1. Please explain the business sectors that eLoyalty is in. How do you define yourselves?
eLoyalty is a management consulting, systems integration, and managed services firm that specializes in helping Fortune 1,000 clients optimize their customer interactions. We have a strong focus in the contact center and marketing organizations of our clients, as well as specific technical and functional expertise in Speech, CTI, VoIP, Marketing Analytics, and Behavioral Analytics.
That is the official description, but what I tell my children, friends, and relatives is: “We help big companies fix their customer service.” I feel good about job security, too, since the most frequent reply: “You should talk to so-and-so, they have HORRIBLE service!”
2. In some business sectors, eLoyalty is offering software/technology solutions, i.e. behavioral analytics, CCOS. Do these offerings conflict with your professional services?
Actually, we are finding that our solutions are starting to become significant drivers of our consulting services. We have a handful of VERY innovative solutions around Customer Experience Analytics that give our clients key insights into how to improve their operations, so it is a natural (and welcomed!) follow-on for us to help them with the actual improvement projects.
And since all of our solutions are offered as Managed Services (versus selling the solution as software), we have created some wonderful long-term relationship with clients that know us and just call us when they have a problem that requires specific expertise.
3. In which areas do you anticipate high growth for eLoyalty in the near future?
We are seeing the early signs of an explosion in growth for voice self-service. In conversations with clients, there seems to be a nice confluence of factors that is driving this:
The technology is ready. Speech recognition technology has improved greatly in the last few years, so that most “transactional” customer calls can be handled with fairly high accuracy. On top of this, standards like VXML have rapidly gained popularity so that the back-end data access required for self service (like getting an account balance or claim status from a legacy system) can begin to leverage the XML work that has been done over the last few years to put this information on the Web.
The business case is very compelling. Many of our clients are realizing that great self-service is a very good alternative to offshore outsourcing – they can save more money and avoid some of the pitfalls and negative PR that offshore outsourcing sometimes brings.
In response to this, we have some very specific offerings around “Smart Speech” that can help companies DOUBLE the ROI they get from speech. I won’t go into details here, but here’s a hint: It helps immensely to treat a Speech Self Service system as part of an integrated continuum of experience, rather than as a stand-alone system. Details can be found in our recent “Getting Speech Right” white paper at www.eloyalty.com/publications.
4. What are some of the most significant emerging trends that we can expect for the contact center market in the next twelve months?
We are seeing the beginning of a quiet revolution in the area of analytics. Clients we talk to have spent enormous sums of money in recent years implementing CRM systems, loyalty programs, and churn reduction programs, but the feedback they are getting indicates that customers still feel frustrated, alienated, and disenfranchised. At the core of the problem is the fact that most companies cannot see themselves through their customer’s eyes.
eLoyalty’s Customer Experience Analytics is an amazing technical solution to what would appear to be a simple problem: “Tell us the experience each customer has when they need service from our company.” Easy right? As it turns out, this has been a nearly impossible task for our clients to solve – until now. Our Customer Experience Analytics solution helps them answer some fundamental questions so that they can begin to make informed decisions on how to continually improve service:
Did the customer try your Web site before calling? What areas did they visit? Did they get an answer?
When the customer called, did they attempt self-service in the IVR? How did that go?
If they spoke with a live agent, did they actually get their issued resolved?
With Customer Experience Analytics, our clients can report on patterns of the customer experience, and aggregate this data by various demographic variables or drill down to a single customer’s experience and view (and hear!) the experience from end-to-end – from the customer’s perspective.
eLoyalty’s Behavioral Analytics solution goes a significant step further and actually allows our clients to report on the behavioral interaction between customers and contact center agents. We can “score” every call and report on how well CSRs talk to customers and establish rapport, resolve (or cause!) customer frustration, and follow the correct business processes. For example, using our solution, a client can now automatically score customer satisfaction on every single call.
As one of our clients recently remarked, we aren’t just reporting on data differently, we have actually created a new data source that he can use to drive operational improvement and competitive advantage!
5. What are the most pressing issues that are affecting contact center operations today? In what areas are people most frequently requesting your professional services?
Well, aside from the perennial contact center issues of juggling budgets, call volumes, people issues, and customer complaints, we are starting to hear some new themes:
Our clients want better metrics to help “prove the value” of customer service internally.
The mandate to do more with less is continuing, with several of our clients reporting that they must make 5-10% cost reductions each year for the next several years.
Support for corporate initiatives. Some large clients that are on the leading edge with quality improvement methodologies such as Six Sigma are realizing that the contact center is an excellent place to measure “defects” across the company. This is a remarkable insight. Nearly any quality problem in the company shows up in the contact center in a measurable way: product issues, billing issues, service issues, comments, and complaints can (and should) be tallied and reported back out to the organization.
As far as requests for our services, our Voice Self Service team is probably in the highest demand right now. Using our “Smart Speech” methodology, we have helped several clients “reinvigorate” their voice self service platforms by significantly improving take rates and reducing contact center handle times, often without additional hardware or software costs. News of this spreads pretty quickly, so we are getting many “word of mouth” inquiries for these services.
6. Who do you consider are your competitors? How do you differentiate eLoyalty from them?
It seems to me that we have three classes of competitors.
The first are all the other consulting firms that have CRM or contact center practices. It is usually fairly easy for us to differentiate ourselves from them based on our depth and “bench strength.” Since contact center optimization has been our focus for more than 15 years, we have literally hundreds of consultants that have “been there and done that” in thousands of contact centers in every industry and dozens of countries.
The second class of competition comes from the professional services organizations of the technology vendors. If the project is relatively small, some clients prefer to have the hardware or software vendor “on the hook” for delivery. For larger projects, however, they realize that our combination of technology expertise combined with professionally certified project management skills and operations proficiency will help them reduce risk and deliver a better solution.
The third class of competition is from a very formidable competitor indeed: Do Nothing. Our clients often confide in us that their budgets are still constrained and even though a certain project has an incredible ROI, it may take them a few quarters or “next budget cycle” before they can get approval to start. Although Do Nothing is a tough competitor, our 15 years in this business has taught us that with patience and persistence (and a solid business case!) we can ultimately prevail.
7. Similar to many companies in this market sector, eLoyalty has experienced some financial “bumps in the road”. What is the current and future outlook for the company?
Don’t remind me! Yes, the consulting services sector suffered some very significant “contractions” over the past five years. After facing some tough decisions, eLoyalty took a very sound approach. We “circled the wagons” and fell back on our core value proposition: Very smart, experienced consultants that can help our clients make technology and process improvements in their contact centers. In addition, we made several investments to expand our marketing and customer data management capabilities and to ramp up our Managed Services offerings, so our customers can “rent” solutions from us over time rather than making multi-million dollar capital investments to improve service.
I’m delighted to say that our approach seems to be paying off. We had “double digit” growth last year, and there is strong demand right now across every area of our business. And we are hiring again!
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Mike Ashe
Mike is a Vice President with eLoyalty, where he leads the global Contact Center Optimization Solutions service line. He has worked with hundreds of companies over the last 20 years, with a strong focus on keeping customers happier (and loyal!) while reducing service costs. Mike has worked in and performed analysis in over 70 contact centers in nine countries around the world. Key clients include HP, Dell, Avaya, Agilent, Bank of America, Wells Fargo, many Blue Cross/Blue Shield companies, Kaiser, Toyota, Nissan, Disney, BP, T-Mobile, AT&T, American Express, and GlaxoSmithKline.