What’s New at ACCE
For the first time, ACCE had their conference in San Diego September 10 – 13th. It is a bit hard to concentrate when you can look outside and see perfect weather and water, so it is a good thing that the exhibit hall and the conference rooms have no windows.
ACCE 2008 featured announcements of the expansion of several vendors’ application suites and, finally, user acceptance of software that has been perceived as a “a nice to have” .After many years of educating the market, analytics and customer interaction software appears to be gaining market acceptance since there was considerable interest by the attendees in implementing these solutions.
Attendance was down approximately 20% as compared to 2006, and the registrant traffic in the exhibit hall was inconsistent primarily due to the sessions, breakfasts, and a luncheon being held on a different floor. There were also relatively short breaks between the sessions. Some vendors were very positive about the conference, and some were complaining. What else is new?
The following is a summary of “What’s New “at ACCE. We would appreciate your feedback on your conference experience especially regarding the quality of the sessions. Please email us at info@crmchange.com
Following are technologies that were highlighted at the show.
Agent Development
Aslan Training + Development released their latest whitepaper, Why Call Center Reps Hate to Sell (and what to do about it), which highlights the common challenges call centers have transitioning their reps from a service-only role to a more proactive sales role. When call center reps hate to sell, not only are customer service and sales training programs put at risk, but much worse – instead of driving revenue up, we often end up driving customers away.
Why are call center reps so reluctant to move into more of a sales role? That question has not one answer, but five. This whitepaper constructs a step-by-step plan to get reps to embrace the selling part of their job by explaining each issue in detail and then linking them to an approach for solving them.
Aslan is a sales and service training company focused on improving a call center’s ability to up-sell, cross-sell, and convert new customers. They have created training programs that ensure that reps and managers are equipped with the skills, tools, and methodologies needed to optimize their sales and service efforts. www.aslantraining.com/hatetosell.
HyperQuality, Inc, a leading contact center quality assurance firm, made two announcements. First, the company performed its 2 millionth call center agent evaluation, believed to be the most ever conducted by a call center monitoring firm. The company, which has grown significantly since its inception in 2003, is expected to evaluate nearly 4 million customer interactions in 2008 alone. HyperQuality also introduced its HyperSurvey E-Mail Program. Through this short e-mail survey, companies can gain insight into customer attitudes and perceptions as a way to improve their customer service. The data collected can be turned into actionable intelligence, which will help companies understand the attitudes that drive satisfaction and allow them to make faster, better-informed business decisions. http://www.hyperquality.com
Analytics
Autonomy etalk presented the Intelligent Contact Center, which gives organizations the ability to capture, analyze, understand, and share customer insight from contact center recordings. The Intelligent Contact Center is possible through Autonomy etalk’s solutions for multi-channel interaction analysis, real-time agent support, and contact center performance management. Autonomy etalk additionally introduced advanced trend-spotting features for its analytics solution, Qfiniti Explore. These capabilities include visual representations of contact center trends, sentiment analysis, and a “hot and breaking” feature, which notifies users of popular and emerging trends. http://www.etalk.com
BBN has released Version 3 of its AVOKE Caller Experience Analytics platform, which provides new caller experience dashboards, a complete user interface re-design, and user annotation of calls. New dashboards provide role-specific views of end-to-end caller experience, including weekly executive summaries, line-of-business dashboards for high-value calls, as well as dashboards for the IVR team and center managers. Web 2.0 architecture and task-centered design greatly enhances user productivity. And, new user annotation capabilities complement automated call analysis with skilled analyst observations.
