This post was authored by Prem Uppaluru. Prem is the President & Chief Executive Officer of Transera.
Cloud computing is the broad umbrella under which not only SaaS (Software as a Service) fits but also PaaS (Platform as a Service) and IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service). SaaS refers to an end-user application. Salesforce.com, for example, is a very popular SaaS application. PaaS is a slightly different animal, often referred to as “middleware.” In other words, it is software but it is not an end-user application. Dropbox, which provides a platform for storing multimedia in a single location that can be accessed by a number of different applications and devices, is a good example of PaaS. At the far end of the spectrum, Amazon web services provides infrastructure in the form of storage and servers for hosting websites and applications, an offering that includes both hardware and software. Said another way, SaaS is for end-users, PaaS is for developers, and IaaS is for IT folks.
While the offerings from Salesforce.com, Dropbox, and Amazon are all different, each provides a technology over the Internet cloud as a service. Most importantly, the customer is using software and hardware that has been optimized to run over the Internet via a browser as a service. The traditional hosted model takes an application that wasn’t originally designed for hosting, makes a few modifications if it’s to be delivered over the web, or, more typically, delivers the application “as is” over a dedicated network via servers dedicated for each customer.
Why should call centers care?
Many businesses do not wish to lock up capital in call center technology purchases and many, in addition, lack the operational staff to manage implementations of increasing complexity. When call centers look for ways to benefit from technology without suffering the headaches of owning and managing it, they often turn to hosting vendors.
This is a false promise to cure IT headaches. A hosting vendor charges for the dedicated software and hardware as well as staff to manage it on the enterprise's behalf. There are no scale advantages or call center virtualization advantages. Consequently, there are no real cost savings. Frequently, a hosted solution also adds additional transport costs because calls have to be backhauled from the hosting vendor's data center to the enterprise's call centers.
True on-demand virtual call centers deliver real cost savings for businesses without sacrificing functionality or features. Enterprises can't get these savings by simply having someone else host and manage traditional on-premise call center solutions.
This post was authored by Arnab Mishra. Arnab is VP of Products and Solutions at Transera.
It’s not uncommon for direct marketers to use shared agents. In discussions with customers and prospects, however, I have been surprised by the number of direct marketers that rely on shared agents exclusively. Although the scalability and cost effectiveness of shared agents can appear compelling, direct marketers who do this ignore the fact that it is nearly impossible for a shared agent who is taking calls for other clients to be wholly proficient on every client’s products. The implicit trade-off is cost for performance. Recognizing this fact, many contact center outsourcers allow customers to staff dedicated agents and give them the ability to overflow to their shared pool. The key drawback of this approach is that it requires the direct marketer to send all of its calls to one outsourcer, limiting choice in vendors and the flexibility of using multiple outsourcers.
Transera best practices strongly recommends that direct marketers employ a strategy that uses dedicated agents as well as multiple outsourcers. This approach provides the best of both worlds: the benefits of staffing agents with high degrees of knowledge and proficiency in the marketer’s products while also providing the choice, flexibility, and price competition inherent in multi-vendor environments. In this model, direct marketers can choose to locate both dedicated agents and shared agent pools across multiple vendors.
Transera’s Scorecard Routing solution takes the advantages of this model up to another level by finding the best available resource across the entire environment regardless of agent type or vendor. The key advantage of this approach is that direct marketers can staff highly trained, dedicated agents for expected call volumes while preserving the ability to burst to the best performing shared agent pools for unexpected call spikes. A common approach of Transera customers is to staff dedicated pools of agents at 80% of expected call volumes and to send the remaining volume to the best-performing shared agent pools. This ensures that dedicated agents are fully utilized, while also continually “exercising” shared agent resources. Greater use of highly proficient dedicated agents, coupled with intelligent real-time call allocation to the best-performing shared agent resources, increases both conversion rates and order values.
This post was authored by Prem Uppaluru. Prem is the President & Chief Executive Officer of Transera.
