We saw a lot of exciting things over the last year. And we learned a lot about how a reasonably mature sector can branch off into new directions and ferociously attack some old problems.

When it was time to convene our editors to select the Products of the Year for 2007, we discovered that there was a surprising amount of agreement about what we liked and what we found interesting. (For the record, our awards are all selected by editors; there is no formal nomination process, entry fee or quid pro quo for receiving one of these awards. It's all about what tickles the fancies of the editors of the magazine.)

One thing we noted was the emergence of tools designed to enhance security, like the Identity Protection service described below. There's also a trend toward making better use of the information that flows in and out of the call center. Where last year analytics had something of a debut in the call center practitioner's consciousness, this year we think that tools for specific problems are ascendant, like customer feedback survey analysis, for example. And of course, the trend toward managed services and hosted tools throws up its share of noteworthy winners.

Read on to learn about this year's best call center products and services. And congratulations to the winners!

Amdocs, Amdocs 7

Amdocs 7 is everything we hoped to see in CRM -- without the hype, nonsense or self-puffery. Amdocs has built an integrated platform for managing customer interactions, and enhanced it this year with the latest version.

Amdocs 7 is a suite that allows service providers to offer their customers the benefits of access to any service, over any network, at any time and on any device, which is made possible by the move to next-generation networks and the convergence of voice, video, data, content and entertainment.

The suite is broken down into components that allow you to manage specific horizontal functions within a customer relationship -- like traditional CRM, or customer analytics, billing, and so forth.

But Amdocs has also driven it deeply into customized vertical market territory, building the suite into versions tailored for industries like financial services, mobile or wireline telecom and broadband and cable companies. Those industries are notable because they exemplify the highest volume, most customer-sensitive sectors in call centers today. They are the industries that are acutely sensitive to issues like customer retention and churn. They are the sectors that are starting to see the benefits of more effectively managing the totality of the customer experience for overall profit.

A goal of Amdocs 7 is to make it easier and more cost-effective for service providers to launch next-generation services, bundle them, offer incentive pricing to customers, capture and fulfill complex orders, assure quality and accuracy, and focus on the customer experience. It offers a single platform capable of supporting the requirements of traditional and next-generation video, voice and data services -- regardless of the access method, device, payment method, or the network over which the service is delivered, including IP multi-media subsystem or IMS.

One really nice aspect of this is that Amdocs has taken to heart the concept of the unified agent desktop across all lines of businesses, interaction channels and customer-facing processes. The Amdocs 7 suite is a wide, broad framework within which you can find almost any call center-related data management utility.

Autonomy, Qfiniti Enterprise

Autonomy is a British company that has connections to the call center industry through its 2005 acquisition of venerable call recording vendor etalk. What they've done since then is integrate etalk's recording and monitoring technology into the company's overall "meaning-based computing" initiative.

The typical call center (and its parent organization) is literally swimming in "unstructured" information in the form of documents, emails, telephone conversations and multimedia. The problem, though, is that even though that unstructured data is "human-friendly," it's not easy for computer systems and processes to analyze.

Autonomy's tools, in particular its Qfiniti Suite, uncovers and makes sense of the enterprise and customer information that bears on the interaction. Autonomy uses a platform called the Intelligent Data Operating Layer (IDOL) to make all those far-flung points of data searchable and actionable with unprecedented accuracy and speed.

Qfiniti is one single scalable platform, built to organize and control the every aspect of strategic customer care: from quality monitoring to e-learning, automated surveys and speech analytics.

It provides tools to capture call and desktop events, evaluate and analyze these activities, coach and train agents, and measure customer satisfaction through survey capabilities.

Qfiniti Enterprise is designed to integrate seamlessly with other contact center technologies, and the distributed architecture offers highly flexible deployment options that leverage the existing IT infrastructure.

A centralized database and single interface supports consolidation, simplifying administration. And because Qfiniti Enterprise supports standard, off-the-shelf equipment, IT can confidently manage etalk software alongside other mission-critical technologies.

Cincom, Synchrony Central

Call centers have begun to devote more attention to simplifying agents' desktops. But the more call center managers continue to broaden their oversight of how their companies assist customers, the more managers need to streamline what they view on their desktops, too.

Enter Cincom's Synchrony Central software, which we first saw in Orlando. The software lets call center managers use a Web browser to gain access to historical reports, real-time data feeds, routing rules, workflows and knowledge bases.

