Impressing the Boss is Always a Good Thing

Author:  Jamie Ryan, CIO at Aspect

There are certain infrastructure upgrades and decisions that you need to consider as you develop your unified communications (UC) strategy. One of the biggies is the use of Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) Trunking.

For Aspect, SIP Trunking was a no brainer. Our company was looking at Microsoft® Office Communications Server 2007 R2 as a way to consolidate some of our unwieldy technology and streamline processes, but we were also extremely focused on potential cost savings. SIP Trunking was a logical way for us to take significant costs out of our telecommunications activities.

To us, one of the really appealing elements of SIP Trunking was that it enabled Aspect to completely consolidate our voice infrastructure and still look “local” when our infrastructure was really thousands of miles away.  This is resulting in a much more efficient use of capacity.  And, in doing so, we have been able to get rid of lots of hardware (which as you know is expensive to maintain), as well approximately 70 percent of our separate voice, video and data connections at remote sites.  I love the idea that we only need to manage one WAN connection for each of our sites, instead of various voice, video and data circuits.

And, my boss (our CEO) is pretty psyched about the fact that Aspect has seen a significant drop in local and long distance costs because of reduced number of circuits and better usage rates as a result of our use of SIP Trunking. We expect this to amount to be hundreds of thousands of dollars in savings over the next several months and years.

In addition, with all of the consolidation, employees have been able to keep Direct Inward Dial (DID) lines.  This provides improved call handling flexibility and efficiency. We have also seen better call quality of voice-based IP communications because each SIP Trunk is a dedicated “channel”.

As you can see, SIP Trunking and OCS are already providing Aspect with some pretty impressive benefits.  But, I am convinced that the real value will be in what lies ahead –federated multimedia communications.   What role do you think SIP Trunking will play in getting us there?

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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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(3 votes, average: 3.00 out of 5)

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Capabilities for Controlling Customer Contact

Author: Roger Sumner

Last month at the Internet Telephony show in Los Angeles, Aspect Unified IP received an award from Miercom, a leading, independent product test center, for Best Supervisor and Real-time Monitoring /Reporting Capabilities in the Miercom IP Contact Center Product Review. While it may sound like I’m bragging, the point of bringing this up is not necessarily to beat our chests proudly (although I would I would be lying if I didn’t say we were just a little bit proud), but really I just wanted to discuss monitoring and reporting capabilities.

On some levels people may think reporting and monitoring are all created equal, but they’re definitely not. As contact centers applications get more complex, customer interaction channels continue to increase and consumer demands are increasing at a ferocious rate, reporting and monitoring are becoming crucial to the success of the business.

Case in point – Aspect customer, StarTek.

StarTek, Inc., based in Denver, is a leading provider of business process optimization, with 19 facilities across North America and 7,500 agents. One of the challenges StarTek faced was managing the increased requests for real-time and customized reports. The contact centers produced hundreds of internal operational and external client reports on a daily, weekly, monthly and quarterly basis, and its customers regularly required new and modified reports. This resulted in a significant volume and variety of reports, production minutes, staffing forecasts and performance scorecards. Unreliable information was not acceptable to a company like StarTek, in an industry where data integrity and stability are critical to success.

StarTek decided to implement an advanced reporting tool that could gather and consolidate information from one or more contact data center applications, including its workforce management tools and automatic call distributor (ACD) to deliver an enterprise-level view of contact center operations. The implementation enhanced the StarTek data integrity and performance on several levels. The solution ensured higher accuracy of the information and enabled its staff to focus on data acquisition while easily addressing changing customer requests. In addition, an improved reporting process helped StarTek reduce costs and report time, and after implementation, the company was able to handle increased reporting requests with the same size team to manage and track all of the reports. The reporting tool enhanced operational productivity, increased accuracy of reports and data information, and improved client satisfaction.

Clearly, the results of implementing monitoring, and reporting capabilities can really make an impact on the bottom line. If a company is looking to get the most out of its contact center investment, it must look at the supervisor, monitoring and reporting capabilities. Otherwise, how can you have an accurate view of your contact center performance and productivity?

How has reporting, or monitoring capabilities helped your contact center? Or alternatively, what challenges is your organization facing in terms of gaining a comprehensive view of your contact center’s performance?

