VoiceCon 2009 - Now that the dust has settled, and IBM and Microsoft

So what to make of VoiceCon 2009 Orlando?

There didn't seem to be the major announcements that we got in 2008 (see: "VoiceCon 2008 - IBM, Microsoft & Aspect ") but in some ways I think we saw events of more significance.

The first thing is that Microsoft are in this business and are in it seriously. Last year's announcements, while significant, suggested that partnering was the key to Microsoft getting into the voice business. This year the revolutionary aspects of Microsoft's arguments were much more explicit. I rather liked their key-note session. It made one or two very key points that as voice moves from a hardware based solution to a software centric solution, it changes dramatically and that this is the logical evolution of VoIP. I also liked the fact that their demo used a Mac running Safari to Microsoft compatibility. I'm not normally a fan of Microsoft, but I felt they did make the more insightful points. I remain dubious about their ability to execute, but then so were the TDM vendors about IP Telephony! The video is worth checking out:



IBM also did a good pitch, around their UC2 solution from Louts. I liked the blue screen of death April Fool's hoax, but otherwise I felt that they were showing an evolution of Lotus Sametime rather than the more radical changes that Microsoft had in their vision.

In short, I think this software-centric approach to voice is the vision of the future. Whether or not it will be delivered by Microsoft is open to debate, but this was a far more visionary view than the alliances of last year.

VoiceCon Orlando 2009 - Day 1 & Day 2

The blog is not at VoiceCon this year (travel restrictions as part of the global downturn), but I'm taking a keen interest at long range. Fortunately for those of us not able to travel, the VoiceCon 2009 site is running a good series of videos of all the key note speakers.

Last year saw some big announcements (covered in my blog post "VoiceCon 2008 - IBM, Microsoft & Aspect ") but so far these haven't translated into much market change. To be sure Microsoft continues to push with OCS and has a developing Unified Communications story but I have yet to see them get significant traction in Europe. Microsoft and IBM go today, so it will be interesting to see if there are any major announcements from them.

Yesterday it Cisco and Avaya (among others) doing the key note speeches.

Avaya announced the launch of their new solution architecture 'Avaya Aura'. I have to say that at the end of it I was slightly underwhelmed. It seemed good but not as radical as some of their previous SOA type of messaging. There's a very good summary of Avaya Aura on the nojitter.com site from Shelia McGee-Smith.

Cisco's key note was by the CTO, Padmasree Warrior, and focused on the interaction between collaboration, social networks and video. This was illustrated with a (fairly lighthearted) scenario showing how these could be applied to health care. It also showcased real-time translation which is rather gee-whiz stuff, though probably going to be necessary in the future if conversations between different language speakers are to take place.

In short, so far all very interesting, but nothing terribly radical. We'll see if any of that changes with today's presentations. Even if there aren't major changes, it's clear that VoiceCon remains the main event for most of the world's voice industry.

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!

The impact of mobile devices on call centres

Chris Skinner over at Finextra has a great article "Numbers, Part Eleven: Mobile and Cellphones". Chris writes mainly from a financial services perspective but has some really good statistics on how traffic from mobile devices has grown. Examples include:

• there are three billion mobile telephone subscribers worldwide, 1.1 billion PC users and 1.8 billion credit card holders;
• 1,000 new mobile telephone connections are added every minute;
• 60% of subscribers are in developing countries, and 80% of new mobile telephone subscribers are from developing countries;
• there has been a 10% increase in mobile usage in the last year, resulting in a 1.2% rise in GDP;
• a 2.5% reduction in the cost of remittances results in a 60% rise in volume; and
  mobile payments users average 26% more transactions than card users (according to NTT DoCoMo's Edy studies in Japan).

The rise in mobile devices has had a huge impact on call centres because customers can call an organisation from anywhere. In the past you could assume that the phone channel meant a customer at home, while if the customer was out and about that meant they had to go to branch.

