Transcript for Business Process Automation at Zeacom
Blair Pleasant: Hi, this is Blair Pleasant from UCStrategies and I am speaking today with Miles Valentine, CEO of Zeacom. Miles is preparing for this year’s Zeacom user conference, called Zeacommunity, and I had the opportunity to attend Zeacommunity a couple of years ago in New Zealand. It was really a lot of fun, with lots of passionate, loyal Zeacom customers. And today, Miles and I are going to talk about business process automation or BPA. Miles welcome!
Miles Valentine: Thank you Blair, it's nice to be talking.
Blair Pleasant: First can you tell us very briefly about Zeacom for people who might not be as familiar with your company?
Miles Valentine: Sure. Zeacom is a relatively old company. We’ve been around about 15 years, founded in 1995. We have about 170 staff all around the world. Predominately we operate in the U.S.– the U.S. is our biggest market, other than that, New Zealand, Australia, UK, and when I say the U.S., I mean Canada and a bit of South America, as well. Our biggest market is that North American market. We work with the three telephony brands: NEC, where we’re actually a branded product, “UC for Business,” and in Cisco and Avaya, we work with CallManager on the Cisco platform, and IP Office and Communication Manager on Avaya. Quite a broad product suite, predominately in focus around the contact center – that’s our pedigree and then some years ago, we – because we are a CTI-based product, we’ve have always had telephony presence and it was very easy for us to add rich presence, being keyboard and mouse. We added that to the product and evolved from that to our existing voicemail product and turned it into a pretty complete unified communications suite, as well. So we cover the knowledge worker, the contact center agent and also the operator or console user.
Blair Pleasant: And you primarily target SMEs, although you are going a little upstream.
Miles Valentine: We definitely started in the SME space. We started in New Zealand, which is a relatively small user size market. We’ve grown up. We’ve got our biggest contact center in the U.S.; it’s about 850 seats. We have a 400-port speech enabled IVR system handling about 135,000 transactions a day in Kentucky for a client. So we are definitely not SME anymore; we’ve got customers like IBM and DuPont who aren’t SME companies, but we handle some of their small- to medium, and in DuPont’s case their 160-seat credit union. We used to be a small to medium contact server, but I think it's fair to say that we are definitely growing up and moving into bigger spaces.
Blair Pleasant: Let’s talk about business process automation. Tell us how you define it and what it is, and if you can give us a customer or a scenario or examples of how it works.
Miles Valentine: Business process automation is really a re-definition of what we have historically called “systems integration,” and again, we have been doing it for a very long time. I guess we started off going back 10 to 12 years ago, when we started to get into the screen popping area, which is pretty simple; integrated IVR where we – again because our product suite is a single code base, our IVR is part of that same code base, so we provide a truly integrated self-service IVR platform. And we have been delivering relatively simple applications for a very long time. And how would I define it? Everything from simple screen pops and IVRs through to now some pretty complex-type applications.
To give you some examples of those, well screen pops aren’t particularly exciting, although they have a pretty decent return on investment by cutting/shortening the talk time. We have done about 25 of those. So many times we have turned them into plug-ins, and that ranges in everything from GoldMine and Act through to Oracle. So that is a fairly easy cookie cutter part of the business now.
In the self-service IVR space, the 400-port speech-activated IVR is the biggest one that we’ve got. It’s a very common part of the BPA delivery. We’ve just done one; actually cut over a couple of weeks ago for a power utility. We actually replaced an existing IVR system that was not integrated; we analyzed the menu structure and flow of the call and found a number of dead ends. In fact, we were just reviewing this today in our sales conference and one of the guys asked the question, “Why didn’t that customer just take our analysis and get the existing products redesigned?” And the answer was really that by the time we finished the process they had lost a lot of confidence in their existing vendor and they’d gained an awful lot in us. We provided in that case, a bit of design, but very importantly a truly integrated IVR. So by the time the customer popped, hit zero and went to an agent, we were able to say, “Hello Mr. Smith, I see you were just looking at your utility balance, is there some problem with that?” As opposed to “Hi, who am I speaking to and what is your account number?” (and we’ll start all over again). We find this to be an unbelievably common scenario and the internal joke inside our place is all of those IVR systems where you get told to put in your 16-digit account number in and the first thing you are asked by the agent is, “What’s your account number?” It's like well, what’s the point of putting it in, in the first place? So we specifically don’t do that.
An IVR and qualification of the caller before you get to the call center is a relatively very common-type application. The returns, however, are obviously very large when you cut the talk time down and obviously if you can eliminate the inquiry entirely by having a well-designed self-service system, then the benefits are even greater.
We have done some quite interesting and different things. We have a system running for a local government – a local environmental agency down in Australia. We monitor or plug into those little poles that stand in rivers with solar panels on the top of them that tells whether the river is rising or not. We take the information from those devices and as the river rises, if we need to notify farmers along that particular river, we will actually call; call with voice, email, text the specific farmers along that catchment area and say, “look, you had better move your stock because the river is rising at this rate.”
