My last blog focused on how Unified Communications (UC) can empower the contact center by directing nontraditional call center calls to the center. Most people think of UC as a way of combining multiple contact points for one person to a single point of contact (thus John Smith's office phone, cell phone, email, IM, etc. can all be directed to "ring" on his cell phone). This is the common way UC is explained, and it can be very valuable -- but it can also result in TMI (too much information).
Everyone may be created equal, but we can't give all of our customers, peers, bosses, and the world at large equal access to us or we'd never get any work done. We need to prioritize who can contact us and how. Thus with UC we can identify specific people (our boss, our spouse, our key customer) to reach us at our #1 end point (maybe that cell phone) while other important people get directed to voice mail -- or as I pointed out in my last blog -- this is a perfect opportunity to now direct those folks to a contact center where an inside sales rep or pool admin can hopefully handle their needs in one call (OCR = one call resolution).
So there is a natural marriage between UC and CC (contact center).
Where does CRM come into play?
CRM (customer relationship management) has become such a muddied term. It has become far too generic. To some it does mean contact center software (and it can be that), to some it means the software or software as a service (SaaS) that outside sales reps use to keep track of their accounts, where they are in the sales cycle, etc. -- and that is a good definition. . .but CRM is much bigger than that.
CRM is really broken into two broad categories: "front office CRM" and "Back office CRM."
Front office CRM are the applications that actually touch the customer directly -- the voice on the phone in the contact center, an internet interface where they can place an order, customer service (again online or over the phone) or the live customer service rep (CSR). Any part where the customer is directly interfacing with your company is a form of "front office CRM."
And a logical touchpoint for UC and CRM to link.
The holy grail of the contact center for years has been OCR - one call resolution. Any problem that isn't resolved in one call, or any sale that can't be closed in one call ("we have an internet special where for the same price you are paying today you can add XYZ. . .") costs lots of money. Any customer service call that takes too long or requires "follow up" also begins to alienate your customers making them more inclined to leave you for another firm.
UC can dramatically improve the goal of OCR -- whether that "one call" is a phone call, an internet access or even your face to face outside sales rep.
It all has to do with the "hand off." Inside a contact center this can be done with intelligent routing (which is really what UC is in a larger scheme of things). We route the call to the most logical, not the first available, agent. With UC we are now moving beyond the barrier of the contact center and able to route the call to best person no matter what department they work in, or even WHERE THEY ARE physically.
Setting up skills routing takes time, but the rewards are immense both in customer satisfaction and in cost reduction.
All of this so far focuses on the connectivity between front office CRM and UC, but back office CRM can increase this cost reduction by quantum factors. Using a data warehouse (or perhaps data mart) to identify your most profitable customers you may choose to always route them to a specific department or person -- not blindly treating all customers the same but giving platinum treatment to platinum customers.
By contrast your lower value customers (in margins) can always be routed through an IVR (interactive voice response) unit and routed to newer agents. . . The dirty little reality in sales is that there are some customers that are not worth having because the amount of work they require (and work = expense to your company) may mean you actually lose money by having them as a customer. Back end CRM identifies who is profitable and thus worth retaining.
One to one marketing is a myth. We do not market to all of our prospects and customers in the same way and we shouldn't. Back end CRM's information on customer profitability can help determine who we route to whom in our dynamic, unified communications world.
This blog is speaking in generalities -- as if we had all the money and time in the world to link all of these disparate systems together. The good news is that many of these systems are already begining to be linked -- Cisco with Salesforce.com, Aspect with Microsoft, Avaya and SAP, Nortel offers integration to Microsoft Dynamics CRM and implemented Dynamics internally. The idea is to take advantage of the technologies you may already have in place such as a legacy Siebel implementation maybe using AT&T's Siebel Solutions offer) to improve relations with your customers and business partners through a streamlined "one call resolution" that goes far beyond the silos of "outside sales," "engineering," "customer service" across your business.
Sunday, June 21, 2009
Friday, June 12, 2009
In my last blog we discussed the impact of social networking on unified communications and concluded that while UC and social networking are all forms of communications one is "push" (in social networking you post and someone reads it at their own pace and discretion) whereas most of UC (unified communications) is "pull."
