Richard Snow

Call centers have long been concerned with average handle times and occupancy, but the recent emphasis on retention and loyalty building have made customer experience management an imperative. Today, call centers must optimize the process and technology required to deliver an excellent customer service experience — but tight budgets and limited resources can make this a serious challenge.

 In this podcast, appropriate for call center professionals, Richard Snow, contact center analyst with Ventana Research, explains the benchmarking research he’s done on analytics in the contact center, how (and if) call centers have adapted the way they measure performance and how social networks are fitting in.

In this podcast, SearchCRM.com sat down with Richard Snow, a contact center technology and strategy expert and analyst with Ventana Research, who offered insight and best practices into how to select the right hosted contact center supplier.

In this 16-minute podcast, appropriate for both business and IT professionals, Snow offers insight  into:

• The proper evaluation criteria and how businesses should tailor them to the organization
• Who should be included in the hosted call center selection team
• Where other organizations have run into problems with hosted contact centers
• Specific areas technology buyers should pay attention to with their Service Level Agreements (SLAs) and Requests for Proposals (RFPs)

For a full transcript of the interview with Richard Snow on hosted contact centers, click below.

SearchCRM.com – Hi Richard, thanks for joining us.

Snow – Hi there

SearchCRM.com – So a lot of companies are starting to see the benefits of having their contact center technology hosted by someone else and that becomes more attractive as their infrastructure ages and they need to make a decision whether to upgrade or go hosted. So, for companies that have made that decision that hosted contact centers are the way they want to go, maybe you could start out by outlining some of the key evaluation criteria that organizations should be looking at.

Richard Snow – Sure, how to look at this over the last 12 months — really it has developed. I think one can get carried away by the whole hosted scenario the vendors speak of in terms of saving money, saving on infrastructure and that kind of thing.

The important  first thing that companies should consider is does the technology, does the application, does the service the apps are going to provide actually match their business requirements. That tends to get a little bit lost in all of the other assets of outsource contacts.

So primarily the first thing to look at is what is the functionality you need to actually support your contact center, to support your business. We start there.

Then I think the next thing to consider is since none of the suppliers are likely to match 100%, what you need then the question is how easy is it to customize the solution to meet your specific environment.

We have seen over the years that applications can be quite rigid and therefore you have to adapt to them rather than them adapt to you. Now this becomes another bigger issue in hosted contact centers because you don’t have the system in house so you have to be careful with the supplier on what sort of customization error to allow to extend and how that will work and fit in your business requirement. So I think you start with originality and quick customization and I think for me the third big thing is about your data. If you’re going to have your data in a hosted environment you probably still need access to it to integrate with other data inside of your firewall.

Besides the referred criteria to look at very carefully is access to your data, the ability to synchronize it with your internal data and the ability to sort of import it and integrate it for things like analytics and management.

SearchCRM.com – Well, that in some ways sort of brings in the IT aspect of things and I think that in a lot of ways a hosted call contact center circumvents IT but they still need to be part of this process right?

Snow — Absolutely, I think again what you’re leading to is a popular misconception you know things can go off about hosted service without the involvement with IT. For the reasons that I have just discussed. Particularly in terms of integration and then you get involved with things like security, access performance. These are the areas of expertise of IT and therefore I think it’s essential that any decision is a combined decision so the team doing the evaluation should be a team that’s consistent, both business and IT folks.

SearchCRM.com – Yea, who would you suggest being on a selection team for a hosted contact center?

Snow – Well it depends on how large the organization and how the roles are split, you are going to need people from IT, you’re going to need people from networking, you’re going to need people from the contact center, operations, so some maybe the manager and maybe even some supervisors. I’d go as far to say somewhere down the train when you’re trying to make your final selection, it would be even good to involve some senior agents because in the end, they’re the ones that are going to have to use this thing. So getting their opinion early on I think is a good idea and I think in terms is going to help you get acceptance usage down the street.

SearchCRM.com – Right, well where have you seen companies kind of companies run into problems with their hosted contact centers? Are there some common pitfalls?

Snow – It’s very important to say understand  what it is that they’re providing and the biggest pitfall is to get carried away with the argument for going hosted which tends to start off with you know it’s no licenses, it’s not hardware, it’s no support people. It’s easy to get carried away with that aspect then forget that the really important thing is what does it do? Does it fit my business needs?  So I think the biggest pitfall is people not facing that and ending up with a service which doesn’t quite match the expectations. So rather than saving money, their paying for nothing.

