Every time we visit a major show we tingle with anticipation at the new tools, the fresh ideas, the imagination that the industry has on view. This year's ACCE show, held in September in Seattle, was no exception.
In fact, it was a veritable smorgasbord of innovation, full of new and improved technologies to enhance the call center manager's daily life. We came away from the show invigorated by the breath of fresh, salty Seattle air combined with the flinty-eyed calculation of call center ROI. It's a stirring mixture.
For your consideration and perusal, we present our picks for Best of Show - the tools that set our pulses racing with Nascar-like excitement.
Aheeva's Contact Center Suite
We stopped Aheeva's booth to talk about the Canadian firm's Contact Center Suite, which has recently been updated with support for low bandwidth, more versatile quality monitoring, and more security.
Version 2.2, like previous versions, is based on the Asterisk IP-PBX, an open source PBX/ telephony application for Linux.
Aheeva's customizable systems are integrated on a single platform. Aheeva CCS 2.2 requires only a Web browser for access, making remote monitoring, management and analysis possible anywhere with an Internet connection.
Aheeva says its call center system offers skills-based routing and queue control for inbound calls, outbound capabilities with a range of dialing modes (predictive, preview, progressive and broadcast), quality monitoring tools, full digital recording, load balancing, online management tools and real-time statistics.
They provided us with a really interesting chart describing total cost of ownership compared to a "brand name" call routing system - we can't verify the numbers ourselves, but Aheeva is projecting 49.1% savings over a three year period using Yankee Group-supplied figures for the industry standard.
Asterisk has been around for a while, but this is the first time we've seen a full-fledged call center operation built on it. Aheeva's CCS is definitely worth checking out. 866-348-2581, www.aheeva.com.
SoundBite 6.0 Hosted Voice Messaging
SoundBite makes an outbound automated voice messaging solution, used by more than 250 companies in collections, financial services, telecom and health care, among others. It's a hosted offering, which we like for its cost-effectiveness.
At ACCE they unveiled the latest update to their system, now available as SoundBite 6.0. The new release adds significant enhancements that dramatically increase the ability to create, manage and execute highly effective, automated voice messaging campaigns.
One nice new element is called Enterprise Manager: companies with multiple call center locations can use it to grasp a single view across call centers in disparate locations - whether down the street, across the country, or around the world. With this tool, they can create campaign templates that incorporate best practices that can be shared across the enterprise for a consistent brand experience and reduce redundant efforts across various call center teams.
We talked with product manager John Keyes about the enhancements in the system; he told us that most of Soundbite's users are deploying it in a multi-site environment. You can see our interview with John on our website at www.callcentermagazine.com. 888-465-7632, www.soundbite.com.
XSell's Customer Service Marketing Platform
The XSell Customer Service Marketing Platformis like CRM, but it's super-focused: it helps CSRs become salespeople by giving them desktop information about the customer on the other end of the phone, including previous offers, so when a customer calls, the agent can cross-sell in a smart, targeted, and inoffensive way. If the caller wants to buy, the XSell software securely transmits the customer's information to the fulfillment staff, if any, the call center uses.
Most of XSell's clients are in the financial services right now, but CEO Rob Lee tells us that the software works in the telecom and utilities verticals, too. It works alongside your existing CRM software and it will integrate with the back-office systems it needs to integrate with. XSell's product gets our best of show nod because it makes the process of identifying sales opportunities more scientific. 800-961-1513, www.goxsell.com.
Vocal Laboratories' Express Feedback for Call Centers
Customer service surveys are a great idea that call centers seldom take seriously. Most approach surveys as an after-thought, opting for the automated post-call variety. Minneapolis, MN-based Vocal Laboratories (VocaLabs for short) does live human customer service surveys. It's more expensive than automated, but then it's a lot more serious, too.
VocaLabs CEO Peter Leppik recently wrote in company's excellent blog that the most important difference between human and automated surveys were this: "Human surveys leave the customer with a positive impression. And automated surveys are much cheaper."
If you think the flack that IVRs get in the media reflects real consumer angst about faceless corporate America, then why would you ever use a machine to ask your customers how they thought you were doing?
VocaLabs takes surveys seriously. To them, it's more than data gathering, it's a way of showing your customers that you really are interested in hearing how they think you can improve. That's a powerful message, and that's why VocaLabs' Express Feedback for Call Centers is one of our best of show. 952-941-6580, www.vocalabs.com.
Listen for Answers with etalk's Qfinity Assist
Some of the most intriguing new products we saw at ACCE are harbingers of things to come.
A case in point is Qfiniti Assist from Irving, TX-based etalk.
By way of background, etalk's Qfiniti Enterprise is a quality assurance suite that includes, among other capabilities, tools for monitoring calls and for creating automated post-call surveys. In addition, the parent company of etalk, Autonomy, develops a variety of software products for categorizing information and for identifying spoken words.
Qfiniti Assist uses Autonomy's software to help call center agents locate information about your company on behalf of your customers. Agents either type in key words, or they enable the software to automatically identify and search for words that customers have just said during their conversations with them.
Why is the introduction of Qfiniti Assist significant?
From a tactical perspective, Qfiniti Assist broadens, and speeds up, the way agents conduct real-time searches for information while conversing with customers.
From a strategic perspective, Qfiniti Assist has tremendous implications beyond agents' day-to-day interactions with customers. That's because this module allows you to establish a knowledge base that, over time, becomes informed by the questions customers ask agents.
It's too early to tell how soon this approach to knowledge management will catch on in call centers. But it's an intriguing approach that has caught our attention, and that we believe is worthy of your attention as well. 888-258-1528/972-819-3100, www.etalk.com.
Verint Systems' Suite of Customer Interaction Analytics Services
At ACCE, Melville, NY-based 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. That's precisely what Verint's Customer Interaction Analytics services seek to accomplish, and it's why this suite of services earns a Best of Show award. 631-962-9600, www.verint.com.
Copyright 2006 CMP Media LLC. All rights reserved.
11/1/06, Issue # 1911, page 34.
