Contact centres were once the wallflowers of the business world. They might be at the party but no-one especially wanted to dance with them.

Now it seems they’re about to come into their own and take up prime position on the dance floor.

Two developments are behind this. First, advances in contact centre technology are causing them to morph into much more sophisticated beasts, capable of handling calls, emails, webchat and, soon, video, and turning them into business centres in their own right.

At the same time, the workflow planning analysis techniques that have long been used in contact centres, to manage peaks and troughs in traffic, and schedules are making their way out of the company’s contact hub and into other parts of the business.

Workflow is king
In the face of last year’s global financial crisis (GFC), organisations were forced to look at how they could become more efficient and productive, and turned to the metric tools used by contact centres to measure workplace activity and help with scheduling.

As Australian contact centre body ATA’s CEO Michael Meredith puts it: “Staff development and performance management is highly efficient in contact centres, so it’s not surprising that managers are asking: ‘why aren’t other areas of the business like this?’”

Accordingly, they’re looking at the workforce planning that comes out of the contact centre, says Meredith, who gives a quirky example of a company who applied this to its car park, to decide it who gets which car park and when.

Apparently, it works well
Across the Tasman, in Wellington, Fujitsu’s managed services director, Paul Bourke, observes that “a lot of businesses don’t realise this has happened already, around routing work through cycles of approval to speed up processes.”

Bourke says he’s seen quite a lot of interest in streamlining processes in a similar way to how it’s done on its service desks, and applying this elsewhere in the business.

“Business sees IT as an area of expertise when it comes to process, and we can often assist in other parts of the business.”

Bourke says some of the tools used are actually quite simple, such as using webpage form requests for a piece of equipment, which then goes to dispatch or is routed to a purchase authority if it’s not in stock.

And, using a familiar web browser interface, with a shopping cart, that people are familiar with, because they’ve been shopping online for years, encourages people to use the process as it’s easy, says Bourke.

“It helps to take the technology out. The more business systems are like the everyday things we use ourselves, the less likely people are to pick up the phone.”

Bourke makes it sound easy, but Fujitsu has a lot of experience with service desks and contact centres, with clients who range from large and small government departments to Meridian Energy, Qantas and BOC Gases.

Process as a ‘phone call’
Interactive Intelligence’s Brendan Maree has a slightly different take on all this.

He is seeing Interactive’s contact centre technology being applied to business processes, with users “treating the process as a phone call”.

He gives the example of presence management (see box story) being used to, first, determine if someone is sick or away and, if so, to then automatically route, say, an insurance form to another staff member. Then, after the initial pass, it can be sent to the underwriter, with the security restrictions taken off. Interactive sells to a lot of insurance companies.

“Communications-based technology is increasingly being used to leverage business processes,” says the ANZ country manager. He gives another example of how what was originally call centre routing technology has been leveraged to make business processes more efficient.

With a car insurance claim, the insurer usually has to check the engine’s PIN number with the motor registry, says Maree. With our system, it can either make a phone call automatically or go into another application to get this information, if the company has it. Then, if a call is made but isn’t picked up the system can send an email requesting the information.

Maree says this software extension of Interactive’s contact centre suite is quite new, having been released only last December. The Sydney-based company works both sides of the Tasman and numbers Massey University, NZ Customs and Datacom among its Kiwi users.

Just super
Wellington-based absol is in the business of contact centre training, but CEO Steve Miller sees the metric analysis long used in contact centres as being a bit more than just modern time-and-motion, with its ability to be applied to other areas.

“Originally, it was used to measure call volumes, and peaks and troughs, but it could also be applied to measuring supermarket check-out activity, by looking at how much merchandise is being scanned and when. This knowledge could then be applied to scheduling staff rosters, so, if you know, for example, that one of your busiest times is 11am on a Sunday, especially if the weather is bad, you can roster accordingly.”

Grey and balding… just like me
However, it not just a metric feast out there. Contact centres themselves have been busily developing and have become a lot more sophisticated of late.

