VoIP-Enabled Integration In The Contact Center Bridges The Gap Between CRM And Customer Response...

To be competitive and customer-centric, a typical contact center offers its customers choices for how the customer would like to engage with the company - immediate assistance, deferred assistance, or engaging with the company via self-service. Yet companies struggled to manage multiple customer response service models for responding to multiple customer inquiries. The immediate assistance service model is typically delivered by live agents in a call center, but it can also be delivered via Web chat, and even through immediately escalated e-mail. Deferred assistance is typically provided again by live agents responding to e-mail and voice messages, although automated response applications remove the live agent from the process. And self-service is typically delivered over the Web in the form of knowledge base information or over the phone via an IVR.

The degree to which these three service models are integrated determines how intelligently and cost-effectively a company can respond ro a customer need. These service models usually are designed around proprietary hardware and software solutions in a silo fashion, with little to zero integration. In addition to the inefficiency of the silo architectural design, the cost of integrating these service models with proprietary hardware is often prohibitive and is, therefore, seldom considered. Today's customer response management software applications leverage VoIP technology to integrate all three customer service models into a single, consolidated software application on the corporate data network.

In addition to the integration of the customer service models, VoIP also enables these models to be tightly integrated with CRM to automate the routing and prioritization of customers based on historical insight in the CRM database. In fact, because today's VoIPbased customer response management applications are software-only architectures, the integration with CRM applications is at a fraction of the cost and deployment time of traditional CTI (computer-telephony integration) deployments for database access, routing and screen-pop.

There are several compelling reasons for companies to consider the latest customer response software applications:

Prioritize and route customer responses, based on customer need, customer value to the business, and resource availability. The integrated customer response solution allows every customer contact to be evaluated based on the history and relationship of the customer with the company. In this way, companies can respond immediately to highest valued or highest priority customers, regardless of how they chose to contact the company (phone, e-mail or Web). Any business value in any database can be used to determine the priority of a customer.

Provide a more flexible model that allows you to intelligently choose when to escalate the response based on customer need and value to the business. Without the integration of customer response service models with CRM information, it is often the type of service model the customer chooses that dictates the level of service the customer receives. If a customer took the time to phone a company, then that live personto-person call would be deemed more important than an e-mail, when in fact, the e-mail may be from a higher valued customer. However, the value of the customer to the company is not realized upon contact unless the customer's CRM information is integrated with the service models. With the integration, a "high value" customer e-mail, which typically is handled as a deferred contact, can be escalated and handled immediately by a live agent.

Service customers consistent with your goals to reduce operational costs while exceeding customer expectations. As companies attempt to drive customers to self-service, the challenge is to drive the right customers to self-service and to identify those who require deferred or immediate assistance. Driving all customers to self-service, without regard for the customers' needs or their value to the company, forces the company to risk losing the loyalty of some customers.

Reduce the cost of managing multiple customer service models. Companies rely on reports generated by customer service models (phone, e-mail and Web) for making current and future business decisions and improvements. However, today's separate silo operations and systems for phone, e-mail and Web applications require separate system administration, which equates to separate reports. Consolidating, comparing and analyzing the reports each becomes a time-consuming, unmanageable and costly part of the operation. The latest customer response software applications both require a single administration tool and provide consolidated reporting across all service models so business decisions and improvements can be made quickly and costeffectively.

Improve the return on your CRM investment. Today only 36 percent of large call center operations deploy productivity applications such as datadirected call routing and screen-pop at the agent desktop (Datamonitor, 2004). The reason for such a low rate is the prohibitive cost of deploying these applications. Only the larger centers can afford the expense of CTI hardware, CTI middleware and professional service fees for complex and lengthy projects. The latest customer response software applications integrate easily with CRM applications. Typical deployments for screen-pop, as an example, are done within a day or two. And by eliminating the cost barrier to CTI deployments, companies can more widely deploy CTI to multiple database applications.

Ultimately, the integration of the latest customer response software applications with all three customer service models provides the opportunity for companies to handle customer contacts more efficiently and more cost-effectively, producing a win/win situation for both the customer and the company.

It's About The Software, Stupid

An important point to make about today's customer response management applications is that they are most successful working on a software-only, VoIP-enabled architecture that can tightly integrate with other applications important to the customer experience and reduction of costs in the call center.

Traditional customer contact-routing or contact-handling applications (ACD, IVR, etc.) have been built around a vertical solution approach. The vertical approach has been costly and complex to deploy for several reasons:

* Vendor specificity. Companies are forced to deploy multiple vendor solutions to address the total set of call center requirements. Total cost of ownership across all vendor platforms is high. * Proprietary hardware and software. Multiple proprietary vendor solutions limit interoperability and increase the cost of deployment because of integration requirements (CTI, APIs, customized software, additional hardware).

