Contact Centre Expo 2009 - Day One

It's that time of the year again, when most of the UK Contact Centre industry gathers in Birmingham for the Contact Centre Expo.

I covered the Expo last year (see the posts "UK Call Centre Expo" and "UK Contact Centre Expo Day 2") and was interested in the feedback I got as both comments and as e-mails. In the feedback, there was a solid body of opinion that the 2008 Expo lacked much innovation from the vendors. This needed to be weighed against a smaller set of feedback arguing that the show did offer new and valuable ideas, but nonetheless, there was a strong view that the exhibitors needed to raise their game.

I understand where the first group are coming from, but I still find the Expo very useful just because it has so many vendors and customers gathered in the same place and I find innovation a bonus on top of that. There are interesting ideas out in the exhibitor hall (as well as a few rather tired ones) and it's worth going round the Expo to see what is genuinely new.

So the stands that worked for me in the exhibitor hall, in no particular order, were:

• Sword Ciboodle - In some ways, nothing radically new from what I used to know as Graham Technology. In other ways some interesting incremental improvements and a feeling that the market for process based CRM was probably one of the growth areas of CRM. I've felt for a while that the record-centric approach of Oracle/Siebel grown too big for many customers and too 'one size fits all', so it was interesting to see a CRM approach that was much more process-centric.
  
• 60k - Presenting themselves as 'The Alternative BPO & Contact Centre Outsourcer', I was interested to see what 60k thought distinguished themselves from the many other outsourcers in the hall. Part of the answer was "Bulgaria", but the value proposition was much more than that. I've managed outsourced contact centres in a past job (we had European customers with customer service sites split between Europe and South Africa), and my experience is that outsourcing to far off locations can have real disadvantages when you try and manage the resulting operation. Nearshoring and so locating your centre within three hours flight time, but still with cheaper labour is very interesting. The crucial advantage of Bulgaria is that it is in the EU and the EU location is a big advantage over destinations like India when you think of the challenges with outsourcing and data movement compliance with the laws on exporting data outside the EU. What also interested me was the focus of 60k on higher value business process. I've long argued that this is where outsourcing needs to go (see past posts like "Offshore - why I would go for South Africa over India") and it was good to see 60k as a European outsourcer positioning things like 'Insurance Claims Processing' and 'Product Recall Management' that add real value to customers, rather than trying to sell cheap call centre seats.
  
• Egypt - I am very interested in the Egyptian contact centre industry as it shows what growth can happen very quickly with government support. I had a good chat with Raya contact centres, who run the contact centre operations of a number of the big tech firms. I must confess a vested interest here, as I recently blogged on Cisco opening their 300 seat centre in Egypt (see "New offshore developments in the European Market") and it was very useful to hear the Egyptian perspective on this.

So all in all very useful (on top of being an exhibitor with a decent number of customer visits to our stand).

Tomorrow, things I'd like to do are:

• Catch up with Redbox Recorders to understand what they are offering.
• Have a look at the Nortel stand to understand how they are presenting things after last weeks acquisition by Avaya.
• Talk to Aspect and better understand the relationship with Microsoft that is so prominent on their stand. (I'm guessing things have moved on since I covered posted on the tie-up announcements back in March last year "VoiceCon 2008 - IBM, Microsoft & Aspect")
  

As always, do let me have any suggestions for other areas that are getting attention.....

My Contact Centre Top 5 Predictions for 2009

This year I thought I'd do something different to welcome the new year and stick my neck out by making some predictions. I'm often asked what I think the contact centre trends will be in 2009, and so I'll put forward what I think is going to happen.


Making predictions is always a risky business and 2009 looks so turbulent that the risks will increase. I'll have a go, but I am fully prepared that I begin 2010 with a blog post on how I got it wrong!