ATA’s Meredith talks about the development of demographic matching, for example, which sees companies trying to personalise interaction with the customer.

You may have 100,000 customers, but it’s still possible to build up individual profiles, says Meredith. He gives a simple example of a customer whose first interaction with your organisation is negative.

You can collect information like this using colourcoded screen buttons – for neutral, satisfied and unhappy – as well as looking at screen captures and call monitoring records, to ensure that the person’s next experience is better, says Meredith.

You can also use Caller ID to put someone straight through to the right person, he points out.

“Suppose I called about insurance yesterday, it’s likely that is what I am calling about today. Also, if I’m greyhaired and balding, I might like to talk to someone similar.

We can try and personalise the interaction as much as possible.”

While Meredith is obviously tongue-in-cheek, you see something similar with New Zealand’s anti-smoking adverts, which have a focus on Maori, in particular – they have high smoking rates – with a Maori being featured in a call centre inviting smokers to call, because “we know what you’re going through, because we’ve been there”.

Meredith gives an Australian example of home agents in remote towns. Because we suffer from the tyranny of distance in Australia, he says, one in four or five of our agents now works remotely, so you might choose to route a call to an agent in the same remote town a caller is calling is from. The banks do this a lot, he says.

‘Three-in-one’
Another new technology development coming out of Australia is Interactive Intelligence’s “triple play”, as Maree calls it.

We’re presently working on integrating document management into our CIC (customer interaction centre) software, says Maree.

Interactive recently bought document specialist AcroSoft to help it do this. “The idea is to have a triple play, with contact centre communications, process automation and an object-oriented document management solution all in one,” he says.

Interactive hopes to have the three-in-one suite available by December.

Maree concludes by describing how he sees the contact centre having gone on a journey. “Starting out, in the 1980s and 90s, it was seen as a cost centre. Then, between 2000 and now, it evolved into a multi-media channel. It is now seen as a profit centre, with companies using it as a sales channel and getting into social networking, like Facebook and Twitter.

“Now, it’s becoming a business centre; it’s not just about sales and service fulfilment…. [so] business is looking to spend money on it.”

XT blues on Twitter
While Interactive’s Maree paints an exciting picture of the three-in-one suite the company is developing, it’s also worth looking at how end-users are putting some of these newer contact centre developments to use. iStart talked to Telecom and Massey University, which both have big contact centre needs, about what they have been doing.

Telecom is currently extending its contact centre marketing effort into the instant messaging (IM) arena for some of its products and services.

Russell Stephens, head of channel planning, is in charge of this project. He says, “It started four-to-five years ago, when we were doing a lot of work around IVR (interactive voice response) and dealing with balance enquiries, and looking at different ways of dealing with customers, as well as managing the 10 to 12 million calls we receive every month.”

There are four basic ways of dealing with customers, says Stephens. There’s self-service, where you might use the web to check out your balance or change your Telecom plan. Then, there’s assisted service, which is webchat or IM.

“This is a bit like a tennis game, where you ask a question; it’s answered, then you might go off to answer the door or leave to chat to someone, if you need to. It’s a more relaxed experience.”

Then there’s the human service, where you go through an actual agent live in a call centre, which is a bit more formal; and there’s also face-to-face, in a store.

Stephens says the company is using RightNow’s CX (customer experience software, which is described as “CRM’s big brother”) platform as the base from which to extend out its basic call centre operation, to include email management and the aforementioned chat tool. We’re also looking at using social media, he says. But it’s early days for that.

He quoted an iStart example, our ‘There’s sales in them thar blogs’ story, which describes a Mitre 10 hardware store staffer trawling Twitter and coming across a man wanting to buy an electric screwdriver, then informing him that the company has them in stock in four nearby stores.

At the moment, we’re just exploring what we can do, says Stephens. We have an online response team, which consists of people interested in social networking, who are on Facebook and follow Twitter.

