Recently in Call Center and CRM Category

Daniel Adler attacked a Sears' employee after getting fed up with Sear's telemarketing calls for home improvement. Daniel lured a Sears employee to his residence by scheduling an appointment. When he arrived Daniel proceeded to cut up the Sear's employee's ID card and then punched him in the face.

According to Mid-Hudson News, "Adler was arrested and charged with criminal mischief in the fourth degree and assault in the third degree, both misdemeanors. He was issued an appearance tickets returned next month in town court."

C'mon admit it, you know you've dreamed of doing this.

I say he should go for a jury trial. There ain't a jury in the Good Ole' USA that'll convict this guy.

Full story

ContactQ is a new call center application server created by Braxtel Communications designed to run on Asterisk that brings advanced call center functionality to the Asterisk platform. Their aim is to handle any sort of contact method and put it into their advanced multi-media queue. For instance, they plan on queuing video calls, text messages, web callbacks, and of course regular calls. ContactQ is a fully featured multi-media skills based routing ACD. In my meeting with Braxtel at ITEXPO, Lee McCabe, Director of sales said video call queuing brings up some interesting possibilities, such as the ability to play corporate video promotions while the call is on hold. The concept is intriguing and it takes traditional music-on-hold to the next level with video-on-hold.

Lee mentioned that ContactQ is currently being developed as both a commercial product and also as an open source GPL project. It supports industry standards such as SIP, Voice XML(VXML), AJAX (Web 2.0), XMLRPC and designed for inter-working with VoIP softswitches like Asterisk, FreeSWITCH, PingTel and Cisco.

I asked Lee if they leverage FreePBX at all for the front-end GUI or if they use their own and Lee stated they use their own front-end interface for configuration as well as monitoring of call center queues and call center statistics. Importantly, ContactQ sports the ability for call center supervisors to listen in on agents using DTMF/touch tones on their phone.

Features include a powerful IVR with drag and drop programming tool and  historical reporting delivered via the web browser. It features powerful dialing capabilities critical to call centers, including Outbound Preview, Progressive and Predictive dialing modes.

Other features include:

• Fully featured ACD supporting
  • Multiple queue modes
  • Call pull back on no answer
  • Overflow to voicemail
  • Queued voicemails
  • Time / Day routing rules
  • Agent unavailable types
  • Skills based routing (9999 skill levels)
• Telephony based agent logon
• Web browser based system configuration
  • Multi Language support (US English only in Version 1)
  • LDAP integration
  • Multiple partition configuration
  • Role based login
• Supervisor Monitor / Listen-in
• SNMP support
• Real-time Supervisor Dashboard web application providing
  • Agent and queue performance statistics
  • Agent and queue drill down statistics
• Real-time Agent Dashboard
  • Agent performance statistics web application

Lee said their software always uses the latest version of Asterisk with nightly builds available. Installation is via a bootable .iso image which will automatically format and install ContactQ in just minutes. I tried to get some screenshots of the admin from their website, but the website seems a bit of a work in progress. But the feature-set seems pretty powerful and I hope to check it out soon.

Update:
Here's a screenshot of the admin:

snom and Camrivox today announced free VoIP telephony integration with Microsoft Outlook with snom Flexor CTI software for Microsoft Outlook. Microsoft Outlook is the most widely used contact manager with a market share of over 60% of email users. A free CTI app for snom's VoIP phones? I remember the days where you had to pay thousands of dollara for a CTI server. No CTI server required for this app nor the thousands of dollars!

The highlights of this integration are:

• On-screen Click-to-Dial makes calling really simple and screen pop-ups when someone calls
• Calls, made or received, automatically create a journal entry with the call details to build up a call log
• Supports Microsoft Outlook 2003 & 2007

snom Flexor CTI enables users of snom's 3xx series and snom 820 VoIP telephones to integrate their telephony with Outlook. Benefits include click-to-dial, contact screen pop-ups and call logs. Once the snom Flexor CTI software is downloaded onto a user's desktop it automatically integrates the snom telephone with Microsoft Outlook.

snom Flexor CTI for Outlook also enables click-to-dial of phone numbers dialed straight from Outlook, as well as on-screen call control, contact screen pop-ups for incoming calls, and call reporting. Users can also record notes in Outlook Journal entries during a call and have these saved against each contact record to generate a structured call log for each contact.

The snom Flexor CTI software is also available to integrate snom VoIP telephones with professional solutions for Customer Relationship Management (CRM) such as Microsoft Dynamics CRM, NetSuite and Salesforce.