The Version 3 release includes AVOKE Full Text & Keyword Search, the newest addition to its AVOKE Caller Experience Analytics platform. Leveraging technology from 30 years of BBN research in speech and language processing, BBN claims that users can now find calls of interest using simple keyword searches. This new capability is the first and only to provide full text of all audio from the entire call, including: all prompts played by the IVR, all queue & hold messages, all in-house and outsourced agents, and everything the caller says from dialing to hang-up. http://www.bbn.com
CallMiner Eureka! is a speech analytics solution that automatically and accurately reveals what every customer call is about. The software analyzes all the meaningful content from 100% of Call Center calls; automatically mapping call information into language patterns that are based on dozens of indicators such as customer satisfaction, agent politeness, acoustic stress, and call tempo thus helping to identify customer and agent issues your company may not have been aware of before. Eureka! also takes into account call metadata, or contextual information for the call. This includes not only information captured by CallMiner Eureka! such as the length of the call and the word count, but also information from other relevant sources, such as:CTI systems, CRM systems and ERP systems. http://www.callminer.com
Call Recording and Monitoring
ASC, a leading global provider of innovative solutions to record, analyze and evaluate communications, highlighted its VoIP recording and quality monitoring solutions at the ACCE 2007 show. VoIP recording, based on ASC’s award-winning software solution, EVOip, captures telephone calls from the network using both active and passive solutions to store, play back and archive the entire interaction. Their quality monitoring systems include the versatile INSPIRATIONpro, a user-friendly, browser-based software system designed to evaluate and analyze phone calls, screen activity, e-mails and chat. New advanced options allow companies to start recording based on any event on the agent’s desktop, analyze the content of recorded calls through speech processing mechanism including keyword spotting, and obtain immediate customer feedback. ASC also promoted an expanded partnership with InVision Software, a leading international supplier of enterprise-wide workforce management (WFM) solutions, and a tight integration of InVision’s WFM technology into ASC’s INSPIRATIONpro. With this best of breed approach, ASC is able to provide a customized package to improve efficiency and productivity, lower administrative and payroll expenses, and automate standard business processes. www.asctelecom.com
CallCopy debuted its new branding and its latest software release at ACCE this year. cc: Discover – The CallCopy Suite brings an integrated set of solutions for call recording and quality management, surveys, and speech analytics to market in a platform known for its ease of use. The latest release, cc: Discover version 3.6, includes many new features including a Report Library and a new My Filters function that enables users to save their frequently used searches. These advances increase the value of the CallCopy suite by making it more intuitive, helping users to become more productive in less time and truly accelerate the many returns on their investment. http://www.callcopy.com
HigherGround’s Fusion Series 7 solutions transform telecom data. Modules from three product suites are combined to provide tailored solutions that monitor and verify phone transactions, improve agents’ performance, and optimize telecommunications resources. HigherGround’s proprietary engine, Fusion Core™, collects structured and unstructured data from multiple sources and integrates the information into a single user interface.
An innovative feature to version 7.7 is a stand-alone version of the HigherGround’s Mentor QA Suite - quality assurance tools that enable call center managers to evaluate and score calls based on compliance criteria and to identify employee coaching needs. Mentor QA can be used in conjunction with HigherGround’s Praetorian Voice Recorder or as a stand-alone application with any other call recording software. http://www.highergroundinc.com
TeleDirect International recently announced the availability of Liberation® for Collections and Encore™ Enterprise Suite 2.2 (formerly Wygant Encore™). The TeleDirect International Encore Enterprise Suite 2.2 consists of integrated call recording, quality monitoring, performance management and screen recording, optimized for ease of use in today’s contact centers. The Encore Enterprise Suite incorporates data from multiple sources including automatic call distribution (ACD), call and screen recording, sales data, and agent evaluations to provide a complete view of agent performance. This integrated approach helps companies identify best practices to maximize workforce productivity and customer impact.
Liberation for Collections is a CRM platform designed to optimize collections workflow, encompassing contact management, agent productivity tools, compliance management, and a customizable collector desktop. Liberation for Collections functions as a company’s “front office”, managing all aspects of the collector/debtor interaction, including interfaces with leading collections “back office” systems. http://www.tdirect.com
Customer Post Call Survey
Vocal Laboratories Inc., is a consulting and survey company specializing in customer feedback in the call center. With their Express Feedback, within a few minutes after the customer hangs up with an agent, a Vocal Labs professional Survey Administrator calls the customer back for the survey, thus reaching customers while their memory is still fresh, ensuring high-quality feedback and timely data. VocalLabs also conducts consumer satisfaction surveys for financial products, mobile phone and computer products, the latter of which is ongoing. Here is your chance to voice your opinion on what you think of your computer manufacturer’s service. http://www.vocalabs.com
Furniture
Interior Concepts Inc. introduced two new wood furniture lines: Acclaim and Cityscape. This latest product launch will allow call centers to purchase furniture throughout their facility from once source – break rooms to executive offices. Acclaim line offers 11-edge detail selections and a variety of walnut, cherry, or maple finish options. Full mortise and tenon joint construction and vertical matched grain on drawer fronts are standard in the Acclaim line. The Cityscape line features a metal modesty panel option and raised worksurfaces that give Cityscape a modern, streamlined look. The different heights of the accessories give the furniture the look of a cityscape. Both lines include executive desks, storage, reception and conference solutions. www.interiorconcepts.com
IP Contact Center
CosmoCom, a leader in Call Center Consolidation 2.0 was on hand to demonstrate their IP contact center platform, CosmoCall Universe (CCU). A big focus was on how, “Consolidation 2.0,” empowers organizations to run all call center operations, locations, and agents on one platform that integrates easily with other VoIP network components and with the Information Technology environment. Formal call center agents, informal knowledge workers, remote or home-based agents, and outsourcers are all part of the single platform. Recent enhancements to CCU on display include high availability architecture improvements for cost reduction and easier installation, a simplified phone number configuration utility, faster and simpler agent provisioning, automatic voice quality monitoring, improved searching of recordings, deeper permission profiling and others. http://www.cosmocom.com
Global IP Solutions (GIPS) displayed their embedded media processing solutions and complete applications for real-time Voice over IP (VoIP) communications. GIPS Solutions products consist of a suite of applications that are particularly well-suited for contact centers and customer outreach. These products include Click-to-Talk, which enables a web user the ability to establish a direct voice connection with a customer support or sales representative, simply by clicking a link on a webpage. Also part of the GIPS product portfolio that was demonstrated at ACCE is the Remote Extension softphone, which enables remote agent capabilities by offering workers the ability to connect to their corporate phone systems through their PCs, even when they are out of the office. www.gipscorp.com
Legacy Integration
Cicero Inc. announced the release of Cicero 6.2, one of the original application integration platforms that automates the flow of information between applications and streamlines business processes on the desktop. This latest release enables organizations to quickly integrate Web Services and other applications to automate processes, extend the functionality of existing applications, and create a unified desktop without writing any application code. In addition, the company released Desktop and Best Practice Productivity Packs for contact centers. The new Productivity Packs, which are bundled with Cicero 6.2, include pre-packaged tools that extend existing application functionality, automate business processes, support integration best practices, and add new features to address specific business requirements. The Packs allow contact centers to manage agent workflow, create single sign-on, streamline navigation and follow best practices when integrating applications on an agent desktop. www.ciceroinc.com.
