Q&A with Laurent Philonenko, VP and GM Cisco Systems’ Customer Contact Business Unit
1. Cisco has been one of the pioneers in Unified Communications and Unified Contact Center solutions. What impact are UC solutions having on how companies serve their customers?
What we have seen is that companies are continuing to move from processing transactions, to managing interactions, to delivering unique customer-centric experiences. Leading enterprises are thinking beyond the formal contact center in order to create a unique experience for their customers. One example of this is that organizations are looking for ways to provide customers with the right access to subject-matter experts—whether those experts are located in a formal contact center or somewhere else in the enterprise. By doing so, customers have their needs met quickly and efficiently, resulting in high satisfaction levels and an increased sense of loyalty.
While this concept of knowledge workers participating as an extension of the contact center has been around for several years, it is only now with Unified Communications technologies such as presence in the enterprise that it can become an operational reality. To that end, Cisco is integrating customer contact technologies with enterprise presence to deliver the right solution to enable our customers to execute their customer service strategies.
2. What metrics should companies use to track contact center performance and ROI?
Obviously, contact center reporting and business intelligence is critical in managing performance. This is one reason why Cisco acquired Latigent, which we announced in September 2007. With a web-based business information portal, contact center managers and supervisors can have the key metrics that they need wherever they need them, and can create custom views or drill-downs on the fly. Increasingly, we see our customers looking at first call resolution (FCR) as a critical metric. FCR tells a company how often customers are getting their needs met in a single interaction and, more importantly, how often they are not. Analyzing the situations that require multiple calls can surface a business process problem that needs remedying.
For organizations that have deployed voice self-service systems, it’s important to closely monitor how the system is being used by customers to identify process problems. By focusing on process improvements, companies will be able to reduce agent expenses and improve service, thereby reducing the incidence of customer churn while keeping costs in check.
3. What about self-service? Where is that market heading, and how does self-service relate to contact centers today and into the future?
We are seeing interactive voice response (IVR) technologies go through a three phase evolution. In the first phase, roughly from the introduction of IVR technology until 2000, organizations used IVR to automate transactions. There were huge cost savings and impressive ROI available to enterprises using IVR to automate simple processes that could be off-loaded from live agents.
In the second phase, which we’re in currently, we see organizations reacting to the backlash from customers due to too much automation. In this second phase, enterprises are optimizing their IVR solutions to make them more acceptable to customers. In some cases, optimization includes incorporation of speech recognition and text to speech to improve the user experience. But enterprises must be careful; there are lots of poorly executed touch tone IVR applications deployed today, and simply replacing these with a speech-based application will lead to continued customer dis-satisfaction. By optimizing the applications to be truly user-friendly, with easy opt-out options, organizations will find greater customer acceptance of IVR and speech, and will continue to benefit from the cost savings that IVR delivers. We have seen success in this area with many of our customers. For example, a major beverage distributor in North America doubled their self-service utilization by overhauling their IVR applications and moving to speech recognition while replacing their legacy IVR system with Cisco Unified Customer Voice Portal.
In the third and final phase of IVR evolution, which we believe leading-edge enterprises are entering now, the IVR becomes more fully integrated to a comprehensive service strategy. In this integration phase, the line blurs between agent-assisted service and voice self-service and, just as importantly, contact center applications will begin to align more closely with network and software investments. This is where the voice portal, as opposed to traditional IVR, adds tremendous value in its ability to leverage both the network—for example using voice gateways for queuing and treating calls at the edge of the network, as we do with Cisco Unified Customer Voice Portal—and investments that the business is making in service oriented architectures. In this integration phase, we see self-service and automation spreading outside of the contact center to incorporate enterprise workflows that truly define a customer experience.
4. Cisco focuses on pure IP solutions. What's the real value of IP in the contact center? Is it something that managers and in-center personnel need to worry about?
