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Talisma Corporation

This white paper takes a look at trends and business drivers for the 21st Century Contact Center. As trends such as globalization, deregulation, and increased worldwide competition continue, customer service increasingly becomes a key differentiator. The race is on to provide high quality customer service, through ANY touch point, ANYtime, ANYwhere, yet in a profitable manner. Companies that do this well are destined to be the service winners of the future.

Introduction

Until recent years, customers have been limited in the ways they could reach a company: in person or via telephone for urgent matters, and through written correspondence if they needed to document the interaction and could afford a few days’ wait. Today, customers expect to be able to work with your company through any medium, be it phone, e-mail, fax, or your Web site. New electronic communication channels are becoming increasingly popular and present an opportunity for you to better serve existing customers and work with more new customers than ever before at a lower cost.

However, these benefits carry a cost. The need to coordinate the disparate interactions between a company and its customers becomes critical to the company’s success in delivering world-class service. Without the necessary processes, information, and technology to provide the extra service and value today’s customers demand, the organization always struggles to provide the expected levels of service. A customer “contact” center is a promise to your customers to use the right tools to meet or exceed their expectations and win their trust with every interaction.

Evolving to a fully integrated Contact Center lets you improve the quality, consistency, and reliability of the customer experience in every interaction. Combining the power of the Internet with conventional call center functionality makes customer relationships extremely manageable and provides rich, new means of interaction that can be used to turn each relationship into a long-term, profitable, and strategic asset.

A well-implemented Customer Contact Center can evolve from merely being a first level of defense to becoming a company’s strategic differentiator and a critical business driver.

What is a Contact Center?

A contact center is a unified communication system that tracks and services customer needs, regardless of which media is used to contact the organization: telephone, IVR, Web forms, self-service, chat, co-browsing, e-mail, or fax. The goal is to provide consistent, efficient, and cost-effective service across all media and functions.

Modern contact centers are typically implemented by combining Internet technologies with traditional call center approaches. In a contact center, e-mail, chat, Web collaboration, fax, voice and other forms of communication are accepted, analyzed, processed, recorded, and distributed to customer service representatives in a disciplined manner. Any discipline, or structure that’s applied should streamline processes and practices in the contact center. This ensures a consistently high level of service to the customer, while minimizing the overall cost of running the contact center. Thus, a contact center allows a business to improve its efficiency and boost performance while reducing costs and earning higher revenue for equivalent expenditures. One example of how this might be done is by transferring expensive and inefficiently repetitive telephone-based transactions and operations to various Web-based media reduces operating expenses and offers other types of instant service, such as Web self help, to the customer. Moving a phone call to a Web self-help transaction can result in saving up to 90 percent (Giga Group).

Traditional call centers perform work distribution based solely on a call-based model. Changes in customer preferences and advances in technology make it imperative that in a successful contact center, the Web be fully integrated with the call center infrastructure. Without integrating the call center with Internet technologies, valuable customer information is lost and CSRs work with drastically inadequate customer knowledge, and the result is the contact center operating at sub-optimal resource utilization. If you currently operate a call or contact center, refer to Appendix 1 of this paper to determine where your contact center stands today in terms of your ability to effectively and efficiently serve customers.

On the following page, you can see the communication flow in both a standard call center and a state-of-the-art contact center and the potential for media and information integration and leverage in the latter.

Changing Paradigm

Changing Customer Preferences
According to a research conducted by Modalis Research Technologies, more and more customers are using online media and finding it more convenient to solve their queries.

A summary of the findings has been presented in the chart below. The bar chart shows the percentage of customers who use a particular media to access customer service assistance. The line chart shows the percentage of customers rating the service on that media as ‘highly satisfactory.’

The following results most likely have significance for any organization providing customer service:

• The most satisfying media of communication for customers is online CSR chat?data shows that its satisfaction rating is higher than even phone and in-person service (62 percent vs. 46 percent and 49 percent). Though only 12 percent of the customers polled use it (mainly because very few organizations today are offering this service), we cannot overemphasize the importance of this media for providing effective customer service and hence a competitive advantage.
• 50 percent of the customers interviewed prefer using Web over phone?if they can obtain answers in the same amount of time. The customer preference is clearly shifting to Web for inquiries.
• 45 percent of customers go to the Web site as the first place to get quick help— hence organizations need to equip their Web site with tools such as self-help and chat.
• 72 percent of the survey respondents say that they stop doing business with companies that provide poor service. It far outscores price as a factor (only eight percent say that they switch because of lower prices). Clearly, superior customer service is a vital differentiator for businesses.

