IP Contact Center Technology: Eliminating The Risks (Part IV)

Customer Inter@ction Solutions, May 2005 by Borodow, Eli, Betzer, Mike, Hayden, Kevin

One of the questions we hear most often is, "How can I future-proof the IP contact center technology investment I'm about to make and maximize its useful lifecycle?" This month we're going to examine the issue within the context of different technology options that are currently available. We'll also project ahead a few years and examine probable trends that are still a few years out; but which will inevitably become standard solutions for reducing costs and increasing both productivity and revenue production. The goal of this glimpse into the near future is to provide a framework for understanding forthcoming innovations and how future compatibility can be addressed in your current purchasing decisions.

Adaptive Technology

One of the most "future-proofing" attributes to look for in today's solutions is "adaptive" IP contact center technology - technology that empowers real-time optimization of even the most granular technology-driven business processes in real time, at no cost. Adaptive technology is integrated by design to incorporate all of the IP contact center technologies that typically power a Web-enabled call center, including phone, fax and Internet technologies, as well as technologies related to quality assurance. The difference lies in the "integration-by-design" approach; an approach that enables technology-driven business processes and their associated technologies to be provisioned and modified in real time, without sacrifice.

No Sacrifice

Adaptive solutions are driven by the same needs-analysis questions that integrators rely on to define "scope of work" for traditional point solution deployments; but here the entire range of standard outcomes is pre-programmed, and changes are implemented in real time from Web menus. (If an outcome hasn't been pre-programmed because it represents a new and unique idea, Web services are also available to empower the addition of new potential outcomes.)

What's The Value In This Approach?

Historically, contact centers cobbled together as many as 24 different point solutions to create their multichannel customer service communications infrastructures. The result was expensive to buy, expensive to maintain and notoriously rigid; it required significant time and money to implement changes. As a result, companies that have deployed technologies in this paradigm typically shy away from implementing expensive changes to their software investments and, instead, often opt to postpone resolving many problems until the life cycle of their current investments are fully depreciated.

By contrast, companies that have deployed "adaptive" solutions can fix problems in real time and, therefore, run in a more optimized state more often, enabling them to enjoy competitive advantages in both productivity and customer satisfaction. Academic research has validated productivity gains of more than 30 percent for companies that deploy adaptive technology, often increasing to many times that number depending on the size of the company (larger companies tend to have a history of fewer poor "gut infrastructure decisions") and how much time has passed since the company's last upgrade. Of course, it should be intuitively obvious that the ability to fix infrastructure problems in real time not only constantly renews the lifecycle of legacy investments, but also inevitably yields significant productivity benefits.

Perhaps just as important is the effect on customer satisfaction. Studies validate that businesses which deploy multichannel solutions - those that can adapt to changing customer needs in real time - enjoy higher customer satisfaction rates. (No surprise here.) What isn't as obvious is this fact: those companies that have the greatest customer loyalty rates also enjoy much higher growth rates compared with the average growth rates for their industries. This means that customer satisfaction is directly related to business growth. This is what Harvard University Business School calls the "Loyalty Effect." That's why you care.

A Look Into The Future

While adaptive technology leverages the business intelligence of contact center managers by empowering them to implement granular infrastructure changes in real time across all communications channels, it nevertheless relies on the intelligence of the individual to get there. In the future, the marriage of analytics and adaptive IP contact center technologies will result in the emergence of a new paradigm for contact center efficiency: the self-optimizing contact center.

What Is Analytics?

One can hardly work in contact center management today without hearing about the compelling benefits of analytics. Analytics technology provides contact center managers with the insight necessary for them to proactively optimize contact center performance, reduce operational costs and improve customer satisfaction. Of course, while proactive insight obviously has tremendous value, a great many operational bottlenecks might not be foreseeable by human or machine - and these unpredictable bottlenecks will inevitably take their toll on revenue production if they cannot be addressed in real time.