The value of implementing IP telephony in the contact center is its ability to transform the way companies manage their customer service initiatives. Unlike traditional time division multiplex (TDM) or hybrid systems, IP-based contact centers enable organizations to manage multiple contact centers—both formal and informal—from a single instance, location, and data center. This virtualization eliminates the need for buying, managing and maintaining infrastructure at each location, ultimately delivering tremendous time and cost savings. We have seen many of our customers achieve this virtualization with Cisco Unified Contact Center Enterprise and Customer Voice Portal. For example, a very large building supply distributor in North America created a single, virtual customer care environment by unifying more than 400 branch-based contact centers. The only equipment that agents have in the branch is their PC and their Cisco IP Phone; everything else needed to run this virtual contact center is located in and managed from redundant data centers.
Other significant advantages of IP contact centers include mobility and disaster recovery, so companies can quickly resume business through another center if one of their locations is shut down unexpectedly.
A final area that we’re investing in and excited about is video as a customer service channel. With consumers becoming more and more comfortable with online video, we think it is natural for video to play a larger role in creating unique customer-centric experiences. This is much more than simply having an agent “talking head” appear on a customer’s PC screen. What we are looking at is targeted use of video to really enrich experiences with customers. For example, Cisco has combined our innovative TelePresence with our Unified Contact Center queuing and routing to create the TelePresence Virtual Agent, which enables enterprises to create a live, “face-to-face” interaction with customers—over the network. The solution gives a customer the feeling of being “in person” with a specialist agent such as a physician, mortgage broker, or retail expert, using life-size, high-definition video images, digital-quality audio, and interactive elements.
To some degree, managers, supervisors, and agents should not be concerned about the underlying technology. Instead, these stakeholders need to focus where they always have—on serving customers and running the customer care organization efficiently and effectively. Where we will see in-center personnel having to adjust to newer technologies is in those instances where positive changes to core business processes have been enabled by new technologies and architectures. For example, leveraging presence throughout the enterprise to incorporate subject matter expertise is enabled by technology, but is manifested to agents and supervisors as a new business process. The success of any technology shift in customer care will be determined by how business processes are adapted or transformed, and by how the people involved in delivering unique customer-centric experiences adjust to and embrace those process changes.
5. What kind of ROI do IP applications provide? Where are the savings found?
The most significant cost savings provided by IP contact center applications are reduced infrastructure investment and lower maintenance costs for companies with multiple centers, since the sites can all be completely managed from a single location. For organizations operating in a multi-national environment, convergence on IP can significantly reduce telephony costs. The flexibility of IP also enables organizations to employ “right-shoring” strategies, moving seamlessly from in-house agents to remote agents, to outsourced agents located on-shore, near-shore, or off-shore. This approach can lead to a “least cost service” approach, which can be changed as business conditions require. Studies show that IP-based contact centers also provide significant improvements in the areas of employee productivity, revenue growth, and ultimately, customer satisfaction.
6. Can you describe some of the value-added applications that IP will allow me to run in my contact center? And give an example of how long it will take to show effective ROI on the core IP infrastructure?
Two areas that we’ve already discussed are primary value-adds for IP. First, presence integration between the enterprise and the contact center will ensure customers can be routed to or access an available expert when needed. Second, IP applications enable virtualization, which in turn enables companies to become more agile, more efficient and more competitive. In some industries, virtualization may lead to business transformation possibilities--for example, in retail banking, where virtualization incorporates bank branches to form a cohesive, enterprise-wide customer care strategy.
The ROI will vary by company depending on circumstances, but savings in telephony equipment infrastructure and IT resources alone can deliver a huge cost reduction. The flexibility to use inexpensive agent resources in any location is another area in which IP enables reduced expenses. But cost-savings aren’t the only return that IP brings. Better service translates into happier, repeat customers that help companies maintain or increase revenues.
7. What’s ahead for contact centers? What’s the next big thing?
Unified Communications in the contact center will continue to gain traction, resulting in a new way of leveraging both technology and human resources. Back-office workers will play an increasing role in high-value, critical customer service interactions, while more sophisticated and user-friendly self-service technologies will continue to empower customers to gain access to the basic, day-to-day information they need. Finally, video will become a common means of delivering service—both agent-assisted and self-service.