1. What market sectors in the contact center arena is SER focusing on? What directions can we anticipate that SER will take in the upcoming year?
SER is the leading provider of predictive dialing technology to the teleservices market, and the only contact center supplier 100% dedicated to outbound call management. In fact, seven of the top ten global outbound teleservices companies use SER technology for their outbound calling. Both third-party service providers and enterprises use our outbound solutions to conduct B-to-B and B-to-C calling throughout the world from anywhere in the world to execute a wide variety of campaigns including:
Revenue generation – telesales and collections
Customer satisfaction – welcome calls, cross-sell, etc.
Fund raising – non-profit charities and special events
Political actions – voter registration, voter allegiance, voter surveys
Surveys – consumer opinion and focused questions
Additionally, SER provides an agent performance optimization solution, SERTAINTY™, which enables contact centers to obtain real-time analysis on agent and team performance. Using sophisticated speech recognition technology, SERTAINTY analyzes recorded customer interactions to measure and track agent performance goals including: script adherence, achievement of Key Performance Indicators, and overall call quality. SERTAINTY is used by enterprises, especially telecommunications and financial services firms, to augment quality monitoring initiatives and eliminate time- and resource-consuming manual monitoring tasks.
In the upcoming year, SER will continue to enhance our award-winning, next generation outbound call management solution, CPS Enterprise Edition™ (CPS E2™) and assure its “best of breed” status worldwide with features and functions that continue to improve the outcome of every customer interaction while maximizing agent productivity. With our recent expansion into both the EMEA and Asia Pacific markets, CPS E2 and SERTAINTY will be more widely distributed through worldwide channels.
2. Can you please comment on the current economic and sales environment in the contact center market? Is the decision making process getting longer and more complex?
Our success over the past 12 months has clearly illustrated that the contact center market is ready and anxious to purchase new technology that offers a breakthrough in agent productivity. The end user is much more knowledgeable about technology and its application to their business requirements. Consequently, prospects and customers alike demand a complete understanding of a vendor’s solution and its real value to their business needs. It’s not unusual for them to require a total cost of ownership (TCO) and return on investment (ROI) analysis as part of their decision-making process.
The decision process is more complex because each opportunity presents different financing requirements. In general, CAPEX expenditures require a greater number of approvals and the severe pressure on price causes each approval level to question the value of the transaction.
3. Over the years, a major source of SER’s revenue has been in outbound applications using your predictive dialer solutions. How have the FTC rulings, that have limited outbound calling, affected your dialer business?
The FTC/FCC regulations on the teleservices industry had an overall positive effect for the industry and for SER. Teleservices companies that generate new leads and/or new sales don’t want to waste their time and resources trying to contact consumers who do not want to listen with an open mind. The regulations have actually resulted in more productive calls with more receptive consumers thereby increasing agent productivity.
SER believes that the regulations weeded out the marginal outsourcers who were not operating in a professional manner, either because they could not afford the compliant technology or did not have the infrastructure to support the regulations.
SER foresaw the impact of the regulations and were proactive by offering solutions to our teleservices customers that allowed them to be totally compliant immediately. While many of our competitors may have been negatively impacted by these regulations, SER has enjoyed an increase in our share of the outbound market and is today the only vendor solely focused on delivering best-in-class outbound solutions.
4. What applications are you focusing on with your outbound solutions?
SER’s traditional customers have been the major outsourcers worldwide; we are very proud of the fact that our solutions are used by almost all of the larger outbound calling outsourcers. We also continue to focus on penetrating enterprise accounts, large and medium firms most often referred to as the Fortune 2000. Both our outsourcing and enterprise customers use our outbound solutions to perform one or more of the following tasks: collections of their overdue accounts receivables; solicitation of customers and prospects to buy or upgrade to new products and services; welcome contacts; appointment setting; pro-active customer care; satisfaction monitoring; market research; and technical support and customer service.
5. How do you differentiate you dialer solutions from your competitors?
In a time when companies are consolidating or disappearing, SER stands strong and independent, dedicated to our continued pursuit of excellence and innovation in outbound technology. While other vendors are focusing on contact center suites, SER continues to provide advanced features to meet the most pressing needs of contact centers.
CPS E2 delivers more connects to agents per hour, per day than any other solution in the market and is the first enterprise solution to radically shift the contact center away from a linear, list-driven approach to a fully integrated customer-centric business process.
