Over the past four years Siemens has made it pretty clear to industry that they are not interested in the contact center market. The company’s commitment to that market has continued to wane over the years to the point where many industry watchers, me included, consider Siemens to be a non-player in the contact center industry today.

That’s why yesterday’s announcement of Siemens’ joint venture with The Gores Group barely caused a blip on the contact center industry radar. While the unified communications (UC) industry was fairly excited about the possibilities this new JV could bring to the burgeoning UC market, the contact center industry reacted with a collective yawn. There is a bit of irony here.

In earlier posts to this blog I took the position that the contact center will be the launching point for UC into the greater enterprise. Of course there will be exceptions to this, but I still believe that UC will begin to see mass market momentum when the contact center adopts it for its own. Siemens in unquestionably a power to be reckoned with in the emerging UC market, but they’re a non-entity in the well-established contact center market. Thus we have the irony that seems to have kept the contact center industry politely disinterested in the Siemens/Gores Group announcement.

There’s another small but potentially interesting kink in this new arrangement and that is the fact that The Gores Group owns SER, the contact management/predictive dialer company out of Dulles, VA, and they’re throwing SER in as part of the deal. Now, SER is no Aspect but it’s no slouch either and I question whether the new Siemens/Gores JV can afford to ignore it in deference to Siemens’ apathy toward the contact center industry. I foresee a bit of a quandary as the new Siemens Enterprise Communications comes to life.

Long term, the problem will probably take care of itself. Siemens is not going to take its eye off the UC ball but it is going to have to come to terms with the role of UC in the contact center. For the short term Siemens will have to follow the majority stakeholder Gores Group in its support of SER’s products and the contact center industry. This is not, however, where I see Siemens in the long run.

Long-term, I believe Siemens’ role in the industry will evolve with the industry itself. As the UC industry sorts itself out, I believe the players will become increasingly specialized. For example, one company might specialize in UC software. Another might specialize in infrastructure. Siemens’ specialization will be services. Siemens Enterprise Communications has made noise about transforming itself into a services company for years. Now it is out from under the heavy hand of Siemens AG, it finally has the chance to actually do it.

As for SER? Probably acquired by Aspect.

Tags: Unified Communications, Unified Communications Information by Paul Stockford
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The number of disabled veterans in the U.S. has increased 25 percent over the last seven years. Today there are 2.9 million disabled veterans in the U.S. including over 181,000 veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan who are receiving disability as of May 2008. A January 2007 report from the Small Business Administration entitled “Self-Employment in the Veteran and Service-Disabled Veteran Population” revealed that during the years 1988 - 2005, 64 percent of service-disabled veterans were unemployed. 32 percent of disabled veterans were employed by an organization of some sort while four percent were self-employed.

As soldiers continue to return from Iraq with devastating injuries that probably would have killed them in previous wars, they will hopefully be rehabilitated and begin seeking gainful employment. What better place for these veterans to find work than as home-based contact center agents?

Veterans2Work (V2W) is a relatively new organization that seeks to find opportunities for disabled people, and particularly disabled veterans, as home-based workers. Run by contact center industry and Vietnam veteran John Reynolds, V2W is a joint venture with the already-established CORA, which stands for Creating Opportunities by Recognizing Abilities. CORA is a certified training facility that trains, equips and qualifies disabled people for work. CORA can also function as an outsourced facility with disabled workers remaining with CORA but contracting for work with another organization - the classic contact center outsourcing arrangement.

CORA can also train and mentor workers to become direct hires of other companies through a set training period that demonstrates their abilities, typically 90 days, before the disabled worker becomes an employee of the hiring company. V2W’s job is to make sure the business community at large knows about the availability of this workforce.

Although the contact center industry as a whole has not fully embraced the notion of the home-based agent or employee, it’s time to get over the misconception that home-based workers are not as productive or reliable as office-based workers. Internet Protocol (IP) and unified communications (UC) offer any employee or contractor a means to stay in touch with the office regardless of his or her location. A home-based contact center agent can have virtually identical communications capabilities as an office-based colleague with UC solutions such as presence ensuring that qualified support is never more than a mouse click away for any agent.

V2W also offers American business what I consider to be an additional benefit in that it provides many industries, including the customer service industry, an alternative to sending jobs offshore in order to lower labor costs. With the substantial state and federal tax benefits that come with the hiring of disabled veterans and other workers, or through contracting with organizations such as CORA for outsourced services, there is now a viable financial alternative to sending contact center agent jobs to offshore locations.