In UC it is the recipient, the "end user" who determines who can reach them at what end point through a single point of access. Boy that sounds verbose. To put it more simply, in today's world most people have an office phone, a cell phone, maybe a home land line phone, at least one email (usually two or more: business and personal), some still carry pagers, and then we have Twitter and the social media platforms. The promise of UC is that the end user defines where s/he "is" (maybe the cell phone) and all forms of communication are routed to that one source -- even if they are sent to another (the office phone, email, etc.).
Perhaps the greatest thing about UC in this overloaded world is that the end user can actually decide WHO accesses their primary end point (in our example the cell phone) and who is "tier II" and goes directly to voice mail to be retrieved when time is available, or even "tier III" (unknown people, for example) who go to an admin or even get funneled to another department -- for example, the call center.
You knew I'd eventually wrap back to the contact (call) center -- after all the title of this blog is "The Contact Center, CRM (Customer Relationship Management) and Unified Communications.
Most people don't "see" the connection between the contact center and Unified Communications (UC), but is actually pretty obvious. UC is best suited to people with lots of contacts and who may be away from their physical office a lot (think of lawyers, physicians, business executives who attend meetings off-site, sales types, Realtors, etc.). Do we really want the "unknown" callers to go to some over loaded voice mail box where it may never receive attention due to work levels?
How about shipping that call to a $9 an hour CSR (customer service representative) who can identify the purpose and see if there is a potential sale there? If not a sale, how about resolving a problem or at least determing the correct person to handle the purpose of the original call? The result is a happier initial caller, better customer service, maybe a new sale AND OCR (one call resolution).
The contact center vendors are beginning to understand this obvious advantage. Genesys (an Alcatael / Lucent company) -- one of the two largest contact center vendors (the other being Avaya) -- has announced UC Connect. UC Connect promises integration and interoperability between the Genesys Customer Interaction Management (CIM) software platform and UC solutions from many of the major providers in the industry. From what I can tell the only integration available currently is to IBM SameTime.
I haven't seen it so can't tell you how simple or complex (integration) this solution is -- but Genesys claims it will provide connectivity to the Alcatel-Lucent’s MyInstant Communicator, IBM Sametime, Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007, and Siemens Openscape. When? How? That remains to be seen.
Formerly with Siemens I'm very familiar with Openscape and love it. If you are looking into UC be sure you take a look at Openscape -- realizing that Siemens market share is far below Cisco and Avaya but knowing that feature / functionality is tops. IBM integrated some of the Siemens' Openscape code into Sametime -- and initially Microsoft partnered with Siemens in their previous UC generation. Great product, but again the caveat is Siemens market penetration, service coverage -- so be sure you feel comfortable with your support and service if you consider Openscape.
Avaya? Cisco? Genesys has taken the bull by the horn. Granted you have to be a user of their contact center software, but they are one of the two market leaders in that field. . .
Genesys has raised the bar. Cisco offers Cisco Unified Communications contact center system, proclaimed as "the Cisco IP solution for distributed contact center applications," but it is a total Cisco (one vendor) solution not the open true UC offer now available from Genesys. Stay tuned.
In UC it is the recipient, the "end user" who determines who can reach them at what end point through a single point of access. Boy that sounds verbose. To put it more simply, in today's world most people have an office phone, a cell phone, maybe a home land line phone, at least one email (usually two or more: business and personal), some still carry pagers, and then we have Twitter and the social media platforms. The promise of UC is that the end user defines where s/he "is" (maybe the cell phone) and all forms of communication are routed to that one source -- even if they are sent to another (the office phone, email, etc.).
Perhaps the greatest thing about UC in this overloaded world is that the end user can actually decide WHO accesses their primary end point (in our example the cell phone) and who is "tier II" and goes directly to voice mail to be retrieved when time is available, or even "tier III" (unknown people, for example) who go to an admin or even get funneled to another department -- for example, the call center.
You knew I'd eventually wrap back to the contact (call) center -- after all the title of this blog is "The Contact Center, CRM (Customer Relationship Management) and Unified Communications.
