My Prediction for 2015: All That Matters Is The Experience

My wife's company hosted a white elephant gift exchange during their holiday party and she came home with a portable power stick.  You know the kind that are everywhere. Every news stand in every airport sells them and now you can usually find them in the checkout aisle of your grocery store.  What product could be more commoditized than this little battery?  Can you name a single brand?  I love all gadgets so I took the trouble to unbox and charge it.  Inside I found a curious little piece of paper. 
I have been reading everyone's predictions for the Contact Center in 2015 full of the latest buzzwords and trendy tech.  I also went back and reviewed some of those same predictions for 2014.  Precious few became widespread trends.  In 2014 pundits were predicting the omnipresence of Customer Journey Mapping, Multi-Channel becoming seamless Cross-Channel, and every kind of analytics you can imagine; customer experience analytics, social analytics, speech analytics, etc.  Were these technologies adopted in 2014?  Certainly.  Were they widespread?  Not at all.

The economic downturn that began in 2008 made it feasible to throw bodies at call volume and do it with onshore representatives.  At the same time companies caught on to the fact that customer experience is a differentiator - and in an age when information is ubiquitous and scarcely do companies have a captive customer base, customer loyalty is golden!  This little piece of paper says it all.  Anker figured out that the easiest way to stand out gain loyalty was to focus on the customer and care about their experience. 

With customer experience being a major contributor to customer loyalty, even well established technologies like chat and virtual

assistants have lost their luster.  Why?  Both technologies (chat and virtual assistants) leverage an extensive knowledge base for scale and efficiency.  The reason an agent can handle multiple chat sessions while also taking voice calls is because they can fill the gaps with canned responses (that is ALL that virtual assistants do...with a patina of pleasantries overlaid to patronize and waste your time).  Savvy customers get this and are tired of canned answers - whether they be automated or read to them from a script.  We want HUMAN interactions.  Couple that with the fact that Cloud Contact Center technology makes it easy to stand up a sophisticated contact center (or a home-based virtual one) in weeks and the allure of great human-to-human interactions is hard to resist.

Human interactions also make upselling/cross-selling a reality.  My wireless provider peppered me with emails (that I deleted without reading) about changing my plan and saving money.  Later when I called in with a service issue, the representative took advantage of a good experience (they solved my issue quickly) and sold me on the new rate plan.  Even with the most advanced (and expensive) speech and/or sentiment analytics, this is tough for automation to do and most companies would only try it with relatively low-value calls. 

I am no Luddite.  I think all of these technologies have a role to play in a modern customer experience strategy.  What I found in 2014 was that many of the features that make their way into a requirements matrix are driven by industry analysts and consultants and not by the company.  In every opportunity I have pursued where the requirements looked like a list of the breakout sessions at Frost or IQPC, the solution that was ultimately implemented was somewhat vanilla and more dependent upon human representatives; cutting edge tech being pushed-off to some nebulous future "phase". 

Large contact centers are using analytics and smart automation but they are hiding it from the customer.  Silent IVR, WFM/WFO, and Performance Management products that aide in coaching and developing great representatives will be the big winners in 2015 because they drive performance improvements without burdening or annoying the customer leaving us humans to do what we do best: interact.

Cloud Contact Center? Overlook Telco At Your Own Peril.

    Generic statement of the year: everyone is moving to the cloud.  In my world that means the contact center.  Cloud makes life nice and easy.  No big footprint to manage, no big cash outlay, and fewer throats to choke.  With more and more cloud vendors offering to do everything soup to nuts, it is easy for decision makers to overlook some very important elements that are still in their control, like telco.

  This subject is near and dear to me because I have seen firsthand the impact of overlooking telco  (and I am including data bandwidth here too - SIP is still telco) in even small to medium-sized contact centers.  From busy signals and poor call quality to lost calls, companies that rely on their cloud provider to handle their telco without asking some serious questions put themselves at risk of jeopardizing the customer experience.

  Since I am by no means a subject matter expert on this topic, I reached out to one of our network engineers, John Pecora, for help answering my burning questions.  John has been with VoltDelta for almost 10 years and spent 14 years with Nortel Networks; much of his time spent delivering solutions to telephone carriers that demand extreme uptime and reliability.

Here are John's answers to my 5 burning questions on Cloud Contact Center telco:

DM:  What is the biggest misconception you see as it relates to cloud contact center technology and telephony engineering and design? 

JP:  I believe from a technical standpoint that the data and voice transport portion of the cloud solution is often misunderstood or assumed more reliable to some extent due to the virtualized nature of the solution. Cloud technology still has two parts to its reliability, one being the robustness of the cloud center transport and the other being the customers access to the cloud environment.  Although there are costs associated with more robust and reliable networks, it has to be weighed against the quality of the customer experience and its values to the business.

DM:  What telco considerations do you see are often overlooked in contact centers?

JP:  Some items that are frequently overlooked in contact centers are Telco Diversity, the ability for the telco to deliver an end-to-end solution with minimal hand-offs and the versatility and/or availability of specific call routing features to support the business.

DM:  When should a company choose SIP over TDM for their contact center and when does TDM make more sense?  Is there a threshold in terms of call volume or number of agents when one makes more sense than the other?

JP:  This is a big one; there are so many aspects to consider when choosing SIP over TDM and vise-versa.  With SIP being a data connection it is critical to have a properly provisioned and reliable network from end-to-end with the ability to maintain the quality of the call.  Although there may be a cost savings with SIP in larger volume contact centers, if you tend to be in an area with sparse IP connectivity, sometimes the tried and true public switched telephone network (PSTN) may be of value.  There are many more factors in this decision such as audio codec needed to support the calls which vary in bandwidth consumed by the call - reducing number of calls transmitted simultaneously with selected bandwidth, call features, SIP platform adherence to the SIP RFC, data and content security, SIP infrastructure additions such as session border controllers and their licensed features.  A sound cloud solution will offer both options to best accommodate their customer.

DM:  What factors contribute to poor call quality – on either SIP or TDM?

JP:  The biggest contributing factor to poor call quality on SIP calls is improper provisioning and/or configuration of the IP transport which lead to excessive jitter (variance in latency). To maintain call quality during a sip call the audio packets must either be prioritized with QOS (quality of service) configuration or provided enough bandwidth so that packets do not experience queuing delay. Typically straight TDM call quality is less troublesome due to the dedicated channel resources of PRI circuits. 

DM:  I often hear customers say they want to “bring their telco” while other companies would rather not bother with separate vendors for telco and contact center.  What are some of the factors people should consider when making the decision between owning their telco or not?

JP:  The biggest factor would be the efficiency of the call flow and limiting the number of times the call has to be moved around separate networks to complete the IVR/agent experience.  If choosing to have a cloud solution to maintain the telephony, one thing to consider would be your ability to manage call routing features, sometimes referred to as ICR or ECR (intelligent/interactive call routing or Enhanced call routing) for the calls as well as understanding the charges for those individual services whether they be per call charges or one time set up charges.  A good trunk overflow and DR configuration is also important to consider. 

Thanks to John Pecora for taking the time to help me with this subject.  Clearly there is a lot to consider when choosing a cloud contact center vendor.  Finding a team that is knowledgeable and experienced enough to guide you through complex telco design can mean the difference between getting a return on your cloud investment or being stuck with a poorly engineered solution.