The above observations clearly indicate that Web media (chat, e-mail, Web self help) have become customers’ preferred means for interacting with companies. Companies pursuing early adoption of the Web as a media for providing customer service tend to gain strategic advantage. Well-documented examples include Tupperware and Lowe’s Companies, Inc.

Industry Trends
The contact center market is witnessing an increased shift of customer contacts being shifted to the Web. The number of voice-based interactions is decreasing and is projected to continue to decrease over the next period. According to a “2003 Customer Center/ Customer Relationship Survey”, more than 15 percent of the inbound and outbound voice based contacts have shifted to Web technologies (chat, e-mail, Web self help) over the past 2 years.

Technology Trends
Business decisions drive technology and advances in technology open avenues for new business initiatives. The last few years have witnessed unprecedented advances in technology and some of the emerging technologies have significant impact on contact centers (see Appendix 2 for a list of relevant technology advances). Owing to these advances, the needs of the customer contact center market have evolved dramatically. A simple PBX system handling voice calls evolved to an integrated system capable of managing not only multiple media, such as voice, e-mail, chat, and so on but also helps in managing contact center operations ranging from streamlining the processes to complete data intelligence on the contact center.

The following table shows the evolutionary path for contact centers and the technologies associated with each phase.

In summary, modern contact center technology has emerged from a simple PBX to a complete interaction-centric CRM with blended media that also gives the advantage of integrated outbound campaign management and advanced reporting and analysis using OLAP and data mining.

Business Drivers

So far we have seen how technology advances can help a contact center evolve from a simple voice-based call center ‘handling’ only calls to a multi-media contact center ‘managing’ customer relationships. However, the mere existence of technology does not justify its usage in a business. Technology has to pass the acid test of business investment by providing tangible ROI. In this section, we critically evaluate the business justification of moving towards an interaction-centric CRM solution with blended media.

From a business perspective, there are three primary drivers for justifying a contact center investment decision. These are:

• Customer satisfaction.
• Cost savings.
• Revenue expansion.

A successful customer contact center solution should maximize the value of every customer interaction and enhance the profitability of the customer contact center. It must enable companies to improve ROI by more effectively attracting and retaining customers and reducing operating costs.

Customer Satisfaction

An effective CRM strategy re-orients the contact center around the customer and his or her lifetime value. Using contact center solutions, customer service representatives (CSRs) have the ability to easily access and capture customer data and they can smoothly execute transactions in support of the company’s enterprise strategy of delivering premium customer service. Interaction-centric CRM and Media Blending can dramatically improve customer satisfaction.

Interaction-Centric CRM
Interaction-centric CRM gives the unique advantage of managing the entire customer relationship and not just focusing on resolving the individual inquiry. This approach enables contact centers to mange the complete cycle of customer relationship and moves beyond simply handling just a ‘call’. Each interaction is also an opportunity to build the relationship.

Enhance the Customer Interaction Experience
Typically, customers have little patience for long waits and uninformed CSRs. Customers expect to be dealt with personally and rapidly or they will seek out a competitor. Therefore, it is necessary to ensure every interaction with the company reinforces the customer’s purchase decision and, where possible, encourages future purchases.

With interaction-centric CRM, CSRs have customer details at their fingertips, including data gathered from phone, Web, and e-mail interactions. A CSR can effectively and instantly start interacting with the customer and deliver personalized service thereby improving the overall customer experience. In addition, much of this data is automatically collected by the system rather than manually typed in. Visual communication (e-mail, chat, Web, and so forth) has inherent advantages over verbal communication (phone, meetings, and so on). Visual or text-based communication is self-documenting. This means a prior conversation can be picked up where it was left at the end of the last interaction, with the help of a complete audit trail showing exactly who communicated what. In addition, transcripts can be sent directly to customers for confirmation and quality control.

Monitor Customer Service Levels
Interaction-centric CRM solutions are also capable of tracking and monitoring customer service levels in accordance with management objectives and automatically alerting managers of exceptions. With this information, managers can take appropriate actions to ensure service quality metrics are met.

In short, interaction-centric CRM improves customer satisfaction by offering the following advantages to the customers:

• Instant recognition, eliminating the need to re-identify and repeat the problem in each call.
• Personalized service from CSRs who understand their needs.
• Consistent levels of service and quick resolution of problems.