1. IP Contact Centres will continue to grow rapidly.
I'll start off with a relatively uncontroversial prediction. This is backed by most of the market analysts I've seen, but if 2009 proved anything, then it was that uncontroversial, analyst backed predictions could be totally wrong! The most up to date research I've seen was yesterday on Network World (see: "IP call centers will do well despite VoIP slowdown") where Infonetics' newest report had some interesting statistics. Infonetics predict the market for IP Contact Centre as growing 38% in 2008 and continued growth in 2009. The growth in 2009 could be as low as 5%, but that's still pretty rapid for a relatively mature market segment in recession. Forrester and Gartner have higher figures for growth, but I suspect they will revise them downwards as they reassess them in light of the global economic situation. Still, there is steady momentum towards Voice over IP (VoIP) in all aspects of telephony and I expect contact centre to follow the trend.


2. Fixing customer processes will be a major focus in 2009.
To a certain extent all contact centres (whether using TDM or VoIP for the voice traffic) can now do all the basic things needed, namely answer the phone and provide the agent with some information on the caller. These historically have been what technology spend has been focused on, answering the call (which is all the spend on telephony) and getting usable information to the agent (all the spend on CRM).

The problem is that telephony plus CRM has not not fixed most of the issues customers experience. What matters to customers when they call is (1) did I get my problem fixed? and (2) was it a pleasant experience. I've been interested in 2008 to see the big system integrators start to focus on process (see posts like: "System Integrators write interesting things about contact centre for the downturn!" or "Contact Centres, Process and Six Sigma") and much more focus on the customer experience (see posts like: "HSBC creates 250 UK call centre jobs & offshore in decline").


3. A major contact centre technology provider to fail/ be bought from administrators.
I'm not confident enough to predict who, but the press and blogs are providing quite a selection of possibilities. Nortel has had some rough press (see: "Nortel Drops After WSJ Says It’s Exploring Bankruptcy" and "Juniper: the big winner if Nortel goes under?") to pick just two recent articles and their financial situation is not good. There are still Nortel supporters, and I admire the optimism of the article "Don’t write off Nortel yet", but I can't say I share it. I do agree with the point the article makes that Nortel is underestimated and is still a very technically capable company and is likely to have fewer self-generated problems going forward.

Aspect may also have trouble, despite their alliance with Microsoft (see: "VoiceCon 2008 - IBM, Microsoft & Aspect"), but they haven't had the focus that Nortel has. They have a strong (and lucrative) product in Aspect Workforce Management but their core call centre offerings have seemed to struggle in recent years.

There is always the chance that Microsoft will buy one of these vendors (or perhaps private equity as with Siemens) but I'm not sure I see other obvious candidates. It's possible that SAP or Oracle might move in, as both have bought small IP contact centre companies in the past (SAP bought Wicom and Oracle bought Telephony@work) but that seems less likely.

4. Offshoring to decline further for front line customer service.I think it's hard to see further offshoring as going to be well received by consumers. Offshoring of call centres was perhaps already in decline for reasons of brand reputation and cost (see posts like: "HSBC creates 250 UK call centre jobs & offshore in decline ") and I think consumers will be very hostile to brands that are seen to be destroying jobs. In the banking industry this will be a particular issue, as with the banks potentially dependent on government, the views of politicians may suddenly be very important.

I think offshore for non-customer facing activities, like IT, may well go offshore more rapidly. The signs are there (see "Lloyds TSB offshores IT, not call centre ") and Barclays has been doing this for a while and I think this is an area where offshore may prosper.

5. Predictions will be wrong!
OK, this is a bit of a cheap one, but there is a serious point. In very turbulent times, the range of possible outcomes for a given set of events increases substantially.

The predictions I've made look the most probable, but I'm prepared to apologise profoundly if against my expectation, 2009 turns out to be the year of TDM offshore contact centres!

VoiceCon 2008 - IBM, Microsoft & Aspect

I was interested to hear a number of the announcements at Voice Con 2008. I'm not in Orlando this year but a number of friends were at the announcement and I was interested to compare their comments with the press announcements.

The Microsoft and Aspect alliance announced yesterday is on, CCF magazine: "Microsoft Corp. and Aspect Software Inc. have announced a multi-year strategic alliance to help deliver unified communications to contact centres globally".

Of the press coverage, the most positive I've seen was nojitter.com, who described it as "Microsoft's One-two punch" and complimented Aspect on their marketing strategy. More typical was infoworld with "Microsoft buys its way into Call Centres".

