Call Center: What kinds of call center systems or applications best lend themselves to a hosted configuration?
Vin Deschamps: The answer here is really about individual customer needs, and no two customers are exactly alike. That's why Echopass takes an end-to-end, integrated platform approach, offering customers complete but flexible solutions for a wide range of their call and contact center requirements on an on-demand hosted basis. The Echopass EchoSystem offers hosted options for the following call/contact center needs, which reflect the complex requirements we see from our customers in the marketplace: inbound voice call handling with some blending of outbound, complete e-media services -- for handling email, chat and web collaboration interactions, and full multi-channel services, which combines IVR, inbound/ outbound voice and e-service with added functionality such as web-call backs and skill-based routing of voicemails and faxes. Additionally, Echopass either integrates and/or hosts CRM applications from all major CRM vendors, including Microsoft, salesforce.com and RightNow Technologies to provide a complete, seamless customer solution that includes hosted CRM with the Echopass hosted Call Center telephony, fully integrated and delivered as a managed service by Echopass.
CC: Are small call centers the main market for hosted systems?
VD: Not necessarily; and this, too, depends upon the customer and their needs. It's widely accepted that for budgetary and scalability reasons, hosted systems make a lot of sense for small call centers because there's no capital expense. That's part of the same analysis and decision-making process for the larger call center customer market where Echopass focuses. What has changed in the past few years has been the increased adoption of hosted or on-demand models by the type of larger enterprise customers we serve that typically have anywhere from 50 to 300 agents in any one location. We have customers in the financial services, hospitality, transportation, government and retail sectors, as well as outsourcers. These larger enterprises have been either migrating from premise-based to our hosted model or looking at Echopass for disaster recovery options, both of which are continuing to fuel our business. Customers with larger call centers now understand the benefits of moving away from "owning" their own infrastructure, so it is less of a challenge to have to "educate" them about software as a service or managed services. On top of this, customers today are looking for a "wow" factor -- a way to differentiate using technology to deliver over-the-top experiences to their customers. Hosting partners can help make customer service faster, better, more complete and more personalized, whether that customer is large or small.
CC: How well do hosted systems scale up?
VD: In the real world, the number of call center agents customers might need can change at any time. A special promotion, a seasonal spike or some other event can suddenly create a requirement for either more (or less) agents, or new features added to the existing agent feature set. If you're stuck with inflexible hardware- based call centers, not being able to adapt your agent staff could leave you with unacceptable customer delays, negatively impact your customer service levels and irreparably damage your reputation. The beauty of hosted, on-demand systems is that they can easily and quickly scale to fit changing business needs. In other words, you receive exactly the capacity you need, exactly when you need it, every single day. For example, we're proud to have Kodak as an Echopass customer. They are an example of a company that sees a spike in their business in the fourth quarter of the year. Echopass scales to meet their requirements on-demand whenever they need to adjust their agent base to ensure they can handle the increased volume.
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?
VD: It's certainly a trend in that companies are looking to improve the overall customer experience and often this means hosting part of the technology. Some of these technologies that we integrate with, or companies we partner with in our EchoSystem platform delivery, are in the same vein. As an example, Echopass integrates with a number of customer self-service options, so an end user can get simple answers without ever having to speak with a call center agent. This provides better customer service, drives down wait times and is more cost effective for our customer. If, for example, that end user still needs to speak with an agent after finding out their order status via self service, Echopass can route that call to a pre-defined agent, bringing the entire self-service call history, so the agent has all that data at their fingertips right when the call is transferred.
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?
VD: There are numerous customers with these types of requirements, and we do our best to customize the right solution to their needs. In fact, we integrate to workforce management systems such as TCS, and we provide our customers with the ability to have call recordings stored and archived at our SAS70 certified data center in Salt Lake City. This has enabled some of our medical industry customers to meet HIPPA compliance requirements that they could not either reach or maintain on their own. By and large, if a customer is open to having some portion of their infrastructure hosted, they tend be open to having "more" of that infrastructure hosted. As another example, Echopass is the first US Company offering hosted Microsoft Dynamics CRM along with a hosted call center. For customers who want that application on premise, they've got that choice, and for those customers who want that application hosted, they've got Echopass to host it for them. This is why Microsoft chose Echopass as a hosting partner.
