More than in any other type of working environment, culture and technology influence each other in call centers. What was once an abstract concept, virtual call centers, has become a reality with the growth of dispersed workforces, including at-home agents.
With the option of establishing a dispersed workforce comes the opportunity to offer agents greater autonomy in their communication with customers. This option becomes all the more appealing if you already expect, as is often true of an at-home workforce, that agents will perform well and will stay with your organization longer if they have the chance to build their careers in customer care beyond the four walls of your call center.
Such flexibility in the deployment of your workforce is only possible if you have flexibility with how you implement the types of technologies that call centers depend on most. In this article, we primarily emphasize vendors that offer various combinations of hosted routing, customer relationship management (CRM) and workforce management tools.
One point to keep in mind is that many of these companies also let you select from numerous other options, such as quality monitoring systems. That's the case with Angel.com, Contactual, Echopass, Five9, Sento and other providers of hosted call center tools.
A number of call center software developers enable their clients to deploy their systems in a hosted fashion. Examples of these companies include workforce management software developers, such as ISC, Pipkins and The WorkForce Management Software Group (WFMSG), as well as developers of CRM and knowledge management tools, such as eGain and RightNow Technologies. Phone switch manufacturers have been offering hosted versions of their call routing systems for years; one phone switch maker that has most recently begun to do so is Aastra Intecom.
Another point to remember is that even if vendors don't host their products on their own, there's a good chance they partner with other companies that offer these products as part of their menus of hosted systems, so it's a good idea to ask vendors what hosting scenarios they can accommodate. For instance, in addition to developing workforce management and call monitoring systems, Spanlink Communications also hosts call routing, interactive voice response (IVR) and conferencing software from Cisco.
What's more, there is a good chance that your telecom company has created a more sophisticated menu of services than it likely offered during the era of Centrex more than a decade ago. In addition to the large carriers, smaller telecom companies such as EagleACD, NovaTel Networks and UCN host routing systems and other tools for call centers.
One broad category of hosted tools, IVR and speech recognition systems, has become so prevalent that we devoted an entire feature article to them in the May 2007 issue. In a sidebar within this article, we briefly describe how these systems fit within the greater realm of hosted call center tools. We also point you to several Webcasts that illustrate how hosted systems change not only the infrastructure, but also the culture, of call centers.
Top Priorities in Hosting
What types of hosted tools do call centers tend to implement? Most vendors we interviewed agree that call centers are most likely to rely on providers of hosted tools to set up routing systems instead of or alongside those they deploy in-house.
"Routing is absolutely mandatory since without it there is no contact center," says Steve Kowarsky, executive vice president and co-founder of CosmoCom. "Regardless of type, the whole point is to get the contact to the right person. A hosted environment frees that routing from physical boundaries so the call can literally be routed anywhere."
Bruce Dresser, chief marketing officer of Echopass, which hosts a number of software tools from other vendors, concurs. "Obviously, within the call center environment, getting the right call to the most effective and best equipped agent through intelligent skills-based call routing or distribution continues to be a high priority," he says. "It has a direct impact on the bottom line by cutting down customer wait times, improving customer service and optimizing agent productivity."
Referring to his company's clients, Greg Brashier, vice president of marketing and sales with Virtual PBX, a developer of hosted call routing systems, describes routing as "the one hosted application they cannot live without."
"The next most likely need is CRM, followed closely by workforce management," he says.
By contrast, Raj Mruthyunjayappa, vice president of global hosting and support with Talisma, has observed different tendencies among Talisma's clients, who he says "are specifically interested in the following hosted applications: workforce management and customer interaction management (CIM) tools" that keep track of agents' communication with customers. He finds that "Talisma's clients still prefer to host their own phone and routing systems in-house."
Mruthyunjayappa also reports "increased receptiveness" among clients to deploying hosted call centers at all. He points out that fewer "than two years ago, 20% of Talisma's customers were interested in deploying our hosted solutions; that figure is now approximately 50%."
How are call centers' choices of hosted systems changing?
"We see more emphasis on recording and integration," says CosmoCom's Kowarsky. "This is likely due to an increased focus on customer satisfaction and retention. We're also finding that more clients and prospects are looking at the unifying nature of hosted call center technology as a means of consolidating their call center operations across locations to unite the formal call center, the informal call center -- information workers -- and even outsourcers under one common platform."
Some providers of hosted call center tools are broadening the types of systems they offer. As Tom Milligan, a vice president with UCN puts it, they "have shifted their focus from being just a CRM provider or just an IVR provider." UCN, for instance, hosts a combination of routing, IVR and screen pop tools, as well as workforce management and post-call survey software UCN acquired from other vendors earlier this year. UCN refers to the collective suite of these hosted tools as inContact.
Several executives from providers of hosted call center systems say that security has emerged among their clients' top concerns during the past few years.
"We're seeing the biggest priority shift in the direction of security," says Raun Kilgo, director of product management with Aspect Software. "Hosted contact centers are looking for stringent security features in their technology at all levels and are trying to develop a hacker-free environment. As a result, database security is constantly evaluated, as are business process operations and the methods for obtaining private customer information for sales, customer service and collections."