In my view is that this is an announcement similar to the Microsoft and Nortel alliance. Anything that two major players do has to be of interest, but new entrants to a market don't mean that they are necessarily breaking new ground. My suspicion is that this is good for Microsoft as it gives them access to the Aspect install base and moderately good for Aspect as it lets them defend their install base with a strong partner. In terms of reaching contact centre functionality further into the enterprise, I'm not sure it delivers as much as Avaya, Cisco, Genesys and Nortel can already offer with the various forms of 'expert advisor'.

More interesting to me were the announcements from IBM. The first was the alliance announcements with ShoreTel, VBrick Systems, NEC and Ericsson. This completes IBM's alliances, as IBM Sametime already integrates with Cisco, Avaya, Nortel and Siemens and Sametime has long looked at Voice over IP capabilities. Compared to Microsoft, this makes IBM are much more open environment for Unified Communications than Microsoft. This was reinforced by the (expected) announcement of Sametime Unified Telephony, as a type of middleware for the Unified Communications telephone environment.

In short, I think Jan Dawson writing on his blog, twinloops , summed it up nicely:

"The IBM keynote was very dry, shorn of the visionary stuff from the Avaya and Microsoft keynotes from yesterday. It focused largely on new features and capabilities IBM is adding to its Sametime portfolio. And if anything, the key message was a slightly resentful, “we’ve been doing all this for 10 years, guys - how about giving us some credit?” The lack of vision stuff was probably helpful in reinforcing the perception that IBM is perhaps the most serious about UC, and just boring enough to pull it all off."

It will be very interesting to Microsoft and IBM once again competing head to head.

Reporting - some thoughts

I've realised that while I've written previously on Workforce Management ( Workforce Management - is it only for high end call centres? & Workforce Management - Part 2 Vendor Selection ), I've missed the major pre-requisite of reporting.

Reporting on a call centre or a contact centre's activities is the most important first step in managing such a complex organisation. One of the peculiarities of call centre is that because of the early technology it was built on it was possible to report on agents work in great detail. The PBX (Private Branch Exchange) and ACD (Automated Call Distributor), which together manage all incoming telephone traffic, could provide detailed information on each call, such as duration and the agent availability. Initially these reports were pretty user unfriendly, but driven by management demand, call centre reporting developed in complexity and detail to an extent that was unmatched in the work activity reporting in any other business area. Even in a transaction orientated environment such as a bank branch, staff are not monitored in anything like the detail that is possible in the call centre. The result is that in call cente there is a lot of data that can be reported on.

The crucial thing to remember with reporting is to differentiate what you can report on from what you need to report on. As an example, it is very easy to report on agent availability and measure how long each agent is unavailable. How useful this is as a stand alone metric might be more debatable, as it may be that agents have to do a lot of complex work with the CRM system after each call. In other words, although a good measure of contact centre efficiency, with that metric you may be measuring the poor quality of a CRM GUI and workflow rather than measuring your agents ability. Similarly, if you report on average call time, you may incentivize agents to handle more calls, but may also encourage agents to end calls before customers want to so the agents meet their targets. You would then have customers calling back, which doubles (at least) your call traffic even while you are meeting your average call time metric.

This type of distortion has led to a tendency to report on less telephony based metrics and more on CRM based metrics, such as '1st call resolution' or 'completed steps in the customer management process'. This is useful (as it is measuring a business outcome), but can risk loosing the sort of reporting 1st line management and team leaders found useful for operational management.

I would argue that contact centres should be reporting differently to each level of management. Team leaders and first line managers need real-time statistics on their group of agents performance. The higher the level of management above that, the less real-time/ operational reporting they need and the more business oriented the information needs to be.

This is one of the things I like about Cisco's acquisition of Latigent. Latigent provides the opportunity for mashups and the construction of executive dashboards from multiple data sources. For more operational reporting, as used by team leaders the existing reporting tools are adequate, but the Web 2.0 aspects of Latigent (RSS feeds) offer a lot of interesting options for more complex report creation. There's a good podcast with about Latigent here on cisco.com.

