Related Topics:
			Business Research: Contact Center Vendor Research: Aspect, Cisco Systems, Consona, Five9, Genesys Telecommunications Lab, IBM, InQuira, Jacada, Microsoft, NICE Systems, Nortel, Oracle, RightNow, Salesforce.com, Saratoga Systems, Syntellect, Varolii, Witness Systems, VPI, ClickFox
			Printer friendly version Email this article Send feedback to editor

Summary
New research from Ventana Research finds that companies are changing their customer interaction-handling to include employees outside their contact centers, creating virtual contact centers. Many companies seem to see virtualization as largely a technology issue and therefore haven’t stopped to evaluate its full impact on the people (their agents) and the processes associated with interaction-handling. It is also clear from our study that the way most companies measure contact center performance hasn’t changed a great deal over the past decade; they still focus on efficiency – that is, using the smallest number of agents to handle the highest volume of interactions – rather than on indicators tied to business and customers.

View
Virtualization distributes the handling of customer interactions to the most qualified person in the organization, regardless of location or business group. In our report “Customer Interaction Technologies,” Ventana Research notes that while many companies have adopted virtualization technologies, most are not utilizing them fully. Our research also found that companies are not ready for the impact of virtualization on their people and processes and have yet to put in place the key performance measures required to monitor and to assess its success. The study – sponsored by Genesys and IBM and media sponsors CCF/CallCentre.co.uk, Contact Professional, ICCM, Intelligent Enterprise, Montgomery Research and TMCnet – found that the desire to virtualize is growing, with 40 percent of respondent not having a formal contact center and 91 percent saying their organizations are now routing interactions to groups outside, as well as within, the contact center. Not surprisingly, the most popular of these groups is sales and marketing, but significant numbers are routing interactions to specialists in finance, customer service or manufacturing, to mobile field service or sales personnel, or to home-based workers.

As a result, companies have a much greater diversity of people handling interactions. Trained for other roles, many of them are not as skilled at communicating with customers, and many will handle interactions only on a part-time basis. It is essential, therefore, that companies begin to deploy specialized workforce management systems that identify likely interaction patterns and plan for the necessary skilled resources to be available to handle these interactions. This is an area where companies have made the least use of technology; almost three-quarters of respondents said their companies have yet to transition from using manual processes or Excel spreadsheets. The remaining 26 percent said their companies have deployed specialized tools from vendors such as Aspect and Genesys.

The technology architecture to support virtualization should include three key components: a communications network, interaction-routing software and a computer desktop for the “agent.” Our study found that companies are using them but not to the fullest extent. For example, voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) is well on its way to becoming the de facto standard for contact centers. Indeed, 6 percent more respondents said their company has adopted VoIP than in the study we carried out at the beginning of 2006. VoIP provides an affordable and functionally rich platform to support dispersed communications. It also supports “presence,” a function that determines who is logged on and available to accept interactions. This is essential to virtualization, but the study shows few companies have looked beyond the cost savings afforded by VoIP and so have yet to take full advantage of this functionality.

The heart of virtualization is ensuring that the best possible “agent” handles a customer’s interaction. To achieve this, companies must deploy software that identifies and routes inbound interactions to a person who is “present” and has the right attributes to deal with that customer and issue. This goes beyond VoIP’s core functionality and requires “smart” routing software from vendors such as Cisco and Genesys. Although the study shows that many companies have deployed such systems, again the main driver has been to optimize agent utilization and balance interaction loads between different physical centers. However, it is encouraging to see that about 40 percent of companies have recognized that by integrating this software with other sources of information, such as customer data, they can make fuller use of their systems and make routing smarter.

The most overlooked impact of virtualization is on the agent desktop. Agents in a traditional center normally undergo several weeks of training on the desktop computer they use to support interaction-handling. This can include several different applications or systems as well as utility software for workflow, collaboration and performance management. Agents outside the contact center may not get this training and practice, so companies will have to make the desktop easier to use and responsive to events. The study showed that about one-third of companies have taken this step, providing all types of agents with a desktop that has a single sign-on and software that recognizes and automatically configures it for them.

Assessment
Virtualization is one of the current trends companies are deploying to meet two goals: save money and improve customer satisfaction by ensuring that the most capable person deals with interactions. Besides deploying the necessary communication and information systems to support virtualization, companies must re-evaluate the key performance measures they use to monitor and to assess the contact center’s and agents’ performance. Our study shows that the majority of companies still use the same measures they used 10 years ago, and few have transitioned to more business- and customer-focused metrics. Ventana Research believes that unless companies recognize that virtualization is a program that requires changes in strategy, people, processes, information and technology, they are unlikely to achieve their expected goals and might in the process reduce customer satisfaction rather than increase it.