As a veteran of the armed forces myself I believe it is vitally important that we take care of our own. Corporate America, and in particular the contact center industry, owes it to itself and to those who have served to consider what V2W might be able to do to help American business, and to help those who have suffered disabilities in service to their country. For more information on V2W visit www.veterans2work.com or call John Reynolds at 415-925-1515.

Tags: Unified Communications, Unified Communications Information by Paul Stockford
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Aspect Software recently commissioned a study to look at opportunities to improve customer service through unified communications (UC). Aspect retained Leo J. Shapiro and Associates LLC of Chicago to conduct the survey of 50 contact center supervisors and 50 contact center agents at the end of 2007. The findings of the study clearly identify customer service stumbling blocks that could be overcome by the deployment of UC in the contact center.

The Aspect study found that, according to the supervisors and agents interviewed, 10.3 percent of all telephone inquiries handled on a daily basis required assistance from knowledge workers outside of the contact center. When these calls requiring outside help occur, the study reports that one of two things generally happen:

• Contact center personnel place the customer on hold while they seek the expertise required, then relay that information to the customer secondhand; or
• Contact center personnel attempt to resolve the customer issue to the point that outside expertise is needed, and then the customer call is transferred to the knowledge worker for resolution.

I submit that a third scenario is also possible - that the customer service rep takes the information from the customer and promises a call-back once the answer can be gleaned from the appropriate resources. In any case, these scenarios negatively impact two important contact center performance metrics; average call handle time, also known as average handle time (AHT), and first call resolution (FCR). An increase in AHT or a decrease in FCR can both be detrimental to the operational performance and customer service levels of the typical customer care center.

The Aspect-sponsored Shapiro study found that the average call was increased by approximately 2.5 minutes each time a knowledge worker outside the contact center was required to in order to resolve a customer inquiry. Although the study didn’t pinpoint how much of that 2.5 minutes was spent searching for the knowledge worker and how much was spent on the phone with the customer, we can reasonably assume that a good percentage of that time, perhaps as high as half of that time, was spent searching for and connecting to the knowledge worker outside of the contact center.

If that one-to-1.5 minutes spent searching for a resource could be reduced or eliminated through the use of such UC-enabled solutions as Presence, the cost savings and increased productivity could be significant. Think of the number of calls your own call center handles each day and what might be saved by shaving a minute or more off of ten percent of those calls. Although this is conjecture, it still serves to illustrate a point: UC in the contact center comes with a built-in return on investment (ROI) that is not only demonstrable; it is enough to make even the most hard-hearted CFO take notice.

Full details of the Aspect Software survey are available at www.aspect.com.

Tags: Unified Communications, Unified Communications Information by Paul Stockford
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It all starts in the contact center.

That’s my contention anyway. When you look for the obvious launch point for unified communications in the enterprise, it has to be the contact center. Almost all discussions about UC in the enterprise include a mention of Presence, the UC concept that provides users with an overview of the availability and status of other knowledge workers in the organization and a means to efficiently tap into those resources as necessary.

If you think about it, the contact center is the most logical place for the initial use of Presence and UC in the enterprise. The goal of most, if not all, customer contact centers is first call resolution. In other words, the folks in charge of running customer service generally prefer to have a customer issue resolved in one call. There are two reasons for this, the first of which is customer satisfaction. As a consumer or customer, aren’t you generally happier if the company you call can resolve your issue in one call without repeated call transfers or without asking you to call back in order to speak with someone else later? Everyone’s time is valuable these days and no one likes to have to make repeated phone calls to get a question answered or an issue resolved.

Presence would allow an agent the ability to pull in enterprise resources from outside the contact center in order to resolve a customer call. Agents would be able to identify which internal subject matter experts might be available and the best way to reach them. While still engaging the customer, contact center agents would have the additional resources at their fingertips to keep the customer happy or at least resolve an issue without repeated call transfers or callbacks.