The old adage, “You can't improve what you can't measure,” applies in spades to call center operations. In the world of call centers, metrics drive daily operations: call volumes, call wait times, call handle times, agent staffing levels, sales conversion rates, customer satisfaction scores—the list goes on. Continuous call center improvement comes from listening to customer calls, assessing first-call resolution rates, measuring agent performance, and then using this information to improve agent recruiting, training, and staffing, IVR menus, CRM knowledge bases, and other business processes.
Visibility is everything. Call centers that produce the best results and provide the highest quality customer service know what is going on - in real time, not in hindsight. "Actionable intelligence, now!" should be the mantra of every call center manager.
Office Depot, a global retailer of office supplies has found a way to do that. They mix agents from in-house call centers and multiple call center outsourcers and combine them to form a single global virtual call center. Any agent anywhere can answer any call from any customer anywhere in the world, period. Office Depot call center managers know the exact status of every call and every agent regardless of their location or affiliation. They can perform call monitoring on any call in real time and record any customer interaction for later inspection. They can also hire and fire call center outsourcers at will based on their performance.
For the record, Office Depot has been using Transera's SaaS virtual call center software (Transera Virtual Call Center Solution) for more than three years to run their contact centers. “Virtual” is the key word here.
Only a virtual call center can provide centralized management of distributed resources to normalize the variations across multiple contact centers while delivering consistent functionality and performance. Businesses are already adopting virtualization across a wide spectrum of business applications and IT infrastructure. Modern data centers employ virtual machines, storage networks, web services and service oriented architectures (SOA) to gain centralized control of distributed resources. The same benefits can accrue to call centers that adopt similar virtualization solutions for customer interaction management.
Restoring visibility through centralized management is the key to regaining control of your call center operations. With real-time visibility we get actionable intelligence and then, and only then, do you get continuous call center improvement.
This post was authored by Arnab Mishra. Arnab is VP of Products and Solutions at Transera.
Direct marketing campaigns containing offers to respond to a toll-free number are particularly challenging to call centers—especially if they are successful! The responses flood in soon after the campaign is launched, creating call spikes that require careful resource planning. In addition to staffing issues, a more significant challenge lies in routing these calls to the call center agents who can convert the leads into sales while keeping abandoned calls to a minimum.
Direct marketers typically manage these unpredictable call volumes by contracting with call center outsourcers. However, they face a fundamental tradeoff in terms of staffing versus service levels: paying for more call center agents reduces wait times for callers (decreasing call abandons) but also increases costs. Given the unpredictability of consumer response to specific campaigns, it is hard to commit to strict staffing levels at each chosen contact center outsourcer. The inability to accurately gauge staffing needs is further exacerbated by the fact that many companies simply allocate the incoming traffic across multiple call center outsourcers (known as multi-sourcing) in fixed ratios. This “spray and pray” strategy typically yields suboptimal routing decisions and results in high abandon rates and lower sales performance.
Level the playing field. What if call center agents were rated in real-time based on their service levels and performance? Calls could then be routed to the best-performing agents while maintaining the desired service levels. This approach takes the guesswork out of call routing and levels the playing field across call center vendors. It forces outsourcers to compete for their client's business by staffing their call centers adequately with the most skilled agents they can hire and train.
When call center outsourcers compete in real-time for the business of their clients, everyone wins: call center customers are assured the best performance across their vendors, and the outsourcers are assured more business from their clients if they outperform the competition. Enterprises choose the set of contact center outsourcers they wish to do business with and keep everyone honest.
Transera enables this approach with Scorecard Routing, Transera’s intelligent call routing software overlays the software in the call centers of your outsourcers and consolidates their operational data to compute and compare agent performance. Automatically routing calls to the best-performing agents—whichever call center they are operating from—is a sure way to increase sales conversions and drive revenues.
This post was authored by Prem Uppaluru. Prem is the President & Chief Executive Officer of Transera.
