Contact Centers Evolve with New Customer Demands and Solutions
Enterprises and small to medium-sized business (SMBs) are having to meet the demands of customers for improving service in current channels (primarily voice and email), while adding alternate channels for communications, including text messaging, online chat, and even video, in varying combinations of fully automated and semi-automated systems. This applies to both inbound and outbound contact center applications. The migration to Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) in contact centers is well underway, as legacy TDM-based systems approach end of life. Current systems are capable of meeting the demands of a new generation of savvy customers who want to choose from multiple channels, media, and devices for interaction at any point in time from virtually any location.
Aspect Software, Avaya, and Interactive Intelligence
These vendors facilitate solutions to these requirements, in large part by designing their products around SIP and IT-centric Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA). Each of the product suites reviewed in this article are based on features and functions that were demonstrated on production systems that are available today. Their products are scalable to meet the needs of contact centers of varying sizes, from SMBs to very large multi-site centers. Each vendor provides a comprehensive set of solutions, which will be addressed in more detail, but first, let’s set the stage from the business user’s perspective and their customers’ experience.
Customer satisfaction metrics and their correlation with financial performance
Customer satisfaction is primarily a measure of the customer experience, in part with the company’s product or service offering, but also includes the customer communications experience. Significantly, research has shown that this directly correlates with financial performance – the better the customer satisfaction, the better the long term bottom line results for the company.
Solutions
Customer interaction via contact center systems and applications has a direct impact on customer satisfaction. Figuring out ways to improve your customers’ phone and multimedia communications experiences, including self-service, with the right personal touch can make all the difference. Parallel and converged evolution is occurring with computing and telecom platforms and applications. Communication and media servers and associated applications can now be implemented virtually without limitation to geographic placement. This enables an organization to:
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Pool technical and human resources throughout the enterprise, including contact centers;
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Use ‘Presence’ information to reach personnel via the preferred mode of communication based on knowing in advance an individual’s accessibility over multiple devices;
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Improve the overall user and customer experience, with personalization and dynamic interactions or “treatments” for better phone and synchronized Web applications;
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Facilitate efficient and effective collaboration, including knowledge experts throughout the organization;
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Consolidate and extend application and management systems;
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Reduce carrier costs;
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Enable executives to more readily automate business processes and facilitate corporate initiatives, such as joint venture or merger and acquisition activities.
Avaya
Best Voice Portal/Interactive Voice and Video Response (IVVR)
Product: Avaya Call Center and Interaction Center 7.1
Avaya Call Center and Interaction Center Software, coupled with the Avaya Communication Manager, runs on a Linux-based appliance capable of all TDM or all IP with media encryption and server isolation – or a combination of TDM and IP. Avaya is installed in over 32,000 production call centers.
Traditional vs. IP Architecture – Flatten, Consolidate and Extend
Typically, if an organization has multiple contact centers at multiple locations, a suite of servers and applications are required at each site. Network pre-route solutions determine which location can best handle an incoming contact. Advanced 800 features route calls between the locations. With Avaya IP contact center solutions, instead of having multiple separate contact centers across an enterprise, organizations are able to consolidate to a single central location (and perhaps a second for survivability). This centralized location serves as the heart of the operation, providing the intelligence and the contact center applications. Other sites serve as local gateways off the centralized hub. Cost effective communication between the centralized site and satellite locations is achieved by using IP. With this approach, the network is flattened, removing expensive network pre-route applications and associated charges including take-back-and-transfer via the Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN). There is no longer a need to locate each application in each site, so costs and complexity are considerably reduced.
A business can now be served by one consolidated contact center. Upgrade and maintenance costs also drop dramatically.
Avaya calls this approach “Flatten, Consolidate, and Extend.” One of Avaya’s competitive differentiators is massive scalability – the ability to support 10,000 agents on a single server. With this FCE model, it is easier to provide the right agent “on demand.” Contact center-based agents can provide expertise and overflow for branch-based customer service personnel, and inbound customer contacts can be routed to branch-based personnel according to skill sets, availability, or prior contact history. Organizations are able to use a common business model, yet maintain personalized identities at branch offices. Also, by using a global “single queue,” personnel at other locations can be leveraged as expert resources. With FCE, companies are able to do more with decreased infrastructure, thereby reducing the total cost of ownership (TCO). Organizations are able to support consistent processes and brand images across the enterprise.