The second reason customer service professionals strive for first call resolution in the contact center is cost. Each time a customer service agent picks up the phone, it costs the contact center in terms of salary, benefits, etc., and if they’re paying for an agent to address the same problem with the same customer more than once, that is usually money down the drain. UC in the contact center makes absolute sense from a cost savings perspective. Here’s where we run into our conundrum, though.
If you’ve been around the contact center long enough you’ve undoubtedly heard the discussions about the strategic importance of the customer service center in terms of its value to operational success and profitability. To hear some people talk you’d believe that the business universe revolved around the contact center. If you haven’t been around the contact center and heard this talk, trust me when I tell you that it’s mostly lip service.
The truth is, the contact center is as important as all the pundits claim it is but the fact is that most businesses look at the contact center as a cost center. As you probably know, it is generally very difficult to get a business to invest in a cost center. Thus our conundrum: an investment in UC on the contact center would undoubtedly lead to cost savings and a tangible return on investment, but there is a general reluctance to invest in cost centers such as the contact center.
I think we may be able to find our way out of this potential quagmire if the industry in general follows the lead of the small percentage of companies who really do view their customer service function as a strategic advantage or differentiator and will invest in UC in order to provide their agents with Presence functionality. It’s going to take time and there will still be those executives who will drag their contact centers into the 21^st century kicking, screaming and protesting the whole way.

Any other ideas?

Tags: Unified Communications Information by Paul Stockford
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Verint Systems announced that it won a patent suit against Nice Systems, providing the company with vindication and $3.3 million in damages. Here’s a little background – Nice had initiated legal actions against Verint related to patent lawsuits, and Verint then countersued with its own patent infringements against Nice. Without getting into specifics, the patent is about Verint Witness Actionable Solutions’ speech analytics (the suit was initiated before Verint acquired Witness) and covers systems and methods for, among others, analyzing speech to identify, for example, emotion, words, and talk-over.

A federal jury in Atlanta ruled in Verint’s favor, and the next step is for Verint to seek a permanent injunction to “enjoin Nice Systems in the United States from making, using, selling, offering for sale or importing any infringing speech analytics products, including speech analytics offered with Nice SmartCenter, Nice Perform, NiceUniverse and NiceAdvantage.”  Essentially, the jury determined that the Witness patent was valid and infringed upon, and now it goes to the judge to see if Nice can continue to sell these products, which should be decided upon in a couple months.

When I spoke with my friends at Verint Witness Actionable Solutions right after the verdict was announced on Friday, they emphasized that they didn’t initiate the patent lawsuit, but did it only as a response to Nice’s patent infringement suits against Verint/Witness. They noted that Verint has a long history around analytics, and of course they feel good that their R&D team was validated. And then they celebrated with some champagne. Cheers!

Tags: Unified Communications Information by Blair Pleasant
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While everyone’s talking about the announcement made last week between Microsoft and Aspect Software, focusing on Microsoft’s investment in Aspect and the fact that Aspect will be integrating with and supporting Microsoft’s OCS, I think the most important piece of information is missing from the announcement. Ok, so it’s big news that Microsoft is investing a significant amount of money in Aspect, and it’s also important news that Aspect will integrate its Unified IP contact center solution with OCS to provide capabilities such as “ask-an-expert capabilities” (or what I’ve been calling Expert Agent capabilities) using OCS’s presence technology. This will certainly be useful to Aspect customers, and this helps clarify Aspect’s UC strategy. I see this announcement as being very beneficial to Aspect and its customers.
But what is missing from this announcement is information on Microsoft’s contact center strategy vis a vis UC. We still have not heard what Microsoft will offer in terms of a contact center solution as part of or in conjunction with its OCS offering. Clearly Microsoft recognizes how important it is to have some sort of contact center solution offering for customers that are looking into an enterprise UC/voice solution. But the company has not disclosed any sort of contact center strategy to date.
Microsoft has several options– clearly working with Nortel, a leader in the contact center space, to provide the needed contact center capabilities is one option (and while Microsoft made it clear that its investment in Aspect does not impact its relationship with Nortel, I’m sure the Nortel folks weren’t too excited when they heard the news).
Another option is to acquire a company in the contact center market, such as Aspect or possibly Interactive Intelligence. And of course rumors persist that Microsoft will acquire Siemens Enterprise Communications, Nortel, or any number of telephony vendors, which, if true, would provide Microsoft with the needed contact center capabilities and expertise. But these are rumors and so far no truth to any of them (yet).
The cynic in me believes that there’s a good chance that Microsoft will leverage both Nortel and Aspect’s expertise, and then offer its own contact center offering, competing with both companies (although less likely Aspect since they traditionally focus on high-end solutions).
Regardless of what route Microsoft takes, it’s important for the company to articulate its contact center strategy for those companies that are looking to OCS as an enterprise voice solution. Most of those companies also have contact centers and in many cases will be looking for a contact center solution down the road. Microsoft needs an answer for them.

Tags: Unified Communications Information by Blair Pleasant
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