To download free snom Flexor CTI for Outlook head here.

Back in September I wrote about Fonality's trixbox Unified Agent Edition (UAE) and how it can automatically match all inbound and outbound calls with the corresponding record in salesforce.com's AppExchange, and call data is captured and logged. Apparently, this was still a yet-to-be-announced product I wrote about that resulted in a call from Fonality's CEO Chris Lyman asking how I found out about it. Woops, my bad, Chris.

Well, today, Fonality has officially launched UAE. I spoke with Chris Lyman to learn more about this product. Chris told me, "What we've done is allow managers and agents using CRM and a phone system to make some pretty serious decisions about how they run their business and what we consider some major cost savings."

Chris explained that they pumped the CDR (call data records) from Fonality's PBXtra into Salesforce.com. Once the CDR data is housed in Salesforce.com obvious business benefits can be realized. You can for instance know when customers called you or when you last called a particular customer. Importantly, with the reporting mechanisms you can understand how long it takes to call a lead or opportunity and how that affects your close rate. The reports allow you to for example easily see "neglected opportunities" such as 'opportunities that have not been contacted in XX minutes'.  This lets you see how long does it takes an agent to make a first contact for a lead/customer/opportunity that been created inside the CRM system. Here's a screenshot of some of the reports:
[click for larger image]


Fonality UAE brings a whole new level of CRM integration with PBXtra, an Asterisk-based system. This tight-level of integration with an Asterisk-based system with the popular Salesforce.com hosted CRM platform is great news for the Asterisk community. While Asterisk-based systems have made in-roads in the contact center space, heavyweights like Nortel and Avaya still win a huge share of the contact center space because of their advanced CRM integration. So the more Asterisk-based solutions offer advanced CRM applications, the better for the Asterisk ecosystem. We'll see more Asterisk deployments in contact centers as a result.

It's worth mentioning that Digium's Switchvox IP-PBX also offers integration with CRM apps, including Salesforce.com and SugarCRM. I saw a demo of Switchvox's web-based panels down in Huntsville, Alabama. I remember it supported querying Salesforce.com on an inbound call (screenpop), but don't recall if it supported querying Salesforce.com on an outbound call. I'm also not sure to what level Switchvox offers reporting on inbound & outbound calls tied to the CRM contact records. I don't believe Switchvox offers contact-based reporting based on CDR information. I've actually been meaning to do a full-review of Switchvox.

In any event, getting back to UAE, I should point out that Fonality queries a local cache of the Salesforce.com database for it's instant when it performs a contact record lookup and is not affected by any sort of Internet outage or Salesforce.com outage. Importantly, inbound calls can be automatically directed to the contact or opportunity owner. This prevents sales personnel from 'stealing' a lead.

"The Frankenstein, bolt-on products from other telephony vendors provide only basic screen pops or click-to-call features. Fonality has a much more sophisticated approach for delivering feature-rich, end-to-end contact center solutions," said Corey Brundage, vice president of marketing and product management at Fonality. "PBXtra Unified Agent is the only offering available today that immediately impacts a contact center's top and bottom line without the need for professional services or a six-figure capital expenditure."

Overview:

• PBXtra Unified Agent from Fonality combines phone system, call center, and CRM capabilities to provide a complete view of contact center operations. With Salesforce CRM and PBXtra Unified Agent, companies can increase close rates, revenue and profits, while providing much better customer service and dramatically reducing sales and support costs.
• For less than $20/user per month, PBXtra Unified Agent delivers an immediate return on investment. Agents benefit from productivity enhancements and timely access to more accurate and complete information so they can do a better job selling to and supporting customers. Managers gain deep visibility into real-time and historical agent call activity within Salesforce CRM so they can make more intelligent business decisions based on accurate data.

"Today, contact center managers are often faced with inaccurate or missing data and agents struggle with cumbersome CTI applications, resulting in a poor customer experience," said Richard Gonzales, president of Buvelo Solutions, a salesforce.com consulting partner. "PBXtra Unified Agent solves these problems with a unified solution that helps managers and agents use Salesforce CRM more effectively than ever before."

