Keep it Simple, Silly

My daughter, taught by her Kindergarten teacher not to use the other ‘S word’, recently scolded me for calling something ‘stupid’, so we’ll stick with ‘silly’ lest she physically unpeel herself from the Sponge Bob video long enough to read my blog.

I just got back from VoiceCon 2009. I saw many interesting exhibits, sessions and presentations, but there’s one session in particular that really stood out.

Unfortunately, it stood out for all the wrong reasons.

I’m referring to a demo presented by a big— as in major— technology player. The demo was supposed to impress the heck out of us. The UC solution was chock full of bells and whistles and did everything except slice julienne fries. Problem was, it was too complex, and it bombed.  I have never seen half a room that size clear out IN THE MIDDLE OF A DEMO.

What went wrong here? This was an innovative giant demonstrating their latest whiz bang UC solution.  Shouldn’t the audience have hung on their every word, already preparing the speech in their heads they’d use to beg the CIO and CFO for money (‘Your Highness, this UC solution will change the world as we know it!!”)?

The problem was the demo, and the functionality it demo’d, was overkill – if it takes a super scientist and his helper 20 minutes to give the demo, how well is it going to be adopted back at the office after the 3^rd failed attempt at using this solution that over-delivers on their needs anyway?  And if it’s only adopted by the tech weenies, then the productivity gains are lost, which misses the whole point.  The entire audience knew that, and the bolder ones stood up and headed for the door.

Contact Center managers face the same dilemma.  Of all the whiz bang self-service, multi-channel options they could offer their customers (CTI, speech recognition, Twitter self-service options, outbound calls and texts, analytics tools that predict customer needs, personalized IVR options, hold time announcements, call backs…and that’s just half the options), which will give them the most bang for the buck?  How will they budget for it, or ever find the time to deploy it all, much less monitor and optimize it?

Here’s the answer.

Pick a vendor whose business is doing all that, and pay them per transaction, so the incentive becomes theirs to find and implement the options that your customers will use the most.  Avoid giving your customers more than they asked for so they don’t walk out on you.

Keep it simple, Stup…ah, I mean, Silly.

Personalized IVR: the Holy Grail of Contact Automation

Have you heard about “personalized IVR”? If you don’t outsource your contact automation to Contact Solutions, I’m betting the answer is a resounding “Huh?”

Personalized IVR takes contact automation miles further than “listen carefully as our menu options have changed.” I’ll give you some examples. First, personalized IVR can be used to target certain customers and push out relevant notifications or interactions, like if you want to alert only your premium credit card customers of an exclusive pre-sale event.

Ok, sounds simple enough. But the beauty of personalized IVR is in all that it can do when customers call you. Unlike a typical VUI, which is designed to understand customer needs, personal IVR can anticipate customer needs and make decisions that affect call flow.

Scenario: Jane contacts a retailer that deploys personalized IVR. The solution identifies her based on her phone number and, accessing Jane’s purchasing history, determines that Jane has recently placed an order for a custom leather sofa. So, Jane is asked if she’s calling about her recent order.

Sweet.

Jane gets personal, “valued customer” treatment instead of a menu.

Here’s another example. Having purchased that custom-made leather sofa, Jane now phones her bank to check her balance. The IVR recognizes that Jane has a low balance and treats her accordingly. Depending on business rules, the IVR might bypass automation and route Jane directly to a live agent. Or the IVR might push automated prompts designed specifically for a certain class of customer.

This category of personalized IVR is simpler to manage but still requires that the enterprise invest in CTI in order to have the ability to recognize the caller. Most personalized IVR deployments fall into this category, and can be viewed as a gateway to more complex integrations.

Here’s where it really gets good… and infinitely more complicated and costly for most contact automation solutions. Let’s call it personalization by customer relationship. The caller relationship actually determines the kind of experience the customer will have when they call.

Say Jane has a bad experience when her couch is delivered, the movers are four hours late and they break a lamp on their way out. Jane contacts the retailer to file a complaint via their web self-service option. She calls the retailer next morning to speak to a customer service representative. The personalized IVR solution can recognize Jane and her multiple web and phone transactions, and alter the phone interaction accordingly, either by generating dynamic call flows or by sidestepping automation completely and connecting her with an agent.

