Given the challenges of the previous year, it wouldn't be such a bad thing if 2002 were the last year of its kind.
From a numerical perspective, that's very likely to apply to most of us. Not until 2112 will we have another year that reads the same forward and backward.
The year 2002 did exhibit a certain symmetry one might expect of palindromes. 2002 saw the telecom, dot-com and technology booms that marked the last decade play out in reverse. It seemed that companies like Global Crossing, Qwest and WorldCom withered as quickly as they grew. In response to this pattern, projections that were overly optimistic as recently as 2001 were overly pessimistic in 2002.
The recession had its impact on many aspects of our business. Some call centers closed. Others that stayed open scaled back or cancelled technological implementations they had planned.
It's difficult, even in boom times, to come up with new ideas or integrate new technologies. When the best possible outcome is keeping your operation afloat, innovation can seem like a luxury.
But in defining the future of call centers, innovation is a necessity. Hallmarks of our industry, like the automated call distributor (ACD), could not exist if companies had not risked investing in them when these products were new.
Last month, at the first call center event of the year in Dallas, seven companies received recognition for introducing the best new call center products. Two earned honorable mentions.
Among the seven vendors is Rockwell, the developer of the modern ACD. Rockwell refashioned its products for this decade with a new multimedia routing system.
Last year, Symon entered the burgeoning field of workforce management and took the risk of introducing a new product line. The gamble paid off: Call centers now have an inexpensive, robust tool for creating schedules.
One of the more notable trends we predict for 2003 is ongoing advancement in tools that allow call centers to develop agents' careers. Example: Limra's hosted assessment software, which determines whether prospective agents fit in well with the workplace cultures of the call centers in which they apply for jobs.
For agents who continue to hone their skills after they join call centers, GeoLearning's software is the best new product to combine the experience of classroom education with the efficiency of computer-based training.
As more call centers automate frequent transactions like reservations and purchase orders, simply getting the words right isn't enough. With this type of communication, semantics, rather than the syntax, is where the money is.
Island Data's software for analyzing e-mail and Unveil's speech recognition software represent the future of automation, which will focus more on understanding what people say rather than how they communicate.
With knowledge management, the priority is organizing information so that customers and agents access it most efficiently. The best illustration of how to do it right comes from TheBrain Technologies' software, which earns an award for the best product we test-drove in 2002.
Lastly, we are pleased to announce our honorable mentions for new products whose innovations are in their design.
One, from Contour Design, offers agents an ergonomic alternative to keeping the mouse at arm's length from the keyboard. The other, from Dowumi, is a bone conduction headset primarily geared to hearing-impaired agents.
We congratulate the companies whose efforts produced the 2003 Products of the Year. Let's hope that 2003, true to its numerical form, concludes on a higher note than it begins.
Best Products of the Year
GEOLEARNING'S GEOMAESTRO LEARNING CENTER
Odds are that you already have a training program for agents at your call center. But why rely on classroom lectures when you can enroll agents and new hires in a virtual school with a curriculum customized for your business?
GeoMaestro Learning Center (formerly GeoLearning Center) lets you do just that. The hosted training software from GeoLearning (West Des Moines, IA), which we covered in our March 2002 issue, creates an on-line learning environment that simulates an actual campus.
GeoLearning lets you design a "school building" accommodating up to five floors. Each floor can include classrooms for viewing multimedia lessons that you create; conference rooms where agents participate in live Web-based seminars; and a library where they can request additional educational material on-line or through postal mail. Agents can relax between classes in the student lounge, a chat room where they can discuss what they've learned and also learn from each other.
Agents can enter the main lobby of your school to enroll in classes, and they can navigate through a three-dimensional graphical environment to move from one floor to the next. Since you deliver training through GeoMaestro Learning Center on-line, agents working from separate locations can attend the same classes together.
The software personalizes training in an engaging and creative manner. And because it is a hosted service, GeoLearning eliminates in-house IT concerns. 800-970-9903/ 515-222-9903, www.geolearning.com
ISLAND DATA'S INSIGHT RT
What good is customer feedback if you don't properly analyze it and put it to good use? That's the problem Island Data (Carlsbad, CA) addresses with Insight RT.
The software analyzes customers' unstructured feedback, specifically text information that is captured from on-line customer interactions, such as e-mail messages, survey and feedback forms, or Web self-service queries.
By analyzing this data you can identify sales opportunities, prevent attrition risks and leverage product suggestions. The software also dictates actions based on the analyses. For example, a customer might submit a survey form that indicates why she's unhappy with a product. The software might then alert the sales department that the customer is an attrition risk while forwarding to product managers the customer's input.
Insight RT's Concept Recognition Engine, an internally developed technology, analyzes text in real time and categorizes the information. Some of the software's default categories include tone, urgency and profanity. But you can customize any number of categories to evaluate messages for conditions such as sales opportunities, retention opportunities and product ideas.
Insight RT's digital dashboard uses graphs and reports to help you identify trends. You can monitor information and drill down to access individual customers' verbatims. You can also integrate the software with call tracking or CRM software to automate actions in your workflow. 760-517-4100, www.islanddata.com
