Making Contact

Aspect Software yesterday announced its new strategy to bring unified communications capabilities to its contact center solutions. Specifically, the company announced that it will soon be introducing enhanced versions of Aspect Unified IP and PerformanceEdge which are fully interoperable with existing unified communications solutions.

This, of course, could have been expected – I mean, after all Aspect is one of the largest providers of contact center solutions, and the adoption of unified communications is starting to pick up steam. Considering that so many enterprises already use their contact center telephony systems for communications across most, if not all of the organization (linking together different divisions, departments, remote offices, etc., that are geographically dispersed), it makes perfect sense for contact center platform makers such as Aspect to endow their products with UC capabilities (and many have already done so – for example, TouchStar just recently introduced its new “Unify” product, a browser-based product that facilitates true seamless UC across the enterprise). With these advanced, all-IP solutions and their amazing call routing capabilities, an enterprise can make its contact center system the “communications center” for the entire organization.

 

The advantage of bringing UC to the contact center is that it ushers in the next iteration of the “informal contact center,” where the walls, or barriers if you will, that separate the contact center from the rest of the organization are dissolved, and other “knowledge workers” within the organization can be used as resources for handling customer complaints and a wide range of other issues. To deliver superior customer service, agents need the ability to quickly and effortlessly “escalate” calls and put the customer in contact with someone else in the organization who has the exact skills or expertise to help that customer quickly. With UC in the contact center, agents have multiple means for reaching out to these knowledge workers – via IM, via email, via Web chat -- even video chat. Furthermore, with UC in the contact center, managers, supervisors and executives have the ability to reach personnel in the center (and view their “presence”) and get the information they need – quickly, effortlessly, and in the mode they prefer. With UC, not only can processes be seamlessly extended beyond the traditional boundaries of the contact center, with the ability to reach knowledge workers or “subject matter experts” in the organization, all collaboration across the organization is streamlined and enhanced.

 

“It is important for organizations to include the contact center as part of their broader unified communications strategy because customers can be a key beneficiary of the value that unified communications brings,” explained Bern Elliot, research vice president at Gartner, in yesterday’s news release from Aspect. “To succeed, enterprises should leverage contact center technology broadly into their enterprise, and similarly contact centers should understand how to leverage enterprise UC technology into their operations.”

 

For now Aspect is basing its unified communications for the contact center strategy on its current versions of Aspect Unified IP, a comprehensive session initiation protocol (SIP)-based VoIP unified contact center solution, and PerformanceEdge, its workforce optimization suite. The company reportedly plans to release new versions of these products which will be interoperable with other unified communications software.

 

The company claims that future releases of Aspect Unified IP “will enable organizations to route interactions to enterprise experts based on presence and willingness, generate enterprise-level reports of these interactions, and utilize workforce management to forecast expert demand.”

 

For more information about Aspect’s new UC strategy, check out Tracey Schelmetic’s article and Rich Tehrani’s blog entry from yesterday.

Government officials in the various provinces of Canada which are highly reliant on the call center industry to keep the economy afloat are no doubt scrambling to try to come up with additional incentives and new strategies to keep U.S. companies from pulling their centers out.

A recent report from Datamonitor shows that many U.S. firms are now starting to pack up and relocate their Canada-based call center operations due to the increasing value of the U.S. dollar and the increasingly unfavorable exchange rate. Even call center outsourcing behemoth Convergys recently announced that it will be closing some of its facilities in Canada in the coming months. This is bad news for New Brunswick, which relies heavily on the call center industry for jobs and economic growth and is in the process of trying to become independent.

In an article written today by TMCnet’s Susan Campbell, independent economic consultant David Campbell “argues that the area should put more emphasis on attracting financial services and hedge fund centers, which tend to pay higher salaries.” So one approach the this problem will be to continue to emphasize the fact that New Brunswick offers a well educated and highly skilled workforce and therefore is better suited to providing high value, high touch call center services. As Susan explains, “New Brunswick has a goal of becoming self-sufficient by 2026. Campbell warns that this goal will never be realized if the region continues to offer incentives to call centers that pay employees no more than $10 to $12 per hour.”