Apple’s recent announcement about its new cloud service—and the subsequent attempt by pundits to once more explain cloud technology—made me realize that this might be the time to revisit this subject in the context of call centers. Hosted call centers are often equated with on-demand call centers in the cloud. Let me clear up some confusion on this subject from a business-case perspective.
Hosted call centers were initially seen as a bane for businesses that did not wish to lock up capital in call center technology or didn’t have the operational staff to manage the complex implementations of a sophisticated call center. Why not move your call center operations to the data center of a hosting vendor and focus on your core competencies? Seems to make sense, right? However, hosted call centers turned out to falsely promise to cure IT headaches. Hosting implies dedicated software and hardware as well as staff to manage it on an enterprise's behalf. There are no scale or call center virtualization advantages and hence no real cost savings. Frequently, hosting solutions actually add additional transport costs because calls have to be backhauled from the hosting vendor's data center to an enterprise's call centers.
On-demand contact centers, in contrast, are deployed as software as a service (SaaS) in the “cloud.”They are built from the ground up as multi-tenant software applications. These virtual call centers use web services that reside on an inexpensive shared infrastructure and scale simply by adding servers (think about how Google scales). On-demand contact centers typically offer browser-based user interfaces for call center agents and supervisors, reducing their desktop footprint and associated support costs. On-demand contact centers commonly make extensive use of open-source technologies and commercial off-the-shelf networks, storage, and servers to reduce acquisition and call center operations costs. They also wrap their applications with service management software and utilities to reduce monitoring, diagnosis, and break-fix costs.
True on-demand contact centers deliver real cost savings for businesses without sacrificing functionality or feature set. Enterprises can't get these savings by simply having someone else host and manage traditional on-premise call center solutions. For an example of a
SaaS virtual contact center solution, check out
Transera.
This post was authored by Prem Uppaluru. Prem is the President & Chief Executive Officer of Transera.
Cloud computing for call centers is a simple but very powerful concept: it delivers the infrastructure and applications required to run your call center as a service. Rather than incurring large upfront equipment and software costs for each of your locations, you subscribe to a service that allows you to scale your operations up and down according to demand. Running a virtual call center in the cloud has many benefits, including lower costs, simplified management of your operations, greater flexibility in how calls are queued and routed, and a centralized view of your call center's performance.
Cloud computing in the context of call centers is slightly more complex than other cloud applications because we are dealing with two clouds: the voice cloud (public and private networks carrying voice traffic) and the application cloud (customer interaction management software). This is important to understand because decoupling the application cloud from the voice cloud gives enterprises the flexibility to choose the voice telephony and transport networks that best meet their business needs. This can generate significant cost savings.
This is an important differentiation. Call center solutions that intrinsically couple the voice and application clouds (rather than decoupling them) fail to deliver the full benefits of cloud computing. Here is a checklist of the qualifying criteria for a genuine contact center in-the-cloud offering. Cloud solutions that adhere to these criteria will inevitably lower operating costs and simplify call center management:
- Can it manage virtual agents? Cloud offerings should be able to source agents internally or outsource them and locate them anywhere: onshore, offshore, or at home.
- Does it support virtual telephony and transport services? Genuine cloud offerings can use IP or TDM telephony from any vendor and IP or TDM transport from any carrier.
- Does it offer multi-tenancy? Multiple enterprises should be able share the same call center application instance while enjoying performance customized to their service level agreement and privacy pertaining to their data.
- Can you access the offering through a browser? A true cloud offering provides web access to agents and supervisors for all elements of the application and doesn’t require you to download client-specific desktop applications.
- Does it operate as Software-as-a-service (SaaS)? Application software in genuine cloud offerings are hosted in a data center on virtual machines and delivered as a service paid for by subscription.
- Does it enable Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) integration? A genuine cloud offering is built using SOA with web application integration protocols and techniques (such as SOAP, XML and HTTP). This enables the application to integrate readily with other applications, such as Workforce Management, Customer Resource Management, and Quality Monitoring.
