Technology highlights

Customer Inter@ction Solutions, May 2003

Following is an interview between Rich Tehrani, President and Group Editor-in-Chief of TMC, and Eli Borodow, CEO of Telephony@Work (www.telephonyat-work.com). Telephony@Work is a platinum sponsor of TMC's upcoming Global Call Center Outsourcing Summit, to be held June 2nd through 4th in Reno, Nevada. Mr. Borodow will be a featured luncheon speaker at the event. For more information about the GCCOS, visit http://www.tmc-net.com/gccos/.

RT: Lately, it's very fashionable for industry analysts to claim that CRM was a huge failure. Do you agree? If not, where do you lay the blame for companies not experiencing what they thought they would with CRM implementations?

EB: At Telephony@Work, we believe that the extent to which many vendors' CRM and multichannel interaction management deployments have failed is directly tied to how these technologies were deployed up-front; with the ultimate impact of these early decisions on customer satisfaction materializing inevitably over time. Inflexible systems cobbled together via time-consuming and expensive integration are not the ideal vehicle for ongoing adaptation to changing customer needs and wants.

The point here is that customer satisfaction requirements aren't static. Needs change. So do desires. Systems that can't quickly and easily adapt (in the real world this means at no cost) are generally obsolete before they are even deployed. CRM and multichannel interaction management are moving targets - where needs, desires and expectations are constantly changing. The problem is that most systems can't adapt quickly or easily and their outputs often ultimately resonate with customers as hollow attempts to address real-world problems with cliches - instead of reflecting a genuine dialog between companies and the customers that support them.

At Telephony@Work, we recognized this back in the 1990s. Our response was a comprehensive "productization" and "democratization" of contact center technology to enable real-time change to be implemented by non-programmers on-demand and at no cost - with democratized control of everything from suggested-response content to weighted skills-based routing algorithms. Our mission of empowering a "real-time business vision" focused on eliminating the need for business response to customer stimulus to be delayed and ultimately filtered (i.e., watered down/changed/morphed) through the lens of budgetary constraints and the biases of a programming staff - both of which naturally tend to focus on their own root concerns rather than on the customer-centric vision that was initially the catalyst for change. Of course, the bigger problem is that such traditional, time-consuming "change processes" naturally result in the delivery of yesterday's answers to todays questions - which does little to enhance customer relationships and ultimately serves only to undermine them. The problem is only compounded for out-sourcers, whose clients want new campaigns to be up and running yesterday; with evaluation metrics that measure performance against the target of absolute customer satisfaction.

The need to empower real-time business visions for our carrier and outsourcer clients, two of our key markets, led Telephony@Work to develop and ultimately deliver a truly differentiated value proposition: pre-integrated contact center technology that is customized via browser-menus, field-filling and drop-down lists - rather than via the traditional approach of custom programming, compiling and constant re-integration of script languages. The result is consistent quality and real-time change on-demand; without the costs, risks and delays of custom programming and systems integration. Of course, to be really effective, this menu-driven provisioning had to mirror the same needs analysis processes that toptier integrators rely on prior to beginning the programming phases of their deployments, such that no sacrifice in flexibility is traded off in exchange for the ability to "instantly provision" or implement real-time change.

RT: Though everyone seems to agree that a customer's contact information and history with a company should be linked across all media, we all know from our daily dealings with our banks, insurance companies, wireless providers, etc., that this is not the case. What do you think is the reason for the resistance many companies have toward transforming their call centers into multimedia knowledge centers?

EB: The real problem that these companies face lies in the inflexibility of their legacy environments - in that they have become virtual prisoners of their past investments. Their "resistance" is not so much an act of will as it is an act of resignation - resigning themselves to mediocre service as prisoners of the fiscal life cycle of their legacy technologies. Since the life cycles of their various point solutions expire at different times, the implementation of comprehensive solutions that are integrated-by-design becomes that much more difficult. At Telephony@Work, we recognized that this reality could not be denied and we responded with a competitive upgrade program that gives our clients full credit for the balance of the life-cycles in their existing technology investments; and a comprehensive money-back performance guarantee - thereby empowering call center managers to update their systems with both the consent and support of their CFOs.