This type of personalization requires a greater integration between IVR technologies and the enterprise database. And that, my friends, is why on premise contact automation solutions typically don’t do it. It’s too much work, it takes too long in the planning and implementation, and there are simply too many competing IT priorities for anyone to see it through.

If you see the huge benefits of implementing personalized IVR at your organization, don’t build it yourself. It’s better to find a hosted solution that includes a robust platform and technology to implement it faster and far less expensively than you could do on your own.

See, the holy grail of contact automation was right under your nose!

It’s the 4th Quarter, Folks

It’s the fourth quarter of the year.

For IT departments that historically means spending the last of your current year’s budget and planning your spending for next year in the hopes that you’ll actually have money to spend. Nevertheless, with a long economic recovery in sight, experts expect to see further delays in IT spending in 2010. If your customer service department runs on contact automation, that means that your infrastructure is going to get another year older. If your live agent costs are already through the roof, then you can expect more of the same in 2010. More IT resources to manage it all? Forget it.

Forrester says that Cloud Computing is one of the top 15 technology trends to watch in 2010, because with it you can “transform your organization into a more efficient and responsive service provider to the business.” Are you ready to ride the cloud?

Why spend your hard-fought-for IT budget next year on trying to stay afloat? If you go with our hosted automation solution, you will be able to do in 2010 what you couldn’t do in 2009… leverage a state of the art, rock-solid secure contact automation platform. Access an arsenal of actionable analytics that you don’t have to sift through alone. We’re talking all the bells and whistles that your organization probably can’t afford next year, much less manage: hardened data centers, three Carrier Grade sites in the continental US, the very latest in protection and security, with interconnectivity to all major networks.

Sure, you can try to hold off on improving your automation self-service until you get a well-needed shot in the spending arm, or you can find a better strategy for you and your customers. Like finding a hosted IVR solution that saves you money, frees up your already stretched-to-the-limit resources and makes use of the latest IVR technology on someone else’s dime.

If you go with one of Contact Solution’s shared IVR solutions, you can enjoy the savings that happen when more calls stay in the contact portal. You don’t touch the technology “cloud” that surrounds you so there’s no IT spend on updating hardware and systems. You just sit back while we find new ways to save you money via our Continuous Improvement Practice.

Like I said, it’s the fourth quarter folks. What are you waiting for? A big 2010 IT budget?

Reverse CTI saves money….and keeps your customers from screaming at you

It’s become common to have an Agent speak to a caller and THEN route them to an IVR. 

For example, when personal information is required for authentication purposes, but regulations prohibit the information from being communicated to a live agent the caller must be verified by an automated system.   Or, after an agent-assisted call, callers are routed to an IVR based Survey. 

In both cases, the information needs to be tied back to the original call and agent via Computer Telephony Integration (CTI). 

However, just as callers are angered when they have to repeat info to an agent that they’ve already entered in the IVR, they’re really peeved when they have to repeat it to the IVR when they’ve just spoken with an agent.  It’s the #1 customer frustration in many contact centers.

Solving this problem has never been easy and is usually just ignored because of the cost and complexity.  Tailored solutions are costly to build, requiring ongoing licensing costs, and increased infrastructure costs as they usually tie up multiple telecom ports for a single call.

Contact Solutions recently solved this problem for its clients.  We’ve had a robust CTI solution for years based on a web-services model.  This open architecture, based purely on software, allows for integration with most any contact center technology at the agent desktop. 

Instead of re-inventing the wheel, we just rolled it the other way.  We leveraged the core techniques of passing data that are well established, and then reversed them – leveraging a lot of existing code along the way. 

So what does this mean to our customers?  They solve this complex problem without additional hardware or licenses fees. 

They save money and their callers get great service, coming and going.

Disaster Recovery – Are You Prepared for the Worst?