Ofcourse, others in the industry have offerings with a range of capabilities. Avaya have always been strong with their CMS product. Aspect has always had good reporting on the telephony environment (as you would expect from their ACD heritage) and have moved up into workforce management. I'm not convinced that reporting should be considered synonymous with workforce management (at least for large centres, I feel there's a case for best of breed selection for what are two very separate functions), but it has been reasonably successful for them. Genesys too provide a reporting and a workforce management product, but given the large, highly complex environments they tend to be deployed in, I feel there is again a case for best of breed for reporting and a separate best of breed workforce management product.

In short, when thinking about reporting the most important thing is to establish what metrics you need to report on and for whom in your organisation. It's also important to distinguish between reporting (which is collection, tracking & presentation of data), analytics (getting meaning out of data) and workforce management (using information to drive agent performance). These are discrete functions for separate purposes, even if one solution might meet your needs for all of them.

Workforce Management - is it only for high end call centres?

Looking back at my posts I notice that I've written a lot on speech and self-service, a bit on CRM and a bit on e-mail. I've written nothing, though, on one of the major contact centre application areas of workforce management.

For those not familiar with it, workforce management is primarily about managing staffing levels so that they handle call volumes efficiently. What might appear a straightforward calculation becomes much more complex when call volumes peak and trough dramatically, calls can only be handled by agents with the right skills (in financial services, for example, this is a regulatory requirement) and the workforce (with these multiple skill types) might be spread across several sites and perhaps timezones.

For many call centres (especially the smaller ones that are the majority in Europe) the single largest workforce management tool is Microsoft Excel. This has great advantages in being familiar to most managers, relatively easy to use and a simple tool.

Once you get above 100 seats, or have a high degree of complexity in what your agents are skilled to do, I feel that workforce management tools become essential. As an example, a small stockbroker might have 100 seats. On Monday they need 70 or so of those seats to have trading skills to handle the call volume for market opening. Tuesday needs only 40 seats to have trading skills, but 50 seats need to be have qualified financial planning skills and 30 need to have trade settlement skills. Once you have multiple skilled agents (as in this example) it is good for the business, but it can quickly become very difficult to manage, especially where holiday planning and exceptional events need to be built into shift patterns.

The big players that I've worked with are Calabrio Work Force Management , Genesys Work Force Management and Aspect Workforce Management. What I find quite interesting is that the Aspect and Genesys offerings are traditionally pitched at the very high-end call centre, e.g. not the stockbroker in my example where a few agents handle a very complex possible set of interactions, but more the retail banking model where thousands of agents handle a smaller, though still complex set of interactions. Admittedly this high-end is Aspect and Genesys' heritage and where demand for management tools came from but I'm not sure it's the future, especially once multi-media traffic is added to the traditional voice traffic mix. I suspect that as Genesys has always positioned itself for highly complex call routing in very large centres there is a natural market for Genesys Work Force Management plugged into Genesys CTI. The problem for most European centres is that they are not large enough to need the Genesys scale of solution, but are too complex for a simple switch or a PBX and ACD.

One of the interesting things I've found in my work is that small call centres (especially in the B2B environment) can be highly complex and handling very large value transactions and are not just small call centres for small companies. As an example, I worked with a very large cosmetics firm who managed all their European wholesalers from a 70 seat call centre. That (small) call centre ran over 100 product lines, several $B of business a year and did so in six languages. In terms of European call centres, language is obviously a key agent skill and scheduling the right mix of languages is crucial before any other skill can be considered. It might have been a small call centre but it was highly complex.

One of the things I like about the Cisco Contact Centre Express is that it's restrictions are mostly around scale rather than function and there is the option to buy with built in Workforce Management. As an OEM from Calabrio it has a nice look and feel for the user and avoids a lot of the integration issues that happen for any call centre solution when a 3rd party workforce management application is used. There's a good overview here with some screen shots. Importantly, it addresses a call centre market segment (small but complex) that has traditionally been required to either take an over-engineered solution designed for larger customers or a simpler solution for small users that didn't meet their needs.