With PBXtra Unified Agent managers can easily measure, test, and improve sales and support processes, view the effectiveness of human resources, salvage opportunities or identify lapses in service level agreements. PBXtra Unified Agent includes the following features for managers:

• Track and record all call data in Salesforce CRM automatically
• View customer call histories
• Understand how call follow-up times impact profitability
• Find out the number of calls it takes to convert a lead to a sale
• Determine which agents are the most responsive
• Visually rank agent calling frequency and duration
• Instantly report all leads not called within a specified period

With HUD, Fonality's communications application, you can view desktop alerts with inbound caller name, number, even deal size. In the sample below, the sales agent can see an inbound $120,000 opportunity:


"PBXtra Unified Agent's deep integration with Salesforce gives our customers even more value from their CRM installations," said Clarence So, CMO, salesforce.com. "Thousands of customers have installed applications from the Force.com AppExchange because partners like Fonality are offering innovative tools that expand the capabilities of Salesforce CRM."

Chris explained that one of reasons why they called it Unified Agent Edition is because they created a unified agent creation and logon. When you make an agent on PBXtra, it displays a drop-down box of your Salesforce.com agents allowing you to map your extension on Salesforce.com account. So it matches username and password across the two platforms. That's how you know the name of the person making a call as opposed to the extension number.

For current PBXtra customers it's a $4,000 upgrade for unlimited agents. New customers the pricing starts at $6,995 for server hardware and software.  Interested parties may also participate in a Fonality-hosted informational webinar taking place on Friday, December 12 at 10 a.m. PT. To register for this webinar, head to www.fonality.com/UAEwebinar.

Just when you were ready to give up cable altogether and watch TV on your computer, telecommunication companies start aggressively rolling out fast new ways to get TV, Internet and voice services -- do I hear "Triple Play"?

And they really, really want your business. AT&T has announced it would begin selling its AT&T U-verse TV and U-verse High Speed Internet services in Circuit City and Wal-Mart stores across the country.

U-verse uses a hybrid network of fast fiber-optic and conventional copper wires to bring TV, Internet and voice services to your home. Bundles start at $69 a month. It's trying to sweeten the deal by offering $200 cash back to customers who order certain U-verse packages online.

Why the big deals and incentives? AT&T is duking it out with Verizon's FiOS and cable companies like Time Warner Cable to get into new homes as customers frustrated with the relatively slow speeds of DSL look for faster service.

And they're doing it at a tough time. Broadband service providers are having trouble recruiting new subscribers, due to a soft housing market, a weakened economy, broadband market maturity and predictable seasonality, according to research firm Strategy Analytics. 

More at the LA Times.

Fonality's trixbox Unified Agent Edition (UAE) can automatically match all inbound and outbound calls with the corresponding record in salesforce.com's AppExchange, and call data is captured and logged eliminating manual entry. This is a big step for Fonality in taking their Asterisk-based IP-PBX from simply an enterprise phone system to a "true" call center platform that can compete with Avaya, Nortel, Interactive Intelligence, and other major call center platforms.

Fonality, today announced the collaboration of the trixbox Pro Unified Agent Edition and salesforce.com's AppExchange.

Fonality's trixbox Pro, Unified Agent Edition (UAE) is immediately available for test drive and deployment from Fonality Australia. It's unclear whether trixbox UAE is available in the U.S. or elsewhere as well. I'm looking into it. Relatedly, go check out my in-depth trixbox Pro 2.0 Call Center Edition (CCE) review I wrote yesterday.

In the meantime, Fonality UAE features:
- Performance Management:
- Automatic Call History provides a detailed history of who employees are calling and the duration of each call.
- Integrated Call Recording allows any call to be recorded from the PBX system and attached to the corresponding record in Salesforce.com.
- Lead Management Reporting provides reports on how many calls were required for conversion, lead activity, etc.
- Agent Activity Reporting ranks agents based on activity and productivity.
- Outbound Call Reporting shows which reports are busiest on the phone, how many calls have been made to leads and customers.

Agent Productivity:
- Click to Call allows any number is Salesforce.com to be automatically dialed with the click of a mouse.
- Improved Screen Pops address the problem of multiple matching records. A screen is automatically launched for immediate note taking, and then can be attached to the proper record after the call.
- Deal Size Alerts pop-up on a rep's desktop and display the name, company and size of the opportunity before the phone starts ringing.
- Account Ownership Routing automatically directs incoming calls go to the account owners

Rich and I reviewed the Plantronics SupraPlus HW251N-USB Wideband headset, featuring wideband codec support for use in VoIP applications such as Skype and Microsoft Office Communicator. Rich actually got two pre-production models and was kind enough to give me one of the SupraPlus headsets. Actually, he wanted me to be his guinea pig to test the audio quality since I get to hear and review quite a few VoIP products.

We tested the monaural style Plantronics SupraPlus HW251N-USB using both Skype and Microsoft Office Communicator. The audio quality was quite good. I believe the microphone captures a wider range of frequencies to enable the wideband support. The noise-canceling microphone filters out excessive background sound.

