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Contact centers have always to do more with less, and not surprisingly they have been on the practical edge of technology solutions and practices including e-learning, IP telephony, IVR/speech rec, monitoring, telework, and workforce management. Tools and techniques spearheaded by contact centers, such as the shift to home-based workers, are according to the Telework Coalition being watched and adopted by other sectors.

It is a welcome sign that the Obama Administration is tech savvy, which will encourage development of new technologies and methods that will help contact centers, and all other business functions and sectors, become even more productive and efficient. As noted in Rich Tehrani's recent blog "you begin to realize there could be a massive shot in the arm for the tech sector next year."

Our sector has to do our part, instead of relying totally on government. Fortunately the business cases for adopting IP, telework and speech rec especially are powerful, and if deployed on a widespread basis could lower costs across the board while improving productivity sufficiently to pull us out of the doldrums.

An excellent TMC webinar sponsored by IEX, a NICE systems company last week revealed that the potential US employer annual savings through telework from reduced absenteeism, recruiting costs, and from increased productivity could be as high as $441 billion. A webinar earlier this year by Aumtech, Microsoft, and JetBlue demonstrated that you can successfully deploy speech rec at the fraction of typical costs.

There are open-source, hosted, and outsourced solutions for these applications that can enable their adoption with low up-front outlays. The individual and nationwide ROI is there.

So what are we waiting for?

These are tough times for many people in the contact center, communications, and technology industries in this difficult economy: those who have just been laid off and for those who are fearful that they are next.

I don't have to imagine the anguish and fear being felt by individuals and families. I've been laid off three times in my career, juggling with keeping my family fed and a roof over our heads. My father, an engineer working in the electronics industry, was downsized just months after moving to another community to take a new job and buying a house, and my mother was pregnant. We came within two weeks of losing everything.

My employer, TMC, is a great family of people, and it is out of concern for individuals and families in these trying times that my boss, Group Publisher Rich Tehrani, is inviting those who wish to get their name and skills out there to blog for TMCnet.com, a leading communications/telecom site according to Alexa, Quantcast, and other ranking services.

Here is the excerpt:

"Today, TMC launches its Blog Aid program to help people out of work stay in the public eye - in order to improve their hiring prospects in a tough economy. In the last few months, many good marketers, PR people, engineers and others who have been laid off. These potential Blog Aid bloggers have a good deal of quality commentary and information to share which could be very useful to the TMC community of online readers.

TMC is offering these new bloggers - especially those working in the communications and technology industries, a venue to voice their thoughts on the spaces where they have expertise so as to allow them access to the 2-3 million global visitors who come to TMCnet on a monthly basis. In this way, these people who need assistance will not be forgotten and moreover will potentially develop a following which will lead to new freelance or permanent positions."

Getting out there, being known, and visible is the best way to attract potential employers and clients. For despite the doom-and-gloom there are many companies that are in business, and which will need people because the economy will turn around. And of all the sectors that will bounce back it will be communications, technology, and contact center/CRM customer service that will lead the way.

I wish all of you facing this crisis success in getting through and in obtaining opportunities for better days are indeed ahead.

Nortel is a proud company with an excellent reputation for innovative products, especially in the contact center and wireless spaces. Unfortunately the firm has for some years been in rough straits, with what seems to be a sadly neverending stream of cutbacks and downsizings. I live in a town where Nortel has a plant whose size, say longtime residents, is just a fraction of what it used to be.

In what seems to be an insulting blow, an analyst from RBC Dominion Securities in Canada, where Nortel is HQed, has cut its stock target to $0, reported the Globe and Mail. The story says that bankruptcy 'is a distinct possibility'.

Nortel can't keep attriting itself, and spinning or attempt to spin off its assets. At some point it has to step outside of its skin, look at it as others see it (which few companies do, lest they see some unwelcome truths, which is why this exercise is invaluable), assess its strengths and weaknesses in current and future market, and radically refocus itself.

Here are some admittedly extreme options...though in crazed times when one's back is against the wall, crazy may be the only way out

1. Decide to become king of the mature universe of premise-bases switches. Aim to put Mitel etc. out of business, one which Siemens is exiting, and buy up these outfits, divisions, and customers by selling its other lines

2. Be the cloud, for routing and telepresence. Do the reverse of 1. and focus its considerable prowess in network/cloud based routing, and get rid of premised-based switches. Do what IBM did by becoming mainly services firm and leave the low/mid-end hardware making for countries with cheap labor

3. Be wireless solutions only. Dump solutions e.g. IVR, PBXes, that do not directly plug into mobile

4. Go totally virtual except for two showcase/research head and US offices: in Ottawa (in the Confederation Heights area) and in Wilmington, Del.

Why? Power. Ottawa is Canada's capital and Confederation Heights and adjoining areas sits on or just off the main road from Parliament Hill to the airport. Make it easy for decisionmakers, supplicants, and businesses to see you and they may want to stop in. Confederation Heights is a two-minute ride on the O-Train rapid transit from Carleton University, which has an engineering school i.e. interns, recruits, cheap labor etc.