CC: It seems like there's a gray area developing between traditional outsourcing (where capacity is sent off premise based by the seat) and hosting, where all or some of the underlying tech infrastructure is sent off site, and the seats remain inhouse. What's to account for this? Where do you see it going?
VD: Global business trends such as outsourcing, "home-shoring" and off-shoring, combined with technology advancements, have affected the call center market and made the industry more competitive and effective. Echopass provides solutions for both traditional outsourced call centers, as well as hosted contact centers for corporations and government entities. Echopass Call Center On-Demand supports local agents, remote agents and multi-site virtual on-demand contact centers. Because Echopass hosts the entire infrastructure, the agents only require PCs connected to the organization's LAN (via high speed cable or DSL for work-at-home agents), and management can monitor and supervise their agents whether they are all in one physical location, spread over multiple sites, or working from home.
CC: What are the pricing models for hosting all or part of a call center's technology infrastructure?
VD: Echopass pricing is on a "per user, per month" subscription basis, which ensures that customers pay only for what they need. Due to the customized approach we take for every implementation/project, subscription rates vary on a case-by-case basis. In general, however the apples-to-apples comparison looks like this. The per agent cost of an on premise solution is between $10,000 and $15,000 per agent, which consists of the following: ACD or switch, sophisticated call routing, IVR, voicemail, call recording and other features, plus the additional costs to integrate all these systems with the rest of the company's infrastructure, plus support and maintenance, plus the costs of internal staff to maintain all the moving parts. With Echopass, the cost is only $250 per agent, per month, which is fully integrated and managed from end to end, and unlike any hardware platform, can be scaled up or down to add agents or features at any time, on- demand.
CC: Can you cite some examples of situations where hosting has benefited an end user?VD: Yes, we have a lot of examples. Improved customer service and higher agent satisfaction are consistent benefits throughout our customer base. Here are some specific examples:
Outrigger, the largest locally-owned hospitality chain in Hawaii, decided that a hosted system was a better business decision and a better model, after having a premise-based solution with Aspect for 15 years. Their existing ACD system had become expensive to maintain and was still limited in functionality and flexibility. They wanted to lower their technology purchase and maintenance costs, plus create a new system that could integrate all inbound customer contact channels to add more "touch points," plus add new features and capacity whenever needed, plus future proof their business against a growing need to have agents working from home. Echopass was the answer. Outrigger's end users now enjoy a significantly better overall customer experience, while, internally, more volume can be handled by their agents without increasing staff; and both back-office and agent efficiencies have improved, along with higher agent satisfaction. Since Outrigger leveraged Echopass technology to institute a work-at-home option for agents, they've reduced the need for office space and can now have agents placed in different time zones in order to improve customer service levels. Outrigger is handling a 15 to 20 percent increase in their business using fewer agents than before.
Ulta, a fast-growing, one-stop upscale beauty store for women, also needed a better way to streamline their call center operations to meet their customer demands. Because of Ulta's meteoric growth, inbound contacts from customers and in-store personnel had become increasingly difficult to manage. A major concern was the company's fragmented call center infrastructure. With that earlier infrastructure, when customers were referred to their local Ulta store for assistance, the calls never reached the store. On the e-commerce side, incoming email messages from Ulta's cyber store, Ulta.com, were handled by an outsourced web response company. Ulta realized that consolidating and improving its call center operations was an essential priority as the company continued its expansion. Ulta's primary goals were to route all service requests to a single source and to establish a self-service capability for customers who needed routine questions answered, such as store hours or directions. With their hosted solution from Echopass, Ulta accomplished all of these objectives, plus added a robust call center reporting capability that helped improve overall call center performance. After implementing their custom Echopass EchoSystem, Ulta's abandoned call counts decreased from 25 percent to 7 percent; customer wait times were reduced from an average of 3 ½ minutes to 45 seconds; 95 percent of all customer issues were resolved within 24 hours; and there are 36 percent fewer inbound calls due to customer self-service.
CC: Can you perhaps tell us when hosting might not be the best option? In other words, are there circumstances in which premise-based tools are the best choice, maybe for reasons of security or privacy?
