Each time we visit a locale for one of our intimate Call Center Demo shows, we come back impressed with the sights and full of ideas. Our trip to Miami in February was no exception. While we basked in the warmth of the South Florida sun, the real heat was on the Demo floor, where we encountered strong evidence that a renaissance in strategic thinking was in full swing.

Some of the things that struck us while traversing the show floor and meeting behind the scenes with call center practitioners and equipment vendors:

• People are finally tackling turnover in a straightforward, earnest way. The clearest evidence of this was in the emergence of new, improved and scientific pre-hire assessment tools. Some of them were so impressive we went right to them for our choices as Best of Show (read more about the specifics below).

• Remote agents are a reality right now. They are not on the horizon, they are not imminent. They are happening all over the country, deployed by centers large and small for a variety of very good reasons. The underlying infrastructure fabric is ready for a large-scale move, and some of the most interesting call center case studies we've been looking at recently are making the move. (Incidentally, we think that instead of calling these people "remote," "virtual" or "home" agents, we should start referring to this trend as "dispersed agents" or collectively, as a "dispersed workforce.")

• There was a surprising emphasis (in both tools and session presentations) on business problems rather than on the traditional "squeeze every ounce of telephonic efficiency out of every call and every agent." We heard a lot about measuring customer satisfaction, managing expectations among staff and customers, about aligning call center results with the goals of the organization. We encountered more people than ever before who took it for granted that the whole enterprise rests on the ability of the call center to manage the customer experience, not just react to it.

Can it be that the industry in transition is starting to find itself a secure footing as the engine of enterprise sales, service and customer management? We think so. Here are some of the things that caught our eyes while we wandered the halls in search of sustenance (both intellectual and nutritional).

Cincom Systems' Cincom Synchrony 7.0

One of the many highlights of attending Call Center Demo and Conference in Miami was seeing how trends in call center management dovetail with the development of new products.

A great illustration of this is Cincom Synchrony 7.0 from Cincinnati-based Cincom Systems. This latest version of Synchrony combines automated dialing, callback scheduling and campaign management tools with the agent desktop interface that we have already recognized among this year's Products of the Year.

Automated dialing, callback scheduling and campaign management aren't only for salespeople or telemarketers. The trend in call centers today is toward meshing service and sales where it's appropriate (as is the case with a call center that represents a bank or a retail catalog, but not with a call center that represents, say, a funeral home). Outbound promotions and follow-up communication are methods that call centers have come to depend on to sustain revenue, even if these centers primarily answer inquiries from customers.

We're pleased to see Cincom incorporate outbound tools as part of its overall agent desktop interface. Cincom Synchrony 7.0 earns a Best of Show award for the ease with which it lets agents use the same software, whether they reach out to customers or assist customers who get in touch with them.

FurstPerson's Hire@Home

More companies have become open to enabling agents to assist customers from their homes, and they are ready to deploy technology to make this possible. But many companies consider it a challenge to predict which individuals -- including candidates for jobs and agents already on staff -- will perform at their best when they're not in close proximity to their colleagues.

Chicago-based FurstPerson addresses this specific issue with the introduction of Hire@Home. This software comprises online pre-hire assessment and job simulation tools that indicate whether agents or candidates for positions as agents have the skills and traits to work from their homes. In addition, the software verifies that agents have set up their computers to allow them do their jobs. If you're planning to bring new at-home agents on your team, the software lets you automate how you schedule different stages of the hiring process, including assessments and interviews.

We're impressed with Hire@Home, which Jeff Furst, CEO of FurstPerson, demonstrated for us in the exhibit hall in Miami. We also believe that Hire@Home's value extends beyond gauging how well agents will perform from their homes. Given that Hire@Home assesses the types of positions and work environments that best suit agents, the software is useful more generally for identifying individuals who work effectively with less in-person supervision and more independence than in traditional call centers.

Hire@Home earns a Best of Show award because it helps companies employ not only the right technology, but also the best call center agents, to work from the remote settings that we expect will characterize call centers of the near future.

HRMC Acclaim

There are lots of ways to attack turnover and reduce the overall cost of labor in the center, but what's most important is getting the right person in the job in the first place. There's a growing reliance on using professionals to sort through the large pools of people needed for ongoing staffing. And those professionals are turning to sophisticated automated models for help in making the right match between center and agent.