The business objectives of the outbound call center are to maximize the value of the customer list in an efficient, cost-effective manner. Most outbound solutions are akin to mass marketing whereas CPS E2 enables the contact center to easily segment customers and apply specific call treatments to achieve maximum results. Armed with campaign-specific information like who to call, when to call, and how best to interact with the called party, CPS E2 improves the outcome of every customer interaction while maximizing agent productivity throughout the workday.
6. The analytics market has a broad definition with many different offerings from vendors. What are the challenges that SER is facing regarding the marketing of your analytics product, SERTAINTY?
Our SERTAINTY agent performance optimization product focuses on objectively measuring and reporting on agent and team performance. SERTAINTY is unique in its ability to search large volumes of speech at a very high speed and recognize the presence or absence of words, phrases, statements, etc. This capability allows 100% quality monitoring of all of the recorded speech with flagging of calls that do not meet the defined Key Performance Indicators.
SERTAINTY is very unique with no real competition. However, other vendors will attempt to make their solutions seem like they duplicate its capabilities. Consequently, our value proposition gets mitigated and sometimes lost in the complex sell of quality management/assurance solutions. Our challenge is to develop channels that distribute quality monitoring/recording solutions that would benefit from SERTAINTY’s unique capabilities.
7. What impact has IP had on your product development and marketing efforts?
In 2003, SER released the TSP500™ switch with twice the agent capacity of our prior switch and with built-in VoIP capabilities. This combination allowed us to work with our customers to help them consolidate systems into a single location with agents spread over multiple locations, lowering their total cost of ownership. Without VoIP, 96 remote agents would require 4 leased T1 connections resulting in a very high recurring cost. Using VoIP, we are able to provide 96 high quality remote voice connections over a single T1, cutting the recurring costs by 75%.
Our initial use of VoIP only supported groups of remote agents and used the H.323 protocol. Each remote destination required an analog gateway to convert the VoIP stream back to analog phone connections. As the SIP standard gained traction, we embraced it. Now, using SIP, we can still support remote centers with gateways at each end, as well as SIP-compliant IP hard phones and SIP-compliant soft phones. When interfacing directly to SIP phones, there is no longer a need for groups of remote agents to be located together in a single location.
With any VoIP solution, the audio quality depends on the quality of the network connection and how well the software handles high network latency. In a center-to-center solution, dedicated lines can be used with guaranteed latency and bandwidth. If work at home agents are introduced, then end-to-end Quality of Service, the prioritization of voice packets over data packets, is normally not available and there is greater variability in network latency. The SER VoIP has been optimized to provide the highest quality audio connections over challenging network conditions.
8. Self service and speech applications are getting an increased amount of attention. How is SER addressing these applications?
When we think of inbound self-service, complex interactions come to mind, which are possible when the customer initiates the contact. Self-service can also be applied to outbound calling, but is normally limited to shorter automated interactions with the option of connecting to an agent for a more in-depth interaction.
When considering self-service outbound calling, it is important to be aware of all state and federal regulations since for certain types of calls, an agent must be available within 2 seconds of the customer greeting for 97% of the calls (i.e., to meet the 3% abandon rate mandate). However, for those calling campaigns not subject to these rules, automated calling can be a very effective way of delivering a message to a large audience, and with SER’s Text-to-Talk Announcer feature, the message can be customized based on the content of the calling record.
SER supports outbound self-service calling by providing customers the ability to run un-staffed, agent free campaigns; to play pre-recorded or custom messages created on-the-fly; and to collect digits and either store the collected data in the calling record, or branch within the self-service script based on the collected data. Using these capabilities, our customers have come up with high ROI applications.
Here is a simple example. One of our customers is using SER’s self-service features for shipment follow up. When the customer ships a package, it requires a signature. If nobody is available to sign, it is held at the post office for 5 days and returned. Returned packages are a significant cost to the company. At best, they must be reshipped; at worst, they represent a lost sale. Whenever a package is undeliverable and being held at a local post office, the company is notified by the postal service. Instead of dedicating staff to making follow-up calls, SER’s customer is using an automated campaign to call these customers and tell them there is a package waiting to be picked up. During the call, the customers have the ability to press a number on the phone to be connected to an agent to discuss the transaction.
Outbound self-service is not for every application. But, when used for an application where there is a good fit, it can produce significant additional revenue or cost savings.