Multi Media Contact Center Solutions
Altitude Software released Altitude uCI 7.5, the latest version of their award winning offering which now includes a number of innovative features that strengthen the contact center’s ability to embrace industry-wide change. This multimedia contact center solution delivers a wealth of advanced features, including flexible inbound, powerful outbound dialing algorithms, call classification, blended multimedia, universal queue and built-in routing. The application’s IP nature natively supports distributed operations - including home-based and remote agents. Altitude claims that Altitude uCI 7.5 increases customer satisfaction through proactive customer service features and friendlier voice self-service applications. Managers are equipped with advanced tools like the Altitude Fast Script Builder, an intuitive tool for campaign flow and agent desktop screen creation that allows for centrally-developed designs and flexible service-delivery models that aim to increase agent productivity. www.altitude.com
Presence Technology presented The Elastic Contact Center concept, a combination of technology and engagement models that may be quickly scaled up or down based on the changing requirements of any organization. The Presence Technology portfolio is a complete suite of solutions for the contact center. Built on a modular platform, the company portfolio may be deployed onto almost any existing ACD or PBX platform or may be used in a stand alone environment as an all-in-one contact center solution. Presence Technology solutions were designed to be implemented quickly and to seamlessly integrate with your company’s existing applications and infrastructure. http://www.presenceco.com
Performance Management / Workforce Optimization
Thirty percent of your agents’ time is wasted on call backs. At ACCE, Enkata addressed this issue by demonstrating their fully integrated talent and performance management solution. They stated that their customers are seeing demonstrable improvement to their bottom-line with ROIs exceeding 3x in the first year of operation as well as improvement in employee retention rates. Enkata claims that this is the first on-demand contact center performance management application offering a closed-loop solution to identify agent level problems with enough granularity to act on and then initiate coaching sessions to improve agent performance. According to Enkata, the conference attendees were particularly excited to see level of granularity provided by their solution as well as Enkata’s ability to tie into and increase the value of their existing contact center infrastructure investment. http://www.enkata.com
Aspect Software launched PerformanceEdge™, a first contact center optimization suite that synchronizes workforce management, recording and quality management, performance management, campaign management, and coaching and eLearning to holistically improve inbound and outbound performance. By bringing critical performance optimization functionality together, PerformanceEdge enables businesses to control costs, enhance service levels and align contact center performance with strategic company goals.
PerformanceEdge offers unified management, administration, data collection, workflows, reporting and data sharing across multiple applications and sites by bringing together Aspect® eWorkforce Management™, Aspect® Quality Management™, Aspect® Performance Management™, Aspect® Enterprise Campaign Manager™ and Aspect® Campaign Optimizer™.
Aspect stated that performance optimization solutions, like PerformanceEdge, make it easier for contact centers to control costs, enhance service levels and align its performance to support the business’ strategic goals. Managers are now able to tap into historical data, evaluate real-time intelligence and plan future scenarios to gain a complete, end-to-end view of contact center performance and, with that information, take immediate action in the face of changing business conditions. www.performanceedgesuite.com
Envision released Envision Analytics™, a Web-based dashboard which consolidates information across the contact center or enterprise, allowing users to optimize performance against their key business goals. The dashboard combines disparate data sources into a single, comprehensive view, which allows users to gain superior insight into their center’s performance.
