Intervoice and Convergys Marriage Will Have UC Babies

Posted by Art Rosenberg, on September 08, 2008

Marrying Multimodal Customers, Self-services, and Live Assistance for “Customer UC”

Have you noticed how contact center management refers to the term “customer experience management” to describe how they want to serve customers with both live assistance and automated self-service? The problem is that there is no longer just one kind of interface involved, e.g., the voice telephone interface, and both forms of customer interaction will be needed to serve the dynamic needs of the new mobile, multimodal customer. Even though customer contacts are increasingly being made from personalized, multimodal, mobile devices, contact center management may still only be thinking of “First Call Resolution” (FCR) as the key to customer satisfaction that originated from the old call centers days.

Customer care is big business that is not only converging all forms of communication technologies for customer contacts, inbound and outbound, but is also shifting even more between live assistance and automated self-services. The result is multimodal contact capability that really increases the flexibility for customers to access on-demand information, live assistance, and online transactions, as well as to proactively be notified about time-sensitive situations by automated services (Communication Enabled Business Processes). And it is not always necessarily a real-time connection either, since mobile ‘smart phones” make customers more accessible for deferred responses that are often adequate for their needs rather than waiting in a queue.

Multimodal customer contact, or what I have been calling “Customer UC.” to distinguish it from traditional person-to-person business contacts, is becoming the target for new hosted and managed service offerings that are, unfortunately, becoming too complex and dynamic to be supported cost-efficiently by internal IT resources. As both customers and customer-facing staff become more mobile and multimodal, the need for these new tools and services to supplement the limitations of legacy voice contacts has become more important. Accordingly, the latest industry technology “wedding” between large call center staffing outsourcer, Convergys, and long-time IVR application developer and hosted service provider, Intervoice, has stirred up some excitement in the changing telecommunications industry.

“Customer Experience” Combines All Types of Interactions For A Solution

The timing couldn’t have been better for both companies, since Customer UC needs will require device-independent, customer experience management that spans all modalities of interaction between a customer and an enterprise. That means that business processes that involve customers will need the seamless and effective interaction of automated self-services, dedicated “agents”, and specialized subject-matter experts or “action-takers,” who may not always be immediately available. That is the real world of customer care that Customer UC must optimize for everyone involved.

Customer experience satisfaction is not just whether live assistance by a customer is required or not, but also whether the form of user interaction interface that is used to directly access information or perform a transaction easily, quickly, and with minimal errors. In a way, this is really making the data entry task for any automated business process simple enough to eliminate the overhead and latency for a third-party to be involved. However, whenever live assistance is required, it should be readily available to suit the specific needs of the customer.

This brings support staffing into the picture, since we are not talking about gaining access to just any live person, but being transferred selectively from any automated self-service process to an available staff resource that is most appropriate to deal with the customer’s current contextual needs. This is where trained personnel must share the same personalized information, regardless of the form of that information, with automated applications to service an individual customer. The agent interfaces, the customer interfaces, and the business process applications, all have to interoperate consistently with a common information base and ground rules for accessing and managing such information.

Customer UC To Exploit Presence

Customer UC encompasses the role of customer-facing assistance that provides access to “available” people, automated processes, and information, rather than just person-to-person contacts. This is where coming “federated presence” capabilities of UC will enable appropriate personnel, inside or outside of a business organization, to be connected to customers for real-time communications (voice, video, or texting).

Where real-time connections are not required by the customer, or not possible at the moment, the alternative will be an “as soon as possible” (ASAP) contact. That is not simply a traditional callback attempt that may or not be successful. More intelligently, the customer’s availability will be coupled with that of an available customer-facing staff resource to establish a connection suitable for both parties.

There may be various contextual preconditions for such a connection, not simply to talk to a person wherever they are, and such intelligence will have to be part of the orchestration. Very often, customer assistance will require the customer to also see and exchange information, so the type of device that can be used at the moment will make a difference in effecting such assistance. The rising use of mobile, multimodal devices and UC services by consumers will certainly facilitate faster and better customer care service.

Converging Hosted Technology and Outsourced Staffing For Customer UC

“People, process, and technology” has always been the mantra of improving business operations. In the past, this was focused primarily on intra-enterprise capabilities, because hardware, software and network technologies outside of the organization couldn’t be controlled in the same way. With IP communications, wireless multimodal mobile devices, Software as a Service application infrastructures, etc., the business communications world is not only becoming more “virtual,” but also more complex. Such complexity will affect not only the design and implementation of interactive applications for customers, but also the multimodal skills required of customer-facing staff.

As a result, it should not be surprising that business organizations will not attempt to take full responsibility for developing their own customer-facing business applications, which must support both multimodal self-service and assisted service usage. While simple person-to-person UC capabilities may be purchased of the shelf, Customer UC capabilities will require more customization and integration expertise at the business process application level. Training and managing customer-facing staff for Customer UC will also be a chore, that will, first, not be easy, but, second, (with IP networking) will no longer have to be premise-based.

So, the customer care market should be quite interested in moving to the new world of multimodal Customer UC, especially when the technologies and service offerings of Convergys and Intervoice make it easy to do so.

The challenges of migrating traditional call center technologies and customer-facing personnel to Customer UC will be discussed objectively at the upcoming TMC IT WEST conference in Los Angeles during a panel discussion by some major players in next generation contact center technology. Stay tuned for their perspectives!