According to the Information Technology Services Research Laboratory and Call Center Research Laboratory at The University of Southern Mississippi, F.E.M.A. had only 209 call center staffers in days before Hurricane Katrina. The Agency needed more than 16,000 call center workers to meet the call demand, which was in the millions of calls each week following the disaster. As a result, only 21% of the calls to F.E.M.A. ever even made it into the call center, much less answered.

At the risk of being a fatalist, our country faces threats from both natural and man-made disasters such as nuclear and radiological explosives, cyber terrorism, flu pandemic, hurricanes, floods, earthquakes, fires and blizzards. Any organization that depends on contact centers to provide services and information to the public and consumers needs a disaster recovery plan… no, make that a fail-safe, rock-solid,” no losing sleep at night” plan.

Contact Solutions happens to provide that piece of mind for Federal Government agencies (like the US Treasury and the Departments of Agriculture and Labor to name drop a few), plus 23 State Governments and Municipal and County Governments.

We operate independent platform locations in Virginia, Texas, and California, and provide Hot Site Disaster Recovery across all of our applications. You got an application with us – you’re protected. Our shared service approach makes it possible for us to handle significant amounts of extremely high call volume, so no matter what the weather, no matter what is burning or freezing or under water; we can handle many times our normal call volume patterns without playing a single busy signal.

For example, during Hurricane Katrina, our Mississippi debit card application spiked up to fifty five times normal call volume in one day. Contact Solutions handled all those calls without any delay or interruption of service. When the hurricane forced the closing of the Baton Rouge customer support center handling the state’s child support program, our contact portal saved the day. While our client’s emergency response center in San Antonio took calls normally handled by the state’s disabled IVR, Contact Solutions accelerated the launch of a planned upgrade for that IVR. In fewer than three days, the new IVR was answering more than 20,000 calls a day.

Could your IVR do that? No? Stop and think now, who’s going to take the heat for all those busy signals? Who’s going to help all those callers?

Don’t add your own man-made disaster to whatever catastrophe hits. Be prepared! Talk to us about how Contact Solutions can protect you if disaster strikes.

And try to have a nice day…

Per BusinessWeek, ‘Trust’ is the new message….lucky for us, it’s true

The current cover story in BusinessWeek is ‘100 Best Global Brands: The Great Trust Offensive’.  http://images.businessweek.com/ss/09/09/0917_global_brands/index.htm

Since we just ‘re-branded’ ourselves, the article caught our attention. It reports that recent polling shows “increasing numbers of consumers distrust business as a whole“, therefore, companies across the board are marketing their ‘trustworthiness.’

That makes sense to us.  Due to our busines model, trust is like oxygen – without it our business fades to black. There is an entire white paper on this topic http://www.contactsolutions.com/resource-center/.

Here’s the headline: When you buy IVR and other contact automation services as part of a managed service lease or purchase on-premise equipment, your vendor doesn’t really have to continually earn your trust. At that point, your costs are ‘sunk,’ so there is little incentive to continually re-earn your business (i.e. your trust).

When you buy an On-Demand model (which is what Contact Solutions offers), your upfront investment is much, much lower; so it’s much easier to turn to a new vendor if performance suffers. So for us, maintaining trust with our customers is more than a well-timed marketing campaign, it’s self-preservation.

A marketing consultant is quoted in the article saying, “Trust-related marketing only works if there is a message that people want to believe in. You cannot spin an audience that doesn’t want to be spun.”  

Boy, don’t we know it!

Call automation has taken a beating with consumers who universally complain about apps that have been unattended for years (‘Please listen as our options have changed’ – yeah, 10 years ago maybe). To compound the issue, people now go straight to Twitter, Facebook and other social media outlets to tell the world about their poor experience.

No one said viral marketing is always a positive. Good luck getting trust back from a person who has read negative posts about your automated service. No amount of marketing dollars or spin will make YOUR customers believe that self-service is a great option if it’s not continually optimized for them. Nor will it make OUR customers believe their trust is our biggest concern.

Lucky for us, it’s not a marketing campaign, it’s a way of life.

IVR Market Fueled by VXML Technology – Fact or Hooey?

Recently we posted a  report by T3i on our web site that states that the phenomenal growth in the global IVR market is fueled (to the tune of $514 million by 2013) by the growth in VXML technology.