Although Synchrony Central can cull information from a variety of sources, managers only need to use this one tool to view the information.

Considering most agents routinely access five or more different systems or databases during a customer interaction, the Synchrony agent desktop simplifies and streamlines what is often a complex process, enabling agents to work smarter and faster, significantly increase productivity, reduce handling times and improve the customer experience.

Synchrony Central has been described as having "a chameleon-like functionality" that adapts to each user. One thing is for certain: training is minimized because agents only need to learn Synchrony, and not a multitude of supporting applications.

CosmoCom, Video Call Center Solution

CosmoCom is frank: the company acknowledges that most existing call centers cannot support video with their current technology. But CosmoCom has embraced video as a mode that's coming down the road soon enough to start investing in compatible call center technology.

After all, as the number of video-equipped consumers increases, the demand for video-enabled services will also increase. CosmoCom technology has long powered operational video call centers such as CSD, which provides video relay services to the hearing-impaired.

CosmoCom also provides IVVR (Interactive Voice and Video Response) with GUI service creation and easy integration to the overall call center infrastructure. CosmoCom's field-proven video call center technology can provide IVVR as part of a complete video call center offering, or as a front-end to existing voice call centers.

IVVR adds a new multimodal dimension to the caller experience. In addition to hearing traditional IVR voice menus and announcements, a caller can now see menu choices to expedite the call, and receive video presentations while waiting for an agent, during transfers or at appropriate places in the IVVR dialogue. This creates new service and revenue possibilities ranging from ad-subsidized free information, to paid entertainment, and more.

IVVR can be used as a video front-end to a traditional voice call center, or as part of a video call center where callers see agents and vice versa when callers are so equipped. Call centers that can't be immediately upgraded to video can still offer IVVR to video-enable the self-service portion of the call and then transfer it to a voice agent in the legacy call center. In call centers that can upgrade to video, IVVR is the video-enabled prelude and gateway to the video agents.

We applaud their commitment to the next generation of customer interaction modes.

Customer Relationship Metrics, External Quality Monitoring

It's one thing to talk about the "voice of the customer" – it's another thing altogether to scientifically measure and effectively use customer opinions to build better interactions. The tool of choice is often post-call surveys, and according to experts, many of them are just plain wrong. That's where External Quality Monitoring comes in. EQM is Customer Relationship Metrics' umbrella for services that include surveys, but extend past them to analysis, feedback and benchmarking.

Metrics (as the company is known) has been quite outspoken about trying to put a scientific underpinning to the customer equation. In an article in Call Center, Dr. Jodie Monger outlined several key ways that companies make mistakes in crafting their customer surveys and in using the data afterwards. Metrics asserts that it is the only real-time survey company that corrects survey response errors utilizing customer comments prior to generating report cards. Other real-time surveying providers generate report cards from dirty or partially corrected data.

What we like about the EQM system is that it is not an off-the-shelf tool. It's a set of processes by which you (the call center) arrive at a way to understand the whole picture of what the customers want and think. You can use it to assess reactions to voice interactions, or those coming via the web or email. Combined with a wealth of custom programs and services, Metrics is in the forefront of a movement to turn customer data into information that's useful, accurate and totally empowering.

Empirix, Hammer On-Call

Testing is a critical aspect of deploying complex call center infrastructure. Whether you're putting in a voice response system, a speech application, or a new call routing plan, there's no substitute for throwing thousands of simulated calls at the system to see where its weak spots are.

That's one of the things that Empirix does for call centers. We're singling out their On-Call testing services here, but you could do well with any of Empirix's Hammer services and products.

On-Call is a hosted service that automatically generates thousands of test calls that duplicate real-world operating conditions. It finds the capacity bottlenecks and configuration errors that could cause you to lose uptime in your applications and, ultimately, in your center.

From the switch through the IVR to back-end databases and CTI screen pops, Hammer On-Call gives your voice applications and infrastructure a thorough workout. They'll test things like the performance of IVR, databases, call routing and CTI timings under load; trunk capacity; screen pop success; and various architecture components. On the whole, better to be safe than sorry.

Envision, Identity Protection

Envision's Identity Protection system is designed to help call centers protect themselves and their callers against identity theft and safeguard the sensitive data stored in millions of recorded agent-customer interactions.

