It’s Time to Free IT!

Author: Mike Sheridan, Senior Vice President of Marketing and Strategy

I was recently at a tradeshow speaking with a number of operations managers who described some of the challenges they are facing in the contact center: slow speed of technology deployments, costly maintenance contracts, difficulty tracking the effectiveness of individual agents, and a lack of metrics, goals and actionable data. In these extremely challenging times, everyone is looking for a way to save a buck. Some organizations need to identify immediate cost-savings opportunities, while others are looking more closely at what they can do over the long term.

Plus, another challenge that we hear regularly is that companies have to continually think about the end-of-life of their contact center software, PBXs and teleconferencing solutions. One large financial company told us that 72 percent of all their technology was at or nearing end of life.

The good news is, there is a better way to address these concerns in the contact center – and unified communications is the driver. By combining specific capabilities into a unified communications application that uses software to target operational objectives (such as customer service, collections and sales), organizations can better drive company goals and objectives, start using the solutions quicker and reduce the costs associated with implementation and maintenance.

For example, by uniting capabilities like inbound and voice portal and call centers can coordinate a customer’s experience from self-service through to live agent assisted service and even bring in experts from outside the contact center to improve first call resolution and enhance the overall customer experience. Or, by bringing together outbound, voice portal and campaign management capabilities into a unified communications application, organizations can automate early stage collections and provide a more effective past-due account targeting strategy to reduce delinquencies and write-offs.

Not only does combining these capabilities from one vendor into a single unified communications applications allow organizations to target very specific business processes, it also helps them get the technology they need up and running quickly, and leverage the advantages of standards-based IT-ready software solutions. In fact, we’ve seen customers at Aspect reduce maintenance costs by 20 percent and improve productivity by 10 percent by using unified communications applications.

Since so many companies are looking to get the most ROI out of their benefits quickly, it makes sense to deploy an application tailored to specific business goals and requirements. Is your company seeing these challenges that the operations managers mentioned above?

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Better Management – The Key To Your Customers’ Hearts

Author:  Gary Barnett

About a year ago , I talked about how great it would be if businesses could centralize the application layer that brings the administration of multisite contact centers and their components into a single location. Fast forward to present day, and this approach is not only possible, it’s already being used.

One of our customers, Laser Centers of America (LCA), recently took this approach to better manage its growing business and improve customer experiences. When the company opened its second contact center, it deployed an IT-Ready solution to simplify the migration of 8,000 DNIS numbers, and to minimize the administration time associated with the transfer of agent information into the new automatic call distributor (ACD). Using this approach, LCA was able to disseminate customer data and DNIS information to the new applications rather than input the data into each disparate application. It saved an estimated 160 man-hours alone in migrating the DNIS database information for the new ACD.

This approach not only eased LCA’s migration process; it is now helping the company eliminate redundancy and, by extension, many of the ongoing contact center management headaches organizations generally face.  Today, when one of LCA’s administrators makes a change to data and staffing information, the new data is automatically replicated to the company’s workforce management systems and ACDs across both contact centers. As a result, neither the contact center nor the company’s IT staff have to worry about managing duplicate business rules implemented across contact centers.

Plus, LCA can rest easy knowing that their IT-Ready solutions are entirely secure because these solutions include LDAP/Active Directory definition and authentication, and logins via industry standard HTTPS and SSL.   In addition, eliminating data redundancy means less administration and lower exposure.

The possibilities and benefits that arise from a centralized administration layer are limited only by your imagination – today in the contact center, tomorrow throughout the enterprise.

What steps are you taking to reduce your administrative burdens so that you can focus on exceeding your customers’ expectations and growing your business?

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One Huge Mega System – Is that Really the Answer?

Author:  Gary Barnett

I’m sure you’re familiar with a contact center’s core interaction technologies – the automatic call distributor (ACD), the self-service application, the predictive dialer, as well as email and chat capabilities.  These technologies are the primary vehicles through which many customer-company interactions take place before reaching an agent.

These core interaction technologies are themselves supported by a number of additional technologies, such as workforce management, quality management, performance management and analytics, which are designed to help the business improve its processes and find the balance it needs for efficiency and effectiveness.

I’m sure you’re wondering why I’m providing this tutorial on the infrastructure of the contact center.  Here’s why.  One of the biggest challenges facing a contact center is figuring out how to keep all of the information maintained and shared between these various components in continual lockstep while the contact center continues to operate in a 24×7x365 dynamic environment.  For example, when a new representative is hired, the agent identification typically needs to be populated in each contact center application – a very onerous task.  And today, because so many companies have multiple contact centers in distributed/remote locations, the task of managing these systems has become incredibly complex, enormously time consuming and fraught with error.

One solution to address this problem is to create one huge mega contact center system that is used to essentially manage everything.  This approach obviously creates its own set of issues.  This system would probably not be able to scale to meet future agent levels.  And, it would generate considerable challenges if it failed while trying to support the company’s customer-facing business processes – a failure that would obviously put the business at risk.  In addition, if the existing software solutions come from different vendors, it is likely that many of these existing, fully-depreciated, and still fully-operational software licenses would need to repurchased in a mega scenario.  That is a big capital expenditure. Ouch!

What businesses really need is a centralized application layer that brings the administration of all contact centers and their components into a single location, addressing the need to eliminate complexity and reduce overhead, but at the same time keeping the individual contact center applications in place. This approach enables individual contact centers to continue to operate in the event of an outage, and eliminates the need for a business to repurchase the same software licenses again.

But you tell me…  Does mega system spell mega trouble?

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The World Needs One Super Duper Handy Dandy Remote

Author:  Jim Mitchell

I was walking around my home tonight thinking about how much I would enjoy living in a “smart house.”  You know, one of those houses where all electronics and appliances are remotely controlled.  I would love it if I could press a button as I walked through my front door and instruct my oven to cook dinner. Come to think of it, I wouldn’t mind sitting in my recliner in front of the TV while my vacuum completed the obligatory after-dinner cleaning session.  Of course, all of these technologies would be connected so that I could operate everything with one super duper handy dandy remote.

Being a contact center guru (so named by Gary in his initial blog posting), my dreams of household appliance harmony and master control quickly turned to thoughts of contact center technologies.  It occurred to me that a unified solution is a contact center guy’s workplace version of the smart house with an even more souped up super duper handy dandy remote.

Where else can you administer multiple key contact center applications and capabilities with one product? Or, configure your agents and your business rules in one application?  The beauty of the unified solution is that your ACD, predictive dialer, speech self service, monitoring, email, and routing schemes are all working together in harmony.  And because all of these applications are so well synchronized, with the click of the mouse, you have historical and real-time reporting on how the agent and the technology are performing.  There’s no data crunching required.  That’s pretty darn smart, if I do say so myself. 

So, here’s my big question: if a unified contact center is possible today, can I start educating my house tomorrow?

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