VD: All of the key analyst firms that cover the call center market (e.g., Yankee Group, Gartner, Forrester, IDC, Datamonitor, Frost and Sullivan, Saddletree and the 451 Group) agree that the trend of hosting call centers taking market share from the premise-based vendors will continue to grow, at a rate of 10 percent, 15 percent, or even 25 percent per year. If the hosting provider is SAS70 certified like Echopass, clients can be assured that security and privacy issues are part of the guaranteed service, just like satisfying their other regulatory compliance or business continuity concerns. Echopass takes care of those issues, so they're not reasons to "stay" with a premise-based solution at all. Are there still companies that prefer to own their hardware? Yes, and those companies will continue to do so. We provide the alternative choice, one that we, and our customers, believe is better for them, whatever the metric or rationale may be.
CC: There's also an emerging gray area that seems to encompass a) companies that make "all in one" or "call center in a box" platforms; b) those that make IP-based switching systems; and c) those that offer these platforms as either premise or hosted options. How should a company evaluate the different choices that are available to them? Are there any useful criteria for selecting one model over another? Are there any guidelines or rules of thumb that they can use for determining what's right for their particular situations?
VD: The evolution of contact center technology, and the various solutions available today, can make it confusing for companies that are trying to understand, compare and decide upon various solutions. IP telephony makes it very efficient and effective to distribute application functionality across corporations and render the distance between corporate locations and call center personnel irrelevant. IP telephony now enables remote control and management of contact centers via high-speed bandwidth and a standard browser interface. In general, analysts predict and we already see about 25 percent of contact center implementations being via hosted platform solutions.
Some companies will still prefer to maintain maximum control over their technology. For them, a premise-based solution may be the answer. They can choose to supply their own agents, IT management and supervisory personnel onsite to run the operation, or opt for an "in-sourced" option in which hardware and software remains on-premise, but non-company personnel staff manages the operation. Beyond traditional premise- based and hosted contact centers is another option of an "outsourced" contact center solution. In this scenario, enterprise personnel are relieved of most operational responsibilities and the contact center itself is moved to a remote site and becomes the responsibility of a third-party organization under contract to provide personnel and maintain specified levels of service required by the enterprise.
To make the decision process easier, executives should consider their decisions in light of their organization's business needs. This means considering current and future customer demand, as well as corporate and product/service expansion plans and balancing all of these factors with the internal business and IT organization structure and resources and what impact these decisions have upon customer service and support levels. Some questions they should ask would include:
Do we need to deploy rapidly?
Does our business fluctuate?
Is our business changing?
What are my internal IT resources?
Do we have a business continuity plan or requirement for one?
How important is it to be on demand, always on, guaranteed and end-to end?
CC: Are there any hosting "best practices" you can share?
Certainly. Echopass' customers have achieved tremendous results with our hosted, on demand contact center solutions, including improved customer service (i.e., fewer abandoned calls, reduction in customer wait time, faster resolution of customer issues), better trained and more effective agents, and more efficient management of the contact center (i.e., few agents needed, better utilization, lower operating costs and ability to manage more volume with fewer personnel). Some of their best practices include:
Establish a self-service capability for customers who have routine questions.
Consider integrating CRM capability with your call center for faster, more complete and personalized customer service.
Understand what makes your customers call (e.g. is it a rewards program?), and make those answers easy to obtain through your call center.
Intelligently route inbound requests according to their particular requirements to make sure that the right call gets to the right agent with the right skill set, whether based on foreign language, customer type or other variables.
Establish one agent interface for all communications -- so agents can easily field phone, email and other forms of contact such as faxes or web chats .
Use reporting functionality to track requests and determine how to train agents.
Monitor overall system and individual agent performance to ensure consistently high service levels and pinpoint problem areas should they arise.
Cross train contact center agents so they can handle any form of electronic request, from phone calls to Internet chat to faxes and email, eliminating the need to re-deploy workers when call volumes are heavy.
Leverage available technology and the needs of your employees to institute a work-at-home option for agents, reducing the need for office space and allowing agents to be placed in different time zones in order to improve customer service levels.
Keep the main focus where it should be -- customer loyalty and retention. That's what ultimately counts, and that's what Echopass helps enable in a better way.