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IP Success Story, Now a “Centre of Excellence”

Author: Serge Hyppolite

First, I’d like to thank Gary, Jim and Roger for letting me post my first blog! As director of product management, I’ve spoken with a lot of companies that are evaluating the possibility of moving to an IP-infrastructure in their contact centers. Many of these organizations ask about the return on investment and are looking for examples of companies that have successfully transitioned to IP. One such example that comes to mind is Garlands Call Centres.

Garlands has been an Aspect customer for years, providing a range of outsourced services for various business processes. This UK-based company made a commitment to creating a 21st century IT infrastructure to gain a competitive differentiator through technology leadership. A key piece of this strategy was building a technologically advanced contact center, using leading-edge IP and Aspect Software standards-compliant solutions interoperating with other third-party vendor products.

The results have been tremendous. Garlands was able to reduce its technology footprint and administrative costs, cut IT operating costs by 25 percent, improved overall architecture uptime to 99.9 percent, and gained a competitive advantage with its IP contact center—which played a significant role in four business wins worth more than £12 million.

Not only did Garlands successfully transition to IP, but the company also recently announced the development of a Centre of Excellence for Collections and Debt Recovery. I think this new collections center will be a very promising business offering from Garlands, given the current market volatility and increasing debt collection requirements. The company picked a good time to transition to IP – now Garlands has a competitive advantage and the flexibility to quickly and easily respond to the changing market demands of the collections industry, allowing them to scale up or down as needed.

And most importantly, Garlands is being recognized for their ability to capitalize on advanced technology. In fact, Garlands’ new IP contact centre won the North East region ‘Orange Best Use of Technology in Business’ award at the 2007 National Business Awards in the UK.

Is your company encountering success or challenges in your transition to IP? I’d like to hear how IP is playing a role in your company’s business strategies.

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Using Standards To Reduce The Cost And Complexity Of Your Network Layer

Author:  Gary Barnett

When it comes to reducing IT costs, the network/telephony layer is a good place to start.  But, reducing costs also usually involves eliminating complexity.  And, both objectives are difficult to achieve when you’re using proprietary solutions that are hardware-centric. 

I’m sure your IT department is currently incorporating standards-based solutions into their enterprise architecture.  They are using those solutions to leverage existing investments, eliminate vendor-lock in, save money and time, and reduce risk.  You should be taking the same approach in your contact center – for the exact same benefits – deploying standards-based solutions that will make your center IT-ready.

You see, the network layer, which transports data from here to there and back, has become a commodity – meaning that it all does basically the same thing. The differentiator is the applications sitting on top of the network layer. But your IT staff still wants the flexibility to select their transport of choice and use whatever option best fits the needs and budget of your business – open source Voice over IP (VoIP), such as an Asterisk IP-PBX, closed source VoIP or traditional voice.  Leading IT organizations also want to be able to easily migrate you from traditional switching technologies to SIP-based VoIP, single-site to virtual contact center, centralized to localized management or any combination thereof. 

There may be a major obstacle standing in your way … you may be faced with a hornet’s nest of proprietary solutions that currently comprise your contact center and limit your options.

Incorporating SIP 2.0-compliant solutions into your contact center empowers your IT staff to leverage other investments that have SIP-based capabilities. As a result, you will be able to use a single network layer for all interactions, reduce proprietary hardware dependencies and isolate the impact of change.

In fact, Aspect Software is so serious about the importance of SIP that we recently attended SIPit 22, an event dedicated to refining the SIP protocol and its implementations.  We were one of only 50 companies to attend this year’s SIPit 22, which was coordinated by the SIP Forum.

And, last year, we introduced our SIP Power Through Choice program and challenged all of our contact center peers to guarantee the compliance of their SIP-enabled solutions with SIP 2.0 devices.  We’ve also created an interoperability lab as part of our R&D investment, which pre-certifies “pipes and plumbing” from the leading infrastructure companies to ensure the interoperability of our standards-based solutions.  These are just a few examples of how we are providing you greater choice and control, and you should be looking for this type of commitment from all of your contact center vendors.

Do you feel like your proprietary solutions are holding you back?

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Why Can’t Your Contact Center Infrastructure And The Rest Of Your Enterprise Just Get Along?