Now customers can call their bank from outside the branch to see if they can get a better deal in the call centre channel. Similarly, mobiles now allow voice and data to presented, rather blurring the distinction between internet and voice channels. I suspect video might well be the next thing for mobiles, from evidence for insurance claims to helping with complex transactions. I've written a bit on this last week (though not specific to financial services) at: Video and contact centre - some thoughts.

I suspect in the future we may not look at the distinction between channels, but the instead think of the distinctions between end-user devices and their capabilities.

Google - part 2, yesterdays UC developments

This blog can't claim to have an inside line on Google, but I was slightly startled to read Google's Unified Communications announcement on Thursday after my post on Wednesday.

It was the timing rather than the content that surprised me. Headlined "Google releases free UC for the masses", it was actually the rather less exciting news that Google had moved their GrandCentral acquisition into beta. GrandCentral has an interesting set of capabilities around click to call from web sites and click to call from contacts books, and provides a single number for users for life which is usable for all devices. Google is not unique with these capabilities, other providers include Ribbit with Amphibian open platform (whose relevance to banking and their contact centres is discussed on Chris Skinner's Finextra blog), but Google's reach and scale makes their developments always worth observing. Interestingly, GrandCentral has not been integrated with Google Talk, their VoIP offering, though there may be a 'yet' needed in that statement.

Like so many Google developments, the target market is initially the individual user not the enterprise but I would not be surprised if it started to evolve into a small business offering.

The interesting thing is how this is relevant to the contact centre. There has been interest in ensuring contact centers can handle Skype but handling Google Talk should perhaps be as important a consideration. Similarly, a single lifetime number for users offers some interesting ideas about how you could use outbound to a manage relationship for such a user who would be nearly always reachable. Finally it also highlights that the pace of voice and web integration seems to be accelerating and organisations need to be able to adapt to that what ever that might require in future.

Happy New Year - 1,000 new UK call centre jobs

I was wondering what blog topic I should begin the new year with. This good news story, "Call centre begins recruitment drive" in the South Shields Gazette seemed a very appropriate way of starting.

Garlands, one of the UK's largest privately held call centre companies is adding 1,000 jobs (100 in the first phase)to their South Shields centre. It's interesting to see that these are onshore customer service jobs, primarily for the telecoms/ broadband industry.

Now my experience of the telecoms industry is that many organisations have a high percentage of low margin customers and make their money on a much smaller percentage of high spending customers. In the past this has led to a focus purely on cost of service and for many organisations that meant looking at offshoring. It's good to see that the onshore is now a consideration again when customer service is a consideration besides cost.

In many cases, offshoring purely for cost led to a reduction in customer service quality (and as previously discussed in posts like "Offshoring and mainland Europe" and "On-shore Call centres in decline.... is that the whole story?"), that decline in customer service led to the brand value of the business being damaged. Offshoring should not be blamed purely for customer satisfaction declines though, any large change program focused only on cost would have reduced customer satisfaction. A good example is Powergen (now called EON), a big UK energy utility, who closed their Indian operations. The BBC reported their managing director as saying this was because Powergen were "...not prepared to achieve savings at the risk or expense of customer satisfaction". Six months later in Jan 2007 this seemed to have produced results as the BBC ran a story that Powergen had moved from last place on EnergyWatch's table of customer satisfaction to second place.

It's good also to see that Garlands as an onshore outsourcer recognise that they will compete on quality and innovation rather than cost. It's not just that they run Cisco technology in their call centres (they also use a number of other suppliers as well), but more that they have a strong focus on the quality of their workforce and the agents working conditions. I know recent surveys suggest that salary is a major driver for agent recruitment, but as I argued in my last post "Sometimes it's not rocket science....", it is a key factor in agent retention.

Anyway, a Happy New Year to all readers and I hope you have a pleasant work environment and successful year.

Financial Services Branches, IP and Contact Centre

One of the blogs forums I read regularly is Finextra, the financial services community forum. The UK financial services sector is such a major user of call centre technology that this is an excellent place to explore the environment that contact centre technology needs to interact with.

