how they might leverage unified communications and engage the right people within their own company and ours so they could get the ball rolling.

Performance management was also a hot topic.  Companies are still looking for and the most appropriate way to assess contact center performance.  They are looking for tools and metrics that can measure the strategic value of the contact center.  They want common, visualization tools that can be leveraged in the board room, as well as with all levels of management down to the individual service representatives. They want to be able to provide executives with a snapshot of key operations and financial data, while helping agents see how they contribute to the overall well being of the company. Keith Dawson, a senior analyst for Frost & Sullivan and an expert in customer experiences, did a great job addressing this topic in the keynote speech he presented on the first day of the conference.

There were some other particularly memorable moments from ACE 2008. Everyone in attendance at the conference had the opportunity to observe two world-class contact centers in action when Coca-Cola and The Atlanta Journal-Constitution each provided tours of their facilities.

The crowning moment took the shape of an Aspect Software customer presentation, which created significant buzz. With hard numbers in a very powerful presentation format, one of our large global banking customers was able to demonstrate to his contact center colleagues how a huge organization like his is leveraging Aspect Software products to achieve its goals.  He provided the audience with an overall picture of the company and the technology it’s currently using, and delivered information about his company’s plans to move forward with UC and virtual environments.  

It is an exciting time to be in the contact center industry as the contact center assumes even greater importance within the enterprise.  I’m personally looking forward to helping you with your journey, and I can’t wait to hear all about your progress when we meet at ACE 2009!

During the past few weeks, we’ve been talking an awful lot about unified communications.   In fact, just today Aspect Software made another announcement about how we plan to support our Unified Communications for the Contact Center strategy through our partnership with Microsoft.

We’ve outlined what it is and why it’s important to your contact center, your customers and your enterprise as a whole. As you can imagine, I’ve been thinking about UC for quite some time now.

Last week I was on a plane heading home from our customer conference - the Aspect Customer Experience 2008, and I started to think about Gary’s UC-related blog  and how I could expand on it. In that posting, Gary talked at great length about why he believes the contact center should lead the UC effort – a sentiment with which I wholeheartedly agree. As I was mulling over his thoughts, something occurred to me - we left you hanging!  Gary shared with you his view of what you should do relating to UC in your contact center, but nobody has yet provided you with any guidance on how to actually do it.

So I thought I would share with you the four steps that I think you should take to move forward and implement UC in your contact center:

1. Educate yourself. There is an abundance of information about UC available on our Web site, as well as on Web sites of technology-related, non-profit organizations, industry analyst firms, and industry-related publications.  Take the time to read about UC and ask questions. Don’t stop until you have all the answers you want and need. 
2. Close the yawning chasm between your contact center and the enterprise. Help your company develop a well-rounded UC strategy that includes all facets of your business – not just those that are internally-facing. To bridge the gap that most likely exists right now, initiate talks with your IT department to determine how far along they are in their UC strategy development and implementation.  Then, help them understand how they can leverage your insight and existing contact center tools to benefit your customers and your enterprise as a whole.
3. Use UC to foster collaboration between your contact center and the rest of the enterprise. As your organization looks ahead to deploying unified communications in the contact center, make sure that you deploy IT-ready solutions that can be easily extended out to the enterprise. Taking a unified approach – having all of the contact center applications on a single platform – makes it very easy for the enterprise to leverage all of those capabilities.  You should also take advantage of standards compliant, highly reliable, services-based software. 
4. Proactively consider potential issues and address questions relating to how knowledge workers will be measured for customer-facing activities.  Determine if all customer-facing knowledge worker interactions will be recorded and monitored and how those knowledge workers will be coached to improve their customer service skills.  After all, the satisfaction levels of roughly 10 percent of your customer interactions depend to varying degrees on the performance of these employees.

Hopefully you’re now ready to move forward and lead your contact center’s unified communications strategy.  If not, how can we help?

Earlier this week, Aspect Software announced that we are now offering UC for the contact center. With this announcement, I felt the need to come clean.  I’ve seen far too many companies with plans to begin their UC deployments in the non-customer facing parts of their enterprises. I strongly believe that your contact center should actually be leading the charge!  

Wait…wait.  Now, please hear me out for a minute. The idea of combining multiple communications methods with communications-enabled processes was born with the opening of the first real digital intelligent call center in the early 1970’s. Over the years, as call centers have morphed into contact centers, that integration has become stronger. It has evolved from very simple communication and collaboration methods, namely agent-assisted calls and self-service technologies, to an ever-growing list of IP- and SIP-based technologies that are today broadly categorized as unified communications – things like email, IM and calendars. And, though your enterprise is viewing technologies like presence as brand new and cutting edge, the truth is that your contact center has been using them for quite some time – each day for as long as you can probably remember, every one of your agents has logged on and established their “agent state” letting the technology know they are ready to take calls. 