For these reasons, explains Kilgo, "hosting is not necessarily ideal for contact centers that have very strict security privacy laws, either local or federally mandated."
Sue Andersen, product marketing manager with Empirix, cites health care as an example of an industry that emphasizes security, and she points out that Empirix has helped "health care providers with Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) compliance by ensuring that the environment is secure and that data is not compromised." Empirix offers hosted tools that test whether a wide range of systems - including routing systems, predictive dialers, call monitoring systems, IVR systems and screen pops that appear on agents' computers as customers' calls come in -- function the way you expect them to.
Changes in call centers' priorities with regard to hosting also reflect cultural developments in the ways organizations define the roles of call centers.
"One of our clients -- Health Advocate -- is not concerned with traditional call center metrics like first call resolution and call durations," says Randy Saunders, marketing manager of customer experience management systems with Cincom Systems. "Instead, their priority is ensuring the customer's issue is resolved, regardless of how many calls and the time it takes to get it done. However, they aren't turning a blind eye to the costs."
Adds Saunders: "We see this trend increasing as more call centers are using power agents, or professionals in their respective fields, such as nurses, art curators, brokers and master technicians. This contrasts with the more traditional hourly employee that we all think of."
Among the best-known providers of hosted call center tools are those that offer IVR and speech recognition systems.
These types of vendors have become especially appealing to call centers because, as John Joseph, vice president of corporate marketing with Envox Worldwide explains, they are excellent sources of "hard-to-find expertise for design, development, deployment and maintenance."
Joseph cites the example of Green Mountain Energy, an Austin, TX-based provider of electricity, which contracted with Envox Worldwide to set up a hosted speech-enabled IVR system. This was an alternative to the more cumbersome in-house touchtone IVR system the utility's customers had encountered and often eschewed in favor of speaking with agents.
What's more, observes Bruce Eidsvik, a vice president with Genesys, hosted IVR and speech recognition systems are less costly, and call centers can usually deploy them more quickly, than their on-site counterparts.
"Premises-based speech and IVR projects generally have long lead times as it is necessary for such projects to get all the necessary resources in place," says Eidsvik. "Hosted application deployments, on the other hand, take between 30 to 50% less time to set up. In some cases, when the applications pre-exist, the service can be set up in days."
Eidsvik challenges the notion that hosted systems are most appropriate for small and midsize operations. "There is no definitive call volume that dictates when a premises-based system is warranted; it is really up to the company to decide," he says. "The common misconception is that the bigger the deployment, the more sense it makes to host it."
Many providers of hosted call center tools highlight the implementation of their products in call centers that employ at-home agents and other dispersed workforces.
In addition, vendors that are currently less well-known to call centers, like Sentillion, are making inroads into these operations by offering hosted remote access software so that at-home agents can use many of the same tools that their on-site colleagues rely on without having to install these tools on their own computers.
Given call centers' growing interest in hosted systems and in at-home workforces, Call Center Magazine developed several Webcasts about these topics.
For example, a December 2006 Webcast, titled "Forget What You Thought You Knew About Hosting: It's Really All About Better Service," and sponsored by Envox Worldwide, makes a compelling case for the role of hosted systems in improving customer service. This February also featured two Webcasts about dispersed workforces. One is in the context of at-home agents; the other is in the context of business continuity.
More recently, an April 2007 Webcast explicitly addresses the link between the flexibility of a staffing model that accommodates at-home agents, and a deployment model that accommodates on-demand call center tools. This Webcast, titled "Think Outside the Call Center Cubicle: Utilize At-Home Agents to Expand Your Workforce While Maintaining Quality Standards," describes how the outsourcer LiveXchange implements on-demand call center tools from Oracle to enable its team of remote agents to assist customers on behalf of Direct Energy, Pizza Hut, The Shopping Channel and other clients.
You can view and listen to all these online events by selecting from the list of archived Webcasts on CallCenterMagazine.com.
Meet Your Hosts
These are among the numerous companies that can hook you up with hosted call center systems.
Aastra Intecom
800-468-3266
Angel.com
888-MY-ANGEL
Aspect Software
978-250-7900
Cincom Systems
800-2CINCOM/513-612-2769
Contactual
877-725-2621
CosmoCom
631-940-4200
EagleACD
800-339-7171
Echopass
801-258-7000
eGain
800-821-4358
Empirix
866-EMPIRIX/781-266-3200
Envox Worldwide
508-898-2600
Five9
925-201-2000
Genesys
888-GENESYS
ISC
212-477-8800
NovaTel Networks
210-698-8005
Oracle
866-906-7878
Pipkins
314-469-6106
RightNow Technologies
877-363-5678/406-522-4200
Sentillion
978-689-9095
Sento
801-431-9200
Spanlink Communications
763-971-2000
Talisma
888-462-3484/425-688-3800
UCN
888-UCN-0002/801-320-3200
Virtual PBX
888-825-0800/415-221-6600
WFMSG
877-668-6870
Copyright 2007 CMP Media LLC. All rights reserved.
6/1/07, Issue # 2006, page 16.
