indepth
CONTACT CENTRES

The long-awaited transformation of South Africa’s telecommunications sector is well underway.
With the re-regulation of telecommunications, the ending of Telkom’s monopoly, legalising (and maturation) of VoIP technology, large-scale investment in infrastructure and the arrival of new undersea cabling, the local contact centre industry can at last look forward to being able to compete with its global counterparts on a technologically-level playing field.

LEVELLING THE PLAYING FIELD

Over the past decade or so, contact centres have undergone a revolution in both userperception and the technologies used. No longer the dry, limited offerings limited to phone-based voice offerings, today’s contact centres are adopting cutting-edge technology to transform themselves into an essential aspect of marketing and customer relationship management, not to mention drivers of new business growth.

As customer service expectations grow, so too has the need to integrate new applications such as email, online chat/instant messaging, unified queuing, self-service... the list seems endless. It’s no longer enough to merely log calls as a measure of productivity, either. There’s so much more to making sure that the customer keeps coming back for more. Productivity has to be balanced against quality of service and it’s not always easy to find the sweet spot. With the credit crunch placing pressure on companies the world over, hardware expenditure in an environment that demands it is set to join skilled-staff retention and the adoption of quality, Web-based applications and services on the list of challenges for this sector in 2009.

KEY FACTORS AND CHALLENGES

The long-awaited legalisation of VoIP in South Africa and its subsequent maturation have given the local contact centre industry the injection of life it needed to compete with the likes of India and Ireland. SA continues to compete strongly with India, largely on pricing and more rigorous labour laws for a share of outsourced business in particular. Ireland, for all its current economic troubles, continues to be able to offer a pool of highly-educated and skilled workers with an infrastructure to match. This latter point continues to hurt the local industry – when Dialogue Group recently announced the cutting of 650 jobs, one of the key factors cited was the high cost of bandwidth, which makes it difficult to compete.

In addition, the National Credit Act has added no small amount of pressure to a sector that is heavily-focused on financial services. With Frost and Sullivan reporting a growth of 30% in the market for 2008, it seems fair to say that it’s up to those in the industry to get out there and fight for their share of the action, particularly when it comes to marketing themselves to global clients, many of them seeking to economise by outsourcing their in-house centres to more cost-effective locations. The imminent arrival of new undersea cabling and the better-value bandwidth these promise are only one factor that enhances SA’s saleability as a contact centre hub.

New technologies and business processes are beginning to make their presence felt; traditional contact centre software vendors are being shaken up by the growth of open source competition, largely in the form of the popular Asterisk system. Beyond the open source arena, growth in contact centre outsourcing is changing the face of centres, emphasising the importance of the human component in the field, even as all eyes focus on self-service to address cost-cutting requirements.

VOIP TO THE RESCUE?

With regulatory uncertainty a thing of the past, Neotel up and running and the Seacom undersea cable expected to have gone live by the time this book is printed, a significantly more competitive voice and data environment are set to broaden contact centre options greatly. With enhanced infrastructure in place, VoIP is well-positioned as the technology of choice for an integrated contact centre infrastructure. VoIP significantly lowers the cost of implementing voice and data solutions, allowing for intelligent call routing and, because it’s possible to embed it in the IP PBX, can eliminate the requirement to purchase additional hardware. The ability to integrate with the desktop environment as well as CRM and ERP applications allows for true voice-data integration.

While cost is a key driver of uptake at the contact centre side, the ability to accept incoming VoIP calls also enhances growth opportunities. Centres serving corporate workers – such as technical and support centres – are coming under pressure from client companies also keen to reduce costs using VoIP. In many cases, responsibility for ensuring end-to-end quality will fall on the shoulders of the contact centres, which will also have to ensure that the skills are in place to service this requirement or, at the very least, trusted partnerships must be in place in order to keep things running smoothly.

