It’s Time to Wrangle that Runaway Data

Author:  Gary Barnett

Data, data everywhere but way too much to drink! Does it seem that way to you?  If you think about it, the contact center may be the largest data creator in the enterprise. ACD and predictive dialer systems have long tracked very detailed information about each customer interaction – length of the call, transfers, hold times, network information and so on. And, each additional contact center technology created its own source of data too. From workforce management systems to contact center performance management systems, each application brings a wealth of potential insight into how agents and customers interact.

While gathering this information with the contact center can provide insights into how to better respond to customer demands while reducing costs, combining some of this information with enterprise data stores can lead to even more value. For example, average handle times contrasted with sales per interaction can lead to insight into the optimal amount of time your representative might want to spend with a prospective customer.

However, taking advantage of the opportunities this level of knowledge offers, requires contact center technology that fits neatly into the enterprise architecture that IT has already put in place. That can be a tricky business if you don’t have the right kind of applications in place.  By this I mean deploying IT-Ready customer interaction reporting solutions that leverage open standards like ODBC, JDBC and XML, and delivers the tools you need to consolidate and deliver raw data from multisite, multi-vendor, and multichannel implementations and aggregate data from all connection channels (email, voice, Web, chat) contact center sites and all agents. You’ll be able to reduce costs by decreasing the number of staff you need to consolidate the data and interpret the information. And, you’ll simplify your ability to make operational decisions that maximize agent productivity and enhance customer service, sales and collections experiences.

IT Ready reporting solutions can provide your contact center with some very real and immediate benefits.  But, just as importantly, implementing these types of solutions now provides your company with the foundation for the essential enterprise-wide reporting capabilities that it will need to maximize its overall unified communications strategy.

How are you preparing to wrangle your runaway data?

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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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What The Heck Does It Mean To Be IT-Ready? And, Why Should You Care?

Author:  Gary Barnett

During the past few months, we’ve spoken at great length about the business problems that can be solved when the contact center is extended to the enterprise via unified communications (UC). I’m sure that the idea of being able to do this is exciting to you and your contact center colleagues, but when your IT department hears you talking about the possibilities, they’re possibly cringing.  You see, there is a good chance that they’re concerned that you’re planning to take your big black box and mess up their scalable, redundant, and reliable architecture.

The nice thing is you have the ability to calm their fears by letting them know you’re sensitive to their need for IT-ready solutions. You can tell them you want to deploy solutions that are designed and built specifically to meet their challenges – lowering costs, reducing complexity, providing stronger security and greater reliability, and enabling better responsiveness.

So, what the heck does it mean to be IT-ready? At its highest level, IT-ready is a concept.  It represents the notion that “IT-ready” contact center solutions are designed to fold into the enterprise architectures that are being deployed by IT organizations within companies. This in turn gives IT the ability to better address time and budget constraints, and the opportunity to do more with less.

There are five main criteria that must be incorporated into a solution for it to be deemed IT-ready.  The solution must:

1. Utilize services-based software and hosted solutions to more easily employ virtualization tools and techniques to simplify and reduce your physical footprint. An IT-ready unified solution reduces time- and cost-consuming integrations.  And, hosted solutions allow companies to save on network traffic costs and eliminates expensive networking equipment to diminish your cost of ownership. 
2. Provide standards-based capabilities, giving you the power to deploy your contact center applications on top of your transport of choice – Voice over IP or traditional voice (or even a blend of both). IT-ready solutions use session initiation protocol (SIP) to deliver optimal device and service provider choice, support XML-based open Web services and APIs, and integrate to data stores through ODBC, JDBC and XML.
3. Leverage standard system management, security practices and tools such as LDAP, Active Directory and Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI), and SNMP.
4. Offer high availability and reliability and provide a variety of redundancy features – including disaster recovery options – that increase the fault tolerance and efficiency of the system and minimize single points of failure.
5. Support single- or multi-tenant deployments to provide greater choice and control to organizations.

IT-ready solutions are important for a variety of reasons.  Not only can they significantly reduce the burden on your IT staff, they can also give your contact center and your enterprise the tools it needs to reap all of the benefits of UC and, of course, they can help you make your customer happier and improve your bottom line.

Do you think IT-ready solutions will benefit your organization?