Author:  Roger Sumner

For as long as I can remember, most companies have maintained two separate and distinct technology architectures – one for the contact center and the other for the rest of the enterprise.  While that statement is probably somewhat exaggerated, until now, maintaining disparate infrastructures has been an inconvenient truth, but there hasn’t been a compelling reason to bring two diametrically opposed systems together.  Enter unified communications.  In order to extend contact center capabilities out to the enterprise, you really need to start thinking about how you can get your contact center infrastructure to easily interoperate with what’s already serving the rest of your company.
 
Why are we faced with this conundrum?
 
Since the beginning, contact centers have focused on customer-facing business processes – customer service, sales and telemarketing, or collections. One of their primary goals has always been to implement technologies that improve these processes while reducing associated costs and/or increasing revenue.  To achieve these objectives, contact centers have historically been forced to integrate their architectures together using a variety of proprietary solutions from a myriad of vendors. Sometimes these solutions work in harmony and sometimes they don’t.  As a result, it is often difficult for contact centers to pinpoint the place of failure when one occurs and just as challenging to add and integrate new (proprietary) capabilities.
 
Now consider the enterprise architectures – placid by comparison.  This infrastructure, always a work in progress, is being carefully crafted from standard protocols and interfaces.  All the components work together well enough to allow the corporate IT staff to support multiple business units, enable new products, partners and channels, respond to changing competition, manage additional regulation and oversight, support a 7 x 24 x 365 business and protect corporate assets … all while keeping costs to a minimum. IT is building this infrastructure for extreme scalability, flexibility, agility, security, and reliability.
 
Do you think it’s possible for your IT department to synchronize your loosely integrated contact center infrastructure with the enterprise superhighway?  You probably said no (I’ve painted a pretty bleak picture above), but the answer is actually yes.  Regardless of whether your IT group is trying to drive your business through technology or using technology to react to situations, two things can help them align these vastly different architectures – consolidation and standardization.
 
Right now, while you’re reading this blog, your IT staff is probably working on implementing standards across five key elements of your technology architecture – physical footprint, network/telephony, application integration, reporting, and management.   They are doing this so they can increase the re-use of your enterprise’s current technology investments, enhance IT productivity, consolidate redundant platforms and applications, and employ technology innovation as an agent for change. It’s time for you to help your IT staff fit your contact center applications neatly into the above-mentioned stack of elements so that the contact center and the rest of the enterprise can learn to talk to one another.
 
Is your contact center technology playing nicely with the rest of the enterprise? If not, keep an eye out for Gary’s upcoming blog about how you can make your contact center IT-ready.

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Are We Making Progress?

Author:  Gary Barnett

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.

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New Off-Shoring Possibilities Are Popping Up Every Day

Author:  Roger Sumner

Outsourcing contact center operations has long been cited for its pros and cons, but it’s not something that’s going away anytime soon. In fact, during the past decade or so outsourcing has expanded beyond country borders, giving companies the ability to tap into less expensive, highly-educated labor forces located anywhere in the world.  India has long been a hotbed for off-shoring for just this reason. 

But as labor costs continue to rise in India and churn remains high, companies are beginning to look to other countries, such as China, and regions, including Latin America, the former Soviet Block of European countries, the Philippines, and South Africa, which all provide access to a highly qualified, but rather inexpensive workforce.

As all of these regions enter or expand their presences in the global contact center arena, they will build new contact centers based on IP or wireless, rather than TDM, which is primarily used in many developed countries such as the U.S.  And, they will have the opportunity to take advantage of the benefits of IP before many centers located within G8 countries, who will continue with their traditional telephony infrastructure until data requirements are too high or pricing issues emerge.

This is not only a wake up call to China, but to outsourcers located in all mature contact center markets.  It’s time to step up to the plate and begin the transition to newer technologies, or face the fact that up-and-comers may likely surpass your capabilities. By leveling the technology playing field and deploying the right technology that leverages SIP and VoIP, you can gain the flexibility you need to tap into and effectively manage employees that work from their homes, are based in local contact centers, or reside in India, China, or any other market. The truth is that, if you have the right infrastructure, it doesn’t really matter where your labor base is located.  What does matter is the quality of your service and how much it costs you to provide that service.

