Unified Communications and Collaboration: Opportunities for the Contact Center

Author: Andy Bezaitis, Senior Vice President of Product Management

We’re starting to see that companies looking at unified communications (UC) deployments have also been evaluating the benefits of collaboration technologies.

Since Aspect just announced the acquisition of Microsoft National Systems Integrator (NSI) Quilogy , I thought I would discuss the specific opportunities collaboration brings to contact centers, provide an overview of what collaboration is, and explain how it can deliver benefits by providing concrete examples of its application. 
I think it’s important to first define collaboration.  Like UC, it is being defined in a number of different ways.  Gartner has segmented collaboration into four different elements:

1. Communication
2. Coordination
3. Communities
4. Social Interaction facilitation

And, the tools that support these elements can be divided into two categories (which do have some overlap):

- Non-real time tools shared document repositories like SharePoint, wikis, enterprise search, blogs (like Contact Center: Unplugged), and of course e-mail.
- Real-time tools for conferencing like Live Meeting, IM and social messaging text messaging or micro-blogging tools like Twitter

Aspect has already demonstrated the value of desktop sharing and leveraging enterprise knowledge workers in the contact center  through the use of real-time UC capabilities, so let’s look at additional benefits and implications of using collaboration tools in the call center.

By integrating collaboration capabilities within UC applications in the contact center, companies will be able to take advantage of the groundswell of social media   to fundamentally change workflows and business processes.  They will be able to take raw content– structured and unstructured data – and turn it into information that drives action.  This means a wealth of opportunities to improve productivity and communications (and ultimately the overall customer experience).  Let me give you a few examples of the benefits that collaboration tools can bring to the call center. 

- Use data from customer and partner communities, social media and websites
- Tie results from post-call surveys or responses to emails and notifications to individual customer records
- Leverage portals and enterprise search to bring additional enterprise content and analytics into the contact center
- Make structured and unstructured contact center  content (including call recordings) consumable and actionable by other departments
- Use search capabilities to monitor customer conversations around key topics (such as (“closing account”) by linking SharePoint into customer facing emails, instant messages(IMs), simple message syndications (SMSs), web conversations, and social networks

Next, we’ll be looking at the significant benefits that collaboration technologies can bring to the enterprise, so be sure to check that out next week.

In the meantime, I’d like to hear about ways in which you are thinking about using social technologies and other collaboration technologies in your call center.

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Some Thoughts on the New Avaya-Nortel Roadmap

Author: Gary Barnett, CTO, Aspect

Working within an organization that has experienced a number of noteworthy mergers and acquisitions over the years, I am well aware of the challenges that are faced internally with bringing two companies together in a seamless fashion (or at least seamless to the customer). Having done this many times in the past, we understand how challenging it is to bring together two different companies products and this one will be particularly difficult knowing the breadth of the offerings and size of the companies.

The Avaya and Nortel merger has certainly given many in the business pause . The merger brings the company a larger customer pool, but the customer does not necessarily stand to gain much in the way of new capabilities.  In fact, they may have to deal with a number of challenges and pain points.  The two companies have spent many years executing on very distinct strategies and developing solutions that are not compatible.  And when they were separate entities that was a logical approach.  This new entity has a monumental task in front of them in trying to integrate platforms and people, and still keep their existing customers satisfied.

I’m sure most customers of either Nortel or Avaya, are trying to get a handle on what exactly this means to them and their business.  Having had to address these same questions and concerns from our own customers over the years, I thought I would take this opportunity to help identify some of the things that you may want to look out for in the next 6, 12 or 18 months.

• • UC Future Strategy/The Microsoft Relationship – Nortel had a relationship with Microsoft to deliver unified communications (UC) to the contact center and the enterprise that didn’t progress too far and has come to an end.  And, Avaya has been developing its own stand-alone UC strategy with proprietary solutions.  This will potentially require one customer or the other to abandon its UC strategy in mid-stream.  Most analysts have stated that no single vendor can provide everything that an organization will require for a complete UC strategy, so this will compel customers to develop an understanding of how this will impact a future UC direction and who will provide the full capabilities needed to execute on that strategy.
  • Product Compatibility – Avaya has announced that it will select  the best of breed solutions to provide the greatest value to its customers.  But where does this leave the customer who has already invested significantly in the platform that’s not going to be supported in the long-term? Customers will need to determine if there is a clear migration path for future investments or if this is going to require a forklift implementation.  And most importantly will the new solution actually yield the capabilities and results they’re looking to achieve?  The company has a history of stopping and starting the development of unified solutions, and from the roadmap discussion it looked as if that wouldn’t be available for several more years, so it could get worse before it gets better by having to integrate multiple points across numerous applications.
  • Customer-Facing Contacts – Whether you work with Avaya through a partner or directly with the company, there is bound to be duplications with your customer-facing contacts, which will inevitably resulting in staffing adjustments. Whether these changes happen all at once or gradually over time, you should plan to weather some changes that may not all be to the good. Customers may have to deal with people that don’t know their business and don’t understand the solution and the problem is compounded with a channel strategy where all partners are not necessarily on board with the go forward plan.  And, when customers contact the support group, they may be routed differently than they were in the past and they may not be treated the same way.  Asking how all of these changes will impact a customer’s day-to-day operations is key.