Media Blending
As customers gain greater access and familiarity with various communication media, contact centers must gear up to accommodate the changing terrain. The new customer expectation of service is – The CHANNEL they want, WHEN they want it, on the DEVICE they are using. Not the way YOU offer it. Media blending allows you to offer the following advantages:

Customers Have a Choice of Ways to do Business with the Company
Phone is just one of many available media. If you can make money by letting your customers call you on the telephone, it stands to reason that you can make more if, additionally, they can contact you by e-mail and the Web. Media blending makes all contact channels equally viable for delivering customer service and supporting sales.

Continuous Contact is Maintained Independent of Media
(solves the “I already sent e-mail about this” problem)
The proliferation of contact channels is no longer a trend—it's a reality. To stay competitive, you have to treat Web and e-mail interactions as seriously as telephone calls. And the more quickly you blend all your contact channels together into a unified, centrally managed CRM solution, the better your chances of leading your market.

Customers Receive Consistent Response Across Channels
Customers expect the same level of service, regardless of how they get in touch. Blending media channels lets you control response times and service levels and give your customers the same favorable experience no matter how they contact you.

Customers See the Company as a Single Entity
Customers see your company as a single entity. If they send an e-mail and then call on the telephone, they expect the agent who answers the phone to know about the e-mail. If the agent doesn't, your company comes across as forgetful, or even uncaring. Blending media channels gives your company a memory, because every contact, regardless of channel, automatically becomes part of a unified customer relationship.

Customer Requests can be Automatically Prioritized
Prioritization can be based on customer priority or transaction value, and not on the basis of the media. Employing a blended media and interaction-centric CRM strategy, you can set priorities according to the value of each transaction. You can identify customers who prefer e-mail and Web contact, identify transaction types, and base priorities on factors that contribute to business success.

Representative Results (Case Study)
Some of the companies that use Talisma have witnessed a dramatic increase in their customer satisfaction levels. The following graph shows the results of an independent third-party study conducted by a Talisma customer. After each interaction, customers were asked to rate their overall satisfaction (using BizRate, an independent research firm). The graph shows the change in customer satisfaction levels six months after implementing Talisma. As is evident from these results, the percentage of highly satisfied customers increased from 65 percent to 92 percent and at the same time the percentage of dissatisfied customers decreased from nine percent to three percent. As most of the returns were the result of poor customer service, the company’s return rates reflected a corresponding decrease, which resulted in significant savings.

Cost Savings

By using a solution that offers interaction-centric CRM approach with blended media, a contact center can save huge costs in its operations. Embracing the contact center approach will yield savings in the following areas:

Optimizing Media Mix and Media Blending
Deploying an integrated multi-media approach can reduce costs and create significant savings. Telephone calls carry the highest per interaction cost of all service and support media, so it is good business to accommodate as much traffic through other channels as possible. While typical customer service request over phone costs about $10, the same request costs about $5 using chat. The economies are driven by the fact that an agent can manage about 3 chat sessions simultaneously and also use collaboration tools to resolve the query faster.

In the data show in the chart above, Giga Research reports that the:

• Average e-mail cost is 30 percent of a phone call cost.
• Average chat cost is 50 percent of a phone call cost.
• Average self-help cost is only ten percent of a phone call cost.

Let’s consider a call center that currently handles only phone requests and moves to a multi-channel contact center. The table below outlines several scenarios showing different combinations of types of service requests and the estimated costs involved.

*Assuming a cost of $10 per request handled over phone (hence, cost of chat is $5, e-mail is $3, self-service is $1.)

As is evident from the table on the previous page, as the center embraces more cost-friendly technologies and the customers use those technologies to interact with the company, there is a substantial cost saving in handling customer requests. A company can see a 50 percent or greater cost savings when it deploys a complete contact center solution.

Once the decision is made to incorporate media other than phone, it becomes imperative to blend media to optimize operating costs and reap the many benefits of integration:

• Turn several operations into a single efficiently managed one. If you manage different media in disjointed media silos, then you're wasting effort in a number of ways. Applications developed for one media have to be redeployed for the others. Training and instructions given to one group have to be given again. Customer information accumula-ting in separate databases has to be collected and consolidated manually. By blending media, you turn several operations into a single efficiently managed one.
• Make your CSRs more effective by linking all your contact channels to customer databases. For years, call centers have used computer-telephony integration (CTI) to link call-handling software to customer databases so that customer case histories, account information, and other crucial data can be brought to the agent desktop along with the call. By blending media, you extend this capability to e-mail contacts and Web contacts as well, and you personalize the experience of dealing with your company—for all of your customers.
• Have common business rules for optimized customer routing across media. With blended media channels, you can put all customer contact under the control of the same set of centrally managed business rules. Web, telephone, and e-mail responses are all driven by the business goals that you define.
• Maximize CSR resource utilization. Level out the peaks and valleys in CSR activity across media. Blending helps level out the peaks and valleys in agent activity. When the volume drops across one media channel, agents can be shifted to another, reducing downtime and making work more challenging and fulfilling for your CSRs.