Most people don't "see" the connection between the contact center and Unified Communications (UC), but is actually pretty obvious. UC is best suited to people with lots of contacts and who may be away from their physical office a lot (think of lawyers, physicians, business executives who attend meetings off-site, sales types, Realtors, etc.). Do we really want the "unknown" callers to go to some over loaded voice mail box where it may never receive attention due to work levels?
How about shipping that call to a $9 an hour CSR (customer service representative) who can identify the purpose and see if there is a potential sale there? If not a sale, how about resolving a problem or at least determing the correct person to handle the purpose of the original call? The result is a happier initial caller, better customer service, maybe a new sale AND OCR (one call resolution).
The contact center vendors are beginning to understand this obvious advantage. Genesys (an Alcatael / Lucent company) -- one of the two largest contact center vendors (the other being Avaya) -- has announced UC Connect. UC Connect promises integration and interoperability between the Genesys Customer Interaction Management (CIM) software platform and UC solutions from many of the major providers in the industry. From what I can tell the only integration available currently is to IBM SameTime.
I haven't seen it so can't tell you how simple or complex (integration) this solution is -- but Genesys claims it will provide connectivity to the Alcatel-Lucent’s MyInstant Communicator, IBM Sametime, Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007, and Siemens Openscape. When? How? That remains to be seen.
Formerly with Siemens I'm very familiar with Openscape and love it. If you are looking into UC be sure you take a look at Openscape -- realizing that Siemens market share is far below Cisco and Avaya but knowing that feature / functionality is tops. IBM integrated some of the Siemens' Openscape code into Sametime -- and initially Microsoft partnered with Siemens in their previous UC generation. Great product, but again the caveat is Siemens market penetration, service coverage -- so be sure you feel comfortable with your support and service if you consider Openscape.
Avaya? Cisco? Genesys has taken the bull by the horn. Granted you have to be a user of their contact center software, but they are one of the two market leaders in that field. . .
Genesys has raised the bar. Cisco offers Cisco Unified Communications contact center system, proclaimed as "the Cisco IP solution for distributed contact center applications," but it is a total Cisco (one vendor) solution not the open true UC offer now available from Genesys. Stay tuned.
Tuesday, June 9, 2009
How do Twitter, Facebook and other Social Networks impact UC?
Unified Communications -- the holy grail of both traditional networking companies (Cisco, Avaya, etc.) and some not so traditional network firms (Microsoft) has the lofty goal of bringing together your office phone, voice mail, home phone, cell phone, email and instant messaging into one point of contact. You (as the end point) decide who can reach you at whatever access point you are at, through a central phone number or ID. You can also identify who cannot get to you (for example that pesky sales rep goes automatically to voice mail, SPAM filter or admin).
Unified Communications puts the receiver in control of who can reach them and how they are reached.
Unified Communications, aka UC, has great possibilities to make time more productive -- no more phone tag, no more voice mail hell of trying to reach someone for a deadline and failing. It really is a time saver, can be a deal saver -- and has the possibility of being an enormous money saver. (You can have a central phone number but let many workers telecommute while still having the professional "front end" of your central business phone gateway).
UC is NOT UM (unified messaging) which centralized the voice and electronic mail together. It is much, much more than that. Yet not only has UM muddied for most what UC is and is not, now along comes social networking which has muddied it even more!
Twitter is a quick burst "push" technology that lets its users post what they are doing. Others can follow these "tweets." Facebook and other social networks lets you keep up to date with your friends and LinkedIn lets you network with business associates you know, or whom you should know.
Let's face it -- UC and social networking are all forms of communications.
Do they dove tail somewhere in the middle? Are they diametrically opposite? Is one the death knell for the other?
They dovetail.
UC allows the recipient (end point) to determine who can reach him/her, how and when.
Social networks allow the sender (send point) to broadcast messages to individuals or groups. There is no way to immediately reach the sender (even with a tweet or message on Facebook there is no way to determine when the sender will see it let alone respond to it).
So UC is the ying to social networking's yang. Opposite, yet complimentary. One is casual and end points access it when they have the time and the need and the inclination. It is a "pull" technology.
UC is more professional and allows the end point to be reached as needed (instantly) by those who should have that access as allowed by recipient.