Communication Server
Avaya Communication Manager 5.0 is designed using Enterprise Linux as the foundation software. With the introduction of Communication Manager 5.0 and SIP Enablement Services 5.0, Avaya offers the following:
Expanded SIP trunking options to support new, low cost carrier servers, reduce hardware requirements and enrich applications for Contact Center environments;
Improved support of SIP-based telephones to include enhanced mobility features and additional phones;
Foundational support for an increased suite of communications applications to enhance workforce productivity and customer service.
Contact Center Products
Avaya Call Center 5.0 software is embedded in the Avaya Communication Manager software. It includes basic call center functionality at no additional charge, with optional upgrades. Customer Interaction Express 1.1 with Avaya Communication Manager 5.0 is designed for mid-market contact centers. Avaya’s Customer Interaction Center 7.1 operates in conjunction with Avaya Communication Manager 5.0 on industry standard servers to deliver telephony capabilities for all locations through media gateways and endpoints.
Avaya Interaction Center 7.1
Interaction Center is the Avaya customer suite software platform for enterprise-class management of multimedia communications: voice, video, email, Web chat, and IP telephony. Avaya Interaction Center 7.1 includes Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) services and introduces several enhancements that optimize contact management and offer greater agent effectiveness. Voice, email, and Web chat are managed based on a single set of business rules to ensure consistent service and optimal utilization of SMBs. Avaya Interaction Center includes an integrated, consistent view of the customer with cradle-to-grave history in an open, standards-based architecture. Avaya Business Advocate software is embedded.
Business Advocate and Advanced Segmentation
In Avaya’s view, best-in-class contact centers make matching decisions with agents while looking ahead, not behind. Some contact centers today are still using measures such as Average Speed of Answer and Expected Wait Time to make routing decisions. But, if there was a sudden burst of traffic in a short time, or a sudden dramatic dip in call arrival, these measures can’t provide optimal information for routing, since they are based on historical data. Another commonly used approach is that of priority queuing. However, when calls are queued at a High Priority, this often leads to “starvation” of low priority calls, and creates longer delays and more abandons for all other calls. Today’s best practice contact centers use software that looks ahead, instead of behind, by using predictive technology.
Traditional skills-based routing alone often does a poor job of “matchmaking,” given the complex random arrival of calls and agent availability. In Avaya’s experience of measuring contact center operations, match rates of less than 20 percent are common when looking at whether the most appropriate agents are actually handling customers. Trying to overuse skill queues to fix this typically reduces overall efficiency and impacts service levels for other calls. One approach to solving this problem is to use Avaya’s patented Business Advocate predictive decision making contact center software that looks at how best to use each agent as he becomes available, automatically managing agent pools, and bringing in reserve agents when needed to meet service levels. A set of unique, patented algorithms called Business Advocate allows contact center managers to specify, in advance, two layers of reserve agents. These reserve agents are automatically invoked only if needed in order to meet pre-defined service levels in a specific area. When the unexpected call spike flattens out and the agents are no longer needed, they are automatically released. This software can also ensure the agent has a screen pop of relevant caller information.
Avaya Call Center 5.0 was released in January 2008. Avaya Call Center software is highly versatile, spanning all communication infrastructures — traditional circuit switched and IP. More sophisticated functionality can be added by simply activating licenses.
Basic Call Center is embedded in Communications Manager 5.0 at no charge. It allows companies to offload attendants, create routing groups, and automate the routing of customer calls. By identifying groups in the business who will handle each type of customer call, the software automatically can route callers to the right group. If no one is available to answer a call immediately, the software can play an announcement. This package includes all basic capabilities needed in a call center, such as service observing and routing to the most idle agent. Customers can build upon the basic call center software by adding the next layer of call center capabilities when needed.
Avaya Call Center introductory routing logic tables can be created, enabling customized call treatment for premier customers. Automatic Number Identification (ANI) can also be used to route according to who is calling. Each caller can be informed how long the expected wait is for the next agent, and offered self-service options if wait times are long.