Thus, having a blended multi-media approach helps dramatically improve your overall contact center resource utilization and results in significant cost savings. It also has the advantage of turning individual interactions into ongoing conversations, thus contributing towards building an enduring customer relationship.

Reduction in CSR Costs by Improving their Efficiency and Effectiveness
Embracing the interaction-centric CRM approach increases CSR output and professionalism by providing these powerful tools: • Complete information about the customer to effectively manage the customer.

• Knowledge base of ‘correct’ answers to resolve a query and reduce dependence on experts.
• Automated processes to complete routine tasks.
• Efficient productivity tools for improving task efficiency.
• Blended media.

With enhanced efficiency and effectiveness of CSRs, the same number of customer requests can be handled by fewer CSRs.

Tier-1 CSRs
Increasing the effectiveness and efficiency of the CSRs with tools that streamline many of their daily tasks and empowers them to easily respond to more customers each day and provide superior service.

Reduce Average Time to Find Customer Information
CSRs spend a lot of time searching for customer details as well as any information pertinent to customer requests. Proper use of the following set of tools results in substantial timesavings:

• Advanced configurable search, categorization, and indexing of customers and requests using properties to reduce search time.
• Single audit-trail to provide all information related to the request in a single window.
• Screen Pops (using CTI) for a phone call to help reduce time to find customer information.
• Convenient cookies to help one resolve the customer requesting a chat session.
• AutoThreader to automatically resolve the incoming customer details from an e-mail alias.

Reduce Average Research and Delivery Time
Depending on the nature of requests, CSRs spend anyway between 30 percent and 90 percent of the time in writing the right answer in the right format. A contact center deploying the following tools, result in significant time savings in this area:

• Knowledge base of FAQ that can be used across different media.
• Automatically suggesting appropriate responses for a query.
• Complete customer profile to find customer preferences.
• Personalization features to reduce delivery time.
• Productivity features, including AutoText, AutoCorrect, and spell-check to decrease delivery time.

Reduce Average Wrap-up Time After Phone or Chat
After a phone call or a chat session, the CSR needs to record the call or chat details. The call details have to be summarized and preserved for future reference. For a chat session where the details of the conversation are preserved in the form of a chat transcript, the CSR still has to save that along with the other conversations over other media.

Providing an automatic audit tracking coupled with dependent fields and drop-downs decreases the wrap-up time significantly.

Tier-2 CSRs—Decrease the Number of Escalations and Consultations
CSRs often get queries for which they do not have the answer. More often than not, they escalate the query to the next higher level. With each escalated request, the cost of handling the request also escalates as the Tier-2 CSRs are more expensive and the time invested by Tier-1 CSR in wasted effort.

CRM solutions offer an integrated knowledge base using which the Tier-1 CSRs can find answers to most of the requests. This reduces the cost of escalating issues to Tier-2 CSRs considerably.

Reduce Staffing with Multi-skilled CSRs Using Blended Media
You can make better use of your staffing resources by maintaining a small pool of multi-skilled CSRs working with blended media. If you maintain different groups of agents for different media, you may be supporting more agents than you actually need. A smaller pool of multi-skilled agents, working in a blended media environment, can most likely accomplish as much as many more CSRs working in the confinement of media silos.

Reduction in Supervision Costs
A contact center being a people-intensive operation requires a lot of monitoring and reporting. A sophisticated supervision effort is required to ensure that the service provided by the contact center meets clients’ and end users’ expectations. Good supervision ensures that the contact centers perform well across service, quality, and cost.

• Service encompasses cycle time and on-time performance. “Cycle time” refers to the length of time it takes to complete a process or task. “On-time” refers to the percentage of times the contact center achieves its cycle-time target, e.g., 95 percent of e-mail was responded to within 24 hours.
• Quality is doing things accurately, e.g., giving the correct answer to an inquiry, entering an order correctly, and shipping the correct product to the correct address.
• Cost focuses on the cost per unit incurred by the contact center to provide a service.