And Wilmington? Just ask Vice President-elect Senator Joe Biden of Delaware. Wilmington is a quick ride on the Senator's (now VP's) favorite mode of transportation i.e. Amtrak's Acela from the Beltway, Congress, and Philly, NYC, and Boston. Great labor force, available property, and star preference.

The recent Forrester Research Customer Service Software Solution WAVE™ Q4 2008 study points to a strong need for a new customer service solution: one that bridges the three silos of interaction-, record-, and process-centric customer service products.

Forrester says that a complete customer service solution includes three key components to provide great customer experiences:

1) An interaction layer to manage all customer interaction channels and underlying knowledge management, workflow, and business rules engines

2) A customer record repository to aggregate customer information and manage more complex contract and entitlements

3) A business process automation to streamline common cross-departmental tasks

"Customer service app vendors are beginning to develop applications that deliver multichannel experiences, tap into multiple business processes, and access multiple data sources," says the report. "However, most have been developed from one of these three heritages and still deliver functionality that is skewed toward one of these three components. Until vendors provide a new type of cross-component architecture, Forrester will continue to divide customer service vendors into three categories to help businesses understand the current choices, their pros and their cons."

That's your challenge, solutions vendors. When you come up with a proven, reliable application to meet what Forrester is calling for, let me know, and in doing so we'll let the world know.

I came across a fine in-depth report from Forrester Research, The Forrester Wave™:
Customer Service Software Solutions, Q4 2008

The study has an excellent premise: how the technology can help companies provide better customer experiences. Its author, Dr. Natalie L. Petouhoff, Forrester Senior Analyst, says "before a company even thinks about a software vendor they need to define their customer strategy, what they want their customer experience to be and how they want to provide service to their customers."

Then I saw the writeup on Entellium, which has been having its fair share of troubles lately, and I began to wonder: should such reports look at the vendors' financial and legal history and stability? That has a big impact on whether their technologies will deliver the goods; if the suppliers have gone belly-up who will be there to support the solutions and keep them updated? New owners of the firms or the patents may, or may not, decide to buy and continue to support all product lines and their customers.

With the economy still going south at the same time as contact centers mature as a market, expect more mergers, and shutdowns, and such issues to arise. Tough times have a not unfortunately foolproof way of weeding out the useless and the incompetent, leaving the strong, well-managed, financed, and the lucky.

The acquisition of Envox by Syntellect for $14 million is the latest in a series of smart and timely consolidations in the maturing contact center/CRM solutions space, others being Verint and Witness and Aspect and Concerto (this juror is still out on the Convergys/Intervoice deal announced earlier this year).

The Syntellect/Envox deal appears to be an excellent and complementary match of two fine companies. Envox brings to Syntellect's table a global reach and technology heft, not to mention a $16 million per annum revenue stream: very handy in an uncertain marketplace. The menu of Envox's powerful communications platform, IVR, CTI, and Voice XML tools may well enhance Syntellect's flagship Customer Interaction Management suite. That will help Syntellect to fend off competitors in a slow-growth market, and position it to take advantage of opportunities when the economy turns around.

When I saw the press release from the American Teleservices Association and DialAmerica reporting that most major teleservices clients would leave their outsourcer vendors because they were dissatisfied with them i.e. the service they were getting, I didn't know whether to laugh, cry, or curse or all three at the same time. Naturally I turned this into an article that I put on our site.

After all, what are teleservices firms in the business for, except to deliver services? If they can't deliver them to their clients' satisfaction then why should they exist?

The underlying issue is quality. Teleservices companies have historically been the 'teleprofessionals': the experts with the expertise to deliver high quality customer care and acquisition at low costs.

Yet too many teleservices outfits have dropped the ball for reasons both preventable i.e. greed, incompetence, lack of attention to detail, underpricing, and understandable: limited resources, overly demanding clients, costly new technologies with long-burn ROIs, and offshore and onshore competition.

In fairness, and to the last set of points, clients too must share part of the blame, including for the low service quality their customers get. Stressing cost over price, which too many outfits still do results in poor results for cheap: you get what you pay for. Lousy metrics and lists generate lousy returns: garbage in/garbage out.

This leads to another key question: is the teleservices industry sustainable? The hard reality is that outsourcing is a more expensive solution than in-house centers because the outsourcers' profits have to calculated into the total costs. The only savings--and rationale--for outsourcing, is avoiding staffing and facilities costs for short-term programs. That is why organizations typically have a core in-house group to handle the steady calls and outsource the rest.

Yet advancements in speech rec, and increasing comfort levels with employee home agents are making these options viable to handle outsourced calls. Outsourcers like Working Solutions are wisely also marketing their platforms to serve in-house operations.

The only choices available for teleservices firms seem to be:

* Get back to the quality roots. Make the people and processes outperform the best in-house centers. Clear out the management and supervisory deadwood. Lead, follow or get the (H) out of the way. Do whatever it takes. Teleservices can be better than 'DIY'

* Go innovative techwise. There are a wide range of hosted solutions on the marketplace for everything from CRM to routing to WFO. Go SIP ASAP

* Board up traditional contact centers--they are a waste of money and those jobs tend too often attract low-performing 'gumsmacker' young slackers--and instead go home where one can recruit higher quality, mature, and responsible adults

* Focus on the clients. Treat them like gold, because they are.

