A View Of The Industry Through ICCM's Window

Customer Inter@ction Solutions, Sep 2004 by Tehrani, Rich

If you were there, you'll know that the recent ICCM in Chicago was smaller than in previous years. It was not, however, lacking in new solutions, and I'd like to offer my impressions of several of them. (Tracey Schelmetic, the Editorial Director of this magazine, wrote a wonderful summation of her own, located at tmcnet,com/40.1, that you should read if you are interested in more details.)

What is still the largest contact center event in the U.S. appears to be shrinking quickly, while the newly announced ACCE show is set to debut in September in Seattle. It will be interesting to see which show does better. The lack of large crowds, such as those that shows in past years boasted, allowed me to speak with a number of vendors without feeling the need to rush through my meetings.

My initial impression, upon my first look at the show floor, was that Aspect Corp. (vvww.aspect.com) had the best attended booth at the show, and there were a surprising amount and variety (surprising to me, at least) of countries and cities promoting call centers in their respective regions.

Interestingly, last year I wrote about the lack of new products at this annual show. The industry was slow, and R&D spending had been cut to the bone. This year, there were many more announcements and new products in evidence. It's possible that this show was slower than in years past because people were disappointed last year. I can tell you from first-hand experience, however, that the contact center market is picking up, and there are a lot of exciting new products and services to explore.

The first meeting I had was prior to the opening of the show. I received a call a while back from someone I knew who worked for Sphere Communications (www.spherecom.com) nearly a decade ago. (Sphere basically invented the concept of a packet-based PBX, although they used ATM where IP is now fashionable.) I met my contact and some of his colleagues to learn about their relatively new company in the contact center space, Sivox Technologies (www.sivox.com), which supplies products that maximize call center performance.

Sivox recently released its interactive RealCall 4.0 Contact Center Training Suite. RealCall 4.0 is an agent training product that uses speech recognition to determine if what agents are saying on the phone conforms to the company's policies and best practices. This occurs in training exercises, before agents pick up the phone to speak with real customers. For example, if an agent answers the telephone by saying "Whassuup?" the software will not recognize the greeting as an acceptable option and will query the TSR for an alternative. The system is customized for each contact center and simulates the software in use. This is done by capturing real screen shots and presenting them at appropriate times for the agent to interact with.

Intuitively, learning by doing is the absolute best way to learn, Sivox cites research that shows the retention rates of lectures are as low as 5 percent, retention from reading training materials at 10 percent, discussion at 50 percent and practice at 75 percent. Simulating a real experience can lead to retention levels of 90 percent. The point is, we learn best when we assimilate new information in context.

Theoretical learning put into practice is not a skill that many of us possess. For those of us that do possess it, we don't like to use it. My database professor in college, for example, was obsessed with theory. My eyes glazed over whenever I was in the class. After lectures, he would ask us to write database queries. Essentially, we had to learn coding without the instructor's help. I hated the class but loved database programming. When you learn programming, there is no better way to learn than by working with the actual code. The same can be said of almost all learning processes.

Back to Sivox. If you think about it, contact centers and retail outlets are unique in that they present a front line to your customer that is very difficult to monitor. It is naturally difficult in these environments to provide a uniform customer experience.

This is why "uniform quality assurance" should be a mantra in every contact center (and anywhere else we touch the customer). Making sure that all agents are up to a certain standard is virtually impossible to do without automated tools. In addition to the above, you can use the Sivox solution as a way to weed out underperformers before they get on the phone with customers. By hiring agents on a one week trial basis, you are able to determine if they measure up to your standards. If they do, keep them.

In case you are wondering, Sivox has some huge customers, such as MCI, SBC and Sprint, and in every case, they have received testimonials from customers who say that Sivox has dramatically improved their business. There are a few important notes to mention, Sivox was initially targeting Fortune-class companies but is now choosing to move down-market and offer a hosted solution as well. The system is "accent trained" across a pool of 40,000 agents from the U.S., Mexico and, more important recently, India. It has a 96 percent recognition rate across the board.