The supervision costs can be broadly divided under two categories:

• Reporting and Analysis: Traditional call center operations requires one to collate data from different sources and then run various reports to analyze the performance levels on service, quality and costs. This effort becomes huge if one has to repeat the exercise for different media and teams.
  The interaction-centric CRM approach with blended media saves this effort. The CRM solution gathers data without disrupting normal activities and provides information at any level of detail. The solution provides integrated reporting tools, based on data warehousing, data mining and OLAP principles, that turn information into business intelligence and use it to manage the contact center operations as well as the customer relationships for maximum business advantage.
• Monitoring: Online monitoring is very important in a contact center operation where it is important to be aware of the status of various requests. On an ongoing basis, operations management must monitor resource performance, checking average session duration, accuracy, and productivity in general.
  A blended system managing all communication channels in the same way, enables management to see all channels at once, and monitor each resource in a consistent manner, regardless of the channels being used. Also, the CRM solution can trigger automatic alerts that assist in proactively taking corrective actions. This helps managers attain consistent levels of monitoring without actually deploying human resources to monitor the operations.

Recruitment (replenishment) Costs of CSRs
High CSR attrition can result in high recruitment and replacement costs. Job enrichment and diversification can be particularly effective in reducing agent attritions. Multi-media environment with lot of process automation ensures that the CSRs can work on more challenging tasks and also handle a variety of media making their jobs rich in both diversity and content. This definitely raises CSR morale and reduces agent attrition. One case study by Gartner Group reports a 20 percent reduction in agent attrition rate as a result of higher CSR morale.

Revenue Expansion

Gartner Group expects companies migrating from call centers to contact centers to witness a revenue increase between ten percent and 20 percent.

Implementation of an effective customer contact solution boosts the revenue generating capability of a contact center. It increases the volume of successful customer contacts, identifies up-sell and cross-sell opportunities better and improves the close ratio; thus resulting in much higher revenues with the same resources. Apart from providing a means to contact the right targets at the right time, a complete contact center solution improves the revenue enhancing opportunities at every stage of customer buying stage in the classic AIDA marketing model (Attention, Interest, Desire, Action).

Higher Close Ratio for Outbound Campaigns
A better understanding of customer needs and wants including buying trends, product feedback and demographic information allows more focused marketing campaigns and enable permission-based marketing efforts. A company, for instance, can initiate an outbound calling campaign to all prospects living in New York who request a brochure from the Web site. Focusing efforts on a pre-qualified group of customers assures companies of a higher success rate and faster closing. The company can gather the necessary intelligence to focus its effort on groups having a higher ‘interest’ in the product.

Campaigns Across Media Result in Faster and Higher Conversion Rates
An advanced campaign management solution enables a contact center to deploy multiple media to contact the customer, thereby improving the chances of conversion. A multi-media campaign strategy enhances top of the mind recall and ensures that the customer pays attention. Further, offering the choice of calling back, having a chat session or mailing back, makes sure that the interested customers instantly move from the ‘Desire’ stage to ‘Action’.

Increasing the Volume of Successful Customer Contacts
With more channels of communication, the customers get more ways of doing business with you. Having immediate assistance (chat now or collaborative browsing) available on the order page reduces cart abandonment rates drastically. These help features available to the customer ensures that he is able to move effortlessly from the ‘Desire’ to purchase stage to the completed action of buying.

Increased Up-sell and Cross-sell Opportunities for Inbound Calls
Company with knowledge of customers’ interests and purchase history can identify an opportunity to offer premium or complementary products to existing customers. While a CSR is interacting with such a customer (over phone or chat or even e-mail), the system can automatically prompt the CSR about an opportunity. Further, to assist the CSR engaging the customer in an active sell opportunity, Advanced Scripting Tools can be used to execute active promotions to offer specific customers. This turns customer service calls into revenue generation opportunities, improving overall ROI.

Generating Leads for the Sales Teams
For products and services that cannot be sold without an in-person meeting, contact centers play a very important role in generating and seamlessly passing leads directly to the sales organization. This results in a tremendous amount of saved time and effort for mission-critical sales executives.

Key Factors for Selecting a Contact Center Solution

Moving your call center to a contact center is a compelling proposition, with real?and often immediate?payback to your company’s bottom line. The next question to ask is- “How do I go about choosing the right partners?” Not all customer contact technologies are equal and it is critical that you choose a solution that meets your requirements.

The purpose of this section is to raise issues that the executive selecting a customer contact center solution should be considering with regard to solutions on the market.

