Most of us know what a contact center is. Most of us know what a knowledge worker is. Put them together and you get a new type of contact center that expands beyond formal agents to enterprise-wide "knowledge agents." For lack of a better term, we're calling this the Knowledge Agent Center (KnAC). The KnAC knocks down the walls of the formal call center and expands the responsibility for customer care to the enterprise. We believe it will soon become IT's single most important task. And our industry's technology is absolutely the key to making it work.

Times change; so do call centers. Having a group of dedicated call-center agents who are the only interface to customers is becoming less effective.

Today, knowledge is spread throughout the enterprise; in order to serve customers in the best manner possible, companies should be able to enable all workers, or specialized individuals such as product experts, to deal with customers.

We are already starting to see a shift in the types of services that companies can provide to customers by going beyond the walls of the formal call center to the vast pool of knowledge workers. The whole company, from account manager to product manager, as well as other knowledge workers such as personal bankers, technicians, programmers, and so on, will become part of the KnAC (pronounced nak, rhymes with, uh, yak).

And it doesn't matter if they're located in the corporate headquarters, at branch offices or remote sites, or even on the road or working from their homes.

Supplementing With Knowledge

There are basically two types of Knowledge Agent Centers that we see emerging - the informal contact center and the formal contact center that is supplemented by knowledge workers.

Informal contact centers are the most common type of KnAC, and a large variety of companies already have informal contact centers - whether they realize it or not.

The informal call-center knowledge agents interface with customers and may at times provide customer support, but this isn't their primary gig. The most typical informal contact center is an internal help desk. Other examples are sales teams, billing departments, accounts receivable - basically any work group that interacts with customers on a sporadic basis can be considered an informal contact center. The informal contact center isn't new, and vendors like Shoreline, Zeacom and, most recently, Siemens offer products dedicated to this marketspace.

The other type of KnAC (a formal contact center that is supplemented by knowledge workers) is new, and there aren't as many products available as of yet; still, we've seen several applications beginning to bubble up:

• Overflow: When things get too crazy in the formal contact center and callers are waiting in queue for too long (that never happens, does it?), overflow calls can be offloaded to the knowledge worker agents who are assigned calls only when every one else is busy.

• Escalation or Single Call Resolution: This lets the organization provide the right answer the first time, without requiring follow-up calls. Agents without the authority or knowledge to satisfy a customer request can either transfer the call and the accompanying data to someone in the organization who can resolve the issue, or conference in a back-office expert.

• Direct Access: A caller, identified through ANI or their customer profile, gets direct access to the appropriate knowledge worker or expert. For example, a platinum customer calls their bank's 800 number to get information about the latest mortgage rates; instead of going to the next available agent, they're routed directly to their personal banker or a mortgage specialist who can better service the caller.

Case in point, one of the largest brokerage firms in the country uses Genesys' Expert Contact product to route specific customers directly to their broker.

• Ad hoc call center: In special situations, such as emergencies or snow days, it may be necessary to set up an ad hoc call center, enabling knowledge worker agents to log in from wherever they are and get calls routed to them.

The City Service Divisions of City of Coquitlam uses Nortel Networks products to be able to set up and take down phone service at will to meet seasonal fluctuations, such as for swimming pools that are only open in the summer, or to quickly move critical services to backup locations in emergencies.

Using an IP Contact Center based on Nortel's Symposium Express Call Center and skills-based routing, incoming calls can be automatically routed to the most knowledgeable person anywhere.

We are at the very early stages of this type of KnAC, so expect to see more examples and customer case studies very shortly.

IP Makes It Happen

By now you must be thinking, but we can do all of these things today - what's so different about this new KnAC? The answer is - nothing. Much of what's needed can be done today using existing CTI-based contact-center technology, such as intelligent call routing, overflow routing, database access, screen pop, virtual contact center tools, etc.

Of course, as we know, traditional CTI is not an option for most enterprises for a number of ugly reasons (implementation nightmares and cost being the top two). But as enterprise telecom moves more and more to pure IP-based communications, we also move closer and closer to this new knowledge agent model.

IP systems can more easily and cost effectively link multiple remote offices and individual workers, regardless of geographic location; they also make it a lot simpler to manage all this as one seamlessly integrated network, with each user having full access to all shared voice applications, services and, increasingly, presence management thanks to the burgeoning support of SIP.

IP-PBXs also reduce the cost for the KnAC. Many of the new IP switches provide basic call-center functionality out of the box, which gives knowledge agents some of the tools they need right out of the starting block.

But Will it Work?

While the technology pretty much exists today to let companies build a KnAC, it's not so simple, and there are many issues to be overcome. The largest gating factor is price.

With the exception of Genesys' Expert Contact and Siemens' HiPath ProCenter Agile products, there are no specific products for the KnAC, and most vendors are using their existing contact-center products to serve this new market.

This leads to one very big problem - it's usually way too expensive to purchase contact-center licenses or seats for every knowledge worker that may be part of the KnAC. Most of the vendors interviewed for the vendor round up offer basic contact-center functionality with their IP switches at no extra cost, but they don't provide all of the functionally needed - special contact-center licenses are usually needed in order to provide integration and screen pop capabilities, plus be able to report on, monitor, and track the knowledge agents.

This runs anywhere from $2500 to $5000 per seat. Add in the cost of training knowledge workers to use the contact center and implementation tools, and multiply all this by the number of knowledge agents you have, you're looking at quite a nice amount of money.

Genesys is attempting to overcome this problem by offering the Expert Agent product at a lower cost than a "regular" contact-center seat. One vendor suggested that perhaps transaction-based pricing, rather than per-seat pricing, should be the model for the future. Not a bad idea. Another vendor is looking into having a rental-type arrangement so that instead of purchasing licenses on a permanent basis, companies can get them on a rental basis.

There are still other challenges. Workforce management and scheduling is tricky, since you need to make sure the expertise is available when the customer needs it. Presence management will help in this area.

The biggest issues are personnel issues. Knowledge workers are more highly paid than call-center agents; they're busy with their primary responsibilities and may resent having to take time to deal with callers. Companies will have to position this properly, making people understand that serving customers is part of everyone's job.

After my last article about this issue ("Revisiting the Casual Call Center"), Grant Young, Associate Partner with IBM Business Consulting Services, wrote me and pointed out some issues that he dealt with when trying to have knowledge workers handle specialized calls. He noted:

"Unfortunately, the informal knowledge workers who only handle calls on a secondary basis rarely, if ever, have primary job responsibilities that are compatible with inbound call-center work. Their duties often require them to be away from their desks or involved in activities that are not conducive to ad hoc, unscheduled interruption.

"Just try to send a call to a programmer in the middle of writing code. The quality of the code and the call will be endangered. You can't afford to have these more specialized, higher-cost knowledge workers sitting idly waiting for that specialized call, nor can you afford to have them interrupted in their primary tasks to provide real-time responses to calls."