Avaya Call Center Elite automatically selects the most expert agent by using skills-based routing. Sophisticated algorithms balance callers’ needs with those of agents, automatically balancing the workload of the most skilled agents to avoid agent burnout. During peak call times the software automatically balances competing needs and allocates agents to meet targeted service levels. Additional capabilities include advanced conditional routing to provide a virtually infinite number of possibilities in routing callers. Conditional (if/then) call routing uses context-based inputs to customize routing, on the fly. Effective load balancing across multiple sites is accomplished with Virtual Routing, which makes dynamic routing decisions on whether to route a call to another location for faster or better service. It enables multi-location organizations maximize resource utilization across all sites.
The final layer of capabilities is delivered with Business Advocate. Communication Manager 5.0 and the built-in call center product suite, provides one system, not multiple systems, to manage business communications and the call center (i.e., one system to maintain, upgrade, and administer – all within a five 9’s reliability framework.)
Management and Supervisory Capabilities
Avaya Call Management System (CMS) is an integrated reporting, administration, and analytical tool that helps organizations keep in touch with virtually everything that’s going on in the call center, including evaluating the performance of a single agent, a specific queue, a larger group of agents or queues, or the entire call center. Avaya Operational Analyst (OA) builds upon CMS by providing multi-channel customer interaction data for reporting and analytics, delivering a 360-degree view of customer interactions and contact center performance to help companies optimize their contact centers and their business.
Avaya IQ is a reporting and analytics platform that consolidates real-time and historical data from Avaya customer service solutions and enterprise business resources to deliver reports that relate activity to results. Avaya IQ provides insight into what drives the business through views of the total customer and agent experience.
Avaya Voice Portal/Interactive Voice and Video Response (IVVR)
Avaya is paving the way with interactive video, including the use of 3G video cell phones, Internet videophones, and video-enabled personal computers. By using video in addition to Voice Portal's speech capabilities, application developers can show callers menu choices, product options, instructional video clips, as well as dynamic information such as personal account information, airline flight options, and current stock prices.
Avaya has extended its Eclipse-based application authoring tool, Dialog Designer, to support the creation of voice and video applications directly, including full voice and video application testing on the developer's workstation. This makes it easy for a voice application developer to extend his skills into voice and video application development.
We believe Avaya’s IVVR is the best voice portal based on these extended capabilities.
Proactive Contact for Outbound Campaigns
Soft dialer leverages Communication Manager and IP Telephony with effective integration and blending with inbound centers. The system incorporates patented call pacing/Cruise Control to ensure effective use of the system and regulatory compliance.
Third-party Applications for Contact Recording and Quality Monitoring
Avaya partners with the leading independent vendors in this space, including NICE Systems and Verint.
Computer-telephony Integration (CTI)
New built-in screen pop capability is event driven, and can be based on user-to-user information (UUI), and database lookups to display caller-relevant data simultaneously with call arrival. Communication Manager receives UUI on the incoming call, and can pass that information to the IP Agent application, enabling a relevant screen-pop to arrive at the agent desktop along with each call.
Clients/Agent Desktops
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Configurable screen-pop of customer-relevant data;
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Configure full access to customer history, applications, scripted business processes;
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SIP phones or PC softphones with integrated SIP-based agent Instant Messaging.
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Software Support plus Upgrades
In addition to comprehensive hardware and software support, Avaya now includes an upgrade subscription service designed to make it easier for customers to facilitate upgrades at reduced package pricing.
Aspect SoftwareBest Supervisor and Real-time Monitoring / Reporting Capabilities
Product: Aspect® Unified IP™ 6.5.1
Aspect Software, through its various acquisitions and mergers, has stayed in the forefront of contact center solutions for more than 35 years. Its products are designed to meet all contact center needs via comprehensive interaction management and performance optimization. Since the first ACD in 1973, Aspect followed with the first workforce management system in 1980 and the first dialer in 1981. Subsequent innovation and overall contact center experience has lead to the enhanced capabilities of Aspect Unified IP.
Communication Servers
With its long contact center history, Aspect has developed tight integration and supports all of the major PBXs and Communication Servers on the market. Aspect Unified IP architecture was designed to support any TDM or SIP 2.0 compliant environment, enabling Aspect Unified IP to be configured within an Aspect Software SIP solution or integrated into any existing SIP-based IP telephony environment. Inbound calls via SIP eliminate the need for costly pre-routing via the PSTN. Outbound requires call progress detection via T1/E1/ISDN trunks. Media Gateway functionality is provided by Aspect’s Digital Communication Processor (DCP). Aspect provides cards for TDM. Web callbacks are enabled via an API on the enterprise web server to the Aspect Unified IP server.