The firms that do the above will survive this economy and prosper, and may find themselves at the top of our Top 50 Teleservices Agencies, where they belong.

Imagine being able to take and make calls, receive e-mails, IMs, and SMS, and at the same time manage web-enabled applications like hosted CRM and workforce management in a convenient, go-anywhere, user-friendly wireless appliance.

Imagine no more being tangled up in cords, or fiddling with multiple (and expensive) gadgets.

Imagine having at last a truly usable phone for home workers, including contact center agents and supervisors.

The hard reality is that when you are working from home you do get interrupted, like for deliveries, plumbers, other contractors, family responsibilities: which beats productivity and cost-wise having to leave early/arrive late to handle when working in a traditional office. Such a device would enable you to stay in touch and keep on the go while signing documents, giving instructions, etc.

The reality of having such a tool may be closer than you may think: in the form of an IP-enabled iPhone that acts like a mutant cordless handset.

Give the credit and kudos to Group Publisher Rich Tehrani who revealed in his blog just before ITEXPO West how the iPhone can become the ultimate (and universal) handset via IP by using the extra wire connected to the headphone jack.

This is roughly similar in concept to the Hutchison Telecom Telepoint hybrid cordless/microcellular units marketed in the UK in the early 1990s which if you were in range of one of these base stations you could make calls. I used to live and work near Manchester, England where this was launched and saw these 'points' but I never witnessed anyone using them. You could also use the devices at home as cordless sets.

What I'd like to see is someone to bring back the Tandy TRS80-T100--the first truly functional portable computer: the ultimate tablet--with 21st centry functionality.

The T100 combined word processing, BASIC, a small but readable screen, a built-in modem, and a a rugged keyboard: features that made it the journalist's best friend. You could, using an acoustic coupler, zap files over a pay phone. I used the clamshell model, the T200, when I wrote for the Manchester (N.H.) Union-Leader over 20 years ago, and it far beat most laptops I've relied on since.

I and other journalists, programmers, and other keyboard-intensive users have been reluctant to switch over to BlackBerries, etc. because the keys and pads are too small and unforgiving for us two-fingered demons, and the screens are way too small. The tablets that have come on the market in recent years lacked usability.

What are firms like Apple, and they and other practical geniuses who can box and package proven technologies waiting for?

While at ITEXPO West in L-A last week I saw a headline in USA Today "Opportunity Knocks in Canada". The story discussed how the petro-rich province of Alberta is recruiting skilled Americans to work there.

The other side of the picture is that US-serving contact centers located there are closing, such as Convergys' shuttering of its Red Deer site because of the high Canadian dollar that is largely fueled by the resource sector that has made services less competitive.

At the same time despite the widespread investments in predominantly nearshore contact centers throughout Canada over the past 12 years, there has not been the rapid expansion in IT and the subsequent movement up the skills and technologies food chain on any signficant scale there like that which has occurred in Ireland and is now taking place in India.

That shift has enabled the Irish economy, once Europe's basket case, to shrug off the loss of contact centers as it becomes less competitive than that in other nations, with former contact agents have moved on to become IT developers and help desk specialists. India is taking the same route.

Canadians have lost the puck as it were on the great opportunity that contact centers have provided elsewhere in laying the basis of a strong high-tech economy, which overall has long been fairly dismal with the exceptions of a few bright lights like RIM, Nortel, Mitel, and CRM vendors like Maximizer.

For when the oil runs out, what else is there going to be left especially in Alberta? While there has been much talk and a few high profile projects on technology, Canada, especially the West, is still a nation that 'hews wood and draws water'.

While managing the SIP in the Contact Center Certification track at ITEXPO West yesterday I came across two excellent insights courtesy of the speakers and the attendees.

In a discussion following TDI CTO Mark Moore's session on enabling home-based agents arose the issue of how to manage bandwidth at home agents' premises, what with everyone else in the household tapping into wireless networks unbeknownst to the agents.

The concern is to make sure the demand on the pipe at home is not constricted to the point where agents cannot access applications they need. This can be an issue in many households, especially with teenagers...one that I will be looking into...and reporting back on.

I don't have that problem in my household as the cable feed, base set phones (we have IP for residential too as well as for my work) the wireless hub are in my office, and I know exactly how many devices are on it. It helps that my peak usage times (daytime) are not the same as other users: my wife and a tenant, both of whom are full-time students at a local college.

Bandwidth may be a major issue in whether the cable companies in particular, are keeping up their investments in the pipes with demand. That's the issue I have where I live. That too I'll be reviewing...

The second insight is from Brian Spencer, president of Oaisys. He made a very good point in that you don't have to be live with customers to give excellent customer service. That it is OK to look into matters and get back to them, and in doing so reviewing call recordings to make sure that every issue customers raised and the importance they have given to them by language and tone of voice are followed up on.

This too will be followed up on in future articles.