Your contact center has a significant amount of experience communications-enabling customer service, collections and sales business processes, and is therefore the only logical starting point for an enterprise-wide UC deployment. Your company should be applying what you’ve already learned and the processes that have been honed in the contact center to your enterprise as a whole to shorten problem resolution cycles, enhance the effectiveness of collections activities, and increase cross-selling and up-selling of services and products. Your company should also be using your expertise and proven contact center applications to more efficiently link agents, customers and access pre-scheduled knowledge workers, and ensure the quality of all customer-facing interactions across the enterprise.

Tell me if you agree – should your contact center be helping to drive your organization’s UC strategy?  If so, further educate yourself – it’s your first step to leading this enterprise-wide change.  

A big thanks to the three luminaries for giving me the floor this week for my first blog posting!  I have to admit that I’m excited about the topic but I’m also thrilled that I’ve been entrusted to make an extremely important announcement to our blog-reading community.  Starting today, Aspect Software wants to make sure you are thinking about and developing a strategy for unified communications for the contact center.

Right about now you may be scratching your head wondering what that means.

Let me start by saying that unified communications (UC) is not a piece of technology.  It’s a concept that uses communications to streamline processes and help companies more easily achieve their business goals. UC generally relies on building bridges between many types of enterprise and collaboration applications – email, calendars, IM and presence, Web conferencing, directory integration – and communications tools, such as mobile devices, audio and video, unified messaging and desktop call control.

Many companies are already in the midst of deploying UC strategies, but most of these efforts are focused on using UC strictly to improve employee productivity and internal-facing processes. Thanks to UC, employees in geographically diverse markets can instantly see if their colleagues are immediately available for quick brainstorming sessions, they can post information in central repositories for efficient collaboration, and they can locate each other anyplace, anytime.

But, there’s a key piece of this strategy that most organizations are forgetting about – the customer.  Which means, the contact center and how it can leverage unified communications, is also being forgotten.  Do you remember the 10.3% of calls Gary talked about last week – the calls that require expertise from someone outside of your contact center?  Well, with UC you can reduce the amount of time it takes your agents to contact and engage knowledge workers (someone outside of the traditional contact center boundaries who has particular expertise) and, by extension, the amount of time your customers spend on-hold or even the number of interactions it takes for their inquiries to be resolved. Instead of frantically running down a call list to reach someone with the technical expertise to answer a specific customer question, UC empowers your agents to instantly check the availability of knowledge workers and quickly get their input with a few keystrokes and the click of a mouse. For more complex customer issues, UC makes the call conferencing process faster and easier. 

By simplifying your customer-facing processes, you can make your knowledge workers more easily accessible to your customers, accelerate your company’s responsiveness to your customers’ needs and most importantly make your customers happier. That translates into a higher proportion of exceptional interactions and improved customer loyalty which, in the end, increases top-line revenue growth and makes you a big hero.

To learn more about the media’s perspective on UC for the contact center, check out TMCnet.com’s Rich Tehrani’s blog.

Each day, your agents receive a large number of phone calls probably focusing on a wide range of issues.  Some customers may have basic needs, such as getting their bank account balance, checking on the status of an order, or changing their addresses.  Others may have more complex issues, like over-the-phone computer tech support, that require a higher level of insight from your agents. There’s one more level of customer inquiry – the one that is so specific or difficult that it calls for additional help from someone outside of the traditional contact center boundaries who has particular expertise – typically called a subject matter expert or a knowledge worker.
 
In these instances, your agents usually follow one of two processes, both of which are time-consuming and possibly annoying for your agents, your customers and the knowledge workers:

1. Ask for assistance from a knowledge worker in order to complete the call.  In this scenario, the agent gathers background information from the customer, places the customer on-hold, calls a certain “gate” or goes down a list of people until they find an available subject matter expert.  Next the agent provides the knowledge worker with background information on the customer’s question or issue, listens to the knowledge worker’s explanation and maybe asks a few more questions to gain a full understanding of the information provided by the knowledge worker.  Finally the agent communicates the answer or information to the customer.
2. Transfer the call to a knowledge worker.  Here the agent gathers initial information from the customer and tries to resolve the customer’s issue.  This process is similar to that described above except, after speaking with the knowledge worker, the agent conferences the customer in, introduces the customer to the knowledge worker and then transfers the call to the knowledge worker for problem resolution.

According to a new study (An Evaluative Report of the Knowledge Worker’s Role in the Contact Center) conducted by Leo J. Shapiro and Associates, 10.3% of the telephone calls handled by a contact center in a typical day fall into one of the two categories I outlined above.