“Those jobs filled a need, but now that we have low unemployment, we need to look for jobs that will contribute taxes that will pay for government services,” Campbell said in a statement. “Essentially, we were attracting jobs that did not generate enough taxes to pay for the government services covering the worker.”

“Much like other locations, New Brunswick has found that more sophisticated contact centers tend to remain, especially those in IT and financial services. Call centers that live from contract to contract and whose basic operations include calling out to sell everything from phone services to car insurance, have proven to be transient.”

My take? Canada is going to be greatly challenged to keep its call center industry from shrinking unless it starts offering additional economic incentives to U.S. companies. Some regions are going to have a hard time attracting new center based on their “highly skilled workforce” alone, especially considering that workers with good IT skills are now finding opportunities in other industries outside of the call center realm all across Canada. It could be that as some U.S. firms begin to pull their operations out, the percentage of workers with good IT and customer service skills will begin to increase, thus creating new opportunities for Canada to attract new, “premium” centers which handle more complex, higher value transactions.

Now is the time for Canada officials to start planning carefully -- not panic, but calmly plan. With the right mix of economic incentives and skilled workers, it just could end up attracting the kind of centers it needs to make it through the rough times ahead ….

I was at the Call Center Demo show down in Miami this past week – you know, the call center trade show brought to you by the people who no longer have a print publication focused on the call center industry (heh, heh)?

Anyway, during the show I noticed that a majority of the exhibitors were focused on the workforce optimization space – which by definition includes workforce management, performance management, call recording, quality monitoring. e-learning and analytics. Apparently Tracey Schelmetic, editor of Customer Interaction Solutions, TMC’s illustrious print publication focused on the call center industry, got it right when she dubbed 2008 “The Year of Workforce Optimization” on the front cover of this month’s issue. From the look of this past week’s Call Center Demo show, I’d say she hit the nail on the head.

Breaking down the exhibitor list, there were nine companies offering workforce management; ten companies offering performance management; ten companies offering call recording; nine companies offering QM or “quality assurance;” and 11 companies offering analytics (Web and Speech). Of course, there is duplication in each category, as many of these companies offer a suite of products for addressing some or all of the technology “disciplines” that make up the WFO realm. But bear in mind that there was only a little more than 50 exhibitors!

The thing I see, though, is that the WFO space is becoming so competitive that many of these companies are having a hard time differentiating their products -- as became evident when I asked each of them what made their solutions unique in the marketplace. Beyond the fact the solutions are geared for certain sized markets (SMB or enterprise), and are sometimes tailored for specific industries, many of the vendors (save for a few) were unable to tell me which feature sets or capabilities really distinguished their products from their competitors. A couple of them actually seemed bored from having to explain the capabilities of their solutions over and over (trust me, I understand). Sometimes the emphasis was more on who they interoperate with, the level of scalbility provided, or how their pricing is structured (if offering hosted) than it was about the specific features or capabilities. But to me it seems like it should be the other way around. I know there are major differences between some of the products I saw -- that there key differences between the features and capabilities they provide -- so I'm wondering why that wasn't better conveyed.

One thing that makes me chuckle is how performance management solutions are “working their way up the food chain,” if you will, and how there are now PM solutions geared for trainers, coaches, managers/supervisors -- even company execs. Yes, indeed, it seems like everyone or anyone in an organization can benefit form a little performance management from time to time. I’m wondering if one day soon we’ll see performance management solutions geared for high level executives like COOs ands CFOs. Heck why not performance management for your company president or CEO? Of course, your CEO’s performance would have to be continuously monitored, in real time, by an independent third party (hand picked by the board, of course). And as long we’re going to do that, why not improve accountability among all of our government officials – including our President – and have them operate within the rigors of a standardized performance management solution as well?

And, as long as we’re at it, how about some performance management for the “Big Guy” upstairs too? You know, the ancient one, with the flowing white beard, up in the heavens? Shouldn’t there be a performance management solution designed for Him as well? Afterall, gotta make sure He's holding up His end of the bargain ...