We sort of morphed that out of an emergency notification system, but it is a very specific application. Previously, that was a manual process where hopefully the river was rising during work hours because there weren’t a lot of people to actually make all of those phone calls outside of work hours and we completely automated it and got rid of the entire process. It saved an awful lot of labor and provided a reporting process to it and is a relatively small example of a very unique and high value add example.
Blair Pleasant: It also saved the farmers thousands of dollars because they were able move their cattle.
Miles Valentine: Absolutely, and the environmental agency potentially avoided lawsuits by notifying their constituents of a disaster that they knew about. There are a lot of benefits.
Another example is the power company where we use our outdialer and again, our self-service system, where a power utility user customer is about to be terminated. To terminate a customer and reconnect them costs the power utility a lot of money. There is Federal law that mandates the amounts that you can then charge that customer as you reconnect them and they do vary it state-by-state, but basically the amount is an awful lot less than the cost that the utility bears to terminate service and then reconnect it. So if we can improve their collections through outdial, and try to – well firstly capture caller’s numbers as they come in from previous interactions, and then use those numbers that are stored to actually try and contact them and improve the collection rate, the return on not terminating customers and not having to reconnect them is actually very substantial. Again, a relatively simple thing you would think, but again saves an awful lot of labor in terms of the standard debt collection processes where people would have been doing it manually and it costs a lot of money to do so.
So the range of business process applications is very broad. Another one we do is down in Australia, we strip words out of an email and put them straight up onto the digital signs on the side of the freeways. So we record traffic information and exit information and really anything that they want to communicate and we just do that automatically by stripping words from text and putting it directly in there. Very straightforward and a fairly unique application.
Blair Pleasant: Why is it that Zeacom is doing this or can do this and we don’t see too many other vendors doing this?
Miles Valentine: I think it's something we started doing it a very, very long time ago. It is just something that we feel we have naturally grown up with and I am sure as other people listen to this, if they are in a similar position to us or they are resellers, we do see a lot of reluctance from resellers often not wanting to engage in this part of the business. It potentially slows the sale down; it makes it more expensive and makes a bit more complex, but we actually see those things as advantages, certainly in the sale process and more importantly, the return for the customer is, or can be huge. We are running through some of the returns for some of those applications that I talked about previously at our very recent sales conference, and some of these people are saving 300, 400, 500, $600,000 a year in savings and the paybacks are in the two, three, to four-month range.
So we’ve grown up a bit, coming back to your question; we have just sort of more naturally done it and we have literally done hundreds and hundreds of deployments. I think we’ve got – it's more than 15 and less than 25 projects on the go in the U.S. alone right now. So it's just a common thing for us to do and frankly, we see a lot of other vendors talking about it, but we don’t see an awful lot of delivery and we think that is one of the very real differentiators and we have a very good track history. We can show this very easily and that is what it is all about for the customer – having the confidence that they can rely on the vendor to deliver a project and deliver to their expectations and achieve the returns that were forecast. I think it's a question of expectation, we just expect to go out and offer it and sell it, and we deliver it and we move on to the next one. I don’t know whether we do it any differently, it's just maybe the fact that there is a bit of history there and we just do it naturally.
Blair Pleasant: For companies that are thinking about doing something in business process automation, how should they get started or what should they be thinking about as they approach this?
Miles Pleasant: Somebody has to go and look for those areas. And when I say somebody, I mean somebody from a company like us or from the customer themselves where they have identified those processes that are either repetitive, which are the obvious ones, are labor intensive, have a degree of communication involved in them so that somewhere there is a communication process going on, be it through email, or text, or voice, or in-bound or out-bound, whatever it may be. So somebody has to identify those repetitive time-saving processes and then thought about how could they be either lessoned or removed through automation? The way we go about it, we have a dedicated group of people that actually go and work with the customers and oftentimes we actually insert ourselves in there at our suggestion, if we can. And then look at the business and identify where those bottlenecks or volume areas are and then we analyze it, write it up, build an ROI around it. But it is definitely a business analyst-type functional role that goes on, either as I say, proactively from us, or reactively as a result of a query by a customer. And that person needs to be skilled in that and very importantly, if it is a self-service-type environment, they need to know what they are doing in terms of building IVRs. There is a staggering number very poorly designed IVRs out there, where the worst examples are you get the whole way through, and then it says, “we’re sorry, we’re closed.” There are so many bad examples. One of the ones we were going through and looking at yesterday, the IVR went back to the same command about six times in different stages in the call flow. And very understandably, the callers thought they were stuck in a loop and hung up and called back in again and inadvertently raised the call volume dramatically where they were same people just thinking they got into a loop, then thinking that they have gotten into it again, because this particular specific greeting or command turned up at different stages in the process and it was exactly the same every time. It's just poor design. Again, that comes back to the confidence and trust I was talking about before – that they are working with companies that have a very good track record and can show a lot of experience in these areas.
Blair Pleasant: Well that’s all we have time for Miles. But thank you so much and good luck with the Zeacommunity this year.
Miles Valentine: We are looking forward to it. We have a good number of people already signed-up and we are looking forward to a very successful event.
Blair Pleasant: Great, well thanks very much.
Miles Valentine: Thanks Blair.