"The Internet bubble may have burst and stocks may be down, but customer expectations are not," argues Lawrence Byrd, CRM evangelist at Avaya. "We've left customers with the expectation that email and web collaboration and so on all work." Result: You have regular customers using alternate channels now, not just geeks.
It's not that you'll frustrate your customer if you can't deal with their email, according to Byrd. You will frustrate them, of course, but that's not the point. "The business driver today is not going to be that customers are unhappy. It's cost savings. Our argument is that it doesn't actually save you money to do it badly.
"Let's say I'm on the website," Byrd says. "I'm halfway through a transaction and I get stuck. If an agent showed up in a chat session, helped me, pushed a page, gave me some information and I went on my way, that would cost you a certain amount. If I gave up, went through the entire transaction again with a phone agent, repeated all the information I'd already typed in, that would be significantly more expensive. So it's not cheaper to do multichannel customer service badly. It's actually horrendously more expensive.
"So we ask," Byrd says, "what is it we will save if we get this right?"
Interaction Center
Avaya's offering, Interaction Center, is based on technologies acquired with the purchase of Quintus early last year. Avaya, of course, has had prior products in this arena as well, including a chat and email product (Internet Call Center) introduced back in 1997.
The current iteration of the product features a centralized data repository and modular components that allow channels to be added as needed. "What's important is not that each customer has full capabilities in each of the channels," Byrd says, "but that all of the mechanisms behind those channels work the same. There's one business rule engine, so that whether it's an incoming chat request, email, or phone call, an agent can get access to the same customer information and can make the same routing decisions." More to the point, contact centers save big money by not paying agents to repeat already asked-and-answered questions.
With all the channels in place, Avaya Interaction Center routes voice, IVR, fax, email, and web interactions. The product, which runs on Unix and NT servers, stores contact histories in DB2, SQL, and Oracle databases, and works with both new and legacy switch equipment from Aspect, Intecom, Nortel (Meridian and Symposium), Rockwell, Siemens, and, of course, Avaya.
"We are tracking all the interactions," Byrd says. "We can keep a database of every phone, chat, or email and we can show it to you along the bottom of the screen when we pop some other application. If you're deploying Siebel, then we take that same data and we push it into the Siebel database and GUI. But if it's not Siebel - let's say it's a 3270 emulator and the mainframe data model hasn't changed in a hundred years?. Then there's no way that there's room in that application for all the emails. So we keep track of that outside the legacy app."
Avaya clearly has a lot of traditional strength in management reporting and real-time tracking of call center activity. Byrd says the company is now working to generalize that reporting, "to take our point solutions that were reporting for the voice call center, and for email, and to turn that into a platform of common reporting and analysis tools that uses a single repository across our portfolio." The company plans to release the first version of this reporting product in the first half of this year.
Several other vendors either already support combined reporting (Telephony@ Work, Interactive Intelligence, and CosmoCom, for example). You can see the move toward common reporting edging all the way to reader boards: Symon's (Sugar Land, TX - 281-240-5555, www.symon.com) latest hardware, to take just one example, is not only IP-addressable (meaning, in essence, that the boards have become easily addressable by third-party vendors), but also is aware of email messaging queues. In fact, it's fair to say that Symon has rethought the old reader board paradigm (a custom-built LED display connected via serial line to a proprietary voice ACD) and recast it as a client-server system. A centralized monitoring server (running NT) collects data from all sorts of sources, recasts it as messages, and delivers these messages to various endpoints, including agent desktops as well as reader boards.
The Inner Queue
Avaya's Interaction Center reflects the fact that a queue is almost always implemented as a database of records. When someone calls or when an email arrives, a new database record is created. When a transaction is completed, the record is archived for reporting and for maintaining customer contact histories.
This process of creating a record and figuring out how to assign it to an agent or automated process is separate from the actual nuts and bolts of managing a call inside a switch, a fact which has not been lost on a number of vendors in this market, including Intel.
"The sequencing that has always been built into the telephone switch can't be there anymore, because that's not where all the work is coming from," says Carl Strathmeyer, senior director in the Strategic Marketing CT Consulting Services division at Intel. "That sequencing work has got to happen outside the phone switch, which probably means a general-purpose computing server of some kind. It also has to manage communications coming from all these different media."
The move to general-purpose servers, of course, opens the marketplace to vendors who come from data networking software backgrounds, rather than the traditional niche of telecom equipment vendors. "And so it's no accident," Strathmeyer notes, "that Intel is becoming much more active in the communications business in the last couple of years. These are the kinds of partners that Intel is very comfortable with."
Says Strathmeyer: "One of the things we believe people will need is a software module that does the basic chores of queue management." The idea, consistent with Intel's general business approach, is to provide a building block, not a finished application.
In fact, Intel didn't even create this building block from scratch, but instead licensed the underlying technology in a queuing product from Lightning Rod Software, a Minneapolis- based company that has since fallen on such hard times that it may no longer exist by the time you read this.
"We've been taking that turnkey application technology," Strathmeyer says, "and we've been chopping it down and extracting that kernel, that queue management functionality, and providing some very nice, well-documented APIs that allow people to write applications."
The Intel queue manager is basically in charge of what Strathmeyer calls work piles. It doesn't manage the media - doesn't transfer phone calls or forward emails - but instead manages records of who's waiting for service. To make it work, developers have to create two modules of their own, a media interaction module and an agent module.