(OK, so I’ve officially lost it …)

A new report from market research firm Datamonitor shows what many of us already know: Companies are starting to pack up and relocate their Canada-based call center operations due to the increasing value of the U.S. dollar and the increasingly unfavorable exchange rate. Even call center outsourcing behemoth Convergys has announced that it will be closing some of its facilities in Canada in the coming months – this news coming directly from the mouth of Convergys CEO David Dougherty.

“Convergys’ announcement of a scale-back on Canadian operations could be the first of many by outsourcers,” warned Peter Ryan, head of contact center outsourcing analysis at Datamonitor, in a press release. He said the decline of the U.S. dollar “has badly eroded the profitability of U.S. outsourcers based in Canada,” and that “Canadian contact center labor is becoming difficult to recruit and retain, further adding to outsourcers’ costs.” In addition there is not enough supply of Spanish-speaking contact center labor in Canada to meet U.S. demand, Ryan said.

If things don’t change soon -- and right now there’s no reason to expect that they will --Datamonitor predicts that companies will be pulling their call centers out of Canada in droves, crippling what has become one of the country’s largest and most profitable industries. They will go out and find new regions for setting up their call centers -- in India, in the Philippines, and in Latin America -- Datamonitor suggests, and some will no doubt want to bring their centers back home to the U.S. too.

Datamonitor says the increasingly unfavorable exchange in Canada “has been a nightmare for American contact center investors.”

“Indeed, since 2004, the CDN has appreciated over 30 percent, which has effectively eroded profit margins and operating cost savings that many U.S. outsourcers had come to rely upon from their Canadian operations,” a press release touting the new Datamonitor report states. “This had been a major selling point for luring American investment north of the border.”

According to the report, a diminished pool of qualified applicants for contact center jobs – which now demand both good technical and interaction skills – is also hurting the contact center industry in Canada. Recruiting good agents has become a serious challenge, particularly when considering recent trends such as the migration of prospective agents from across the country to the burgeoning Alberta oil sands, where firms are paying higher salaries – salaries which contact center industry in Canada simply cannot match. This in turn has led to an increase in overall wages and benefits paid to existing agents in order to keep attrition low – however, outsourcing firms are going to have difficulty bearing these higher wages over the long term and for that reason many of them will begin to pull out.

Another factor resulting in diminished interest in Canada as a location for contact centers is the fact that the country offers so few Spanish-speaking agents. With roughly one third of all U.S. consumers now Spanish-speaking, it is little wonder that so many organizations see multilingual capabilities, in particular English-Spanish, as being critical to their future success. As such, many of the U.S. organizations pulling out of Canada will likely be looking at other “near-shore” options, such as those offered in the Caribbean and Latin America (CALA).

Datamonitor is a leading provider of online data, analytic and forecasting platforms for key vertical sectors. For more information, visit www.datamonitor.com.

Maximizer Software Inc. has released the Entrepreneur Edition of Maximizer CRM 10 – thus rounding out its CRM software suite with a new edition targeted at the small business.

 

Maximizer CRM 10 already included covered the SMB market well with its Group, Professional and Enterprise Editions. Now, with the introduction of the Entrepreneur Edition, the suite has an edition for every size business (including departments within a larger organization), from small to medium to large to enterprise. In fact, Maximizer claims it is now “the only vendor that offers a complete family of CRM products for small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) that enables a smooth migration from contact management through to full-featured CRM.” Its CRM software suite is now flexible and scalable enough that it can help a business of one grow to become a business of “500 or beyond.”

 

Introduced this past November, Maximizer CRM 10 represents a departure from Maximizer’s previous CRM product line, in that it has eliminated the former stand-alone Enterprise edition found in version 9 and combined it into a more full-spectrum version with different editions to suit the needs of different-sized companies.

The new Entrepreneur Edition covers the “small” end of the spectrum, but as company officials point out, this easy-to-use, turn-key CRM solution offers advanced functionality found on more expensive systems – including, perhaps best of all, CRM for BlackBerry smartphones.

 

Even a small business can benefit from a mobile CRM solution. With mobile CRM, your workers can have access to the critical business information they need via their BlackBerry devices, and the ability to manipulate it in near real time.

