Outbound Call Center Featured Article

Q&A with Altitude Software

By Brendan B. Read
Senior Contributing Editor

These are “interesting times” for contact centers what with a slow, but recovering economy, ever-more (and rightfully) demanding customers requiring topnotch service and limited resources. The advent of the social channel as a customer interaction vector, with its tremendous power to sway business and of new UC solutions and increasingly improving service options including outsourcing and home-based agents are providing considerations and choices for center managers.

Altitude Software is a leading supplier of innovative and practical multichannel contact center routing solutions. Mark Lepko is Altitude’s, president for North America. He has over 20 years experience in the contact center industry. He started his career managing large scale inbound and outbound operations in a wide range of verticals and later held senior leadership positions in companies such as Aspect, CosmoCom (News - Alert) Verint and VoiceGenie (later Genesys, an Alcatel-Lucent company). He joined Altitude in 2007.

I met Mark in-person at the American Teleservices Association conference in September 2010—we had conversed by phone and e-mail in the past, and I followed up with him for TMCnet in an interview on contact center trends. Here are the highlights from our conversation:

TMCnet:              What do you see happening in the demand for and what is new with contact center routing solutions?

ML:        On the “Interaction Routing” front we see three main trends:

1. Unified multimedia routing where all the incoming interactions, regardless of the media they come in, are queued with the same business rules
2. Distributed routing where interactions get routed from where the customers are to where the agent skills are, in a cost effective way
3. Self service applied to all channels in order to keep handling costs under control

These trends push for true unified solutions where all interactions are handled and routed by the same logic engine.

TMCnet:              There has been an exponential growth in the social channel and firms are beginning to grasp that they need to listen and engage the social customer. What are the impacts of this on contact routing?

ML:        The “social channel” opens yet another communication channel between the enterprise and its customers. The contact center routing strategy should be able to take it into consideration and apply the same business rules that are applied to the customer regardless of the communication channel used.

The social channel will compete with the e-mails and chats but most likely will not compete with the phone channel. If you are near a computer then you will use social media, e-mail or chat. If you have only phone, even a smart one, then you most likely will use the voice channel because of its convenience.

TMCnet:              What is happening with the outsourcing option including hosted solutions?

ML:        The trend is there to outsource, driven by the need of companies to streamline their operations and focus on their core competencies. Most companies have for years relied on outsourcing the whole contact center to specialized contact center operators – the contact center outsourcers.

Some outsourcers, mainly those that specialize with human resources, are considering moving their IT to the cloud or they themselves becoming cloud computing providers, depending on their skill set. Financial institutions seem to be following a slightly different strategy: They are keeping their inbound contact center in-house – usually their phone banking and customer care operations - due to data security issues and outsource their less sensitive outbound operations – namely debt collection and telemarketing.

TMCnet:              It has been a year since Avaya rolled out its roadmap following its acquisition of Nortel’s (News - Alert) NES. Outline what you are seeing and expect to see going forward in the contact center-focused business communications marketplace especially technologies such as IP and unified communications (UC)?

ML:        We see a trend in contact centers out of the traditional “switch”/application vendors – Avaya in the Americas and Avaya, Genesys/Alcatel and Siemens in Europe--towards IP based applications that can handle both voice and the application logic. Altitude Software (News - Alert) with Altitude uCI with its own communication server positions itself as such provider although it can also interoperate with leading vendors like Avaya, Cisco, Alcatel and Siemens (News - Alert).

Microsoft Lync (was OCS R2) is starting to have some traction, specially pushed by the business side. At the present time it is still a too complex technology to be used standalone on intensive operations like contact centers but its something that we are following attentively. Altitude Software is working to have interoperability with Microsoft Lync.

TMCnet:              There has been much talk about enabling and connecting informal agents i.e. banking, retail staff through routing calls to them and to subject matter experts via UC-enabled presence as means to improve service while reducing costs. Is this conjecture or are these trends happening, to what extent and what are the real benefits, challenges, and what are the proven methods to mitigate the latter to enable the former?

ML:        This trend is in fact starting to materialize although the actual implementations are few. Both the benefits presented – better service and cost reduction – need to be well evaluated by the organization:

1. Better service is achieved if the expert matters also have the required communication and social skills to handle customers directly – this is not always true
2. Cost reduction is achieved if the experts’ time is well managed – experts will usually have key tasks at hand and if they are pulled into direct customer care these tasks might become delayed. Ultimately there may be shortage of skilled resources in order to handle both key technical tasks and customer care

Technology may be a good helper for bringing this vision to fruition by implementing a layered interaction handling strategy where interactions are transferred to experts only when it is strictly required, after correctly characterized by the first line of service i.e. the contact center.

TMCnet:              Gartner (News - Alert) and others have observed that customers are now dictating the interactions including when and how they want to conduct business with firms and with this contact centers need to scrap the queue and instead give customers choices such as which agents to talk to. What is your take on this?

ML:        More and more we see customer care operations work to deploy advanced interaction routing strategies that interact with the customers, making the frontier between self service and interaction routing really fuzzy. Altitude Software since its very inception designed the routing and self service engines of Altitude uCI in a way that makes this self service routing really easy to implement and deploy in large scale.

TMCnet:              There is growing deployment of and interest in home-based agents. Are you seeing these supplant traditional employer-premises-located staff or supplement them?

ML:        Although we have seen some experiments on the area of home based agents, the on-premises staff is still prevalent. Home based agents present resource management challenges and interaction handling quality challenges that are not easily surpassed. Most organizations that we see only have a small percentage of home based agents either for very skilled personnel or in order to assure emergency staffing.

TMCnet:              Video has been talked about in contact centers for years but rarely implemented: it has been termed as a "tomorrow technology". Do you see contact center agents being seen or agents seeing customers to enable transactions and if so, why, and if not why not?

ML:        It seems that video on the contact center is a neat technology that everybody seems to like but not to the point of actually deploying it. Telecom operators tried to use it to work as killer application for their 3G networks, but the effort seems to have stalled.

We believe that the mobile internet is a better technology platform for the type of applications that video would also be used and somewhat works as a super set of the actual video technology.

Anyway we have been involved in some video projects for very particular niches. One of the most interesting was a contact center specially target at supporting senior citizens where the human touch brought by video improved the communication experience and where the ability for the agents to see the callers allowed the possibility for, for instance, remote diagnosis.

TMCnet:              What is new and coming down the pike from your firm in response to these trends and issues?

ML:        Altitude Software will be rolling out Altitude uCI v8 during 2011 with specific functionality addressing the ASP market needs, out of the box support for social media, enhanced business analytics and workflow automation.