Call Center: What kinds of call center systems or applications best lend themselves to a hosted configuration?
Assaf Baciu: A variety of systems and applications can function in a hosted environment. Some companies choose to outsource only telephony and technology infrastructure while others go the whole nine yards and outsource application development and management as well. With the significant cost reductions associated with long distance calls, the advances in VoIP, and the ability to transfer calls easily within the network without adding extra call legs, outsourcing telephony infrastructure becomes increasingly viable. More important, the rapid evolution of technology and best practices associated with development, deployment and maintenance makes hosted configurations a preferred architecture for customer self service solutions/applications. Hence, hosted service providers are best positioned to take advantage of emerging technologies and growing knowledge bases to achieve high automation rates combined with improved customer satisfaction. Some of the systems that are part of hosted customer care self-service:
Next generation IVR
Speech technology platforms -- Interpreter, recognizer, TTS etc.
Knowledge base -- Set of generic highly tuned speech modules for target verticals
Additional hosted customer care solutions include:
ACD
CTI
Call recording and analysis
CC: Are small call centers the main market for hosted systems?
AF: Definitely not. BeVocal, as an example serves both Tier 1 wireless service providers such as Cingular with thousands of agents as well as smaller high growth providers such as MetroPCS having smaller call centers leverage BeVocal's hosted systems.
CC: How well do hosted systems scale up?
AF: Hosted systems typically operate at 50%-70% capacity across all clients. This means that any one client typically has access to spare capacity in the range of three to four times their current port usage. Hosting systems capacity is added proactively as the 70% threshold is reach.
Furthermore, hosted systems are typically designed from the ground up to handle very large call volumes, so they are in a much better position to scale versus small scale systems that are upgraded piecemeal.
CC: We've seen a lot of growth in hosted speech services; is that indicative of a trend that companies are interested in off-loading the most technical and non-agent-facing pieces of their technology?
AF: BeVocal believes that the growth of hosted speech services is inscribed into a larger trend: that of re-invention of the customer touch point. 20 years ago companies turned to CPE (Customer Premise Equipment) touch-tone based IVRs for cost reductions and later integrated speech capabilities to these systems to improve performance. Today, companies are looking to change the customer touch point -- achieve far greater automation rates as well as satisfaction and try to transform customer interactions into marketing touchpoints -- deliver promotional messages and drive sales through the automated speech channel.
IVR as a customer interaction point is evolving to a marketing touchpoint and hosted managed service providers are best positioned to make it happen.
CC: Flip side of that last question: what's the status of the market for hosting of the agent-facing pieces? Are there any call centers that are interested in having their workforce management or their monitoring/recording systems done off-premise, for example?
AF: Yes. CTI and Monitoring/recording systems are two examples of call centers hosting the agent-facing pieces.
CC: What are the pricing models for hosting all or part of a call center's technology infrastructure.
AF: BeVocal provides flexible pricing schemes that have a small professional services component but are essentially based on a pay-as-you-grow model. These fees are:
Telephony: Per minute for PSTN & VOIP Application Hosting: Per minute or per transaction
CC: Can you cite some examples of situations where hosting has benefited an end user?
AF: Specific Examples:
BeVocal was able to launch a 300-port order status application for a wireless carrier in one week. This dramatically reduced hold times for the carrier's customers.
BeVocal received a ‘AAA' rating from Vocalabs for Liberty Wireless hosted self-service application.
CC: Are there any hosting "best practices" you can share?
AF: To maximize the success of speech-enabled customer care solutions, a confluence of four areas must exist:
An outsourced ASP model with standardized methodologies to implement continuous application improvement. An outsourced solution where the ASP provides both application development and hosting capabilities allows the service provider to focus on achieving its business objectives rather than on managing complex speech recognition applications and infrastructure. Perhaps most importantly, having standardized methodologies allows ASPs to address the application tuning process in a systematic and comprehensive fashion, therefore yielding predictable, measurable results. Because the ASP has constant access to the application, it can provide faster and more frequent tuning cycles.
Business model alignment through proper pricing structures. Whereas CPE vendors and application development shops take their fees upfront, ASPs should strive to better align their interests with the clients' via "pay-by-the-drink" pricing. This is typically structured as per minute or per call pricing. This not only mitigates risk for the client, but also provides the appropriate incentive for the ASP to overachieve. In other words, with a per minute pricing model, the ASP is generally motivated to drive up automation rates, thereby increasing the number of minutes that it handles and consequently the revenues that it earns from the client. Success-based pricing, whereby the ASP earns higher price points by achieving higher rates of automation or caller satisfaction, further aligns incentives.
Appropriately structured client engagement teams. A client engagement team that is well structured and intimately familiar with the client's organization and business processes can achieve a high level of coordination, which is a necessity to facilitate rapid launch cycles (both initial and subsequent continuous improvement launches). A client engagement team must be comprised of the requisite client-facing resources (client account manager, project managers) and technical resources (applications engineers, voice user interface designers, audio production engineers, and systems engineers). Through this team, the ASP must act as an extension of the client's actual resources, working side by side with the client almost on a daily basis to facilitate the rapid decision-making necessary to push the envelope of application performance.
The underlying technology to facilitate rapid improvements. Lastly, the underlying technology (core application modules, reporting instrumentation and infrastructure, tools to analyze performance data, etc.) must exist to allow for continuous improvement to occur in a rapid, seamless and cost-effective manner. Without this, the client engagement team lacks the transparency to assess current performance and therefore is incapable of rendering insightful decisions on how to improve the applications.
