A View Of The Industry Through ICCM's Window

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

An Orchestra Of Products At Concerto

If you haven't been focusing on Concerto (vvww.concerto.com) lately, you have missed a number of acquisitions, as well as the fact that the company has gone from public to private. One of the advantages to this latter move is that the company is now able to plan for the long-term, as opposed to quarter by quarter. This should be a positive happening for Concerto's customers. They recently acquired Melita and tell me they are happy with much of Melita's technology, especially with that related to dialer compliance with recent FTC laws. In fact, Concerto informed me that they now have just under 50 percent of the worldwide dialer market.

CenterForce Technologies was Concerto's most recent acquisition, and with this they are better positioned to focus on business applications such as performance optimization and business process management. This particular acquisition made a great deal of sense, as CenterForce has been working with Concerto and Melita for years, and now mutual customers can have a single point of contact for questions.

It's been a while since I've written about Concerto and their Ensemble Pro products, and I think it's worth pointing out that they are doing some amazing things with technology, such as contextual screen-pop. If a customer is getting billing information via IVR and he or she "zeros out" out an agent, the system will route the call to an agent who is familiar with billing. The system will also "pop" the agent's screen with the customer's information, including the bill in question. The reverse can also be achieved, with customers contextually placed back into the automated system. If, for example, a customer calls to change his address and then asks for account balances going back three months, the agent can ask the customer if he minds being switched to the automated system for this information. If you're thinking that this is too impersonal, you may be right (at least for the moment), but many of us thought the same thing when IVR systems and voice mail began to gain acceptance. One case study detailed by Concerto shows Computer Sciences Inc. using this technology today, and they have subsequently increased calls handled by IVR from 30 percent to 70 percent!

What is more important than the specific technology in this case is the fact that by using integrated systems, we are able to allow customers to pick their preferred type of interaction. Without such integration, a customer becomes merely a series of transactions: an IVR transaction, an e-mail transaction, etc.

Getting back to performance optimization, Concerto is able to use this technology to provide truly valuable business intelligence. Data from a variety of environments are rolled up to provide key business metrics and indicators. For example, you are able to determine if your sales have dropped from $100 per agent per hour to $90. By clicking and drilling down, you are better able to determine the root cause of this loss of revenue. Is it a Tl line that went down, a bad board in one of your systems, a revised IVR script that has a problem or an issue with your training? Your analysis might even point to a larger issue that needs to be addressed immediately.