We're approaching the midpoint of the decade. And things are looking up.

We had a good-sized and good-natured crowd at Call Center Demo in Dallas. That was clear from our well-attended conference sessions, some of which you can see for yourself on the magazine's Web site, www.callcentermagazine.com. In a state best known for football, cheerleaders and oil, there was indeed a high level of energy among attendees. That, too, is visible from our live interviews with industry executives, which you can also watch from our Web site.

But it was the exhibit hall where the energy was most apparent. Also apparent was the widening access that call centers of all sizes have to technologies that were once exclusively for places with hundreds or thousands of agents. With a combination of tools that route calls over IP networks and offer new ways to plan for the lifecycles of agents' careers, all indications are that Call Center Demo in Dallas is the start of something big.

By big, we're not only referring to size. We're talking about the emergence of a broader view of call centers' impact on the customers they serve, the employees they develop and the businesses they represent. In our upcoming events in Orlando and Seattle later this year, look for more tools on the show floor and more discussions in conference sessions that reveal, from a bird's-eye perspective, how the aims of a call center's constituents — businesses, customers and agents — are all coming together.

Beyond A Call Center's Walls

Mobility and knowledge agents were among the big topics in Dallas, no question. More companies than ever are intrigued by the option of using voice over IP to connect customers on the fly not only to call center agents, but also to specialized experts outside the call center.

AltiGen (Fremont, CA) and its latest release of AltiWare, version 5.0, caught our attention in this area with a nifty feature that makes the knowledge worker model very possible, especially for small and mid-size businesses.

AltiGen calls this feature the Alti-Mobile Extension. Here's the deal: AltiWare lets a company treat any phone with a unique number, including a mobile or home phone number, as though it is a full-fledged extension connected to the company's phone switch.

Many systems let companies blindly transfer calls to outside numbers. But here, you actually get the same call routing, transferring and conferencing capabilities as any extension within your company. If, for instance, a knowledge worker, like a computer networking expert or a mortgage specialist, is based in San Francisco but is traveling to New York, AltiWare lets you direct calls to the knowledge worker's wireless phone. If the knowledge worker then needs to transfer a caller to a colleague in Los Angeles, all he or she has to do is send the call to the colleague's three- or four-digit extension. You get the picture.

What's more, "full-fledged" applies both to incoming and outgoing calls. With AltiWare, you can also allow knowledge workers to dial in, and access all the features of the phone system, from outside your company. How do we know this is possible? When we were in the exhibit hall in Dallas, one of the folks at AltiGen's booth took a call on a wireless phone and transferred the call to a colleague, simply by dialing the colleague's three-digit extension. Now that's mobility. And that's why AltiGen's AltiWare 5.0 earns a Best of Show award at Call Center Demo Dallas.

A Unified Agent Desktop from Cincom's Synchrony

Cincom's (Norcross, GA) Synchrony is a suite of tools that lets you manage communication with customers in two ways: by tracking customer data and by coordinating how this data circulates among myriad back-end applications.

What's most intriguing about Synchrony is something Cincom doesn't make a lot of noise about, but should: integrating the agent desktop. Call centers hamper agents' productivity when they require agents to flip back and forth among applications that fight for attention and space on agents' screens.

One of the things Synchrony has going for it is a very powerful framework that presents customer data to agents in a single view. When agents don't have to look at multiple screens or windows to see all the information they need to assist customers, agents require less training. They make fewer errors. And interactions become more fruitful.

Part of this derives from Synchrony's architecture. It's totally Web-based, and is available to agents from a central server. Synchrony's Agent Anywhere capability lets agents and managers log into the system from any location with a browser. And Synchrony also lets you push certain aspects of the system past your firewall to become part of a self-service system for your customers.

Cincom describes its approach as "a unified 360-degree view of the customer" — something many call centers aim for in theory but rarely achieve in practice. In this case, we are very impressed that beyond providing agents with access to complete customer interaction and transaction histories, Synchrony allows agents to maintain knowledge of customers, across all communication channels, on an ongoing basis. It is for this reason that Synchrony earns a Best of Show award.

Agent Development in Action

We first started writing about agent development when we noticed that vendors were starting to smudge the boundaries between different product categories. We got the notion that finally the call center community was starting to think about solving long-term structural problems — in which the agent plays a critical role — and not just day-to-day operational problems.