• Does the vendor provide a solution with out-of-the-box integration for all communication channels?
• Are these channels available on one unified desktop?

If a contact center deploys multiple media, such as e-mail, chat, phone, and collaborative browsing, it is essential that the chosen solution offer integrated out-of-the-box media. A Unified CSR Desktop is a necessity in today’s contact center environment. It’s critical that CSRs see a single view of the customer to ensure better service and relationship, independent of the interaction medium. CSRs can level out their peaks and valleys in workload by dynamically switching between media to improve their throughput. Also, CSRs spend much less time learning the application and become productive right away. Furthermore, any external applications need to be interfaced only once with a truly unified solution.

Talisma offers a unique interaction centric approach with blended media that supports universal queue, integrated message threading across media, and a unified agent desktop with a uniform look and feel of the application.

How easy is it to integrate the solution with other contact center applications? Is the solution built upon an open architecture and industry standards? Implementation of a customer contact center solution involves several customer contact technologies (e.g., ACDs, IVRs, and so on), multiple databases, agent desktops, management reporting interfaces, as well as existing contact center applications such as workforce scheduling and forecasting. Contact center solutions should provide open application and telephony interfaces. An open architecture preserves your investment in current applications and infrastructure and ensures that you do not end up spending a fortune in integration effort. Talisma is a standards-based solution that provides open interfaces to various telephony and contact center applications. The powerful SDK with a published set of APIs makes integration with even legacy systems very simple.

How easy is the solution to deploy, use, maintain, and evolve? Can managers and users make changes to the system, or does this have to be accomplished through consultants and integrators? There is little point in having the most sophisticated customer contact center system in your industry if you go out of business while implementing it. Long deployment periods negatively impact both the deployment costs and the solution ROI. With many contact center solutions, companies spend three-to-five times more money implementing than they do for the application itself!

In addition to fast deployment, a contact center system should be easy to use and require very little training. According to an estimate by Gartner Group, training costs can run as high as 30 percent of the base salary of CSRs. Furthermore, Gartner Group found that a careful consideration and implementation of an integrated, multifunctional agent desktop environment can result in a training time reduction of 70 percent. So, it is important that the solution offers an easy-to-use graphical user interface (GUI), standard processes, and easy to access contact profiles.

Another important consideration for a contact center is the ease with which the contact center solution can evolve with its changing needs. No one can perfectly predict system requirements until the system is put into actual use. Having to call external consultants to make changes in the system is both costly and counter-productive.

Talisma deploys in weeks, and provides rich functionality in an easy-to-use GUI that has CSRs up and running in a matter of hours. This provides a much faster ROI. Further, we pioneered the concept of “use-based evolution” to ensure that you do not have to have a PhD in computer science to make changes to the system or get important data out of it. Changes can be made by business owners, rather than technical consultants.

Is the system capable of providing actionable business intelligence? Can this data be created automatically, rather than manually?
Since a contact center is a people and operation intensive business, reporting and analysis becomes as important as the operation itself. The reporting engine must provide real business intelligence and help the contact center discover areas for improvement. The reporting engine also needs to monitor for, notify, and send alerts in case of exceptions.

Talisma offers sophisticated reports that gives deep insights on contact center operations?ranging from individual CSR productivity, percentage utilization of teams and media, and average turnaround time for requests handled across media, to top issues consuming maximum contact center resources. OLAP capabilities provide powerful drill down capabilities that help management get to the root cause of a problem, rather than simply focusing on the symptoms. Data mining capabilities help uncover the hidden factors that can dramatically improve performance of a contact center.

In all cases, much of the data collection is automatic, so you don’t have to completely rely on manual data entry data to draw conclusions. Things including priority, category, stage, cost, and profitability, for example, can be completely automated.

How much can the solution really help in increasing the CSR efficiency and effectiveness? What tasks can really be automated?
The ultimate objective of an effective contact center application is to increase the effectiveness of the CSRs and the contact center. The application must provide productivity tools and streamline contact center processes.

Talisma provides a rich set of CSR productivity tools across media. These tools help the CSR at every stage of query handling?finding customer information, researching answers, escalating the query, delivery, and wrap-up. The 360-degree customer view and a single-audit trail across media helps find the customer details in practically no time. A knowledge base, which might contain product information, scripts, templates, and solutions, reduces research and escalation time. Furthermore, features that include AutoText, AutoSuggest, spell checker, rapid-response, and AutoThreading help reduce delivery and wrap-up time.