The Human Resource Management Center, known as HRMC, has an automated pre-hire tool we looked at called Acclaim. We like it as much for the zip of its integrated phone and web technology as we do for some of the philosophical assumptions that undergird it.

The way it works is to pre-screen, interview and evaluate candidates before handing them off to live recruiters for consideration. Acclaim administers the questions, ranks and filters the applicants based on those answers, and schedules the most qualified for the next round of screening. It also builds in job simulations so Acclaim can evaluate specific job-readiness skills. Overall, HRMC claims to reduce hiring from a traditional six to eight week process down to 15 minutes. We didn't get to see that dramatic a reduction in action, but they did tell us that they can conduct as many as 1,500 simultaneous job interviews via IVR.

One of the things that they told us that really struck a chord was the idea that a lot of hiring decisions are actually made backwards. People traditionally define the job they are looking to fill by establishing the minimum qualifications they'll accept for that job -- the lowest possible threshold of performance. HRMC advocates the opposite: define the best qualifications from the start and, if you're hiring in volume, you'll pack your staff from the top performers down, instead of from the middle up.

IQ Services

Load testing for call centers is not a crowded field. As far as we can tell, only two firms do it, and we'd like to focus on one of them for our Best of Show award: IQ Services.

But the firm says its real competition is with an uninformed market: not everyone knows what they do, or just how vital a service it really is.

Here's a short explanation: When a call center sets up its technology, it needs to know that it's going to work. IQ Services tests call centers by bombarding them with hundreds of calls and internet browser sessions to see if they can handle it. This will show you if your center's technology is going to break when sudden floods of calls come in, or if a sustained heavy load will tax the system in ways you can only predict by simulation.

Their StressTest service for phone systems simulates peaks and heavy call volume, the WebStress service does the same for Web-based contact center services and both are offered as continuing monitor services. All services give you recorded calls or HTML files to show you what's happening when customers call in, so you can isolate problems before your actual customers encounter them.

NICE SmartCenter

Last year, when NICE Systems acquired IEX and Performix, they swallowed a set of tools that are a necessary complement to NICE's historic call recording base. IEX was a long-term workforce management powerhouse, with a lot of experience in complex and multi-site scheduling. One of the important questions at that time was how far they should (or would) go to integrate the separate products.

This month they unwrapped their approach: the NICE SmartCenter. It's an umbrella offering that combines the workforce management, performance analytics and the monitoring feedback tools under one banner. The underlying products retain their separate functionality and character; they remain just as usable as separate entities as they were pre-unification. But what this does, smartly, is put them together in a way that makes them maximally useful to a call center operation.

Administration of all the components can be handled through a single unified user interface, for example. Report extraction works the same intuitive way. You no longer have to extract one set of KPIs about agent activity in one place, and then coordinate it with data about performance goals in another place. IEX's TotalView information on workforce schedules is visible through a "My Universe" portal that's part of the overall umbrella. Performance data can spawn the need for coaching, which can now be intelligently scheduled through TotalView. And they've added an integrated look at KPIs to the mix, making it a smart center indeed.

NICE executives told us that they are planning to preserve the separate identities and product update cycles of the originally independent units within SmartCenter.

The Workforce Management Software Group

The Workforce Management Software Group (WFMSG) started as a consulting firm, helping call centers effectively use the workforce management software they already owned. They found that most centers had very sophisticated and comprehensive tools, but very little idea how to make them work.

Enter Symon, the readerboard company. Symon commissioned the consulting firm to use its expertise in workforce management to create a new, ground-up software system for them. The software worked out, but the partnership dissolved when Symon no longer needed the system after an acquisition. The WFMSG was born when the consulting firm bought back the rights to their creation from Symon.

The result is a new kind of workforce management system, one designed by people who heard all the worst complaints from the users of a variety of systems for years. It's called Community, and it's completely web-based. The idea behind Community, as the name suggests, is that everyone in the call center uses it -- it's designed to be that simple. What's more, Community was designed with today's Web-savvy generation in mind.

The Workforce Management Software Group's Community is one of the most interesting innovations in workforce management in years, and maybe the first totally new system in more than a decade.

Copyright 2007 CMP Media LLC. All rights reserved. 5/1/07, Issue # 2005, page 36.

---