* Two network infrastructures. In most cases, the various solutions deployed within a call center operated either on the telephony network or on the data network. Application development across two networks was costly, : complex and time consuming. !

This model resulted in the current infrastructure for contact centers: a set of telephony-based switching components sitting on the telephony network; a set of data applications (CRM, e-mail, chat, etc.) sitting on the data network; and a third layer that consisted of lots of CTI hardware and middleware to integrate the voice and data components. This third layer also required lots of care and feeding, in the form of expensive CTI professional services, in order to deploy applications.

The reason for much of the expense can be traced back to where the integration effort occurs. The integration or interoperability of multiple voice and data solutions typically occurred at the telephony network level or in the switching platform. Again, proprietary systems and multiple vendors increased the cost of application deployment.

The new, horizontal, software-only model for contact centers is a model more familiar to IT professionals. This simplified model allows companies to leverage a common hardware platform for all enterprise applications, typically based on low-cost generic servers. The network infrastructure, or layer, relies on the company's IP data network. In the case of the contact center, both voice and data are carried over this single network. The software layer sits on top ot the network layer and is based on a set of industry standards (e.g., VXML, XML, VoIP, SIP, SOAP, ODBC) adopted by vendors to support interoperability and to support faster deployment. And finally, the application layer, call routing and queuing, IVR, self-service applications, Web chat, etc., are built around these standards.

This new software-only model for customer response delivers general deployment benefits, as well as specific call center benefits:

* Low-cost deployment. As with other enterprise software applications, the call center application leverages a common, low-cost hardware infrastructure on which companies have standardized. This server-based infrastructure costs less to deploy and manage.

* Interoperability. Systems and applications built on industry standards allow companies greater flexibility when designing business applications.

* New distributed architecture. The distributed nature of an IP network supports one of the critical requirements of any call center - system reliability. A distributed architecture allows companies to cost-effectively network multiple locations together in a distributed fashion, for redundancy and call fail-over.

* Multimedia contact routing on a single platform. VoIP enables the software-only, single-network approach: all media (phone, e-mail, Web) on a single platform for universal queuing and consolidated reporting.

Align Your Customer Service (Contact Center) Strategy With Your CRM Strategy For Operational Cost Reductions

The value of integrating CRM databases with telephony-based contactrouting systems has never been disputed. Applications such as screen-pop and data-directed routing dramatically reduce agent time on the phone and thereby reduce the number of agents required to respond to a volume of customer contacts. Those same applications more intelligently route customers to the agents best skilled to handle the contact, effectively improving the customer experience.

It's the cost of the integration that has been at the center of such low adoption and deployment statistics as previously noted. The fundamental difference in the two approaches - vertical, telephony-based solutions versus horizontal, software-only solutions - is that the integration for telephony-based solutions occurs in the telephony switching components. With the software-only model, the integration occurs at the desktop and application layer, dramatically lowering the complexity of integration.

Most cost justifications or ROI analysis for IP contact center systems are based on hybrid IP models. These systems are composed of TDM switches that have been "IP-enabled" by swapping telephony trunk cards for IP line cards. In this manner, voice traffic is carried over the data network or IP network. But cost justifications for these hybrid IP solutions are weak. In fact, they are so weak that some industry analysts now recommend companies do not undertake this hybrid conversion. In contrast, by moving to a softwareonly, VoIP-based solution, a company can impact strategic cost areas for a potential saving of more than $4 million annually.

For example, a company operates three call centers geographically dispersed, 100 agents at each location. The centers use traditional TDM switches to route calls across telephony network services. They are contemplating the deployment of CTI applications for screen-pop at the agent desktop. After deploying as such, they should attain the following results:

* Labor cost reductions as a result of networking centers over IP. By combining multiple dispersed pools of agents into a single, larger pool, the same volume of contacts can be handled by fewer agents.

* CTI application deployment cost reductions. Conservatively, a single deployment of a screen-pop application can cost $250,000. Multiply that expense by three sites for a total of 750,000.

* Agent productivity gains from wider CTI application deployments. Assuming a 20-second call reduction per call for calls of three-minute duration on average, a 300-agent call center could reduce labor costs by $1.2 million.

Software-only, VoIP-based contact center systems are setting a new level of customer service response. Customers no longer have limited choices for contacting a company. At the same time, these contact centers can now customize each customer service experience so that the customer's service expectations can be met, while the company can meet or exceed its customer service and operation performance goals.

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