Lastly, the Talisma rules-based workflow engine streamlines all the contact center back-end processes ranging from request routing, prioritization, escalation, and process enforcement ensuring standardization of workflow that results in consistency in quality and service levels.

Can the solution meet your future requirements as well? Is it scalable, extensible, and applicable to other departments within the company?
No matter where you are starting from, purchasing and implementing the wrong customer contact center technology will create massive problems in the future as your company grows and re-aligns itself to its market environment. Putting in place a low-end solution incapable of growing beyond a certain customer volume and number of CSRs will rapidly involve the need for a “rip out and replace” strategy. This question raises many “hygiene issues” that should be raised with a customer contact center vendor, such as scalability, the capability to grow beyond an initial implementation, and capacity to absorb future technologies.

Talisma scales to thousands of CSRs and millions of customer requests. Also, Talisma is abreast of both the business and the technology trends that will drive the next step in the evolution of contact centers. And we'll continue to develop our extensive product portfolio with solutions that preserve your investment while meeting your expanding business needs.

Customer Contact Center Checklist

In summary, this section has attempted to set out major areas that a business executive looking to move towards a customer contact center solution should be examining. In short, we believe that a customer contact center needs to have the following attributes to enable a business to compete in today’s market:

• Integrated media: telephone, e-mail, chat, and Web.
• Rapid deployment.
• Easy to use, administer, and extend.
• Easy integration with other front and back office applications.
• Management and productivity tools to enhance effectiveness and efficiency of operations.
• Ability to streamline and automate contact center processes and support of intelligent routing.
• Sophisticated reporting and analysis tools.
• Modular and scalable design.

Conclusion

Service centers today are in a state of evolution?moving from simple phone-based call centers to completely integrated multi-media contact centers. Apart from providing higher levels of customer service, modern contact centers are also much more cost-effective. If you don’t provide this level of service to your customers, in a profitable manner, your competition will. Again and again we hear that customer service is the key differentiator in today’s fast paced, and agile business climate.

Talisma can help you make the transition to world-class service through interaction-based CRM solutions. We offer a different kind of value proposition, one integrated product that empowers your users and is easy to deploy, extend, and maintain. The net result is a much more compelling ROI than any other vendor can offer. We encourage you to take a closer look, at both our company and our solutions.

Appendix 1 Your Contact Center Check-List

This appendix asks hard questions about your current call center. As you answer these questions, we recommend that you visualize your current practices in the contact center, consider all the ways your customers get in touch with you, then think about how you communicate with them, and finally think about how you would like to interact with them. Then answer these questions:

• Can customers and contact center staff interact via e-mail, chat, the Web, telephone, fax, or a combination of devices using the same application set?
• Can customers get intelligent self-service?
• Are customers frustrated by having to repeatedly contact your staff and re-explain issues to get answers to their questions?
• Can your help staff successfully provide full customer service immediately and intelligently?
• Is previous communication between customers, help staff, marketing, and sales seamlessly available across your organization?
• Does your staff have real-time access to relevant customer details such as purchase history, previous complaints, and interactions?
• Does your help staff have access to a knowledge base for answering routine queries about policies, products, and so forth?
• Does your staff have tools that reduce their effort on routing, prioritization, tracking escalations, and mundane activities to improve efficiency and morale?
• Can your contact center implement quality standards that not only help them monitor but also suggest areas for improvement?
• Can your contact center manage and supervise workforce productivity issues and easily obtain actionable performance metrics?
• Can your contact center generate revenues by generating leads and orders for clients and sales staff?

Appendix 2 Technology Trends

This appendix documents technologies that are significantly impacting the capabilities and economics of today’s leading contact centers. We are by no means asserting that all contact centers should be implementing all technologies, but are suggesting that you become aware of the possible impacts these technologies may have in the future.

Internet Integration
There is a steady migration towards integrating Web applications with traditional operations. Web integration allows customers to interact with call center agents through Web callback, Web chat, and collaborative browsing. This allows companies to provide live contact to online customers, which is essential for providing non-standard information.

Unified Messaging
While voice, e-mail, chat and fax are still the dominant electronic message media today; the manner in which these messages are retrieved is changing. UM provides multimedia consolidation in the evolving Customer Contact Centers. The key feature offered by UM in the customer contact center is access to voice, e-mail, chat and fax via a single application. UM is getting any message at any time from a convenient and easy to use point(s) of access and typically encompasses voice, e-mail, chat and fax message media.