I'm a user and huge fan of both technology camps. UC keeps a busy person spinning many activities at once more in control -- which in this world of constant demands is a refreshing technological advantage. Unfortunately UC has been slow to catch fire -- perhaps due to the economy or the inability of vendors to clear articulate its true value. Given time UC is a natural winner. It simply needs to be explained, cost justified and exploited. As with everything: what is the value to the customer?
Enormous.
Unified Communications puts the receiver in control of who can reach them and how they are reached.
Unified Communications, aka UC, has great possibilities to make time more productive -- no more phone tag, no more voice mail hell of trying to reach someone for a deadline and failing. It really is a time saver, can be a deal saver -- and has the possibility of being an enormous money saver. (You can have a central phone number but let many workers telecommute while still having the professional "front end" of your central business phone gateway).
UC is NOT UM (unified messaging) which centralized the voice and electronic mail together. It is much, much more than that. Yet not only has UM muddied for most what UC is and is not, now along comes social networking which has muddied it even more!
Twitter is a quick burst "push" technology that lets its users post what they are doing. Others can follow these "tweets." Facebook and other social networks lets you keep up to date with your friends and LinkedIn lets you network with business associates you know, or whom you should know.
Let's face it -- UC and social networking are all forms of communications.
Do they dove tail somewhere in the middle? Are they diametrically opposite? Is one the death knell for the other?
They dovetail.
UC allows the recipient (end point) to determine who can reach him/her, how and when.
Social networks allow the sender (send point) to broadcast messages to individuals or groups. There is no way to immediately reach the sender (even with a tweet or message on Facebook there is no way to determine when the sender will see it let alone respond to it).
So UC is the ying to social networking's yang. Opposite, yet complimentary. One is casual and end points access it when they have the time and the need and the inclination. It is a "pull" technology.
UC is more professional and allows the end point to be reached as needed (instantly) by those who should have that access as allowed by recipient.
I'm a user and huge fan of both technology camps. UC keeps a busy person spinning many activities at once more in control -- which in this world of constant demands is a refreshing technological advantage. Unfortunately UC has been slow to catch fire -- perhaps due to the economy or the inability of vendors to clear articulate its true value. Given time UC is a natural winner. It simply needs to be explained, cost justified and exploited. As with everything: what is the value to the customer?
Enormous.
Wednesday, June 3, 2009
The Irony of it All
My last blog posed the question: "Is Microsoft the next Dinosaur?" My point was that most companies have a lifecycle, just like products do and people do.
Microsoft may or may not be at the precipice of a decline -- it is really up to Microsoft. The thing I always admired about Bill Gates in the "early days" (and I was a UNIX fan since I worked for AT&T Computer Systems) was that he was always paranoid. He knew the internet could eclipse the OS as far as the center of the IT universe and so out came Internet Explorer. Microsoft tried to win the search engine war -- and after repeated lack of success has what looks like a nice product in Bing.
But no sooner did I post my Blog and get lots of comments (most not so nice from Microsoft proponents) along comes PC World with an article that asks the very same question I asked:
J. Peter Bruzzese, InfoWorld
Microsoft may or may not be at the precipice of a decline -- it is really up to Microsoft. The thing I always admired about Bill Gates in the "early days" (and I was a UNIX fan since I worked for AT&T Computer Systems) was that he was always paranoid. He knew the internet could eclipse the OS as far as the center of the IT universe and so out came Internet Explorer. Microsoft tried to win the search engine war -- and after repeated lack of success has what looks like a nice product in Bing.
But no sooner did I post my Blog and get lots of comments (most not so nice from Microsoft proponents) along comes PC World with an article that asks the very same question I asked:
Is Microsoft Following GM's Road Map?
Analysis: GM's bankruptcy marks the end of an era. Is Microsoft repeating the automaker's mistakes?
J. Peter Bruzzese, InfoWorld
// Jun 3, 2009 6:00 pm
"Microsoft has faced a few serious bumps over the last 10 years but came out fine. . .Knowing the work Microsoft developers put into their products, I believe they are the saving grace of the company -- as long as they are allowed to hear the voice of the people. This is an area where I've seen a problem."
I worked for AT&T at the hey day of Bell Labs. We had the brightest, most awesome minds around -- just like Microsoft does today. Microsoft ca be its own best friend or its own worst enemy. Only time will tell.
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