We’re very proud to be a RightNow Technologies partner. Our RightNow Adapter continues to attract lots of interest from RightNow customers and companies hoping to improve their customer experience in the contact centers.

Speaking of which, today RightNow announces its CX (Customer Experience) Suite, a “total customer experience solution”:

RightNow CX is a total customer experience solution for consumer-centric organizations serious about enabling superior interactions across web, social and contact center touch points. RightNow’s on demand CX solutions give companies the ability to coordinate disparate resources across the organization to develop, rapidly execute and manage a comprehensive customer experience strategy.

Today, consumers are empowered like no other time in history. Although they’ve always had high expectations – to be heard, supported, valued – never before have consumers had such an arsenal of tools at their disposal to ensure those expectations turn into reality. RightNow’s on demand CX solutions deliver comprehensive customer experiences that build loyalty, drive revenue, and increase efficiency.

This looks to be a very exciting and innovative product to redefine CRM in today’s multichannel, experience focused world. Clearly RightNow understands the impact of multichannel interactions, evident in its recent acquisition of HiveLive, its encouragement of staff to use social media, and inviting David Carroll of “United Breaks Guitars” fame to speak at the Summit.

While some may argue that RightNow is simply riding the wave of social media buzz, there is little doubt that businesses can indeed utilize social media to engage customers at a different level than the traditional channels. Comcast has a team of contact center agents on Twitter and Pizza Hut hired a young full-time social media director — both companies now share plenty of positive customer experience stories. RightNow understands that the customer is king in CRM, and therefore its products need to reflect on whichever means the customer choose to interact with an agent of the company.

Eugene

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But because of the emphasis on AHT, some agents will intentionally hang up on callers just to lower AHT, even though that’s clearly a customer serve no-no. And who can blame such rogue agents when their compensation and/or promotion depends so much on their AHT numbers?

It is time to re-evaluate the AHT as Tripp Babbit points out:

The average handle time target is the problem. The average handle time becomes the de facto purpose of the call center representative, meaning their focus is on the target and not the customer. The call center representative is left with a choice to either serve the customer or risk being paid attention to or not receiving some incentive for not achieving some arbitrary numerical goal (target).

Additionally, the target does not account for the variety of demand that a call center representative receives. I have seen on many occasions where the customer demand is a hard call (time consuming) and no call center representative wants those calls when they are under the gun of an arbitrary target. Sometimes call center representatives hang up or don’t give complete answers to customers, leading to more failure demand (call backs, errors, follow-ups, escalations, etc.). This just increases call volume at great expense.

The focus should be the customer. Ultimately, the goal of a contact center to to serve customers. Too much attention paid to AHT means less attention paid to who’s important — the customer. The agent should be evaluated on his or her service, whether s/he met the needs of the caller. Even if a call took one hour.

Eugene

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We have quite a few upcoming enhancements — official and unofficial — for OpenVXML. One of them, authored by Tarun, an  intern from UMKC, is a plugin to list all the voice prompts within the project: the prompt name, language, brand, and actual file name. Simple, but absolutely useful! It’s still in its early stages of development and Tarun plans more refinement soon, but it just shows how beneficial the plugin framework is and how any programmer can quickly extend OpenVXML’s features

What other plugins have you created or used within OpenVXML? And what specific features do you want to see?

Eugene

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1. Eliminate Intrastate Toll–Calling between LATAs within a state is usually 4-5 cents a minute vs. interstate calling at 1-2 cents a minute. Yes, when calling from Houston to Dallas Texas, it is cheaper if the call goes through a data center out of state. This applies for both Toll Free and Long Distance calls.

2. Fixed Rate Billing–40% of the phone bill is the phone bill. Enterprises have entire departments that sort through a telephone bill to validate it and then charge back the various business units. With SIP trunks, an enterprise can pay for a fixed access and peak concurrent call rate, similar to Internet or MPLS billing.

3. Eliminate Local Usage–Within a lot of LATAs, the LEC will charge a per minute rate for usage based on bands (distance within the LATA between callers).

4. Eliminated Advance Features–PRI D channel and toll free features such as transferring a toll free call from one site to another.

5. Economies of Scale–Aggregating all the trunking requirements for an enterprise into a few data centers can reduce the number of trunks required by 40-60% and cut the cost of access by 80%. Four, 100Mbps Ethernet connections are a lot cheaper than 200 T1s.

6. Reduce 3rd Party Audio Conferencing–Most enterprises that use a 3rd party to host their audio conferencing service could cut their costs by 25% by using a standard LD number from an office vs. offering a toll free number. A toll free outbound call must ride over a LEC circuit vs. one from an IXC. IXC trunks are typically half of a LEC trunk, plus if you define the service provider as being on-net, the LD costs go down further. Of course, moving to VoIP/SIP will further drive down the cost.

7. Competition–With multiple carriers into a few data centers, an enterprise can easily move traffic between service providers. Local SIP trunks are typically half the cost of existing TDM T1/PRI trunks, plus they will include up to 1,000 minutes/month of free long distance.

Of course, a company has to do it right by possibly investing in or upgrading the WAN infrastructure since all voice traffic will go through as packets. VOIP/SIP technologies has matured already, and there’s simply no reason to continue paying outrageous moneys to telecom providers for traditional TDM services.

Eugene

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Partners Motorola and Voxeo go way back when Voxeo was an early licensee of VoxGateway in 2002. Voxeo apparently saw the business opportunities with VXML and not only bet on being an early adopter, but also poured resources into making VoxGateway even better, to a point that it now wants to own all of the IPs and rights to the VXML browser.

The financial terms of this transaction were not disclosed, but struggling Motorola probably welcomed this sale. For Voxeo, it now has a jewel in the VXML arena and a clear competitive advantage in the industry. In fact, starting today some of its competitors probably just become its license customers…

Eugene

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