The road ahead for Avaya and Nortel customers will be a challenging one. For those involved, it is important to go into this with eyes wide open. Current customers need to know what to be on the lookout for and to ask the right questions.

What are some of the other challenges that you think are important to consider when your vendor mergers with another company?

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What is the FDCPA and Why Should You Care?

Author:  Allyson Boudousquie, Director of Business Process Marketing at Aspect

Collections agencies have been around since the 1920’s, usually bringing in debt that credit issuers were not able to collect for various reasons. The environment then was much different than it is now, however. Most of these agencies had few clients, few employees, and everything was manual. Collectors used index cards to write notes on, and when mail and phone didn’t work, these collectors would become “door knockers”, actually walking to the debtors’ homes to collect on debts.

It wasn’t really until 1977, when the United States Congress cited “abundant evidence of the use of abusive, deceptive, and unfair debt collection practices by many debt collectors”, that regulations were established around debt collections. That’s when the Fair Debt Collections Practices Act (FDCPA) set guidelines on how, when, and where a consumer could be contacted, began to require collectors to identify themselves and the company they worked for, and limited the information that could be given to a person that was not the debtor.

Due to these new rules of collections, businesses had to change the way they viewed their collectors.  They needed to refine business processes, including introducing new technology to optimize the use of their collections agents as well as ensure they comply with the FDCPA because failure to meet regulation requirements could result in big fines. In fact, they still can – the largest fine to date is $2.25 million.

The good news is that today’s technology is better than ever, which means that compliance can be virtually automatic. A variety of capabilities like quality monitoring, list management, and performance management tools, are configured to help organizations meet FDCPA requirements. In particular, some areas that require particular focus include:

• Dialing and tracking based on your customers’ time zones. Your system must be able to differentiate time zones, and base calling on those time zones, in order to both meet FDCPA and individual state requirements.
• Scheduling callbacks to avoid harassing your debtors.
• Reducing work phone calling at the account level or through exclusion process to ensure prohibited numbers are not called.
• Monitoring and tracking to ensure collectors are not using abusive or profane language, revealing specifics of the debt to any third parties, or using language that could be considered threatening.

The goal of technology used in collections call centers is to help mitigate risk and improve collections as much as possible. How else can companies like Aspect help? We’d love to hear your suggestions.

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Can UC Really Improve Your Customer Service?

Author: Gary Barnett, CTO, Aspect

We’ve been talking with customers about unified communications (UC) for quite some time. We’re finding that many people understand how deploying UC across the enterprise can increase employee collaboration and productivity, and significantly lower costs, such as those associated with conferencing and telephone usage. We’re also finding, however, that a lot of people are still unclear about where the contact center fits in. So, I thought I’d take some time to share with you a real-world example of how Aspect has implemented UC across our own global contact center environment with multiple locations and languages.

You may already know that earlier this year, Aspect completed a company-wide deployment of Microsoft’s UC solution, Office Communications Server (OCS) 2007 R2. We immediately began to see the benefits from this new technology. But, being in the contact center business, we really felt like we needed to take the capabilities one step further and use it to radically improve the service we were providing to our customers.  So, we implemented Seamless Customer Service, a unified communications application for the contact center, and transform the way our Aspect® Technical Services team was communicating with our customers.

Now, thanks to Seamless Customer Service and its Ask an Expert feature, our support personnel has access to UC capabilities such as presence detection, instant messaging (IM) and conference calling, which gives them instant visibility to worldwide contact center resources and those in the enterprise who are available to assist with customer inquiries. Ask the Expert enables the support engineer to quickly and easily use presence identification and skill criteria to find an available expert and rapidly address customer questions that may not be available in the knowledge base. They can call anyone in the enterprise by pointing and clicking (no need to use valuable seconds looking up phone numbers and dialing the phone), and even route a customer interaction directly to that expert if necessary. This eliminates the wait time to request assistance and effectively expands the pool of available resources for the Aspect support center.

