There's an interesting nugget buried in this article about a recent Gartner report on the IP contact center market. According to the Gartner report, in 2007, for the first time, IP agent stations out-shipped TDM stations for the contact center.
Convergys announced today that it will acquire Intervoice. Those of us in the enterprise voice communications space are well familiar with Intervoice, perhaps less so with Convergys. Who are they, why are they buying Intervoice and what does this acquisition say about the IVR/voice portal space?
Sheila's on the case, and promises a post on the latest bit of contact center/IVR/UC consolidation.
Kudos to Aspect Software for bringing some excitement to an otherwise slow post-holiday news week. (As I recall, they served a similar purpose when Concerto acquired Rockwell just after Labor Day in 2005.) Kudos also because this is not your typical ‘down-cycle in the market’ acquisition of an aging customer base. Instead it brings sexy new technology that SVP Mike Sheridan says will allow Aspect to accelerate the company’s stated strategy to bring UC and the contact center together.
The term skills-based routing entered the contact center lexicon some 10 years ago. In June, as part of its announcement of release 3.0 of Interaction Dialer, Interactive Intelligence coined a new term, skills-based dialing. Understanding what the term means and if the capability was unique to Interactive Intelligence required discussions with both Interactive Intelligence and some key competitors.
This post was written by Jason Alley, lead consultant at Vanguard Communications.
UI prototyping is critical for contact centers implementing new agent desktop technology. This posting will review why prototyping is important, why it is often overlooked in the contact center, and what steps can be taken to facilitate effective prototyping.
Today Syntellect Limited, a division of Enghouse Systems Limited (TSX: ESL) acquired Fluency Voice Technology Ltd. of London, England. Syntellect is well established player in the VoIP contact center space, which is rapidly converging with UC within the enterprise. The Fluency acquisition broadens their contact center offerings and complements their ability to deliver speech-enabled contact center and other communication solutions. Fluency Voice is a 7 year old company that delivers both hosted and on-premise packaged speech applications for contact centers. They also do custom speech applications as well.
The metrics used in call centers are often analyzed and then acted or reacted upon. The data in the form of abandoned calls, dropped calls or lost calls pretty much means the caller hung up. Why the caller hung up isn’t always because they are impatient, though recent statistics from Dimension Data’s 10th edition Contact Center Benchmarking report reveal that Call abandon rates – due to long hold times – increased in the past year by almost 127%, going from 6% of calls to nearly 14% of calls.
This post was written by Jason Alley, lead consultant at Vanguard Communications.
After reading C.S. Lewis’ The Screwtape Letters, I began to wonder if like correspondence existed that had to do with IP Contact Centers. After a long and arduous search, such writings fell unexpectedly into my hands. While I take no responsibility for the content, I thought it important to publish the letters to help equip the contact center market to combat the devilish schemes revealed.
Last week, Interactive Intelligence made some exciting product announcements and fellow-blogger Nancy Jamison has already skillfully covered those related to Customer Feedback Management. The other major piece of the story centers on integration with Microsoft Office Communications Server. Interactive Intelligence joins a field already populated with the contact center solutions of Nortel, Aspect Software and Mitel (and others?) but adds an aggressive edge to their story that reminds one of David and Goliath.
This post was written by Jason Alley, lead consultant at Vanguard Communications.
We see end user companies continuing to streamline investments in communications technology and vendor relationships. This often manifests itself in the form of a decision to standardize on an enterprise communications suite, including a common IP PBX/ACD infrastructure. On the other hand, we also see contact center management (often referred to as “the Business”) defending their territory, or staking new claims, by investing in a standalone contact center suite to liberate themselves from the rest of the enterprise.
In a triple announcement this week, Interactive Intelligence scored a hit on three fronts, adding survey functionality and speech analytics to the contact center, and integration with Microsoft OCS. Today, I’m going to focus on the first two as they are what had me nodding in agreement when I was briefed on them. They also, unlike the OCS integration, fall under the umbrella of what Interactive Intelligence is calling Customer Feedback Management.
One last observation to wrap up my musings on the Microsoft-Aspect alliance. Tucked into the press release announcing the whole shebang was this curious line:
NoJitter reader Kevin noted that Aspect is by no means the first to integrate Microsoft Live/Office Communications Server with its contact center solution. Mitel has in fact been doing this for a while. It’s a great point, so I spoke with both Mitel and Aspect about what contact center integration with OCS means to them.