Vendors are starting to acknowledge that call center managers need to understand the lifecycle of the agent's tenure in the context of a closed loop that incorporates training and assessment. No product we've seen lately embodies this approach more than the newest version of Dictaphone's (Stratford, CT) ContactPoint Workforce Relationship Management system.

ContactPoint comprises three modules — Recruiter, Trainer and Assessor — all of which share a competency model that outlines the skills and traits agents need to be effective. At Call Center Demo Dallas in February, Dictaphone introduced new capabilities of this suite; the addition of these capabilities earns ContactPoint a Best of Show award.

We especially liked ContactPoint's new workflow engine, which identifies what actions, such as providing more frequent feedback about calls or assigning training courses, might help an agent become more proficient at communicating with customers. The engine lets you track the status of these actions and their effects on an agent's performance.

Dictaphone's newly-enhanced ContactPoint Trainer module automatically updates you as to whether agents have started and completed courses you assigned them. If you expect lots of agents to receive the same training, ContactPoint Trainer lets you vary the order of the test questions during their courses. The module also enables you to set time limits for finishing one or more courses.

What's more, ContactPoint allows you to define incentives based on various performance indicators, so that, for instance, agents accumulate rewards when they cross-sell callers, or when they consistently earn high marks from customers and your company for the service they provide. And, since ContactPoint is a suite, the system lets you report on, and draw correlations among, all aspects of an agent's development, from how agents score in training courses to how much progress they make in their evaluations as a result of coaching.

Cast A Wide Net With SER's CPS E2

What did we like most about SER's (Dulles, VA) latest version of its predictive dialing system? CPS Enterprise Edition, otherwise known as CPS E2 (as in e-squared), treats the people you're calling as a population, rather than as a list.

Let's say you have a team of collections agents who are reaching out to customers who are late on paying their charge card bills. You've segmented customers by geographic location, so that some agents, for example, get lists of customers in Montana who are late with bills, regardless of how long past due these payments are.

The problem you encounter is that the division of labor, in the lists you've set up, is inefficient. Worse, the organization of the lists doesn't address your company's priority, which is to collect payments as soon as possible.

The approach CPS E2 takes is to enable you to define customers in terms of broad characteristics, independently of the lists on which you place customers. So, for instance, you can aggregate a set of customers who are 30 days late on payments, another set of customers who are 60 days late, and so on. CPS E2 gives you the option of overlapping characteristics that customers share. If you define, say, a set of customers with balances between $100 and $500, CPS E2 lets you include or exclude customers who are a certain number of days past due.

Why is this important? Vendors that offer predictive dialing systems often tout specific features of their dialing algorithms. SER, for example, points out that its dialer can accommodate multiple phone numbers per customer and generate multiple calls to the same population as necessary at different times throughout the day. But what really matters in the end is not only whether your company has connected with the people you're aiming to reach (and done so legally), but also whether you can demonstrate how successfully your outbound efforts are going.

By enabling you to aggregate highly specific lists into broader populations, CPS E2 lets you convey your efforts using criteria your company cares about. Your colleagues may not be interested in how many people you reached in Peoria yesterday. But they do care if agents consistently reach and collect from, say, 80% of customers who are 30 days past due. CPS E2 earns a Best of Show award at CC Demo Dallas because it makes it easy to set up campaigns, and to report on them, by referring to attributes of customers that mean the most to your business.

Symon Says Workforce Management is For Everyone

Remember when scheduling was only an option for large call centers? That's changing, due in large part to tools like Symon Communications' (Plano, TX) Symon Community, which makes workforce management possible for call centers that don't have hundreds of seats.

We saw the latest version of Community, version 2.8, for the first time in Dallas. What we liked most is the extent to which Community adds the kinds of capabilities you'd typically expect only with workforce management systems for large centers. One of these capabilities is an automated system to approve agents' requests for time off. Another is a highly flexible way to characterize schedules so that you can assign agents to a fixed schedule during one period of time, and a more variable sequence of hours or days during a different period of time. And since Community enables you to set up forecasts before you schedule agents, the software lets you plan for the long term rather than for the moments agents need to be in their seats.

If workforce management is ever to mature as a discipline, and not just as a product category, then scheduling and forecasting need to be easily available to call centers whether they have hundreds or dozens of seats. Symon Community 2.8 earns a Best of Show award for helping to bring this goal to fruition.