We immediately began seeing measurable improvements in key customer experience metrics after implementing Seamless Customer Service and OCS in our contact centers. In the last year, call hold times have been reduced by 76 percent from an average of 2.5 minutes per call to just 44 seconds per call. Our overall first day resolution rate has increased by seven percent and the time to reach a support technician with the correct skill set has improved by eight percent.

Thanks to Seamless Customer Service, we’ve improved our call routing through our worldwide resource pool to the most appropriate available resource based on factors such as product, language, region and issue severity. Clearly, the right UC capabilities can mean measurable improvements in customer satisfaction for any global contact center environment.

Are you ready to fit your contact center into your UC strategy?

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Surveying the Market: Bridging the Enterprise and Contact Centers

Author: Andy Bezaitis, Senior Vice President of Product Management

Since I’ve moved into my new role as head of product management at Aspect, I’ve had the opportunity to speak with several companies from around the globe and gain more insight into what they’re planning for 2010 and beyond for their contact centers. One common trend that I’ve noticed is that more organizations are looking at the bridge between the enterprise and the contact center— through unified communications.

The companies that I’ve spoken with are not alone in these plans. In a recent survey of more than 1,300 participants, Nemertes Research found that more than 52 percent of organizations will be bringing unified communications into the contact center in the near future. I found this stat to be very telling on the direction of the contact center industry. Clearly, companies are moving to architectures that support unified communications strategies, and are looking at technologies such as IP infrastructures, presence engines, instant messaging tools and other applications that can help manage virtual contact centers or remote agent workforces.

The report also surveyed the participants for feedback on contact center vendors. They gave the highest marks to those vendors that offer professional services and systems integration offerings to support UC deployments across the enterprise and the contact center. This is seen as a clear differentiator in this market – a vendor that understands the broad need of the enterprise and the contact center.

The voices of hundreds of companies were heard loud and clear: organizations have been integrating (or will soon deploy) UC technologies into their contact centers, and the right software and services are key to their vendor selection. They want platforms that standardize their investments across the Enterprise and allow for software integration to their many systems. Services experience deploying mission critical voice will be table stakes as these customers select their suppliers.

Where is your organization in terms of bringing in unified communications into your contact center operations? What are the key services and capabilities that will be key to your rollout strategy? How does software figure into your long-term strategic thinking?

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Practical Applications for On-Demand Solutions

Author:  Gary Barnett, CTO at Aspect

Not too long ago, a Top 5 bank decided it wanted to focus more on maximizing “share of wallet.” In order to do that, the bank needed to align its voice portal with its overall bank strategy, a process that required getting rid of multiple, inflexible legacy dual-tone multi-frequency (DTMF) systems. The bank ended up replacing these systems with a tightly integrated on-demand inbound self-service solution that included a financial services voice portal. The pay off was huge. The bank’s customers noticed the change immediately as they began to experience a single phone call view of their entire bank relationship, rather than just bits and pieces of disparate information. As customer satisfaction increased, the bank saw impressive results. It experienced a 10 percent increase in its voice portal containment rate, and a dramatic decrease in the average time customers were spending in the voice portal, driving $25 million in cost savings per year. The bank also was able to reduce callbacks by 25 percent, and increase the cross-sell response rate by 7.5 percent, driving $56 million in new bank revenue during the first year after implementation.

Another example is an online global travel company that saw a big business impact when it began using an on-demand voice portal for customer care. When the company entered the market in 2001, it immediately recognized that outstanding customer experiences could help set it apart from its competition. The company’s differentiating strategy was to deliver timely information to its customers within seconds of a change. In order to achieve this goal, the company began using data from its customers’ travel itineraries to provide the most relevant information, and then utilized an on-demand proactive customer care solution to communicate that information to customers via high quality recorded messages. Since the company has implemented the on-demand solution, its sales have doubled per year, while inbound call volume has remained approximately the same. What’s more, 80 percent of the company’s customers have indicated that they would refer a friend and 25 percent said they would use the company to book another trip within 12 months.

We’ve seen several of our customers use on-demand solutions for collections. It’s widely known there is significant value in proactively contacting delinquent customers within the first 15 days of their delinquencies. Some companies are using on-demand voice portal solutions in early stage collections to deliver reminder messages about outstanding bills and provide customers with the option to pay by phone or make arrangements to pay. These types of automated interactions sometimes result in more in-depth discussions with agents. However, managing initial contact on demand with automated messages or self service reduces the burden on agents and enables them to focus on the mid- and late-stage delinquencies, which are often more complex to solve.

How do you feel about using on-demand solutions?