Maximizer claims that one big advantage of its software suite is that it lets companies transition to mobile CRM at their own pace (or as the business grows), from basic mobile messaging to full-fledged mobile CRM (with full access to real data, and the ability manipulate it in real time, as well as the ability to conduct transactions remotely).

With Maximizer’s MaxMobile client for BlackBerry working in concert with the mobile version of its platform, mobile workers can have access to their customers, leads, schedules, sales deals and forecasts, and service cases directly on their handsets, through wired or wireless synchronization. As such, changes and updates made in the field can take effect in real time (or near real time) on a server at the central office. Plus, with Maximizer 10, managers can get centralized, Web-based “dashboard” views of business activity and do real time analysis of the data which is coming from every end point, including the mobile devices.

“For budding small businesses, choosing a key technology solution is a critical investment, as both money and resource allocation can make or break the business,” said William Anderson, executive vice president, Maximizer Software, in a press release. “With the release of Entrepreneur Edition, small business owners gain an extremely comprehensive contact management solution that enables them to incorporate best practices in customer care and time management right from the start.”

Another key differentiator for Maximizer CRM 10 is its integration with CanDoGo.com’s on-demand sales and professional coaching solution. Thanks to Maximizer’s partnership with CanDoGo.com, your workers can have anytime access to high quality coaching and training content and other basic business advice from leading experts through their CRM apps. Topics covered range from sales negotiation, to proposals, to leadership and motivation. Users can leverage advice and coaching from more than 150 authors, speakers and professional trainers including Zig Ziglar, Tom Hopkins and Tony Parinello, in text, audio and video formats.

Maximizer CRM 10 Entrepreneur Edition also offers easier communication and time management with improved Microsoft Outlook integration; improved administration and security to manage small groups; and overall productivity enhancements in on-the-fly reporting, and task management.

For more information, visit www.maximizer.com.

Improving agent performance in the call center requires a holistic approach – not only do you have to a thorough job of assessing agent skills during the recruiting/hiring process, you also have to train your agents to become customer care experts and then continuously improve their skills through ongoing coaching.

Perhaps more importantly, you also need to do a careful job of recruiting and training your call center managers. The manager’s role is becoming increasingly critical today, as so many organizations are now near-shoring or off-shoring their centers and spreading their centers across the globe. In some of these off-shore locations, managers find themselves in a 1:6 manager-to-agent ratio -- and facing major cultural and language barriers. Needless to say there can be some serious challenges for these managers as they try to adapt to their new environments.

But regardless of these challenges, there is a systematic and proven method for organizations to improve operations at their off-shore call centers and boost customer satisfaction. And here we’re talking about a lot more than basic training in customer interaction skills and “accent neutralization.” To learn more, check out this white paper from Ulysses Learning.

Research In Motion is reporting that there is a "critical severity outage" of E-mail service on BlackBerry smartphones across North America, however, the cause of the outage, or how widespread it is, has not yet been reported.

According to a Reuters Canada report, BlackBerry users today received an emergency notification email “regarding the current BlackBerry Infrastructure outage.” An AP report says the outage occurred sometime shortly after 3:30 p.m..

The e-mail notification said the outage has affected enterprise clients and "users of the Americas network." Neither the Reuters Canada report or the AP report says how many users in the U.S. and Canada are affected.

TMCnet has been searching the Web for more news on what caused the outage and how long it will take to repair. We’ll let you know as soon as we know …

Geez, first it was the undersea cables and now BlackBerry email service. Wonder how many conspiracy theories are forming around this one ...

In an article posted yesterday on Marketing Pilgrim, Greg Howlett has some great practical advice for smaller sized companies thinking about outsourcing their calls to a call center.

 

He makes the point that companies need to do a thorough job of assessing a call center outsourcing firm’s operations – and in particular the skill level of its agents – before making a decision, and that furthermore, once the decision is made, you have to continuously monitor the call center’s performance in order to ensure that service quality isn’t slipping.

 

“The key is simply this–you cannot hire one and forget about them,” he wrote. “You have to remember that those people whom you have little control over have the ability to make or break your business. That is scary thought.”

 

He suggests that companies place a lot of “test orders” with the BPO firms they’re considering contracting – and also that they have a sharp eye for the details in the contract itself, in order to protect themselves. He also suggests that companies reps actually visit the call enters they’re doing business with, and meet some of the agents to get a first hand perspective of their skill level and the quality of their work.