The latter was used extensively during the recent failures of the XT network. Telecom would tweet about what was happening with the troubled mobile network. The company’s communications team sees this as being a different kind of interaction, more immediate than formal updates.

Stephens stresses that, although online interaction saves the company money, it’s also about giving customers choice. For example, with the new virtual hold service, customers in a call queue might be asked if they’d prefer a call-back – without losing their place in the queue.

This is done just by pressing a button on a website, to indicate if and when you’d like a call-back. You then enter your name and address, and when you’d like to be called, says Stephens. This is an extension of the ‘presence’ facility.

Telecom is also currently trialling remote assistance, which involves taking control of a customer’s PC – with his or her permission – to perform remote diagnostics.

“We could look at the signal strength of your broadband service, for example,” says Stephens. “Doing this reduces the time it takes to deal with a call.”

Next year, Stephens hopes to use metric analysis to move beyond analysing workflow in the contact centre and apply it to see what is happening with customers. For example, do they keep getting into a loop, pressing A when they should have been pressing B, and do we need to look at this?

Beyond the silo
Massey University has gone much further in its use of multiple channels at its 27-seat contact centre on its main Palmerston North campus. From here it serves 30,000 students from around New Zealand and across the globe.

Half of our students are ‘remote’, says contact centre manager Tina Rowland. They will likely never set foot on campus, but they are, nevertheless, in close contact with the university, with the help of its multi-media contact centre.

Rowland says the centre used to have a “siloed approach”, with, for example, out-bound calls having no link-up with emails. We’ve spent the past two years blending in-bound and out-bound calls, and other communications media, she says.

The integrated result is reflected in a change of name – to customer interaction centre (CIC). This allow for calls, an 0800 number service, SMS messaging (texting) and webchat, and emails with a link-up to Microsoft Outlook.

All these have been migrated onto one platform, says Rowland, who emphasises that this has been “a business and not a technology-led change”.

The Massey centre uses Interactive Intelligence’s software-based technology. Because it treats all media types as one – it was designed as an integrated PABX, IVR and ACD (automatic call dialer) system – it is easy to add new media types.

Rowland says while the university is a relatively conservative organisation, it is nevertheless keen to future-proof itself. To this end, Rowland is currently writing another business case, to include video in the CIC suite.

Massey got on the multi-media train early on, using text-messaging way back in 2004, and webchat from 2005.

But this didn’t happen because the university is dealing with switched-on young students, says Rowland.

“Less than 20 percent of our students are school-leavers, 80 percent are professionals who are upskilling.”

“They like webchat because it saves on toll costs, and it’s good if English is your second language,” says Rowland.

While webchat doesn’t compete with calls when it comes to numbers – these can peak at 2,000 a day – or email, which can peak at 500 a day, it registers a steady 60 a day.

The university also uses text messages extensively. “Text is a great marketing tool,” says Rowland.

While, typically, texts (or SMS messages) come in at a rate of 10-15 a day, when text is being used as part of a television marketing campaign, the centre can see 300 come in an hour. An automatic response is then sent out and agents follow up the next day.

The university is also in the process of extending ‘presence’ across the organisation, which Rowland thinks will have a big impact, as well as extending out ACD (automatic dialing functionality). The question is: ‘what does the business user need on his or her desk?’ says Rowland.

The CIC is extending out beyond its boundaries too, so calls and other enquiries can be dealt with remotely if need be.

Citrix’s Access Gateway technology is being used to allow for secure remote access and for the CIC to be extended to say a home PC or laptop.

At the same time, USB headphones allow for quick plug-in – such used to hard-wired only in old-school style contact centre systems.

“I could be on my parents’ farm up in Northland but you wouldn’t know,” says Rowland.

This remote capability is part of the university’s disaster- ready plan too. “As long as they can log in to the server, people can work from anywhere,” says Rowland.





View all Industry Reports

For more information visit the iStart VoIP/Unified Communications Pavilion 

By Johanna Bennett



View all Industry Reports