Contact Center Products
The new Aspect Unified IP solution is aimed at providing a migration from its legacy and Automated Call Distribution (ACD), Automated/Predictive Outbound Dialing (AOD) and Aspect EnsemblePro™ systems. The Aspect Unified IP product line incorporates universal administration, queuing, reporting and multimedia communications — ACD, AOD, Web Chat, Email, Interactive Voice Response (IVR), and Automated Workflow Distribution (AWD).
Unified Command and Control™ was released in October of 2007. It is a standalone tool that aggregates information from disparate systems and data sources, including all of the major ACD and workforce management systems. Unified Command and Control is designed to compete with vendors offering standalone tools for contact center performance analysis. Currently, it is Aspect’s way of integrating multiple contact centers across an enterprise, which may have Aspect Call Center ACD, Aspect Unified IP, or other vendors’ systems, under a single, real-time and historical umbrella for enterprise-wide monitoring, administration, and reporting.
Unified Command and Control enables contact centers to centralize reporting, routing, administration, and workflow management in a single console. It can manage up to 40 different nodes for 40,000 agents, either in a single site or across multiple locations. Contact centers can use existing Aspect Software solutions while seamlessly moving to new Session Initiation Protocol (SIP)-based Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) platforms. Since Unified Command and Control was built upon Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), third-parties or Aspect Software partners can build their own adapters for their products or other, similarly open, products in the future.
Aspect Unified IP offers unified management and supervisor capabilities through inherent Recording and Quality Management and Unified Command and Control enterprise multi-platform/multi-vendor real-time data aggregator. It offers consolidated routing rules across multiple communication channels through a single set of business rules, enabling administration and reporting across a wide range of applications (inbound, outbound, campaign management, IVR / voice portal, etc.).
Supervisors have centralized multi-site, enterprise-wide capabilities through multi-system provisioning, enterprise monitoring, enterprise reporting, enterprise recording, and disaster recovery for replicating data across multiple systems. Supervisors can create custom real-time displays or canvasses.
For companies seeking recording and speech analytics, quality management, performance management, and coaching capabilities, Aspect Software offers the PerformanceEdge™ suite, bringing together Aspect eWorkforce Management™, Aspect Quality Management™, Aspect Performance Management, Aspect Campaign Management™ and coaching and eLearning capabilities.
Aspect has worked with a third-party consulting company to optimize its user interface designs. One customizable user interface provides seating charts with system information and statistics on specific agents and groups at various sites providing the ability to drill down for more granular information. Executives can create dashboards and tickers to monitor real-time activity for the various contact center systems.
Aspect’s Unified Command and Control leverages all fixed granular data elements occurring in the contact center environment and is used to launch Aspect’s Unified Director to monitor and manage changes in real time. Unified Director provides a customizable single supervisor interface for all components.
For these reasons, including the fact that Aspect’s Unified Command and Control can operate alone or with disparate systems, we feel that Aspect does provide the best supervisor and real-time monitoring and reporting capabilities, especially in large contact center environments or those involved in merger and acquisition activities.
Architecture
Aspect Unified IP is IT-ready, built upon distributed n-tier architecture. The switching, call routing, load balancing, and transaction processing are managed by distinct software processes. These processes are loaded on a single physical server – delivering an all-in-one solution, in conjunction with third-party PBX and Voice/Unified Messaging or its private label enterprise Asterisk Business Edition PBX – or distributed across multiple servers for added scalability, performance and reliability. A key differentiator is a unique call ID applied to all services, as opposed to transfer between components, as with standalone IVR systems. Aspect Unified IP workflow automation, such as Rightfax queues to agents, monitors and measures transactions as it does a call.