To which our CTO Mark Whittle said “that’s a lot of hooey.” Mark’s British. He uses words like that.

Mark’s got a valid point. While people in the industry are saying that the growth of the IVR industry is due to VXML, we beg to differ. Don’t get me wrong, we love VXML. In fact, we build and run VXML applications; we just don’t see it as the primary growth driver for our space.  We would argue it’s the move to hosted solutions that’s driving growth in the IVR market.

Hear me out. Prior to VXML, customers were trapped by the proprietary language of their chosen IVR vendor. That meant you either trained your own team in that language or were held hostage by that vendor’s professional services organization (sound familiar?). Every time you needed to make a change – ouch – another big charge. Very costly indeed! (Mark says “indeed” a lot, too). So, VXML was a great step forward.

However, the primary selling point for VXML was ‘portability of the apps’ (i.e. bypassing the inherit traps of proprietary code mentioned above).  Here’s the thing.  As vendors added their own tags, the open-standard became “sorta open”.  Which is predictable and OK, but anyone who thinks you can truly port a VXML app effortlessly from one IVR to another needs to Google ‘hooey’.

What the market has since figured out, and what is truly driving IVR growth, is that moving to a hosted model has many benefits, including portability. Does that mean that you can take a VXML app built by one hosted vendor and instantly port it to another hosted vendor?  No, but you can certainly do so with less time and expense than an app built in a proprietary language for sure.

What the market has decided is “who cares”. When you can very affordably have hosted vendors build your app and provide a SLA around it, who cares what language they write it in? And if you’re a Contact Solutions’ customer, there is the added benefit of knowing the applications will constantly be optimized as a standard service.

The shift to hosted contact automation solutions is the real impetus for our industry’s growth. There’s no hardware/software investment, no maintenance fees, and best of all no hiked-up professional services fees… or even the need to be concerned about proprietary vs. open standards IVR languages (oh how I’ll miss that stimulating debate).

As Mark would say, “It’s bloody brilliant, you blimey bloke” (OK, OK, but he does say “brilliant” a lot).

Making ‘Name and Address’ Speech Apps Better

Contact Solutions has recently taken an unique approach to incorporating core name and address speech recognition technology into our platform.  This name and address technology typical resides in what are called Open Speech Dialog Modules (OSDM).   We have removed the dialog framework that drive OSDMs.  Instead  we have stripped out the core name and address recognition speech technology and placed it into a more robust and flexible dialog framework.   Call flows using name and address recognition can now be tuned with the your particular application in mind, rather than a call flow based on the OSDM opinion of how speech dialogs should be designed. 

This new dialog framework not only plugs easily into any applications built at Contact Solutions, but provides better dialog control and is more robust from a customization perspective.  Time to delivery is improved, and we now provide a more robust offering when it comes to name and address speech recognition.

SpeechTech Market Leader ‘Winner’ – A big whoop or no?

So we won an award – no big whoop, right? 

Well, here’s what’s relevant about being named The Winner of SpeechTech’s Self-Service (inbound and outbound IVR) category?

First, it was not based on advertising spend – we spend a fraction of our billion-dollar peers vying for the award.   We were The Winner because, well, we actually won. 

We got the highest marks in 4 of the 6 judging criteria, 1) Ability-to-Customize, 2) Customer Satisfaction, 3) Integration and 4) Cost. 

And it wasn’t a popularity contest – we didn’t even have to sing in front of a blurry-eyed pop star –we won it ‘straight up’.  It was determined by industry analysts, consultants and the editors of Speech Technology magazine.

So, yes, it’s clearly a big whoop.

What to look for in stock picks (i.e. great companies): efficiency

In a recent issue of BusinessWeek, Robert Zagunis, chairman of the investment committee at Jensen Investment Mgmt, noted themes he’s looking for as he evaluates specific stock opportunities.  ”One theme for us is efficiency – businesses looking to outsource functions that someone else can do a lot better than they can internally”.

We couldn’t agree more.  Efficiently making sure our customers automate as many contacts as possible is what we do….and most often, we do it better than even great companies can do on their own.