1. What is your view of Workforce Optimization today? Has the definition changed?
Companies have always strived to get the best and most productive workforce. What has changed is increasing customer demand and expectations, which are driving organizations to solve much bigger business problems, and these challenges span functional and global boundaries. Fortunately, there are tools to help; unfortunately, these tools are usually a collection of separate systems from different suppliers who haven’t contemplated the bigger challenge of the need to interoperate. The result is, a market where companies are looking for broader solutions to enable customer service delivery much more holistically, which up until now has been fragmented.
The workforce optimization landscape reflects the needs and conditions of the market, where quality monitoring and workforce management are the two major anchor segments. If you look at companies and where they start to invest in workforce optimization, it is usually through the entry points of workforce management and the quality monitoring. Those are enhanced further with actionable learning capabilities and various performance management and analytics capabilities. Combined these capabilities define the workforce optimization market.
2. What was the thinking behind the Blue Pumpkin and Witness merger? What does the combination of the companies bring to the table?
The combination of the companies really reflects the needs of the market. Until now the market requirements of a broader suite have not been met. Because of this we view the combination as a transformational event. The capabilities that were so well developed and delivered by Blue Pumpkin were the last holes in our suite. And now for the first time, organizations can secure a tangible economic benefit and single source support for their entire workforce optimization needs from Witness. This combination is really a first in the market place. That was our fundamental motivation for putting the companies together. Naturally over time we’ll release even more integration providing a richer set of capabilities. As customer expectations and demands continue to rise, there is an incredible opportunity for us to create a much more unified solution. We believed that the only way we could do that was by putting these companies together.
3. What has been the market acceptance of VoIP? Is it still a “nice to have” or has the market evolved to a “must have” situation?
Along with the convergence that has been going on between the contact center and the broader enterprise around a more holistic view, convergence in terms of networks is also making strides. VoIP is not a new concept, but market adoption for this type of technology has not been as strong. However, Fortune 500 companies are embracing this technology faster and faster, to advance further in today’s competitive marketplace.
Last year, we began to see extensive IP projects being implemented. We have large customers that have 15-18 different IP contact centers with us. A year and a half ago they started putting in an 80-seat pilot around VoIP, and over the next year, we anticipate that they will continue to move all of their centers toward a VoIP environment. We’ve seen the VoIP trend manifested in our own business. Over a year ago, we were doing a little less than 300 recording applications to VoIP sites, but in the last year, we went from around 300 to over 650 sites.
4. As you speak with contact centers about their needs and challenges how are their expectations changing?
At a high level, executive management expects more performance for less expense and that trend has been going on for quite some time particularly once the economy and the bubble burst in 2000. The economic challenge paired with rising customer demand creates a tough situation for contact centers. The positive offset is that contact centers are being viewed much more strategically. As you drill down, companies are also prone to operational challenges: improving customer retention, gaining a much higher wallet share through more effective cross selling, and better customer satisfaction all amidst a limited time tolerance. In addition, ROI is now measured in months and no longer in years. Fundamentally, it’s these operational challenges in the contact center and the broader enterprise that are driving Witness Systems’ own product and services investments.
5. What are the reasons and potential benefits that companies are interested in procuring a broader solution set?
There are several reasons that drive a company to invest in a single workforce optimization solution from a single provider. First, there is a need to address the broader business problems. To really improve cross selling for example, you need to ensure the right number of people with the right skills and learning, at the right time – all supported by comprehensive analytics that enable you to take real action and continuously improve your processes. This means that you need an integrated work force optimization suite, hence our combination with Blue Pumpkin. Secondly, organizations want to procure technology from as few vendors as possible. This makes is possible to secure the best possible support, eliminating finger pointing, better coordinating software support and upgrades and best leveraging training. So ultimately, companies want to address their larger business challenge while reducing total cost of ownership. A workforce optimization solution from a single partner allows companies to meet those imperatives. For organizations looking to optimize the performance of their workforce, they have historically relied on a set of separate tools. There might have been an interface between different tools from different vendors but they were procured separately and the systems themselves were different point solutions.
6. Do all contact centers have the same needs? Are they all moving down the same path?
Software suppliers often try to move customers into a single box regardless of their specific needs. Unfortunately it’s easier for people to believe and it’s cheaper to operate but it doesn’t meet the market need. We’re taking a different approach. We have a set of pre-packaged solutions that are designed to meet the specific needs of different segments whether they have purely operational or further advanced or strategic need. These organizations now have the ability to invest in pre-packaged solutions to address their current operational issues, and as their business needs evolve, they have to ability to incorporate technology that is best suited to their growing needs.
7. What about small to medium-sized businesses (SMBs)?
The combination of the Witness Systems and Blue Pumpkin firmly establishes a strong presence for the greater Witness Systems in the fast growing mid-market (contact centers with 50-150 seats – a sector in which Blue Pumpkin has established a strong foothold), considerably accelerating the company’s market momentum and opportunity in this area. Further, there are strong synergies from a technology perspective, adding such advanced workforce management capabilities as forecasting, scheduling, adherence and planning to Witness Systems’ solution set.
VoIP brings great advantages to small to medium-sized businesses. Until VoIP, the was limited opportunity because you had to cable together too many different pieces of hardware to really make it cost effective. Now companies have the ability to deliver many capabilities strictly in terms of software through a single channel and a single channel partner. Companies now have the same opportunity to deliver this type of solution to the smaller to medium-sized businesses that were historically only cost effective in a larger organization
8. As you well know, there are many companies offering workforce management software. How do you differentiate yourselves form companies such as Aspect, IEX, Pipkins, etc.? How does the combination of the companies impact your market share?
Organizations can now secure a tangible economic benefit, maintain a lower total cost of ownership, and receive support from a single source for their entire workforce optimization needs from Witness Systems.
In addition, uniting Witness Systems’ established lead in customer interaction recording with Blue Pumpkin’s market strength in workforce management offers customers a comprehensive set of applications to help optimize workforce performance and capture customer intelligence. The combination creates a unique leadership position in the two anchor segments of the broader workforce optimization landscape (quality monitoring and workforce management), which represents 78 percent of the market, according to Datamonitor. The contact center e-learning and performance analysis segments, which are applications included in the current eQuality® suite from Witness Systems, represent the remaining 22 percent of the overall workforce optimization market.
Based on market data from Saddletree Research, an industry research firm for emerging and high growth communications markets, in the past seven years, Blue Pumpkin has quickly secured 21.2 percent of the workforce management market, establishing a clear leadership momentum (compared to legacy vendors with 16-23 years in the market with little recent market gain).
9. What can we expect in 2005 from technology buyers in the contact center market?
The market is seeking a tightly-woven, holistic contact center solution that encompasses the four foundation segments of workforce optimization: quality monitoring, workforce management, performance management and e-learning.
Also, IP voice network technologies are fast becoming mainstream technologies for contact centers. The move to IP is really opening up new application ground outside their traditional arenas of contact centers and compliance applications. Further, it's not only because of the shift toward remote agents and virtual contact centers and/or the move to centralizing systems like call recording (although that's definitely helping). On a purely technology front at the transport level, VoIP makes it much more practical for "on demand" call recording. In this case, Witness will constantly store and spit out voice packets, waiting for a user command to go ahead and ask the platform to store a conversation permanently.
At the same time, contact center workforce optimization techniques are moving into the back office and the extended enterprise. Traditional back offices are now employing tools to optimize processes and apply best practices to improve performance.