What is your company’s future outsourcing strategy?

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Three Reasons Companies are Considering At-Home Agent Programs

Author:  Roger Sumner

Regardless of whether they focus on customer service, sales and marketing, or collections, virtually every Aspect Software customer that I have spoken with during the last year has told me that they have, or are thinking about trialing an at-home agent program. I can say without hesitation that a lot of this interest is being driven by the availability, and increased adoption, of Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP).  VoIP is making it infinitely easier and less expensive for companies to set-up at-home and remote agents, and laying the foundation for supervisors to effectively monitor, coach and manage this new breed of agent.

There are a number of reasons that companies are considering work-at-home programs. One Fortune 250 energy company is in the process of planning a fairly significant migration to at-home agents for business continuity purposes. This particular company has two electric utilities that serve areas that are sometimes threatened by hurricanes.  Using at-home agents will enable the company to ensure that it has the coverage it needs during emergency situations because the agents will not be concentrated in any one location.

Work-at-home programs are also becoming viable alternatives to off-shore outsourcing. While off-shore outsourcing can clearly result in significant up-front savings, in some situations it can generate considerable costs in terms of decreased customer satisfaction and lost business. I feel relatively confident that work-at-home programs will encroach on off-shore outsourcing as it opens the door to a new labor pool for the businesses looking to augment their current staff. However, I don’t think it will eradicate the need for off-shore outsourcing all together.

Finally, companies are looking to work-at-home programs because their facilities are too small to accommodate their growing businesses. One very large wireless carrier recently told me that they plan to stop constructing contact centers due to the high cost associated with doing so.  To address this issue, this company is building virtual contact centers, using data centers to house their equipment , and creating groups of agents and supervisor in many offsite locations, including work-at-home solutions. This strategy will enable the wireless carrier to hire more agents and continue to meet the needs of its customers, while simultaneously eliminating the outrageous expenses that can be associated with owning, managing, and operating a contact center.

If you’re contact center is considering a work-at-home program, what is your motivation?

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Why Does SIP Trunking Matter?

Author:  Jim Mitchell

A few months ago, Aspect Software announced that we had successfully demonstrated interoperability of our product portfolio with BandTel’s Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) Trunking. As I have visited with customers in the recent months, I have received many questions about why SIP Trunking is important, so I thought I would address this topic in my blog.

We are seeing many contact centers moving to SIP-based systems and products as they incorporate Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) into their operations.  But, companies that want to use SIP to fully support virtual contact centers in highly-distributed environments need to learn how to manipulate inbound SIP calls between heterogeneous products (e.g., Aspect contact centers, third party contact centers, and IP PBXs).  SIP Trunking is the most inexpensive and efficient way to accomplish this goal. 

Let’s talk about the different ways you can send a contact to the right resource – you can redirect the call or you can use pre-call routing.  Redirecting the call requires that you have tie lines or “take back and transfer” capabilities, both of which cost a significant amount of money when you’re dealing with a high volume of calls and distributed, remote sites.  SIP Trunking, on the other hand, enables you to easily and cost-effectively accomplish pre-call routing. 

Here’s how it works: with SIP Trunking, SIP calls are taken directly from your telecommunications service provider and load balanced across all of your sites or put into a voice portal or other call classification system so that they can be referred to the appropriate resources – a contact center product or agent. There is no limit on the number of times you can direct or redirect a contact without incurring take back and transfer costs, assuming your SIP provider doesn’t charge for it.  Alternatively, you can use your own network infrastructure to direct and redirect contacts. Why is this good?  By referring calls, you are freeing up the initial resources to handle the next contact and you are eliminating your reliance on a computer telephony integration (CTI) interface for load balancing.

You can also use SIP Trunking in lieu of an extensive inter-site network for VoIP, allowing you to utilize your SIP provider as your virtual network.  This is important because it gives you seamless connectivity to the public switched telephone network (PSTN).

I think that SIP Trunking is an extremely important piece of the VoIP puzzle because it can help you to continue to provide a high level of customer service and begin to realize VoIP benefits while migrating from TDM to IP.  I’ll share more with you about the high-level benefits of SIP Trunking in future blogs.  For now, I’d be interested to know if your company is exploring SIP Trunking.  Let me know!

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