"Everyday, agents process customer transactions using sensitive customer information that can expose companies to unprecedented risk," Envision CEO Rodney Kuhn says. "With agent attrition rates as high as 40 percent annually, contact centers are exposed to greater risk as customer information changes hands. As more enterprises listen to the voice of their customers outside the contact center, the need for greater protection increases."

Envision's Identity Protection system protects a variety of customer data including date of birth, social security numbers, drivers' license numbers, as well as credit card, bank account and phone-card numbers. The company says the system also addresses regulatory guidelines for personal data protection, privacy and safety within the contact center.

This is a big deal in particular for two vertical sectors: financial services and health care. Both serve markets in which individual customer data is exchanged at a very deep level. And both are often guided by regulatory requirements. Identity protection as an embedded tool in their call center software is a great idea and a major step forward.

GMT, GMT Planet v9.5

In the early stages of developing the latest version of GMT Planet, GMT solicited input from experts in the contact center and retail banking industries, including power-users, industry analysts, and partners.

Enhancements offered in 9.5 include partial-week rescheduling, scheduling flexibility, self-reporting of employee performance and productivity metrics and time-off request management. Experts in contact centers and in the financial industry report unrelenting pressure in trying to ensure proper staffing levels without incurring any unnecessary expenses, which GMT attempts to alleviate with its upgrade.

The company's Michael Williams told us this about their strategy earlier this year: "GMT has noticed a recent trend in that many contact center clients are now asking for a workforce management solution not only for their contact centers, but one they can deploy enterprise-wide – from administration and back-office to logistics and order fulfillment.

"Our flagship product, GMT Planet, replaces the need for multiple software products to run the scheduling and forecasting functions of an enterprise's back-office, so there is a cost-savings that can amount to hundreds of thousands of dollars for Tier 1 businesses who standardize their operations and contact centers around our enterprise-wide WFM solution."

One option in GMT Planet is to have it hosted. The software can run at GMT's data center, connect to the contact center's ACD remotely to collect contact history data and from there be securely accessed via the Internet with a browser to perform the forecasting, scheduling and assignment functions. A hosted ASP model streamlines the process of implementing workforce management, and smaller contact centers can implement the application easier, faster and less expensively than otherwise possible with a traditional server-based WFM solution.

We applaud the effort to integrate the whole business into a single workforce planning engine and at the same time approach the smaller call center with something that gives them the features and functionality that you'd expect in a large-center tool.

Interactive Intelligence, Customer Interaction Center

ACDs used to be big, expensive, standalone machines that were built on closed systems and did one thing really well: move voice calls. No longer. The term "ACD" is almost an anachronism, but we still like to use it to describe call routing platforms, even if they are open, sophisticated and handle many kinds of customer interactions.

One of the best out there is the pre-integrated application suite and multimedia ACD from Interactive Intelligence called the Customer Interaction Center. It's everything rolled into one package: PBX/IP-PBX call processing, voicemail, fax server and unified messaging. It's call center focused, but it also reaches out into the rest of the enterprise to provide a unified platform for telephony and data management.

It's IT-friendly, requiring no multi-box hardware or customization. It sports a central administration interface, and reduces the complexity often associated with CTI. Also, unlike hardware-centric proprietary solutions, the IP-ready CIC architecture gives organizations a clear-cut path to adopting voice over IP at any time, no bolt-on VoIP products required.

This past year, Interactive Intelligence added a new workforce management module called Interaction Optimizer to the package.

Interaction Optimizer forecasts, schedules, and compiles real-time adherence data for any size contact center. The pre-integrated Interaction Optimizer uses CIC's automatic call distribution data, which includes multi-channel routing; this, the company says, gives customers an easy-to-use and accurate method for planning schedules and making changes on-the-fly.

The application's demand forecasting has the ability to simulate a wide variety of scenarios, such as seasonal effects and promotional campaigns. The real-time adherence feature includes a simple graphical interface that helps supervisors quickly identify out-of-compliance scenarios, while maintaining service levels.

KNOVA, KNOVA 7

One of the most impressive new products we've seen is KNOVA 7, the latest knowledge management suite from Cupertino, CA-based KNOVA Software.

The suite presents you with a variety of ways to segment the kind of information you present on your Website, and how you direct customers to this information.

The Microsite Builder wizard that comes with KNOVA 7 allows you to specify how you segment the content you display on your Website in terms of, for instance, the types of products a customer purchases. With this wizard, you indicate whether your Website automatically displays certain types of information about your company to customers based on their profiles, or if customers view information only in relation to where they navigate on your Website.

