We've had quite a few blogs recently on various vendors' integrations of social networking with contact centers (for example Interactive Intelligence, Siemens here and here, Avaya and Cisco; and also Blair Pleasant's excellent critique of the whole idea). What resonated about Blair's skeptical take was her contention that many contact centers haven't even got the basics down, and are still struggling to integrate the channels that they already had to deal with before social media came along.
But I think another factor to make you skeptical about social media is that so much of how we talk about the integration with business processes really only skims the surface. New developments are focusing on gleaning information from public social networking sites and then passing that information on to the enterprise for proactive but usually higher-level resolutions--the classic scenario is a problem that customers are having with your company, that they've begun discussing on Twitter.
But the Genesys division of Alcatel-Lucent is attacking the multi-channel issue more directly with their latest release. And when I talked with Dudley Larusand Mayur Anadkat, both Product Marketing Managers at Alcatel-Lucent, they didn't exactly dismiss the social networking-integration craze, but they emphasized the need to do more to integrate existing self-service channels in ways that provide better context for agents who are trying to help customers.
Our conversation previewed today's release of Conversation Manager, a new component of the Genesys intelligent Customer Front Door (iCFD) suite. Conversation Manager is a RESTful web services framework that can pull information from one context--say, an online self-service session--into the CRM system that supports phone-based contact center agents. As the company press release explains:
Conversation Manager generates a foundation of data that applications draw from to expedite the customer experience.
For example, a customer can begin seeking service and information through a website such as booking a flight and have that service interrupted. Then, if the customer calls into voice self-service the information already entered from the website is available in that application or to an agent for assisted service.
For example, a customer can begin seeking service and information through a website such as booking a flight and have that service interrupted. Then, if the customer calls into voice self-service the information already entered from the website is available in that application or to an agent for assisted service.
This schematic shows how the information is supposed to flow:
Mayur pointed out that self-service, whether via the Web or an IVR, may be the most economical method for the enterprise, but customers don't always find it ideal: "Pushing self service down everyone’s throats is not the right approach," he told me.
But ideally, if you start a self-service session on the web--say, to book some sort of reservation--only to decide you need to talk to a person, then the call center agent should be able to get the data generated by your abortive web session. Conversation Manager provides that capability.
This is part of the larger goal of Genesys' iCFD solution, which aims to provide more context with each interaction--and to automate that context according to rules the enterprise can set dynamically. For example, if the system collects data that a particular caller (identified via ANI) always zeroes out on the IVR within a few steps, the system can set a rule that pushes that caller directly to a live operator as soon as he or she dials in. Or you can choose not to do this, if the customer is not perceived as a high-value caller who merits the special attention.
Similarly, if the iCFD system learns that a particular customer calls 5 times a day to check his account balance, you can trigger a prompt that would read the person's account balance to them before they even get the IVR tree, something like: "Hello. Today is Monday, August 2, and your account balance is $200...." then transition into the original opening greeting. One of the discussion points we've had here in the past is that some customers get a little freaked out if the call center appears to know more about you than you're expecting them to know, so this would obviously be something you'd have to refine.
Blair's blog made some good points about the implementation being more important than the technology's inherent capabilities, and that's certainly an issue for companies looking to deploy the kind of contextual richness that Genesys is promising with Conversation Manager and iCFD more broadly. Alcatel-Lucent has some cool technology here; contact centers need to make sure they have the resources and process to use ithese kinds of systems effectively.