The Plantronics SupraPlus HW251N-USB features inline button controls. The headset itself features volume up/down buttons, mute, and even a disconnect/end call button that works with Microsoft Office Communicator. Interestingly, if Skype is running and if you press this disconnect/end call button you get simulated dial-tone. Not sure what that was about.

I noticed one end of the headset actually uses a RJ45 clip to connect into what I believe is the DSP processor. I've never seen Plantronics use a RJ45 clip for their headsets, but in theory they must be making some of their components more modular for interchanging various headset components. Or at least, one can hope. Nothing worse than having an incompatible base unit to a headset.

The headset is wired (to your USB port) and I'm much more a fan of wireless headsets even for desktop PCs. The Plantronics Voyager 510-USB Bluetooth headset is one of my favorites (see my review) and it works with your mobile phone and your desktop PC with the Bluetooth USB dongle. Of course, the 510-USB isn't a wideband codec headset, so if superior voice quality is your gig, then the SupraPlus HW251N-USB might be a better choice. Certainly organizations using wideband VoIP applications that have call center agents that don't roam around while on phone calls will find the SupraPlus HW251N-USB a good choice.

Lastly, go check out Rich's in-depth review here for his thoughts on this headset.

Packet8 has always been at the leading edge of cool VoIP applications and products. Packet8 was the first to offer a videophone for their residential VoIP customers (see my review of the Packet8 Videophone) They're had several other firsts to their name along with several patents to boot. Packet8 is like the dark horse when it comes to VoIP. While they don't have their name in lights like big bad Vonage, Packet8 has been slowly growing their customer base while adding cool new features. One advantage Packet8 has over Vonage and other VoIP broadband players is that Packet8 has gone after both the residential and business phone market simultaneously. These are vastly different markets, and would seem to many that Packet8 is biting off more than they can chew. But again, they keep steadily adding more customers. You know what they say - slow and steady wins the race.

Well, today I learned about another interesting VoIP application that Packet8 is offering - namely integration with Salesforce.com. You can call any of your Salesforce.com contacts to your Packet8 Virtual Office extension with the new salesforce.com plug-in application, which is available free to Virtual Office subscribers. Simply click the link next to a contact in the Salesforce.com browser window and you can instantly call your contacts. Just as nifty, incoming calls are displayed with pop-up screens based on the user's Salesforce contacts (using CallerID info).

Packet8 Virtual Office and salesforce.com partnered together to offer small businesses an integrated CRM telephony solution that lets subscribers place calls over the Packet8 Virtual Office service directly from their Salesforce application by either clicking the contact's phone number or using the dialpad on the Packet8 interface window.



The Packet8 Virtual Office Interface for Salesforce is currently supported by Internet Explorer 6.0 or later on Windows XP or Vista - sorry Mac fans. It also won't run on other browsers such as Opera, Firefox, or Opera. Limited browser support aside, Packet8 continues to add interesting VoIP applications that make VoIP a much more compelling argument to switch from PSTN other than simply cheaper voice minutes. Well done Packet8.

Pizza franchises live or die based on their ability to answer the phones as quickly as possible. If the customer has to wait on hold too long - or worse gets a busy signal, then the customer is going to hang-up and call another pizza restaurant.

So how do local pizzerias increase their call handling efficiency? Most have 2-5 analog lines deployed. Assuming it's $20 per line/month, over-provisioning by adding several additional lines that will probably only be utilized during peak load isn't very cost-effective.

Pizza Pizza, a fairly large pizza chain operating 350 restaurants across Canada, has been using VoIP along with a mixture of in-house agents, home-based agents, and outsourced agents since 2005. Using VoIP allowed Pizza Pizza this kind of agent flexibility, as well as the ability to ramp-up or down the number of agents depending on call volume.

It's now 2007, and the world's largest pizza chain, Pizza Hut has yet to deploy VoIP in its chain of restaurants. Or have they?

A source revealed to me Pizza Hut has indeed deployed VoIP. In fact, this source informed me that Pizza Hut has deployed hosted VoIP along with hosted agents to answer incoming pizza orders for local chains. (How widespread or how many chains is unknown) One advantage is the cost-savings of canceling almost all of their analog lines. I was told that these VoIP-enabled franchises typically were paying for 3 analog lines, however, they canceled 2 out of their 3 analog lines leaving just a single emergency line. They now use hosted VoIP and hosted agents, which have virtually unlimited call capacity. Since it uses hosted VoIP, there are no busy signals that you would experience when all 3 analog lines all being tied up – especially busy pizza ordering times like Superbowl Sunday. I'm told Pizza Hut, at least in the U.S., is leveraging Level3's backbone.