A good example is Michael Goldman's post on extending IP convergence to branch. His perspective is not that of the technologist (who have long argued for this) but that of the business person looking at processes and customer experience. I'm pleased to see that he's in favour of more IP convergence, but it's a different perspective from the technology vendors.

It's an area that I'm very interested in as consistent service across channels means (re)-joining the branch and contact centre. I say 're-joining', because historically the branch did manage the telephone channel and it was in response to consumer needs like 24hr service and the difficulty of queuing calls at branch that led to banks to moving the telephony channel from the branch to a centralised service point. This also allowed innovations with 'branchless' and single channel banks, like First Direct in the UK, long before the internet.

Technically, delivering contact centre functionality to branch (where appropriate) is very interesting as it allows a business a lot more flexibility in how it constructs the customer experience. It's an area where Cisco has perhaps a slight advantage from the scale of our IP Telephony deployments, but where Genesys, Nortel and Avaya also have interesting developments. It's probably a subject for further posts as something I'm doing a lot of work on at the moment.

Contact Centre and the Environment

My attention was caught today by an article on the CCF website ("Contact Centres Going Green"). In many ways this struck me as a long overdue area of comment. Given the increasing focus of the European Union on the Environment, I'm sure that green issues will soon become a high priority for European Contact Centres.

My colleagues who specialise in data centre have been working on green issues for a while and their part of the Cisco website has a whole series of free videos on demand about energy efficient data centres. Similarly Cisco provides some good white papers on the use of technology for energy efficient facilities management. Interestingly, the knowledge for both these areas has come from Cisco's own efforts to reduce carbon footprint and you can find out more on Cisco's environment page.

Of course, datacentre has particular issues with power consumption, heat and hardware disposal that are not always directly applicable to contact centre. The CCF article rather highlighted this, by illustrating that unlike data centre most green initiatives involving the contact centre are enterprise wide initiatives. Even more interestingly, Voice over IP was highlighted as one of the key technologies, with up to 82% of respondents expecting to adopt VoIP and 83% looking to adopt workforce management tools. This highlights one difference between contact centre and data centre, there is a lot of scope in contact centre to become greener by using people more efficiently (through better workforce management and call centre virtualistion through the use of IP Convergence).

This confirms one of my suspicions, namely that for achieving green objectives in contact centre the focus should be on changing business processes and while IT should not be ignored, it should not necessarily be the starting point for change. My starting suggestions would be:

• Virtualise - By moving to an IP contact centre (and using a technology like Cisco's ICM) you can divide work more efficiently between call centres, which means fewer people and workstations.
• Location - It's traditional to locate contact centres in remote areas (cheap land prices). I've blogged previously on why this may not always be ideal ("City Centre Call Centers - A European quirk?"), but specifically on green issues, remote areas tend to require the workforce to drive while a city centre location allows shift workers to take public transport.
• Thin client - Delivering applications through a browser reduces your dependency on PC hardware for performance. Although you may still need to upgrade servers, that is usually a lot greener than replacing hundreds (or even thousands) of PCs.

Of course this is just the start of a list and I'm sure there are many more things to put there. Suggestions welcome.

UK Agent Attrition

An interesting article on silicon.com about UK contact centre agent attrition increasing for the 5th year in a row.

I actually wrote a post on the survey (and HSBC's response to agent attrition) last week "The contact centre agent experience - First Direct", but the silcon.com article has a good quote from the analysts Contact Babel.

"Steve Morrell, principal analyst at ContactBabel, said in the report: "The lack of growth in agents' salaries is certainly a major factor in producing high levels of attrition. Businesses should be working to move low-value interactions onto web and phone self-service channels, and to use the savings created to pay higher salaries to their agents. This will attract and retain high-quality staff, a move which will immediately and permanently benefit both the business and the customer base.""

All very much thoughts this blog has been discussing in terms of moving from call centre to contact centre and making contact centre part of a multi-channel strategy. I'm not sure, though, this will necesaarily translate into higher UK salaries as I see high-skill offshore like South Africa being a significant factor in the market.