Contact Center Applications
PerformanceEdge combines the workforce, performance and campaign management applications with next generation recording and quality management and integrated coaching and eLearning. The PerformanceEdge applications dynamically interoperate to help contact center managers consider everything and act immediately, in inbound, outbound and blended contact centers. PerformanceEdge includes the following products:
Aspect eWorkforce Management™ provides tools to forecast, schedule, and track agents with the appropriate skills. It provides strategic planning and workforce management tools to improve the performance of inbound, blended, and outbound staffing resources as well as back-office employees and knowledge workers.
Aspect Quality Management™ records and evaluates agent performance and captures real-time customer feedback, for business issues and agent performance. This component is the result of the acquisition of SophistiCom, a standalone, next generation quality management solution inherent in Aspect Unified IP since the release of version 6.0. It also includes a speech analytics component to automatically evaluate recordings via pre-defined criteria.
Aspect Performance Management™ measures and communicates results by providing scorecards and analysis that can automatically initiate alerts and actions on the fly.
Aspect Enterprise Campaign Manager™ and Aspect Campaign Optimizer™ offer campaign management that increases productive contacts in outbound and blended centers by establishing Best-Time-to-Call and outbound campaign strategy management.
PerformanceEdge eLearning distributes eLearning content to agents and supervisors during periods when the contact center can most afford to allow those agents to be off the phones.
Third-party Applications
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Nuance is a leading provider of speech recognition and verification; and text-to-speech software.
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CallMiner Eureka! speech analytics reports on the content, context, purpose and outcome of every recorded conversation. Together with Aspect Quality Management, it provides a user interface that automatically highlights significant trends and/or variations.
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Merced – Aspect Performance Management, an application powered by Merced Performance Suite, uses dashboards, notifications, and workflows to help align contact center operational performance with strategic corporate goals.
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OpenSpan integration enables Aspect Quality Management functionality, such as screen capture and call tagging, to extend and record all back-office interactions with applications across the enterprise.
Computer-telephony Integration (CTI)
Aspect Unified IP also supports CTI capabilities to work in conjunction with the user’s existing infrastructure. If there is an existing external ACD in place, a CTI Server (and CTI link) can be used to enable agents to leverage the external ACD while being blended with the outbound, IVR, and multimedia capabilities of Aspect Unified IP.
Aspect Unified IP provides the ability to interface to most agent or customer applications through Aspect-provided APIs that grant access to ODBC compliant databases. Screen pops can be created using fields and data from Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and other context applications.
Agent Desktops
LYRICall™ — LYRICall uses browser technology to deliver agent interfaces. LYRICall provides screen design and scripting development based on HTML and JAVA.
Interactive Intelligence
Best All-in-One Multi-Media IP Contact Center
Product: Customer Interaction Center® (CIC) 3.0:
The Customer Interaction Center product suite is well known for being originally designed from the ground up to facilitate communications using all channels and media from a single platform. It is the foundation on which all Interactive Intelligence products are based for centralizing business interactions. The latest Customer Interaction Center® 3.0 is an all-software design which leverages standard servers and Service-oriented Architecture (SOA), while increasing reliability, security and scalability. It removes the need for costly voice cards and improves reliability by eliminating multiple points of failure. The Customer Interaction Center (CIC) 3.0 scales up to several thousand agents and between 5,000 and 15,000 enterprise users per server. The product suite is localized in 18 different languages. Interactive Intelligence products include reduced integration requirements, centralized multi-channel processing and inbound/outbound blending, and single point of administration for all of their components.
Communication Server
Customer Interaction Center® 3.0
Customer Interaction Center® (CIC) now provides solutions for large enterprises. CIC 3.0 is also available in Hosted/Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) form, which can augment customer-premises configurations for disaster recovery.
The latest version 3.0 released in December has been improved in the following 4 areas:
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Increased security by using SRTP (Secure Real-Time Transport Protocol) for VoIP communications; and Transport Layer Security (TLS) for privacy between communicating applications and users;
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Enhanced mobility with a mobile client for Windows Mobile 5 & 6 phones;
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Broader integration to Microsoft OCS and Exchange 2007;
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Simplified deployment – Phone auto-provisioning and a new browser-based client interface.
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Interaction Administrator® is a single administrative interface to configure local and remote users, lines, stations, IP networks, SIP device and digital phone connections, security access, make moves/adds/changes (MACs), etc.