An added benefit of VoIP is location flexibility – organisations are no longer tied down when it comes to siting phone connections: wherever there is a network, an agent can be connected. This allows organisations to operate in a location-agnostic set-up, with agents in multiple countries or even working from their own homes. Further flexibility is offered through the ability to add, move or change agents according to demand or anticipated peaks in response to marketing campaigns/special offers; the scalability that comes with this offers benefits in the cost-effectiveness department also. In addition to carrying voice over the IP network, remotely-sited agents can also have full access to enterprise applications and information on the same secured network. Of course, integrating everything on to one network and then housing agents off-site raises security concerns, both from an information security point of view as well as the organisation’s capacity to maintain services at a high-quality.

 

 

VoIP security an issue

Given its increasingly pivotal role in enterprise communications, VoIP has, predictably enough, begun to attract the attention of criminals. Pretty much every nasty capable of taking out a data network – viruses, Trojan horses, denial of service (DoS), worms – can wreak havoc on a VoIP system too. But VoIP also has other challenges of its own – phreaking, which is call fraud involving users making calls on your network at your expense, or even selling on call time to be carried at your expense, voice spam and privacy-compromising eavesdropping are all issues that have to be taken on board in a VoIP environment.

In his keynote address to ITWeb’s Security Summit, international security consultant Phil Zimmerman said that, if users don’t encrypt VoIP calls, “the criminals will own our phone system.” Zimmerman pointed out that, as VoIP pushes packets of data through the cloud, it’s easy for criminals to wiretap near endpoints. With data networks increasingly locked-down, criminals are increasingly turning towards less-well-secured VoIP systems. Research undertaken by In-Stat in 2008 revealed that, in the US, “no mechanisms for securing VoIP had more than 50% penetration across all sizes of business.” The group identified a lack of pro-active security measures, such as audits and pre-deployment assessments as having a low take-up, even in large organisations.

Because VoIP is often used in the context of an integrated system, a single virus or malware-infected PC could effectively capture the traffic of an entire network, recording everything that takes place and allowing a criminal on the other side of the world access to call data without ever entering the country of origin. Denial of service (DoS) attacks are also on the increase – and would constitute a killer blow to a contact centre environment. Zimmerman listed insider trading, criminals intercepting prosecutors’ calls or mission-critical enterprise data as among the negative consequences of not locking down a VoIP system. “We have to find a way to encrypt VOIP,” he said, “otherwise organised crime will be all over VOIP as it’s all over the Internet now.”

Strong network security is the backbone of quality VoIP security, allied with rock-solid encryption and authentication tools. Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) will keep your private network safe from the prying eyes of the ill-intended while offering legitimate users a secure connection to your VoIP from an outside network. A VPN can help prevent the scenario described by Zimmerman (in which a lone PC takes out everything else around it) by separating your VoIP from the data network and keeping the phone system safe from predators. Intrusion-detection systems are widely available and add an extra layer of protection, analysing all incoming traffic for anything suspicious and alerting the network administrator to anything untoward. Intrusion prevention systems operate in a similar fashion, except that they’re geared towards responding to any breaches immediately.

Where IP’s at

Internet Protocol (IP), including VoIP services, has become a core technology in the contact centre arena, with research from Dimension Data revealing significant growth in the adoption of a broad spread of IP-based technologies, among them IP recording (75%) and Interactive Voice Response (IVR – 82%). As with VoIP, flexibility and cost-savings are at the heart of most of the decisions, with many organisations moving to IP in order to meet specific business or functional requirements – 31.5% according to Dimension Data’s Global Contact Centre Benchmarking Report.

UNITY BREEDS SUCCESS

With interaction between customers and service providers increasingly fluid, the unified contact centre has come in to its own. It calls for a common system to manage all paths of communication within the organisation, which in turn relies on common incident management and a shared knowledge base.