In addition, instead of a 17-year old inexperienced teenager answering the phone, the hosted call center agents are professional and can “upsell” the customer on specials, more toppings, etc. After the agent takes the order, I’m told the order is sent down to the local Pizza Hut over an IP connection and displayed on a screen. Thus, one obvious advantage is that a local franchise owner doesn't have to pay for someone to answer the phone thereby increasing their profit margin.

Another advantage of using VoIP is that it's much easier to build in redundancy. If anything happens to a particular site, calls can be switched from one site to another quickly and seamlessly without customers even noticing. Pizza Hut, like all chain places, charges a franchise fee to the owner of the chain which brings in revenue to Pizza Hut Corporate. They also make money on the food/supplies they sell to each chain. However, that's the end of their revenue stream. By Pizza Hut Corporate offering hosted VoIP services with professional call center agents, they can charge the local franchise for this valuable service for an additional revenue stream.

I tried reaching Pizza Hut for comment, but initially they didn't return my calls or emails. Finally, after several calls and a couple of emails I was able to get a very terse email reply from Pizza Hut spokesman Chris Fuller, which stated, "Its our policy not to discuss business strategy so we wouldn't be able to comment on this story."  The "no comment" would seem to indicate to me that Pizza Hut's strategy is indeed to roll-out hosted VoIP to their locations. I don't see how they plan on keeping this under wraps. The teenager that loses his job to some hosted VoIP agent or simply takes orders from a computer screen is going to figure out that someone else is handling the calls. So word is going to get out anyway that Pizza Hut is using VoIP. I guess you heard it here first!

Ok, so I know what you're thinking. So "Mr. VoIP & Gadgets lover, how can we make VoIP-enabled pizzerias even cooler?" I'm so glad you asked. How bout integrating Bluetooth, GPS, and VoIP so you can track pizza delivery trucks and when they get within 4 miles of your location, initiate a VoIP call to your location to let you know your steaming hot (or cold) pizza is just minutes away! Fantasy right? Not so fast. Check out my post from last year, where a company called Pizza Pilot is looking to do just that. Pretty sweet, eh?

"Ok, Mr. Smarty Pants, that is pretty cool, but what else you got?"

How bout allowing customers to order online? That'd be cool, no? Well, Pizza Pizza already allows you to order online, so it's already being done. Greg Galitzine points out the Dominos also allows online ordering. Let me take it a step further. What if you could order your pizza online and then using some Google Maps mashup, the pizza provider could show you the exact location of the delivery vehicle. So instead of calling the pizza joint to complain "Where the hell is my damn pizza?" and the guy unconvincingly says "Uhhh. It's on its way" (when really they forgot and are just making it), you can see for yourself where your pizza is. Of course, all these pizza scenarios work just as well for other popular food deliveries, such as Chinese.

Watch for hosted VoIP to take off not only in pizzerias where a busy signal means lost business, but also small-to-medium retail outlets and enterprises as well. Even McDonald's already has VoIP. Just don't complain when you call to order a pizza and you get a hosted agent with a foreign accent that you can't understand.

Users of the popular Frontrange HEAT software, a help-desk service & support CRM solution, have been clamoring for a web-based front-end interface for some time. Well, NetworkD informs me through blood, sweat, and tears they've added an HTML interface to HEAT via their iNferndo product and are leveraging AJAX for real-time screen updates. Oh and by the way, HEAT supports VoIP through integration with Frontrange's relatively new FrontRange IPCC voice applications platform, making HEAT a great solution for multi-site centers or even home-based agents since they can leverage low-cost VoIP calls.

Mark Reed from NetworkD writes to me, "We were promised over the last few years by Frontrange that they would develop a web-based front-end for HEAT and they never delivered. Finally we heard from their development manager that they gave up on trying to provide that functionality so NetworkD stepped in to create that for them. This is pretty newsworthy since this product is filling such a large gap in the HEAT product. I've personally poured my heart into creating this product working tirelessly thousands of hours."

Well, I say well done, Mark. Look at these screenshots, the interface sure seem functional and pretty too!




Update: 9/21/07
Jason Holmberg, HEAT Product Manager responded to me, "FrontRange has not abandoned the prospects for a web user interface for the HEAT product. We continue to invest in the HEAT architecture and are making the necessary changes to better facilitate a web user interface."