A second way that KNOVA 7 applies segmentation to knowledge management is by furnishing you with a Recommendation Manager module. The module enables you to display updates related to the types of products your customers have, or promotions for products related to those that customers seek information about. The suggestions or promotions that come from the Recommendation Manager module reflect words customers use or categories they refer to as they search for answers to questions on your Website.

KNOVA 7 also helps you address the issue of what to do if a customer has a question for which your knowledge base doesn't seem to have an answer. The first possibility is that an answer actually resides in your knowledge base, but that you haven't yet linked the answer to the question. A second possibility is that you need to edit items in your knowledge base, or compose new items.

To enable you to deal with the first possibility, the authoring tools that come with KNOVA 7 lets you associate certain combinations of words and phrases with items that are already in your knowledge base. To help you address the second possibility, KNOVA 7 enables you to compose or edit items in your knowledge base.

As we show in the screen shot in this article, the search criteria to which you link the item appears on the left side of the screen, and the form you use to compose or edit the item appears on the right. The software allows you to customize different forms that your call center uses to compose or edit knowledge base items for different kinds of questions or products. In addition, the software allows agents to flag items that they believe require editing.

All in all, KNOVA 7 is among the most comprehensive knowledge management suites available, which is why it earns a Product of the Year award.

LIMRA, JobMatch

In too many call centers, supervisors receive promotions from the ranks of agents without regard to their leadership abilities. They're often thrown into their jobs with minimal training or development of their management skills.

That is why we were impressed with LIMRA's JobMatch assessment software, which helps call centers identify future supervisors and team leaders. This tool also evaluates a prospective leader's potential for success in a management position, as well as opportunities for future development.

JobMatch complements and enhances the traditional interview process. It uses a competency-matching technique to assess each candidate's success potential at a particular center, identifies strengths and development needs, red-flags areas of mismatch, and includes interview questions to further explore the match. The interview questions are accompanied by guidelines to evaluate candidate responses.

Spanlink, Managed Services

Hosting has become more of an intriguing option for call center operations. After all, as one vendor has said, the core competency of any company is managing its own business, and not necessarily managing its IT and telecom infrastructures.

Spanlink's got a cool managed services offering that serves as a cost-efficient alternative or a supplement to an internal IT team. The benefits include a predictable expense model, immediate ramp up and high standards of quality and reliability delivered by resources whose core business is customer interaction and the supporting systems.

It comes in several flavors, including Administration Support, where they support your in-house team for complex or time-consuming admin projects in a way that's more efficient and less disruptive to operations and helps to ease the learning curve challenges inherent to new technology.

Another option is Remote Administration, where you have Spanlink's experienced System Administrators manage your solution remotely and provide a long-term, predictable cost model. Or, you can elect to get early notification to proactively address technical issues with their SolutionWatch service. The service can supplement monitoring solutions at a fraction of the cost and safeguards against business-affecting downtime.

Having someone else handle your infrastructure management gives you the breathing room to concentrate on managing the human and process side of your call center operations.

Symon, Symon Digital Appliance

In recent years, several companies have introduced devices to allow call center managers to serve not only as directors of people, but also as directors of images, on the newest types of electronic displays, including plasma and liquid crystal display (LCD) models.

Among these companies is Plano, TX-based Symon Communications, which earned a Product of the Year award last year for Symon Digital Appliance (SDA), a device that enables you to store and determine the sequence in which you show messages, data and video on the latest kinds of displays.

This year, Symon scores again with its Symon Design Studio software. Symon Design Studio lets you create layouts for slides, which can contain various combinations of data feeds and video feeds. The software enables you to schedule or define circumstances when you show certain slides or sets of slides. What's more, the software allows you to build play lists for specific sections of slides. In this way, for instance, you can schedule different video feeds to appear in the same section of a slide.

Because you store slide layouts on the SDAs, Symon Design Studio enables you to control, and synchronize, if necessary, the information that the SDAs send to displays. In terms of presenting slides, the software lets you do nifty three-dimensional transitions between slides, as we show in the screen shot above.

One of the best capabilities of Symon Design Studio is that it gives you direct access to data elements that you track with Symon's middleware tool, Symon Enterprise Server. By enabling you to display certain slides based on the values of one or more of these data elements, Symon Design Studio makes it possible, for example, to show a series of congratulatory slides as soon as your call center reaches a sales target.