It’s all part of a trend towards big-pictures and long-term views; best practice approaches are taking a back-seat of sorts to the quest for quality service to consumers at the best cost. KPIs, long focused on sales and cross-selling, are now looking towards first-time call resolution metrics as a valuable indicator. Dimension Data’s research underlines this trend, with 38% of contact centre managers polled considered an agent’s ability to resolve a query during the first call was the most important factor in service improvement; 74% rated this among their top three indicators. Customer time spent waiting for their call to be answered ranked second most important on the service improvement stakes, finding a spot in the top three for 47% of those polled.

Through the unified contact centre, gents can build a complete, single and up-to-date history of all customer interaction by logging and maintaining a database of all interactions, regardless of the medium used. The model covers incidents through three distinct levels:

• Tracking: All customer contact, regardless of the medium is recorded in a “single version of the truth” common tracking record. A “ticket” opened using one particular channel can be closed if resolved using a different channel.

• Reporting: Common service records enable coherent reporting processes while crosschannel reporting offers high-quality feedback for customer-centric development and marketing/sales or branding strategies.

• Histories: An integrated view of each customer’s interaction allows for the offering of more personalised and client-appropriate services. It also facilitates up-and-cross-selling opportunities – multi-channel customer histories are more useful than incomplete histories offered by single-channel systems.

The technology supporting unified contact centres in South Africa is generally mature, with universal automatic call distribution (ACD) a standard implementation. ACD allows organisations to route calls to the appropriate agent or destination based on the nature of the query and is capable of handling a variety of media types, be it email, fax, voice etc. Businesses can set their own rules to ensure the right queries are routed to the agent with the appropriate skills. In the past, non-voice-based queries travelled in separate systems on their own queues and using different management and business rules, making life for both agent and customer very difficult indeed.

Email and Instant Messaging (IM) have at once transformed and challenged in this respect – agents need to be trained to acquire the requisite levels of written communication skills if these channels are to be used to positive effect. Poorly-written or unintentionally rude/ abrupt responses are unlikely to win customer loyalty. SMS also offers opportunities as a channel with which most consumers are extremely familiar and can drive significant cost savings for vendors even as they open a channel which most customers are happy to use.

Multi-channel contact centres are far less expensive to run than separate customer service silos. They can drive customer satisfaction too as queries are resolved more effectively as agents have better access to complete information. As a bonus, costs are driven down when users channel queries through less expensive but no less personalised channels such as email.

Customer Information Hubs

Gartner’s approach to these centralised, unified systems is the Customer Interaction Hub (CIH), which draw on operational, collaborative and analytical CRM to feed them. According to Gartner, potentially “40-75% of the information required to fully meet customer and enterprise needs is not resident in a single system or interface. The ability to identify and reach correct information, regardless of location or medium... requires the definition and integration of an information repository.” Although standard tools can facilitate the delivery of information, Gartner says that “only rigorous customer process design and timely maintenance will result in a workable system.”

For Gartner, the CIH forms an integrated customer interaction framework offering realtime, thorough views of the customer across channels. This includes a “segmented, analytical evaluation of the specific customer” and their intentions when initiating the interaction, “along with a determination of the level of service resources to apply to the customer based on the customer’s profile.”

By adopting the information hub approach, marketing initiatives and customer purchase processes can be aligned; Gartner says that in an age when consumers find it increasingly difficult to differentiate between competing products, they rely more heavily on intangibles such as reliability, perceived credibility, business support and responsiveness – all areas in which the contact centre can play a key role. By implementing metrics for each channel, those taking the CIH route can improve customer satisfaction and increase profitability, according to Gartner.

SERVE YOURSELF, BUT BE CAREFUL

The challenge of first-time call resolution is shaping call centre functionality, bringing end-toend process management into focus and highlighting visibility, control and resolution capacity. Through models such as the unified contact centre, agents are empowered to complete transactions across channels. The drive to reduce escalations and hand-offs to business areas outside contact centre walls is part and parcel of this overall view. Increasing call volumes have brought pressure to bear on efficiency and processes, creating a need for self-service options as both a driver of customer satisfaction and in-house efficiency and cost-cutting measures.