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Jumping Into the Clouds

Author: Gary Barnett, CTO at Aspect

At the Gartner Symposium last week, Cloud Computing was listed as the number one strategic technology area for 2010 (up from number three in 2009). Among other things, Gartner said that companies should figure out which specific cloud services might give them the most value. Voice portal in the cloud is one such service and, in my opinion, it’s here to stay.

You may be wondering why I am so confident about voice portal capabilities in the cloud. It’s largely because I see so many benefits. To start with, voice portal in the cloud gives businesses a choice between an OpEx model versus a CapEx model, allowing them to avoid spending their limited budgets on equipment such as additional servers and telephone lines. Leveraging voice portal capabilities in the cloud is also a great way for companies to get up-and-running quickly because it doesn’t require on-premise hardware installation, provisioning or integration.

I think it’s important to note that not all cloud voice portals are equal – there are hosted solutions and on-demand offerings, but also hybrid solutions that use a combination of hosted and premised-based options designed to help companies ease into cloud computing. Hosted and on-demand offerings are basically the same in overall concept (they are both “in the cloud”) but vastly different in terms of flexibility, cost-effectiveness, performance and reliability. With a hosted solution, your capacity is limited. So, handling unexpected or temporary spikes in traffic will be a challenge. Plus, it’s a real headache to determine appropriate capacity. In addition, a hosted solution requires that you pay for technology upgrades and that ultimately performance and reliability is limited.

An on-demand solution, on the other hand, allows you to adjust your capacity in real-time, as the needs of your customers and your business change. You don’t pay for the capacity that is dedicated to you; you simply pay per minute for what you use. In addition, you get the benefits of scale, evergreen technologies and business continuity, as well as carrier-grade reliability. As a result, you can create and deploy more effective self-service applications that drive more savings and return on investment to your organization.

If you’re a bit uneasy about making the jump from on-premise computing to cloud computing, a hybrid option might be your best approach. Microsoft’s Windows Azure Platform, which is expected to be commercially available next month, is one such example. In this type of solution, the voice portal application resides on premise, but the storage is in the cloud. It’s a great option for companies that want to try out cloud computing or just save money on storage/server costs.

Next week, I’ll provide you with examples of how some of our customers are using on-demand solutions and share with you some of their results.

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Regulation Sometimes Leads to Improved Processes

Author:  Lynne Levy, Senior Business Process Product Manager at Aspect

A few weeks ago, the final piece of the 2008 amendments to the federal telemarketing rule took effect. As a result, telemarketers no longer are able to make calls that deliver pre-recorded messages (robocalls) without a previously obtained signed, written agreement from the recipient. In instances where the consumer has provided written consent, the pre-recorded message must provide the consumer with the ability to opt-out either through a toll free number or through Interactive Voice Response (IVR) or key pad entry. This is no joking matter as the fines can be quite steep – up to $16,000 per call. It is important to note that this regulation applies to business-to-consumer calling vs. business-to-business interactions.

Believe it or not, I actually think this change is good for the telemarketing industry. This new amendment will compel companies to really get to know their customers and give them the chance to show their customers that they are good organizations with which they’ll want to do business. It will also force companies to run more targeted calling campaigns to the consumers who are most likely to be interested in their offers. By reaching out to key segments of customers with live agents, there is more of an opportunity for companies to explore their customers’ pain points, increase their sales through solutions-based selling, and strengthen customer relationships. When used correctly, this type of personalized approach results in positive brand building – again, the kind that makes people actually want to interact with a company.

I also think that companies using the right tools in their contact centers – tools with telemarketing compliance capabilities – will see that their compliance process will be largely automated. Centers should be using capabilities like high accuracy answering machine detection (AMD) to identify when a consumer, answering machine or voicemail service has answered the call. And by taking advantage of extensive list management capabilities that allow for highly segmented lists that can be updated automatically. Or high transfer speeds to quickly move answered calls from the predictive dialer to a live sales person. According to the new amendment, 97 percent of telesales calls that are answered by a live person must be connected to a live sales person within two seconds. In addition, there needs to be a way for a call, when being handled through a voice portal, to enable the consumer to add his/her number to the Do-Not-Call Registry.

Other technologies are designed to help companies increase the effectiveness of their campaigns while ensuring regulatory compliance. For instance, advanced pacing algorithms allow companies to track call result history over time and predict the best phone number and hour of day to place calls. With some solutions, such as Advanced List Management within Aspect Unified IP, that information is automatically used to create optimized calling strategies that are based on campaign objectives and prioritized by user-defined criteria. Then, those optimized accounts are fed to the predictive dialer for execution, and record levels are dynamically adjusted as agents log in. The automatic adjustment ensures that enough agents are available to handle successful outbound contacts as they are made so that abandonment rates remain acceptable.