With the above checklist in hand, you can separate the true call center in-the-cloud solutions from those that are pure fluff—and get ALL the benefits cloud computing can offer call centers.
This post was authored by Arnab Mishra. Arnab is VP of Products and Solutions at Transera.
A few weeks ago, Stephanie Overby from Computerworld wrote an interesting article discussing the merits and challenges of adopting a cloud-based contact center. The article raised a number of assertions that I would like to address in this blog post.
- Enterprises with “Cadillac versions” of call center software and hardware will see little benefit in migrating to the cloud.
Progressive enterprises think about the cloud technology in one of two ways: How can my enterprise apply cloud applications to our current business challenges? or How should my enterprise incorporate the cloud into our strategy as premise-based investments reach end of life? I have been delighted to see that companies implementing Transera’s Scorecard Routing solution think about our cloud technology in the first way: as an application that enhances existing investments and addresses strategic business needs.
- Enterprises need to ensure they have the right in-house skills to manage a partial cloud solution
It is important to distinguish between IT resources and administrative resources. SaaS does have the potential to reduce IT resources but in most cases requires the same level of administration as a premise-based application. With that being said, one would be hard pressed to find a successful cloud application vendor selling its wares solely based on a reduction in IT management costs.
- Make sure the solution scales to handle peaks in demand
The key questions I ask customers to consider are: How does the SaaS provider add additional capacity to the service? Has the application been built modularly so that different components can scale independently as needed? Transera software, for example, is both highly scalable and modular and handles hundreds of thousands of calls a day for dozens of enterprise customers.
- Make sure the software integrates well with other complementary applications
To serve the medium-to-large enterprise market, it is incumbent on vendors like Transera to facilitate easy integration with both cloud and premise-based applications. Transera is unique in the on-demand contact center space in that a significant portion of its R&D activities are focused on this effort. To date, Transera has integrated with applications ranging from CRM and order-entry applications to IVR and ACD systems. A concrete recent example is Transera’s implementation with RightNow Technologies in Europe. See recent Office Depot press release http://www.rightnow.com/cx-news-17818.php
- Make sure the on-demand service is reliable
It is no secret that contact center applications are mission critical. Outages have the potential to harm customer satisfaction and increase costs. Transera is very focused on reliability and provides rigorous service-level commitments to its enterprise customers, which they have every right to demand.
This post was authored by Alex
ander Jaross. Alexander is Senior Manager, Telesales and Contact Centre Europe, at Office Depot.
Office Depot is a global supplier of office products and services, and we continuously look for improvements in our global contact center operations. Our goal is to deliver the best customer experience and generate maximum revenues at the lowest operational cost. At Office Depot BV we want to consolidate our pan-European contact centers into a single unified virtual contact center with uniform contact management that improved the customer experience and optimized workforce productivity. Our objective is to employ “universal” agents that can respond to calls, emails, or chat requests with equal facility. We want to be able to route any call from any country to any agent anywhere in Europe as long as they had the appropriate skills.
We recently launched a ground-breaking “virtual cloud” initiative that brings together the company’s workforce serving Benelux DACH, Spain, Italy, the UK, and Ireland with three layers of virtualization: enterprise IP telephony, virtual contact center, and unified interaction management. The IP telephony layer unifies the communications infrastructure with Cisco call managers, media gateways, and wide area networks. The virtual contact center platform from Transera unifies the distributed workforce with global queuing, routing, and reporting. RightNow Technologies provides the customer interaction management solution unifying the treatment of calls, emails, and chat sessions.
Layers two and three are currently in the transition and testing phase. Once we are into production, Office Depot BV will be running multiple call centers staffed by hundreds of agents across Europe with this three-layered “virtual cloud” solution. The benefits are obvious and tangible: superior customer experience, consistent service delivery, and compelling cost savings. Customers will experience lower wait times because call loads can be shared across multiple call centers. Agents will be more productive because they avoid monotony by varying their workload across calls, emails, and chats. They will also be more effective because they will have automatic access to relevant customer information with every contact. By combining an on-demand virtual contact center with an enterprise IP telephony deployment, Office Depot BV will gain the efficiencies of workforce optimization and unified interaction management and the resulting cost savings.