In San Antonio, TX this week, Genesys is hosting its largest G-Force user group ever – 1,300 attendees from 32 countries. Over the next few months, the company will take this show on the road to Berlin, Bangkok, two locations in China and Australia, so hundreds if not thousands more will participate in the annual event. As a self-proclaimed contact center techie, I most looked forward to the product roadmap presentation and I wasn’t disappointed.
This post was written by Jason Alley, lead consultant at Vanguard Communications.
Enterprise customers are becoming more aware of Unified Communications (UC) applications and issues. However, I find many still compartmentalize UC as a futures-only consideration that doesn’t have much bearing on current PBX/ACD investment decisions. After a recent client engagement, I am convinced every enterprise should be armed with a UC Strategy before making a major PBX/ACD decision. Let’s take a closer look at this case study.
Will Siemens Enterprise’s announcement of OpenScape Contact Center and Microsoft’s strategic alliance with Aspect lead to widespread LCS/OCS integration in contact center solutions? That’s the $64,000 question in my mind these days.
OpenScape has been the brand associated with Siemens’ market-defining unified communications solutions for over 5 years. With an announcement today, that brand gets extended to the company’s contact center solution.
This post was contributed by Jason Alley of Vanguard Communications.
We need to spend more time empowering agents to seek the truth about successful customer interactions rather than relying on magic metrics to deliver delighted customers, cost savings and increased revenue. Too often, the reality in our contact centers is that we believe:
In September 2006 market-leading self service vendor Intervoice acquired the assets of Nuasis, a fledgling SIP-based contact center solution provider. Part of the rationale behind the acquisition was that the Nuasis NuContact solution would allow Intervoice to participate in the market transition from TDM to IP-based technology, already in full swing in the PBX market by then but still emerging in the contact center.
I’ve been a fan of Voxify’s Speech-enabled Automated Agents for a long time, so yesterday I sat in on a webinar that they did with one of their premiere customers, Continental Airlines. I’m not going to rehash the whole webinar, but I have to say that it was really worth listening to, and therefore blog worthy. Why? It is blog worthy because of the breadth of useful customer-centric applications Continental has deployed, the quality of those applications, and most importantly, thanks to Voxify, some are customer-accepted proactive outbound applications. This last point cannot be emphasized too much – outbound calls that customers want to get.
This post was written by Jason Alley, lead consultant at Vanguard Communications.
Last Tuesday night I called to see how my kids were doing at their grandparents’ house over Spring Break. I was amused to discover my call had interrupted a fiercely competitive Wii bowling tournament…that my parents were willingly participating in! Those that know Bob and Erin Alley know they are far from the video gaming type. Or so we thought...
Customer service or the lack thereof is always an issue with hardware, software and communications companies. Louis D’Ambrosio, the President and CEO of Avaya, presented the first keynote at Voiceon in March at Orlando. I enjoyed the speech and his humor.
I just read Eric’s report on the Avaya keynote, where he discusses the emphasis that Lou D'Ambrosio placed on customer service during his talk. Eric closed by saying that he was off to see what Gurdeep Singh Pall of Microsoft had to say in the second keynote of the day.
If you happen to be skeptical about this whole idea of using enterprise employees as ad hoc contact center agents, you're not the only one.
Aspect Software has long been a leader in the contact center market, and is now moving into the world of Unified Communications. The company has been busy putting together a plan and strategy “to educate the market on the critical role the contact center must play in the development of an organization's overall unified communications strategy.” As someone who follows both the UC and contact center markets, I’m very happy to hear that companies like Aspect are moving in this direction. Tying in the contact center with UC is practically a no-brainer. The UCStrategies.com team has long been saying that UC is built on many of the fundamentals found in the contact center (i.e.; presence status and awareness – otherwise known as “agent state,” has long been one of the cornerstones of the contact center). It makes sense that a company like Aspect, with such a long history in contact centers, would expand to the UC world.
Sheila covers the Aspect "UC in the Contact Center" announcement below. Here's a few more thoughts, based on my own briefing with Tom Chamberlain, director of business process marketing at Aspect.
Aspect Software issued a press release today in conjunction with its North American User Group meeting that it is re-positioning the company’s solutions as unified communications for the contact center. A bold statement and, at least for the time being, one that is as much about marketing as it is about delivered solutions.
Vocantas is a five-year old Ottawa-based company that describes their business as using “advanced computer telephony and speech technologies to create IVR solutions that enable organizations to automate routine telephone communications.” Intrigued by this positioning, I arranged an interview with Vocantas CEO Gary Hannah to understand what the company actually offers.