Success in this new paradigm will not be based on technology alone. Agent training will also be key. Companies will need to provide agents with in-depth sales and product knowledge so they can up-sell and cross-sell products that customers actually want. Relying on canned scripts could result in constantly trying to sell consumers something they don’t need, which negatively impacts brand perception and a customers’ desire to conduct business with a company.

This new amendment will definitely impact the way contact centers conduct business. Has it affected you? If so, how?

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Four Key Areas for Data Protection in Your Contact Center

Author:  Brett Williams, Director of Product Management at Aspect

We’ve all heard about the “mass hijackings” of consumer data that have occurred in recent years. Each case involved a serious security breach that resulted in the downloading (and subsequent misuse) of thousands of consumer records. While the main vulnerability in these types of cases has generally pointed to corporate systems such as mainframes, Enterprise Resource Planning (ERPs), and Customer Relationship Management (CRMs), it’s still extremely important that you consider the security of your contact center technology.

Of the 12 key compliance requirements set out by the Payment Card Industry Security Standards Council (PCI SCC), protecting stored cardholder data (requirement #3) is the place where the contact center can play the biggest roll. In order to reduce the exposure of your cardholder data, I recommend that you take a good look at the following key areas.

Your database – when cardholder data is imported within the database for outbound dialing, a person with access to the database can view this information. To protect your customer data, look for solutions that allow your center to place outbound calls from its own external database. Alternatively, if you import data for outbound dialing purposes, use access control and encryption to limit employee access to the data.

Agent and supervisor user interfaces – cardholder data is sometimes delivered to your agents’ desktops with screen-pops, and can be exposed as part of the supervisory desktop. Keep your customers’ information more secure by excluding sensitive data from outbound records and/or the user interfaces. If you must deliver the card holder data, make sure that it is delivered securely using Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) and ensure that any temporary files are encrypted.

Log files – cardholder data is often captured as part of a voice portal process, as part of an inbound call screen-pop, or in call data for an outbound call, and stored as log files. You can put some safeguards in place such as restricting access to your log files, or encrypting log files using standard encryption tools.

Recordings – cardholder data can be recorded as part of an agent-customer conversation, an automated speech-based self-service application, or an agent desktop screen recording. Presently, there are a few ways to protect your customers when it comes to recorded data. First, you can encrypt recordings and ensure that playback is conducted over SSL. You can also restrict access to the recording files during playback, archival or transfer. Alternatively, you can pause recordings when sensitive customer data is entered so that sensitive data is never recorded in the first place.

What tips and tricks have you already implemented to protect the customer data in your contact center? How can we help?

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How Serious Are You About Protecting Your Customer Data?

Author:  Brett Williams, Director of Product Management at Aspect

Any way you look at it, protecting your customers’ data is just good business practice.  As a consumer whose friends have had their personal information compromised, I look at data protection simply as the right thing to do. But for companies that aren’t convinced they should make changes based solely on altruistic ideas, here are a few other reasons to protect customer data: people are much more likely to do business with companies that keep important information, such as credit card numbers and social security numbers, safe; and, a breach can cost ridiculous amounts of money in combating bad press and fending off or settling lawsuits.  Oh yeah … there’s one more important reason to protect customer data – the Payment Card Industry Security Standards Council (PCI SSC).

A few years ago, the PCI SSC laid out the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS), a 12-step process designed to regulate and standardize the methods merchants use to protect credit card data. These are basic guidelines that companies should follow. Until now, participation in this program has been somewhat discretionary (but again, good practice) with punishments for non-compliance being imposed only by the credit card companies that created the guidelines.They range from things like hefty fines to credit card companies flat out refusing to conduct future business with your company.

Local government will soon be entering the game. Beginning on January 1, 2010, Nevada will become the first U.S. state to mandate complete compliance with the PCI DSS. Nevada’s law is not designed to punish those that do not comply.  Instead, it will protect those that do comply by shielding them against liability for damages resulting from security breaches.

What does this mean to the contact center industry? The good news is that IT departments largely handle many of the requirements relating to PCI DSS. These include things like building and maintaining a secure network and maintaining a vulnerability management program complete with anti-virus software and secure systems. But, the contact center can and should be supporting IT whenever possible, especially when it comes to protecting cardholder data.

Next week, we’ll talk a bit more about how you can help with PCI DSS compliance in your contact center. In the meantime, I’d like to hear your opinion on whether or not other states or federal governments should implement laws like Nevada’s.

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