 

 

According to the Dimension Data 2008 Global Contact Centre Report, self-service offers real benefits to centres, primarily through reduced transaction costs. According to the report, a typical Interactive Voice Response (IVR), self service transaction costs about $1 while the use of an agent-assisted channel is almost $7. IVR and agent-assisted still dominate as the two most popular channels, with self-service rising to 12.6% and agent-assisted at a slightly-lower 63%. Given the opportunities to reduce costs, it is surprising that 69% of centres were not incentivising customers to use the lower cost channels.

Apart from reducing costs significantly, self-service also frees-up agents to deal with more complex or demanding queries and tasks. According to Dimension Data, contact centres are fast-approaching the time when caller volumes will be almost too great for the industry to manage. If businesses are to retain customers and be cost-efficient, simpler, routine transactions will have to be shifted to well-designed self-service channels. Research undertaken by World Wide Worx reveals that South African businesses are increasing budgets for customer care in general and self-service in particular, with the banking sector leading the bunch in terms of priority.

A double-edged sword

The problem with the self-service route is that it’s something of a double-edged sword – get it right, and the customer will keep coming back for more; get it wrong and watch your costs soar in terms of lost business, escalation and wasted money on poor IT choices. Taking the self-service route means more than simply automating a process; today’s systems need to be able to cope with highly dynamic situations and increasingly-complex queries. To hit the sweet spot, a customer-centric approach absolutely has to dictate how the non-voice channel is developed. If customers have a negative experience with self-service, they won’t use those channels again, defeating the purpose of installing them in the first place. The distinctive characteristic of a successful self-service application is that it is designed completely around customer needs, giving them easy and quick access to the required service. The most successful applications demonstrate clear user benefits, often in terms of security, privacy, convenience and cost.

As well as offering caller benefits, self-service solutions can also support business objectives such as providing a consistent customer interaction experience and corporate image. Natural language-based speech technologies are already helping some organisations to replace the often-frustrating touch-tone systems with intelligent speech front-ends, capable of speeding up the authentication process as well as offering a speedy response to less complex queries.

INTERACTIVE VOICE RESPONSE

Until relatively recently, the technological requirements for full-on voice recognition – from processing to memory and bandwidth – were largely not being met. Since the emergence of standards such as VXML and the fall in price of necessary hardware, however, IVR is now well-placed to become the star of the contact centre show. According to Dimension Data, IVR-related self-service now accounts for almost a third of all inbound transactions, although the level of acceptance and use has yet to broaden out into speech-recognition-based self-service.

Speech recognition can allow for the automation of 60-70% of traditional call centre processes, helping to reduce overheads and agent numbers. In environments where relatively simple information is to be delivered, IVR is ideal; allowing time for more complex requirements to be channelled to physical agents.

Voice extensible mark-up language (VXML), meanwhile, is increasing in-step with speech as a self-service strategy, allowing it to be integrated into the Web service channel. Some organisations are replacing existing, end-of-life proprietary IVR platforms and migrating existing touchstone applications on to new, nonproprietary VXML-based platforms capable of supporting speech as business needs dictate. As centres move up the voice-technology ladder, speech analytics technology will come to the fore. This will allow organisations to analyse calls and extract all manner of data from them to drive new strategies and growth areas. Coupled with this, performance analysis will allow for the comparison and analysis of data against set metrics. According to Microsoft, the “one metric that matters” with IVR is task completion rate – whether or not the user can successfully achieve their goal using the technology in as few steps as possible and without resorting to agent contact. Microsoft says that, even if the customer’s intended task is to speak with an agent, they should be able to do so efficiently and not after they’ve become frustrated with the technology. As with other self-service technologies, designing with usercentricity at heart is the shortest way to success in this area.