Contact Center Products
ACD Multimedia Queuing for distributing and queuing voice calls in the contact center. Multimedia Queuing combines e-mail, faxes, Web chats / callbacks and business objects (trouble tickets, tasks, etc.).
Interaction Director® provides pre and post-call routing and load balancing across multiple sites, and facilitates disaster recovery. Interaction Director sits on the data network and provides a complete pre- and post-call routing solution that allows users to route phone calls, emails, call-back requests and many other objects across 2 or more sites.
Interaction Gateway™ is a 2nd generation 1U rack-mountable appliance for Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) based telephony systems, which can be paired with the Customer Interaction Center.
Interaction Optimizer™ Work Force Management (WFM) based on historical and real-time data. Although the need remains to provide integration into third-party components, Interaction Optimizer can offer a more complete contact center solution for those organizations who want WFM without spending the time and money necessary to perform integrations.
Interactive Voice Response (IVR)/Speech recognition solutions — Voice portals are replacing legacy automated attendants and IVR systems. Interactive Intelligence enables businesses or large enterprise to incorporate highly scalable speech capabilities leveraging speech engines from Nuance or Loquendo. Customers may utilize a VoiceXML interpreter, or use Interaction Designer, a GUI-based development environment, to build their voice interfaces.
Interaction Designer® provides an extensive tool set for designing IVR, workflows, ACD Multimedia queuing, etc.
Computer-telephony Integration (CTI) pre-integrates to IVR plus leading Customer Relationship Management (CRM), Sales Force Automation (SFA), and Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) applications
Interaction Recorder® provides a non call-blocking environment vs. integrated 3rd party products. It includes multi-channel recording, screen recording, and agent scoring for all media types. The Interaction Tracker™ application can archive complete contact and interaction histories with individuals.
Interaction Dialer® – Throughput has increased from 16 calls/second to 60 calls/second in the current version, with further increases in scalability anticipated in a future 3.0 Service Update. It includes different modes: Preview, Power, Predictive, Precise, Agentless, and a predictive algorithm – the key to agent utilization, through Interactive Intelligence’s patented stage-based predicting, which tracks and predicts activity for more granularity. Interaction Dialer® also includes scripting options to drive messages to agents. Interaction Dialer® has the ability to operate on cruise control based on specifying criteria to switch campaigns based on thresholds and dialing modes. It inherently blends with ACD multimedia queuing. Interaction Dialer includes regulatory adherence features for telemarketing sales rules, abandons, Safe Harbor call logging, and support of Caller ID, which can be used to set a policy based on a specific contact record. Another feature is skills-based dialing. An example is insurance agents who are licensed for specific states.
e-FAQ® incorporates linguistic analysis, semantic word-net, or key word searches, as opposed to more complex case-based reasoning (tree mechanism). The same content may be accessed via a browser-based interface, via e-mail, or via an integration directly into the Interaction Client® .NET Edition. e-FAQ’s e-mail response management functionality incorporates auto-reply, auto-answer, or auto-suggestion to a CIC agent.
Interaction Report Assistant™ provides a wizard-driven interface for contact center supervisors to create simple custom reports on the fly, without help from IT or resellers.
Interaction Feedback® is an automated, configurable customer satisfaction survey module that enables organizations to accurately measure customer service levels in a timely and cost-effective way.
Clients/Agent Desktops – The Interactive Intelligence desktop client, Interaction Client®, includes a .NET version, Web version, Microsoft Outlook version, and an Interaction Client Mobile Edition. Interactive Intelligence offers Polycom and other SIP 2.0-compliant phones. CIC 3.0 supports .NET for any type of interactive media or embedded call control in CRM applications. A new SIP softphone that supports QoS and SRTP is also available for contact centers that do not wish to take up desk space with a SIP hard phone.
Business Process Automation (BPA)
BPA extends from the Interactive Intelligence single-platform architecture, which incorporates multi-channel queue management services for workflow automation.
Due to the fact mentioned at the outset, namely all of the above applications are an integral part of the Customer Interaction Center 3.0 foundation; we feel that Interactive Intelligence does provide the Best All-in-One Multimedia Contact Center.
Miercom is a testing lab partner with TMC. Rob Smithers is CEO of Miercom (www.miercom.com). Ed Labanca is a Senior Analyst for UC and Contact Centers. They can be reached at [email protected].