One of the things that always gets me psyched for going to VoiceCon is the process of reviewing the presentations. You see intriguing things, condensed to Powerpoint-ese, so you get just enough of an idea of what they're going to say, so you tell yourself, "I gotta hear what this guy (or woman) says...."
Today's case in point is a presentation we got from Ray Carsey, who's VP of technology at Mountain America Credit Union, a financial institution in the Southwest.
Our friends at Vanguard Communications are in the process of putting together a very cool white paper on IP Contact Centers, which, unlike a lot of vendor and analyst white papers, they're making available free and without even having to cough up any info on yourself. It's over at their blog.
Genesys, an Alcatel-Lucent company, has traditionally been known as a contact center vendor, with its roots in CTI. Over the past few years, the company has slowly been transforming itself into an Enterprise Software provider. At its annual analyst conference in San Francisco last week, Genesys executives and representatives noted that the company is morphing from a pure play contact center player to a company that helps its customers provide great customer service across the enterprise. While Genesys continues to stay focused on customer service, more and more of its customers are focused on going beyond customer service to improving business processes as well. To that end, Genesys’ mission is to be a “Leading provider of enterprise software and best practices that enable best in class customer service, including sales, through interaction management customer service across the enterprise.” The company claims that now it is a contact ex-centric company, providing value to companies outside of the contact center as well.
Last week Genesys held its sixth annual industry analyst conference in their home town of San Francisco. For those analysts (about 25 in number globally) that concentrate primarily on the contact center space, it’s a great way to kick-start the year. For Genesys, the meeting gave them an opportunity to review their 2007 performance (outpacing the market in growth), introduce new members of the executive team (including a new CEO, CFO and VP of Product Marketing), and showcase four users from a variety of verticals (utilities, telecom, and broadcasting).
Here's an interesting tidbit on how queuing models are used in designing Manhattan supermarkets, and what we might learn for the contact center. A couple of features here and here have some in-depth analysis of contact center issues.
Avaya today announced an upgrade to its core Communications Manager software package, to release 5.0. The company's headline for the release is "End to End SIP," and indeed they appear to be incorporating more SIP functionality into CM. But they haven't eliminated the need for the SIP Enablement Server (SES)as a separate entity, and according to Anne Coulombe, who briefed me on the announcement, that's reflective of where the market is relative to SIP.
The feature we're highlighting today, by Bob Bellman, deals with contact center metrics, and how the network and applications help you reach meaningful goals in customer contact. Bob's article is a quick tutorial on the leading edge in contact center technologies, such as knowledge management systems and real-time speech analytics.
Vanguard Communications has a really interesting case study on its blog. The author, Jason Alley, describes what he and the client did when a management personnel change threatened to strand some signficant investment.
(cross-posted at VOIPLoop.com)
Tradition would have that we make our New Year's resolutions- things that we want to do and accomplish. I remain hopeful that in 2008, I'll be writing more about solutions that we have sought and implemented and yet are still coming to terms with how to manage them in 2008 and beyond. Implementation and change go hand-in-hand and change isn't always welcome or convenient.
So, for 2008, here's what you can expect.
Zack Taylor has an interesting visual on Avaya's blog. That CSR definitely doesn't know what she's in for.
One of the biggest barriers to VoIP and unified communications (UC) deployments is that many organizations struggle to justify the cost of network, voice system upgrades and new applications. There are some things that companies can measure such as long distance costs, the cost of moving users, local telephony charges, etc, and these are reduced when VoIP is deployed. However, if these are the only metrics being used to calculate the value of VoIP and UC, the only value proposition for deploying is costs savings, which is just a small piece of the value a company can get from deploying UC. If the sole goal of deploying next generation communications infrastructure is to simply lower the overall TCO, the deploying enterprise is not seeing the big picture at all and they’re better off just renegotiating their long distance contract.
Yesterday Genesys Telecommunications Laboratories, an Alcatel-Lucent company, announced that it has acquired a reporting and analytics firm. Informiam is a 45 employee business headquartered in Atlanta with R&D facilities in Toronto.
SIP is an endpoint-oriented messaging standard defined by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). It is a text-based protocol, similar to HTTP and SMTP, and is used to initiate interactive communication sessions between users. Sessions can consist of any mix of media, such as voice, video, instant messaging, text, etc.
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VoiceCon makes its European debut 14-16 October, 2008, with Johan Krebbers of Shell keynoting. More information HERE
The PBX is not dead. But it is on an evolutionary path towards a new incarnation: Federated Communications System or FCS READ MORE »
SIP trunks could save money and deliver better feature/functionality to IP telephony. But there have been obstacles to overcome. READ MORE »
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