And, according to that same study, calls that require expertise from someone outside of the contact center last two-and-a-half minutes longer than those handled exclusively in the contact center.  If there are just under one billion interactions a day between businesses and customers around the globe the findings of this study mean that more than 95.4 million contacts a day require assistance from someone outside the contact center.  That equates to 238 million minutes each day that contact center personnel spend asking for help or transferring calls. That’s a lot of time for agents, customers, and knowledge workers alike.  And, it can equate to significant amount of money in lost productivity and customer satisfaction.

In light of these new research findings, I think it’s extremely important to think about how you’re going to streamline your customer-facing processes.  What changes are you planning to make to enable your employees and customers to more quickly and efficiently find and access the right people with the right skill sets at the right time? 

Themed shopping and dining experiences have been popular for quite some time.  Now some companies are using the same concept to add fun to their customer’s contact center experiences. 

What am I talking about?  In concrete terms, think of the Rainforest Café – “A Wild Place to Shop and Eat.”  From the moment you approach the restaurant to the second you walk out, you get the feel of the rainforest.  A large alligator greets you at the entrance; hissing snakes hang down from the ceiling in the retail store; and fish tanks, gorillas, butterflies, lions and other animals accent the restaurant.  The themed aspect of the Rainforest Cafe put you at ease and prepares you for an “experience” rather than just a meal. 

What if you carried this concept into your customer service organization?  Some companies, such as the Geek Squad, are already using this approach. The Geek Squad, which installs and maintains computers and home theater systems, employs this strategy to position themselves as a special taskforce that can combat any high-tech threat. All incoming calls are initially handled by an automated system that has a persona of its own.  The computerized voice sounds intelligent and has a sense of urgency.  He tells callers that they’ve reached the Geek Squad 24 hour taskforce and then asks them to enter their secret pass code if they have one, or “hold for an actual human.” When you reach an “actual human” they use the word “Agent” before their name to introduce themselves or, in some cases, you may reach a super agent or some other variation. The themed approach doesn’t end there – agents carry it through their conversations, refusing (politely, of course) to disclose things such as their “top secret location” and providing estimated repair times in minutes rather than hours.

The Geek Squad is taking a creative and fresh approach to customer service. Their automated system is intuitive, and they use a computerized voice and carefully selected language to communicate directions in an amusing but to-the-point manner. By the time a customer reaches a “human agent,” there is a strong likelihood that they’re already in a positive frame of mind, making the job easier for the agent and paving the way for an exceptional interaction. 

Taking a fresh approach to the actual customer service you deliver can really transform the way you interact with your customers. But the cornerstone to all of this, of course, is leveraging coaching tools and maintaining regular training, as well as having the right contact center technology in place, such as the voice portal, skills-based routing and quality management applications.

Would you consider applying a theme to your contact center operations?

It’s been about a year since I made my 2007 predictions, and I was thinking it might be fun to take a look back and see if my trusty crystal ball was accurate. 

Last year, I stated that contact centers would take new approaches in four specific areas: Unified, performance management, agent retention, and self service. Those forecasts were pretty much on target, and I think all of these trends will continue to gain momentum this year.

In 2007, we saw a big growth in Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP), which enabled companies to begin deploying solutions to unify their contact center technologies and to centralize capabilities, such as reporting, routing, administration and workflow management. Over the course of the year, I heard many customers say that they like the single vendor, one-stop shopping approach because it reduces costs over the long term, lowers risk, and gives them the ability to adopt session initiation protocol (SIP)-based VoIP at their own pace, as their needs dictate, and budgets allow.  In 2008, more contact centers will adopt VoIP and move toward a unified approach.

Performance management was another hot area last year. Over the course of 2007, many of our customers asked specifically for the features and functionality that performance management provides, though they may not have been entirely familiar with performance management concept. Our customers were searching for things like automated and customizable dashboards that show at-a-glance summaries of performance; automated goal setting, performance tracking and agent coaching capabilities; and temporal tracking of employee organization data as it changes over time.  This is only the beginning.  I believe that over the next year we will see the increased use of true performance management.

Agent retention, a big theme across the board in 2007, remains the biggest challenge facing contact centers today. Last year we saw more of a focus on retention as companies attempted to improve work environments.  They used tools, such as workforce management and quality management to give their agents more input and control, but they also had help from somewhat shaky economies in North America and Europe, which made contact center personnel a bit more content to stay in their current roles. Most contact centers realized a slight improvement in attrition rates over the course of last year, but they will continue to focus on this area in 2008.

My final prediction for last year was that we would see steady implementation of speech.  Aspect Software completed a large number of speech implementations in 2007 as our customers aimed to simplify self service for their customers.  I believe that more contact centers will take advantage of this technology in the coming year as they aim to simultaneously improve customer satisfaction and cut costs.