SIP INTO SOMETHING MORE COMFORTABLE

Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) uses enterprise software instead of traditional PBXs and ACDs to route and control customer interactions. SIP establishes communications sessions on IP networks, be they basic two-way phone calls or more collaborative, multimedia conference calls. Using SIP, innovative, rich interactions are enabled such as Instant Messaging or Web page click-to-dial. Because it is closely related to the Internet protocols HTTP and SMTP (the driving forces behind the World Wide Web and email respectively), SIP interacts well with Internet applications, opening up a world of converged, multimedia possibilities for contact centre users. SIP’s role in simply handling communications sessions without having to know the details of what’s taking place make it eminently scalable, extensible and workable with a variety of different architectures.

Dimension Data recommends that contact centre operators – particularly those operating in legacy environments or considering a move to IP – make an effort to gain an understanding of SIP; as the benefits become more widely understood and more SIP-based applications are developed, a dramatic increase in adoption world wide is likely to occur. The protocol has the potential to redefine total cost of ownership (TCO) through its standards and lower-cost gateways, which can allow for the roll-out of lower-cost, non-proprietary hardware. Gartner research indicates that a growing number of organisations will innovate contact centre infrastructure using SIP and Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), mobility, rich presence and collaboration technologies.

THE HOST WITH THE MOST?

Despite the ever-increasing availability of hosted or managed contact technologies, many operators continue to own some or all of their technology, leaving them in a buy-depreciatebuy acquisition model that, in today’s economic climate is hard going. Economics aside, the traditional model limits flexibility in a globalised business environment that moves lightning fast. In South Africa (and, indeed, globally), where skills availability continues to be a concern, the hosted/managed option allows for the establishment of skills pools capable of serving several centres – a good way to circumvent the perennial issue of centre-employee churn.

Hosting differs from outsourcing in that it allows organisations to buy services instead of equipment, leaving issues such as maintenance, integration and upgrades to the provider.

Flexibility in both pricing and seat addition/reduction is an added benefit of this model, allowing organisation to scale according to their month-to-month needs. In addition, hosted services can help organisations to manage issues such as monitoring and reporting tools, which are growing in stature as a way of ensuring peak efficiency within contact centres. Having a strong Service Level Agreement (SLA) in place also ensures that centres have a single point at which the buck stops when things go wrong – with the service provider fully incentivised to ensure that things are restored to order as quickly as possible when something goes wrong.

OPEN FOR BUSINESS

As is the case across the entire IT sector, traditional vendors of contact centre applications are facing challenges from the open source side of the fence. In the contact centre and telephony space, Asterix, an open source PBX that does the job of more traditional (and usually more expensive) offerings, is attracting the most attention. An entire industry is developing around PBX solutions based on Asterix, and South Africa has many dedicated Asterix solutions providers.

Most large enterprises looking to gain advantages from a converged contact centre network will no doubt continue to partner with the larger IT services companies and their tried-and-tested partners. Nonetheless, Asterix is clearly picking up a lot of ground, commoditising the mid-tier niche thanks to its use of standard PC architecture and hardware. Even for those not seriously considering migrating to an open source option, the presence of good-quality, viable alternatives on the market at least offers the chance to bargain with suppliers of commercial offerings.

INTO THE FUTURE

As with pretty much all businesses operating in the telecommunications space, convergence is bringing its influence to bear on how contact centres will operate and change over the coming years. The transition to IP networks and advances in speech technology will drive uptake of “unified communications” offerings that will allow users a broad range of channels while facilitating contact centre businesses in driving down costs while improving efficiency. Technological change will also make it easier for contact centres to use their data more strategically and intelligently, using analysis tools to extract information from data in ways that previously weren’t possible. The arrival on the scene of Service Oriented Architecture and Web services will also have an impact in those organisations using legacy systems or which seek to squeeze the last drop of value out of existing hardware and software purchases. As consumer expectations grow and an always-on mentality joins with a similar desire for instant gratification, technology is on course for delivering on those customer needs across an increasing range of channels – and at the right price.