 

As he so aptly points out, when you go to contract with one of these overseas firms, you are basically placing the success of your business into the hands of total strangers. But don’t let them be strangers – go meet with them, assess their skills (and general level of intelligence) – and take a look at the facility.

 

Good, sound advice.

Hosted contact center solutions company Contactual recently released a case study explaining how temporary staffing company Labor Ready realized significant efficiencies and cost savings since it started using Contactual’s Web-based apps. The case study was covered today by TMC freelancer Anuradha Shukla and is posted on Contactual’s new Virtual Call Center channel on TMCnet.

Contactual’s high scalability, reliability and ease of deployment, as well as its “virtualization” capabilities, have brought huge advantages to this busy staffing agency. I think this case study is a great testimonial speaking to the many advantages afforded through today’s hosted contact center offerings.

I met with Contactual CEO Mansour Salame and other members of the Contactual team a couple of times this past summer and I am impressed with the company and its offerings, which are accurately described as “affordable yet very full featured.” I think it is a high class operation.

You might remember that Contactual landed a sweet deal with VoIP solutions provider 8x8 this past July. 8x8, provider of the popular Packet8 VoIP service (which also comes in a business edition), announced that it was launching a new, fully integrated hosted call center solution designed specifically for small to medium sized businesses with call center operations consisting of less than 100 seats. This offering is based on Contactual’s hosted contact center platform. To me, that speaks volumes about the reliability and scalability of this platform.

There are quite a few software providers out there who are now offering hosted contact center offerings, but a key difference (beyond the software’s capabilities and the various pricing schemes) is the level of support – and quality of support – you get with the service. I won’t name any names, but from what I understand this is one of the things that separate Contactual from the rest of the pack.

Keep your eye on Contactual … and make sure you check out the company’s new channel on TMCnet!

According to a report in the Elmira Star-Gazette, Gov. Eliot Spitzer was expected to attend a ribbon cutting ceremony for the opening of Sitel Corp.’s new contact center in Erwin, N.Y. this morning.

The new 400 seat contact center -- which will be a real shot in the arm for Erwin and Elmira-area’s economy -- will be located in a 45,000-square-foot former Corning Inc. building at 103 Canada Road. According to the report, the state of New York is contributing $2.25 million to the project, including a $1.5 million grant from Empire State Development and $750,000 from the Governor's Office for Small Cities. Sitel will invest up to $4.6 million to renovate the former Corning Inc. facility.

Privately-held Sitel is a leading contact center outsourcing firm with more than 145 facilities in 30 countries employing 67,000 employees.

In other contact center opening news, Global Contact Services of North Carolina has announced that it will be opening a new call center in Pittsfield, Pa., creating at least 200 new jobs by early March. This will be GCS’s eleventh call center location. As per a report in the Bangor Daily News, “the move softens the loss of 145 local jobs announced Monday by San Antonio Shoe and six teaching positions that will be lost in June with the closure of St. Agnes Catholic School.”

Dell is reportedly making more staff cuts, this time at one of its Ottawa call centers. According to a report in London Free Press, dozens of employees at one of Dell’s call centers in Ottawa will be given pink slips sometime in the coming weeks. But the bigger blow is that Dell has decided to scrap its plans to add 1,200 seats to its call center operations in the province.

Dell representative Jess Blackburn told London Free Press that the cuts are “part of Dell's global review of its business operations and efforts to consolidate and reduce our costs of operations around the world."

For the past few years, Dell has opened one call center after another, the philosophy apparently being that opening more centers, rather than improving the quality of service, was the best strategy for boosting c-sat … but now it appears the tide has turned, and lately I’ve seen more announcements about Dell call center closings, rather than openings.

This particular report makes me wonder if the current unfavorable exchange rate on the U.S. dollar in Canada had something to do with Dell’s decision …

Not to go off on a tangent, but another thing I always wonder, when I read these reports, is whether self-service solutions and other channels for contact, such as email and Web, are gaining favor among consumers and are therefore starting to have an impact on staffing levels …