The upshot: Symon Design Studio earns a Product of the Year award because it redefines the way call centers use electronic displays, giving them tremendous flexibility with how they can share information among agents.

UCN, inContact

A few months back, UCN's Tom Milligan told us that, in his view, literally any and all call center systems can be run as hosted applications. "CRM, sales force automation, help desk/tech support, and the traditional contact center features: IVR, ACD, screen pops, monitoring/recording, reporting, etc. can be purchased as an on-demand, hosted solution. With the proliferation of Web enabled technologies, each of these applications are now available from anywhere by anyone."

UCN's attempt to back that contention up with product is inContact, a suite of on-demand, advanced contact handling applications that are hosted within the UCN Intelligent Network.

It delivers a very smooth and sophisticated operating environment for call center practioners. Features include interactive (self-service) voice response, skills-based routing, database integration, inbound/outbound call blending, remote agent or multi-site support, Web-based administration, a wide range of management reporting, monitoring and recording options.

In effect, it's an entire call center technology infrastructure hosted in the ether, and you pay for it by the month instead of through deep capital expenditures. There are all sorts of scenarios under which you can benefit from the hosted model in general, and inContact in particular. We like the fact that you can disperse or consolidate your workforce at your discretion, creating small virtual centers, or one large one. It scales up and down to suit your variations, and the suite of in-built applications is top notch.

Verint, Customer Interaction Analytics

Around mid-year, Verint Systems debuted Customer Interaction Analytics, a new suite of services that allows call centers to use a variety of tools, including speech analytics, to resolve some of the most persistent challenges in customer care.

These issues will be familiar to you; they comprise business problem discovery, cross-selling and upselling, customer complaints, customer retention and first contact resolution.

With Verint's business problem discovery service, the technology manifests itself as a tool defining the problems that a company needs to solve. For example, with the help of Verint's business problem discovery service, you can determine whether the root cause of customers' frustrations with a corporate policy is the policy itself or the way that agents communicate this policy to customers.

What appeals to us about Verint's services is that they're not completely dependent on the call monitoring system you've deployed. Just as recordings of calls are only useful if you know how to evaluate them, a call monitoring system is only valuable if it presents you with information you can use to improve your company's communication with customers.

Vocal Laboratories, Express Feedback

Caught up in a vortex of IVRs and automated service, the public has been asking to speak to a person. Whichever side of the debate you fall on, the truth is that when customers get to speak with live agents, they feel cared for. Vocal Laboratories does post-call customer service surveys with real, live agents with a service called Express Feedback.

Here's how VocaLabs' Express Feedback works: After a customer finishes a call to your call center, one of VocaLabs' agents calls them back. Not every customer, but enough to get a good sample. Instead of dealing with the same sort of automated system that can be so frustrating to callers at the beginning of the call, they get a call back, usually within 20 minutes or so, from an agent whose only stake in the call is getting the customer's honest opinion.

But the service isn't just a friendly call to make sure everything went okay. It consists of modifiable reports that are updated constantly, telling the call center how the agents are doing. It also gives you automated alerts when a caller isn't satisfied, giving the call center the opportunity to save the relationship.

The two things that really stand out about VocaLabs are their dedication to, and understanding of, statistics (which is vital in the survey game), and the personal touch that their live surveys can lend your call center. If you want to know what your callers think of your center, survey them. If you want to let them know you care what they think, use live agents.

West, IVR Solution

When we heard about how closely West worked with its client DIRECTV to create and manage its IVR system over the last decade or so, we were impressed. The twenty-year-old Omaha, NE-based company may be best known as an outsourcer, but their voice services also extend to hosting IVR platforms, something they take very seriously.

This isn't a canned, off-the-shelf system. It's a partnership. West works very closely with its clients to create something as simple or as complex as it needs to be. They aren't afraid to blend touch-tone with speech recognition when it's appropriate. In the case of DIRECTV, West helped them migrate from an all touch-tone system to more and more speech-based capabilities – when callers have a choice of more than fifty pay-per-view movies at any given time, they need the freedom of natural language speech recognition. West helped DIRECTV eliminate some of the layers of IVR menus that were created as a result of more and increasingly complicated options.

West will also blend their IVR platform with its own agents, if your situation requires. The advantage of working with a firm like West is that you're getting a service from an experienced company that works like it's a part of yours.

Copyright 2007 CMP Media LLC. All rights reserved. 4/1/07, Issue # 2004, page 34.

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