Envision claims that this powerful analysis solution allows users to identify patterns, trends and relationships in customer and contact center data. It enables users to perform customer experience analysis to understand how their center’s people and processes can work together to deliver exceptional service. According to Envision, users can quickly and easily correlate performance against customer satisfaction scores and identify areas for improvement. In addition, segmented recording analysis provides a cradle-to-grave view of the customer experience, from initial agent contact to back-office transfers. Better insight can help users adjust processes or implement new training programs to improve customers’ experience. www.envisioninc.com
IEX Corporation, a NICE Systems company, has released version 3.12 of the IEX® TotalView® Workforce Management system, which is part of the NICE SmartCenter™ family of solutions. The release of IEX TotalView v3.12 demonstrates the company’s continued commitment to workforce management innovation. Enhancements include home-based agent scheduling and automated schedule change alerts with Express Messenger. Enhancements include: Home-Based Scheduling, Express Messenger, Intraday Shrinkage Management, Overtime Bidding and the addition of the Oracle Database Option.
“Workforce management is our core competency,” said IEX President Debbie May. “By working closely with our customers and investing in research and development, IEX solutions continue to lead the workforce management market with best-in-class technology. And now that IEX TotalView is part of the NICE SmartCenter family of solutions, the value of our offering is further enhanced – providing customers with powerful functionality and maximum flexibility.” http://www.iex.com
Pipkins Inc. announced the release of Vantage Point Real-Time Agent Adherence Plus, a new graphic edition of its agent adherence module that eliminates the need for contact center supervisors to sit at their desks studying text-based adherence reports. The new control panel consists of a visual grid placing agents in permanently assigned squares that change color in real time to indicate agent status, enabling at-a-glance monitoring from anywhere on the floor. Supervisors can also modify schedules with a single click from the same screen which allows managers to spend more time proactively assisting agents. http://www.pipkins.com
Verint Systems announced enhancements to its Impact 360 Workforce Management Solutions which include but are not limited to-- Sophisticated strategic forecasting techniques that account for daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, seasonal and annual growth trends. It automatically flags outliers in forecast data due to special events, days and queue reconfigurations – giving users the ability to either exclude or include the outlier data; a single integrated solution for dedicated inbound, outbound and blended contact center operations enabling users to forecast on five new metrics and set and meet outbound service goals; desktop application adherence giving managers and supervisors the ability to monitor desktop, phone and non-phone activity from a single screen, and extended capabilities into enterprise back-office operations environments that impact the customer experience. http://www.verint.com
Upstream Works Software displayed their Upstart Experience Suite, a set of agent and management tools for contact centers that provides three methods of measuring First Call Resolution rates along with quickly deployable tools to help increase management and agent effectiveness. The system gives you actionable feedback enabling you to improve how you deliver your services. It gives your agents the tools they need to meet the customer’s needs in a single call. http://www.upstreamworks.com
Readerboards
Texas Digital’sQuickCOM Enterprise collects call information fromcritical data sources, organizes and monitors that information., and delivers it real-time and by event through a variety of display options, including FlexVIEW LED displays (reader boards), our Vitals Dashboard, plasma TVs and more. http://www.txdigital.com
Telecorp’s CentrEE Wall Display allows you to view real-time itraininnformation on scrolling, stationary, or variable text on readerboards, such as an LED or IP Display. CentrEE Wall Display PLUS keeps your agents/customers informed; update with multimedia data; display live-feeds; provide up-to-the-minute updates; is available for plasmas and LCDs. http://www.telecorpproducts.com
Real Estate Services
Mohr Partners, a global corporate real estate service firm which advises companies on the optimal locations for call centers, discussed their unique client approach. Since 1986, Mohr has been the key advisor on numerous projects for call center operations and corporations. Through their extensive work with a variety of call center clients, they have seen a new trend develop in regards to their clients’ wants and needs. They know that not every call center has the same strategy, so it is vital that a real estate provider listen to their client to effectively comprehend not only their business, but how to successfully approach a strategic solution through calculated processes and procedures. Not every call center is productive overseas or in tertiary markets and it is their job to provide cohesive consulting with an end result that is uniquely representative of their client’s core business. This approach allows Mohr Partners to determine an optimal location for their clients. According to Mohr, their broad base of services has earned them a reputation as a “one source” provider of creative approaches and flawless execution of call center strategies. www.mohrcallcenter.com
Voice Messaging
SoundBite Communications Inc., a provider of on-demand automated voice messaging solutions, announced its compliance as a service provider under the Payment Card Industry (PCI) Data Security Standard. Compliance with the industry standard is a critical requirement in order for any merchant or service provider to process, store, or transmit cardholder data. Compliance with the PCI Data Security Standard has enhanced SoundBite’s ability to conduct more complex customer contact campaigns and support agentless transactions such as credit card payments and other payments through SoundBite’s Agentless Direct Collect auto payment interface. http://www.soundbite.com