Virtual contact center clouds drive real results for real companies, including Office Depot.
This post was authored by guest blogger, Arnab Mishra. Arnab is VP of Products and Solutions at Transera.
In the first two parts of this series, I discussed the importance of real-time information in optimizing customer service and the traits common to companies that are implementing real-time strategies. In this final post of the series, I want to spend some time talking about the necessary elements and potential benefits of real-time systems in the contact center.
As discussed, organizational culture and investments in infrastructure focused on real-time data creation and dissemination are important. In addition, enterprises must also implement systems that help them execute a real-time business strategy in an intelligent, automated, and adaptable manner. In particular, contact centers must closely examine their routing technology. As most readers of this blog will likely agree, the heart of every contact center is the routing technology used to connect callers with answering resources. Consequently, any real-time strategy must ensure that this core component incorporates real-time data into its everyday functions.
Historically, traditional routing technologies have been built as closed, proprietary systems incapable of leveraging real-time data from external applications. This architectural limitation has been a fundamental inhibitor to contact centers moving to a real-time model. Real-time contact centers require an open routing engine with the ability to process and leverage real-time data to perform two critical functions: one, to assess customer needs and value and, two, to match that customer with the most relevant agent—as measured by real-time agent performance. Transera’s Scorecard Routing is an example of routing software that classifies callers in real time using public and private data sources. In addition, Scorecard Routing tracks agent performance in real time to ensure that customers are connected to agents that are delivering the most relevant performance for a given caller.
Enterprises that have moved to a real-time model for their interaction routing are experiencing very significant business benefits. Transera’s customers involved in sales activities have experienced a 7% - 10% increase in conversion rates and a corresponding increase in revenues. This top line improvement in revenues is delivered solely by implementing Scorecard Routing, with no changes to either the enterprise’s customer acquisition strategy or approach to agent staffing. In customer service environments, real-time data improves customer satisfaction and first-call resolution rates. By routing interactions to agents that are performing well on these metrics, enterprises are able to improve the overall performance of their contact centers.
As Leonardo da Vinci once said, “…Knowing is not enough; we must apply. Being willing is not enough; we must do.” With Scorecard Routing, Transera provides the tools necessary to apply information in real time when “doing” actually matters most—the moment when an enterprise’s most valuable asset, its customer, is connected with an agent.
This post was authored by guest blogger, Arnab Mishra. Arnab is VP of Products and Solutions at Transera.
In part 1 of this series, I described the implications of real-time information on customer service organizations. It turns out that companies successfully implementing a real-time customer service strategy have three things in common:
- A culture that views its customer service strategy not as a periodic business event or project, but rather as an on-going business process
- Investments in infrastructure that support the rapid creation, aggregation, and dissemination of data
- Implementation of systems that support the real-time implementation of business strategy in an intelligent, automated, and adaptable manner
I find it heartening to see companies engaging actively in the first two requirements through business process re-engineering and in continued investments in analytics and business intelligence technologies. What I find generally missing though is the third component. This problem is relatively acute in customer service organizations.
Implementation of real-time business strategies in a call center typically requires that data be brought to bear at the moment a customer is being serviced. This paradigm has been embraced in some self-service IVR applications where callers are provided specific prompting by the application based on a real-time view of their customer profile, history, and value. Self-service IVR applications, however, at best represent one-third of inquiries entering a call center. The vast majority of transactions require live agent assistance, and for these callers, no real-time data is being utilized to identify the agents who are best suited to handle their request accurately and efficiently. This gap in agent-assisted interactions is where customer service organizations can take a leadership role in moving the enterprise to a real-time model.
In part 3 of this series, I will discuss the required elements and potential benefits of moving a customer service organization to a real-time model.