There are those who advocate a hosted solution without any consideration for on-premise alternatives:

…The benefits are substantial in the short and long-term: 1) LOWER COST: There are no/limited set-up fees for a hosted/on-demand offering vs. the extensive programming required for an on-premise solution. 2) FASTEST TIME TO MARKET: A new customer is literally up and running in a matter of hours or days vs. months for an on-premise offering. 3) IMPROVED FLEXIBLITY: An hosted/on-demand offering allows customers to make improvement on-the-fly vs. an on-premise one that can take weeks, as updated coding is required.

If you’re considering a replacement or new IVR or Contact Center solution, GO hosted/on-demand.

Pretty strong words against on-premise IVRs. The three major benefits are quite true,  but are the savings in time and money indeed so great? More architectural considerations are in play here, such as data security, performance, system reliability,  intellectual property, etc.

How can a hosted IVR solution guarantee the bits and bytes going back and forth are encrypted and secure per company security mandate? What additional licenses, infrastructure, and setup will be required? And if data transactions are going through a secure channel (e.g. VPN) to the databases residing on-premise, then what about performance and caller experience? What happens if the hosting provider suffers an outage? Etc.

Remember the rage from users when Google went down a few months ago? Companies that relied on Google Apps were dead in the water, without access to corporate emails, storage, etc. Now imagine it happening to your hosted enterprise IVRs.

Like any technical solution, the decision to go premise-based or hosted depends on several factors from a company: legal, cultural, and technical. It would be unwise and unrealistic to write off on-premise IVRs simply because it is the trendy thing to do.

Eugene

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Abi Chandra of Interactive Intelligence doesn’t believe that

…by 2011 video traffic will overtake voice traffic in a contact center.  The recent advances in compressing high-quality video into modest bandwidth definitely make it easier for an end customer to consume more video services, but does that really translate to the contact center scenario?   When I call a contact center I still have to give the last 4 digits of my social security number, and I must also state my mother’s maiden name.  How does it benefit me if I am able to see the contact center agent with whom I am speaking or vice versa?  

But I think video will be an important evolution of the customer interaction channel, much like Twitter.

Imagine facial recognition and biometric software being able to positively identify a customer through a video link. No need to talk to an IVR, no need to initiate a chat session with an agent, and no need to give out a Social Security number. Plus the bonus of speaking to another person face to face, where facial expressions and tone of voice are easy to pick up by the agent.

Customer: “You have no idea how upset I am with you guys right now…”

Agent, able to see Customer’s face: “Yes sir, I do. I am very sorry …”

And instead of hearing music-on-hold, the customer may start seeing video ads while on hold. And to apply the current business model of several video streaming services, how about that a customer could opt-in to view videos while on hold in exchange for priority (move ahead of the queue) to receive service? Or instead of participating in satisfaction surveys, the customer can choose to view an ad instead.

Video in the contact center should be viewed as any other channel to engage the customer. That future will come to us soon.

Eugene

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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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Many companies and employees have already embraced the user friendly Skype, and some businesses can’t even operate without it. In 2007 Skype suffered an outage and left 220 million users speechless (excuse the pun). That was two years ago. Today it boasts nearly 500 million registered users. And all you have to do is visit its website, register, and download the application to get started. Voice and video, too!

Since the beta program, Skype for SIP has achieved interoperatability with ShoreTel, SIPfoundry, and now Cisco UC500. It’s almost certain that there will be more to come…

Eugene

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Of course, that’s further from the truth. As much as people avoid using the phone to call an IVR, it’s still a must-have technology for any organization wishing to provide decent customer service. There’s a surge in SMS usage, but people still use mobile phones to talk, not text. Email usage is essential in our daily lives, but more often than not we attach our phone numbers in the end of our emails or follow up with a phone call. Web behemoth Google has its tentacles into every online service, and that includes a mobile phone platform (Android) and Google Voice (formerly GrandCentral). Twitter is the hottest new interaction channel today, yet global VOIP provider JAJAH finds it worthwhile to develop a voice service, JAJAH@Call, to enable voice call initiation via a tweet.

It’s apparent that nobody can deny the importance of the voice interaction when it comes to today’s multichannel world. Your company may operate many contact centers, but I bet the agents still wear headsets and use the phone on the desks.

Eugene

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Now LiveWork has released an API to allow third party applications to tap into the data on its platform. But more importantly, it has already found an early adopter, CrowdFlower. Not many people probably have heard of CrowdFlower yet, but it was one of the 50 finalists in the recent (just concluded yesterday) TechCrunch50 competition where startups compete for a $50,000 prize and $1M in advertising from TechCrunch50 partners.

CrowdFlower didn’t win the prize, but just being featured at TechCrunch50 no doubt gave it an PR advantage. (Other famous TechCrunch50 alumni includes Mint, which Intuit has announced to acquire for $170M on Monday, and TripIt, an online travel organizer.) LiveOps/LiveWork is probably very glad that one of its first API users made it to TechCrunch50.

Will the publicized LiveWork API maintain momentum by attracting prominent contact center vendors, perhaps WFM (workforce management) software makers? Or even human resource management software vendors?

Eugene

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