I've always stressed the importance of moving to converged IP because it makes managing multi-media in a multi-channel environment so much easier. Silcon.com aren't making the connection as explictly as I do, but they do produce the quite interesting statistic that:

"...pure IP infrastructure will be commonplace in most UK call centres within the next two years, with 41 per cent of respondents saying their operations will be fully IP-architected by the end of 2009.
Currently only 17 per cent of call centres have an full IP infrastructure, with a further 28 per cent using a hybrid IP/TDM network."

I suspect that one of the other big drivers to IP (besides multi-media management) is the ability to virtualise across borders. I know this is a message Cisco has pushed strongly, and I think it's the right messge for many enterprises. This is especially true in Europe where the continuing integration of the EU offers many opportunities to distribute work more efficently and more widely. Agent jobs (especially in areas like e-mail, where language skills and accent are not so crucial) will go to areas where the work represents a higher salary and on-shore will be left with higher skill, higher value agents.

SOA - bringing CRM, telephony and business together? part 1

It's a Friday, so perhaps time for thinking a bit further ahead.

One of the interesting things about the contact centre (and before that call centre) is that it has three areas that have rarely had more than a passing acquaintance with each other. By areas I mean the the three core functions of telephony (so that you can deal with customers remotely), CRM (which here means the delivery of data and interactions, rather than a specific packaged application) and business process (which is what the contact centre is built to handle and why customers call).

Traditionally self service, or IVR (Interactive Voice Response unit) has high-lighted this separation. It is probably more familiar as "...press 1for..., press 2 for...., etc..." and is the source of enormous customer frustration. This is mostly because it has come from the telephony world (which focused on scalability, responsiveness, routing, etc... ) rather than the IT or business world. As a result traditional IVR tends to be good at managing telephony but rather poor at integrating with CRM, business processes or being customer specific. Similar disconnects between needs and functionality can be highlighted in CRM or all those manual work-arounds in business processes.

It's into this world that SOA enters.

For those not familiar with IT trend, SOA stands for "Service Orientated Architecture". The idea is to build IT systems out of small components of functionality ("services") that can be put together by business processes to perform tasks. These services are not applications as we know them (though they could be) but are much smaller units of business functionality, such "calculate mortgage interest rate" or "identify & verify customer" and can be used by many different functions. These components can be part of existing applications (which increases efficiency from re-use of existing IT) or even come from third parties outside of the enterprise.

In call centre SOA has arrived first (and perhaps surprisingly) in the self-service environment of voice portal. A key factor was that the development of IP convergence meant that voice could be manged in the IP protocol world of the IT industry. A voice portal is not the the traditional IVR unit and from the proprietary telephony world. Instead is more part of IT and can be thought of an internet portal that presents information by voice rather than by speech. The SOA part of this is that if you have services for any channel (branch desktop, web, etc...) then you can present them in the voice portal. So for example, if you greet customers with a personal message when they log into your web site (e.g. "Welcome Mr. Smith, your most recent order shipped this morning"), the voice portal lets you do the same for the telephone channel. It also lets you present information both on a personalised basis and dynamically, which can dramatically increase your customers' use of self-service.

What voice portals are forcing is a coming together of telephony and CRM and SOA is the most sensible architecture for doing so in a way that aligns with business processes. Cisco, Avaya and Genesys are the clear leaders for voice portal, but in my next post I'll try and explain how things like tooling and service management make for big differences between what the vendors offer amd are critical to being successful with an SOA approach.

Skype, Contact Centre & Banking

I've set myself the task of covering three big topics in a short post today.

At first glance, Skype may not seem very relevant to either banking or contact centre but let me explain.

Skype represents a new channel for customer interactions and one the most organisations cannot currently support. Now there are views that Skype will collapse because of its lack of revenue and because it has no network (as most recently argued in The Register). I accept the point made specifically to Skype, but even if Skype fails, VoIP arriving via the web channel is something organisations have to adapt to. Similar to my previous entries on e-mail as process driven or response driven, VoIP is a communication medium that some key demographics are adopting and organisations need to be able to support it.