Computer Telephony Integration (CTI)
CTI has emerged as a promising technology that uses computers to manage telephone calls. CTI applications provide the ability to do one or more of the following:

• Authenticate callers.
• Route a call to the most appropriate handler.
• Provide interactive voice response (IVR) to callers.
• Match the number of a caller with a customer record and display it for reference when talking to the caller (Screen Pop).
• Manage the phone system through computer (conferencing, transfer, hold, and so on).
• Enable CSRs to make outbound calls for telemarketing.
• Provide scripting application to assist the CSR handling calls.

E-mail Response Management System
E-mail management has evolved from simply using an application such as Outlook or Lotus Notes to specialized E-mail Response Management Software (ERMS) applications that allow agents to work on a common pool of e-mail, route e-mail to the appropriate agent, thread all related messages in a single audit-trail, provide for escalations and reviews, monitor state of an e-mail query (pending, resolved, and so forth) and send automatic reminders and notifications about delays in response or resolution.

Internet Chat
Text based chat brings the immediacy of live conversation to a Web site. Chat has emerged as an invaluable communication tool since it offers the immediacy of a phone call and interactivity of the Web on the same platform. If the only support available to a visitor is through e-mail, chances are that the visitor may not wait for your response, and click away to another site. Alternatively, you can expose your phone number. However, this medium, apart from being expensive, also lacks the ability to share documents, co-browse, and so on. Chat being Internet-based, is a very economical and effective channel. It gives your site visitor a tool for ready communication right there on the Web page.

There are two principal ways to implement text based chat:

• Reactive Chat: Here a customer can click on a chat button prominently displayed on Web pages and initiate a conversation with your net-representative (user).
• Proactive Chat: A set of rules to monitor activity on your Web site can trigger a notification to users to proactively engage the visitor in a conversation.

Web Self help
Web self help is an intelligent self-help tool consisting of a collection of question-answer pairs in which the answers to the questions are returned using keyword search, statistical models, or Bayesian Networks or Expert Networks (AI).

This can bring major benefits to your customer service function including reduction in the number of e-mail messages, chat requests, and telephone calls. This gives users more time to handle complex, non-repetitive questions. Customers like Web self help because it gives instant feedback to their questions and encourages them to stay on your site longer. Furthermore, you can use a self-help tool to create a knowledge base. This allows every department in your organization to provide consistent replies to inquiries.

Fax/Faxback Integration
Instead of traditional fax machines, customer contact centers can now use Fax servers. Instead of printing out individual documents and manually feeding them into a Fax machine, CSRs can send faxes directly from the desktop using the "Print" command to send documents to a fax printer device that routes them to a fax server, which then places the outgoing fax phone call. This results in tremendous timesavings by eliminating the need to print documents and manually feed them into a machine. On the fax receiving side, fax servers enable fax documents to be routed directly into a user's e-mail client on their desktop (or, in most cases, into "group" mailboxes). The obvious timesavings here are eliminating the need to retrieve and distribute incoming fax documents manually or worry about the maintenance and expense of a separate high-volume fax machine.

Collaborative Browsing
With the customers spending more quality time on the Web searching for, evaluating and ordering products, they often need assistance to fill out forms and navigate through the Web site. Collaborative browsing technology helps one achieve this objective most efficiently.

VoIP Integration
Through VoIP technology, customers can use their Internet connection to speak directly to CSRs over high quality voice connections. Full duplex communication allows users to converse naturally and even interrupt each other. VoIP also supports conference calls so many users may participate to resolve a customer problem.

OLAP/Data Mining/Data Warehousing

OLAP: Online Analytical Processing or OLAP gives a multi-dimensional and highly visual way to analyze high volumes of data. It allows slicing and dicing of data on any of those multiple dimensions and supports the ability to mix and match these dimensions to dynamically show relationships between data along the selected dimensions.

Data Mining: this powerful capability enables the analysis (mining) of data to discover facts that were previously not known or apparent. Data mining uncovers quality data and connections that equip you to make predictions based on existing information (using decision tree analysis) and see unforeseen associations in the existing data (using clustering).

Data Warehousing: This large database is built for archiving historical data within an enterprise. A warehouse enables an organization to maintain an enterprise-wide data warehouse that archives all information of interest to the business. A smaller version of a warehouse is called a Data Mart. A data warehouse or a data mart can be used for analytic efforts that include reporting, OLAP, and data mining.

These technological advances make it possible to redefine call centers to a degree that results in superior customer service and, at the same time, results in cost-savings and opening new avenues for revenue expansion.

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