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You Can’t Rush the Standards

Guest Author:  Jim Barnett

I’m Jim Barnett, a member of the Aspect Software Architecture Team. For quite some time, I have been actively involved with organizations such as the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), working to develop new standards that I believe will be useful in contact centers, and businesses in general.  I am also the editor-in-chief of State Chart XML (SCXML) – a language that is still early in the standardization process. Aspect Software is committed to open standards, and this is one of the reasons why I and my colleagues on the architecture team are so heavily involved in the standards-making bodies.

Because SCXML has received some media attention lately, I thought it might be a good time to report on where SCXML is in the development process, and when it will be ready for commercial use.  SCXML is being developed as part of an attempt to revise and improve the VoiceXML language.  One shortcoming of VoiceXML is that it mixes up user “interaction markup” with “call flow logic” making the two hard to untangle.  For example, if one developer writes a nice routine to collect a credit card number in one application, it’s hard for another developer to re-use it in different application. There’s no clear division between the part that gets the credit card number and the part that decides where to go next in the original application.  Here’s where SCXML comes in – it’s a new language that will factor out the flow control logic.  SCXML, which can be used with VoiceXML or separately, will allow companies to control and integrate a variety of business processes and back-end systems. 

I say “will” because the standards development process takes time, and SCXML is still in the development process. Each standard requires the formation of a working group, which is comprised of people who are experts in their respective fields.  That group defines the functionality of the standard in great detail, and then publishes specifications that enable companies to implement it. Each working group dedicates countless hours to their standard.  We spend a lot of time on SCXML – a phone call every week and three face-to-face meetings a year – but developing a standard involves getting a lot of different people to agree.  To give you an idea of how difficult this can be, think of the slowest cross-functional team you’ve ever been part of and imagine that there is no executive you can appeal to for a final decision. That’s a standards committee.  

We have been working on SCXML for about two and a half years and have already written three drafts of the specification.  Each draft has contained significant changes, and I am certain that our next draft will also have a number of major revisions.  Draft #4 will still be a “Working Draft,” meaning that the language will not yet be a standard, and we will be free to make major changes as we go along.  I hope that draft #4 will be available within the next year, but cannot say with certainty due to the consensus-based process I’ve outlined above.

When our working group agrees that the language is clearly and correctly defined, we will enter the formal standardization process.  This involves soliciting and responding to public comments on the language, as well as testing prototype implementations of it.  At the end of this process SCXML will reach “Recommendation” status.  At that point, the language will truly be stable and a standard. I can’t predict when we will reach that point, but I would expect it to be at least two years out.  SCXML may change a lot before it reaches “Recommendation” status, and that makes it risky to develop products based on it – this is one of the problems with early drafts of standards. 

What are your thoughts on standards and standards development?

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A Solid Foundation is the Key to a Sturdy House

Author:  Gary Barnett

Aspect Software is having its first birthday – a momentous occasion and as good a reason as any to celebrate. Don’t let our “official” age fool you. We are not the toddler who has outgrown his infancy and is now learning to walk and talk in the contact center space.  To the contrary, I would say that Aspect Software is more like the wise old woman who has discovered the fountain of youth. We actually have more than 30 years of experience in the contact center space, but only one year as Aspect Software. And what an exciting year it’s been!

During the last 365 days, we have gotten closer to what I believe will be the most radical and rapidly changing technological era our world has seen to date.  Fueled largely by the growth and acceptance of the Internet and supporting technologies, multiple siloed economies are morphing into one large, mobile, global and open economy. Standards such as HTTP are allowing computers and people around the world to communicate with one another and share information at unprecedented speeds. This is only the beginning.  The up-and-coming generation of consumers and workers will want and need more – faster, mobile and on-demand.

Many of our customers are researching or implementing technology that takes advantage of new open standards and/or open source telephony options that will set the stage for cost-effective, long-term scalability, and simple integration with emerging technologies. Common platforms such as SIP and VoiceXML are beginning to permeate the contact center and are becoming the ubiquitous foundation on which new applications are being created.  And, open source IP PBXs, which are built on standards such as SIP, are giving companies the control they need to quickly and inexpensively customize their systems to accommodate dynamic customer and market demands.

Think of it this way … if you build your house on a poor foundation, the entire house will be unstable.  Open standards and open source software can give you the sturdy, level floor you need to construct your quality house.  Similarly, I am proud that Aspect Software has a solid base of heritage, industry knowledge and innovation, and I believe this gives us the concrete ability to help contact centers build to spec.

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