This is where banks come in as some of the largest users of contact centres. One of the first to introduce Skype based contact management has been ABN Amro. The VoIP function is built in (with chat bots for IM and avatars) to a site targeted at a younger technically oriented user. This has been followed by Rabobank with a similar site, functionality and target market. Why the Dutch market should be so far ahead of (say) the UK I'm not sure, but it is interesting to see a trend being taken up.

Will Skype or VoIP replace traditional voice? Hardly yet, I suspect that the amount of VoIP voice traffic the banks are expecting is relatively low. The real significance (as discussed in my post on e-mail) is that we are moving to distinguishing communications not by the communication medium, but by whether they are synchronous or asynchronous. In this world the contact centre becomes an essential part of managing the increasingly interactive customer.

How Call Centers vary across Europe

One of the things I find interesting about my work is seeing how call centres vary so much across Europe. The European call centre business is often simplified into a north vs. south situation but is actually it's much more complex than that.

It could as easily be seen as a west vs. east or even a split by language groups and the culture that each has. The simplified view is that the northern nations (the UK and Ireland, the Nordic countries and the Netherlands) were early adopters of call centre technology and the culture of the country is comfortable doing business on the telephone. The southern nations (especially Spain, Italy and Greece) are much slower adopters and have cultures that prefer doing business face to face.

As with all simplifications there is some truth in it, but it hides significant variations and the market has changed quite rapidly over the last few years. Within the northern nations, the Nordic countries are often much earlier adopters of technology than the UK. A smaller, more technically enabled population means that integrating the web and telephony channel is often higher on the agenda in the Nordics (where there is high penetration of broadband) than it would be for UK decision makers. Similarly, with a smaller, more homogenous population to serve, Nordic companies can implement newer technologies more easily. Also in northern Europe telephony has generally been cheaper for consumers, making the telephone a more attractive channel for business. For the UK, scale and cost are two major concerns. UK call centres are large (often only surpassed by those in the US) and the telephone represents a major customer facing channel for the financial services sector, telecoms and utilities. Although UK customers are less than happy about the levels of service at some companies the telephone is still used extensively for complex interactions, while simpler interactions have often moved to the web or e-mail channel.

In southern Europe, face to face still remains a cultural preference for many transactions, but the rise of the web channel is changing this. One of the things I'm seeing is that organisations in these countries are building call centres as a channel to support the web, rather than as an existing to channel to which the web was added. Perhaps unexpectedly, mobile telephony has also brought about a growth in call centres as it has made the telephone cheaper and more widely available than when it was the monopoly of the state owned Telco's. The mobile operators need call centres for their customers, but other organisations have then had to respond to the sudden increase in telephony traffic this has brought about.

The final significant variation is between west and east in Europe. Generally speaking (...and this is very 'generally'!) labour costs in eastern Europe are substantially less than those in western Europe. There is also no legacy of contact centre investments from before the 1990s. As a result, while in western Europe contact centre is a mature part of most organisations with an existing telephony infrastructure, in eastern Europe many contact centres are greenfield implementations but, with EU accession, greenfield in an advanced market. With no concerns about telephony migration and transitioning from TDM to IP Telephony, it's been very interesting to see how this market has adopted IP Contact Centres. Obviously, as I work for Cisco, it's something I've seen quite a bit of and am enthusiastic about, but for the contact centre operators it means they can approach the contact centre business in entirely new ways. As an example, many traditional management structure for contact centre have evolved because all agents need to be within (approx) 200yrds of the ACD. In an IP world that physical restriction does not exist and it then becomes a matter of choice as to whether concentrating all your agents in one place is a suitable business strategy.

The changes in the call centre industry is a subject I'm sure I'll be covering more of in the future, but that's probably enough for now on the high level trends across Europe.