SearchCRM.com – Well maybe you could talk a little bit more about the economics of hosted contact centers. Are there situations where it doesn’t make sense for some companies? Are there places where they really need to keep a close on costs weather its managing subscriptions or what have you?

Snow – Well I think the advantage of hosted has explained very well by the most of the vendors. You know most of you’re looking at — no software license fee, no software license upgrade fee, no support staff, and no hardware. So you know these basic criteria have appealed to everybody and what it comes down to is that you’re going to pay a monthly subscription. I think that’s what people need to understand —  how that subscription escalates. You know if you start off with, as I’ve seen, a number of people say, “I want to go to hosted and I want 25 subscriptions.” But then people are expanding and you think “this is getting really quite expensive because it escalating in a straight line.” So I think one needs to do some projections of growth and see how the subscriptions match that kind of growth profile that you’ve got.

SearchCRM.com – Is that something that is negotiated when you first bring in a hosted contact center?

Snow – These are things which are typically negotiated. Not all of your users are likely to want full access. One can think quite typically these days that maybe you want to transfer the occasional call from the call contact center agent to a worker in the back office. So you need to look at the times and how often is that going to happen, and how often am I going to pay for these infrequent users. Again, you know even the license terms can get very expensive if you say. “well everybody who wants access is going to have to pay a full license.” I think it’s important to again to understand your business model and to see how flexible the supplier will be on their subscription charges.

SearchCRM.com – You mentioned earlier and just now that mapping the functionality to your businesses is really what’s important. Do you have any tips? Is that something that people need to get into their RFP’s or is kind of a boiler plate enough?

Snow –Yea, I kind of have an interesting perspective on that and at one point in my career I worked for Price WaterHouse and we used to deal with lots of RFP’s and actually had enough time to sit back and to ponder what was a good hour of PM and what wasn’t. What the conclusion was is that typical RFP’s focus on what you might call the boiler plate. You know do A, B, C, D, and E. Well in reality, most systems already do A through E and so getting a big book is not really adding a great deal of value. What we actually advise people and even in the hosted environment is to focus on your differentiators and then the RFP in your evaluation process. Actually ask the vendor, the supplier to show you — and I do mean in the end show you — how one solution is going to support your key business differentiators. I mean one of the classic problems people wrestle with being hosted is “am I going to be forced to do the same as everybody else that is using the service?” So that goes back to the question of customization which I think why customization is important and reinforces what I’m saying. Look at your key business differentiators your key business processes of you like and say to the vendor and get focused in the RFP.

How they’re going to support those, generally speaking you know if you’re looking at hosted call reaching or hosted workforce management you know each vendors system is going to do the basic. I think you can kind of pretty well start without a function and therefore get focused on those differentiators.

SearchCRM.com – I guess I have a similar question about the service level agreement — which is particularly important with the hosted contact center. Are there certain things that companies need to watch out for there?

Snow –Again, I think that a slightly different approach is what’s needed. We can focus in terms of the SLA on these basic performance measures. You know, how many transactions are you going to handle, what response time are you going to deliver? You know these basic transactional type measures which get into an SLA. I think people need to rebuild that and start looking and putting into their SLA’s some business related metrics. So you know if using a hosted environment is going to have an impact on customer satisfaction or customer up sales or these kinds of things. So I think it’s important that you just discuss with that supplier some service level agreements which in a sense get rambled into providing the service which supports that need. Therefore if their service doesn’t come up to scratch and support your need then you should be looking at something else really.

SearchCRM.com – Generally, what’s been your experience with the reason for bringing in hosted contact centers? Is it mostly savings or do you see a lot of companies interested in using work at home agents?

Snow –I think there’s again a number of perspectives. I think that for me particularly in the contact center space, and I think that for some of the hosted vendors emerging. is that it’s bringing into scope really quite high functional technology on a hosted basis. That was probably too expensive for the smaller medium sized centers to actually justify. So if you have to buy an expensive workforce management system to manage 25 to 50 agents then you’d most likely stick with something else. If you do that on a hosted basis, and you can get the subscription rights right, it opens up that kind of functionality to the small to medium ends. That’s going to be exciting to see small to medium sized centers being able to take advantage of more advanced technology. So I think that’s really exciting.

I think most people have looked at it from how you look at it, from a cost saving point of view. I think I’d like to see over the years that people sort of look beyond that. And they will, given the advances and the technology supported by these hosted vendors. You know, how I can really start to improve the operations of my contact center and particularly make life better for my agents and how I can actually improve customer experience, customer satisfaction.

SearchCRM.com – Well, great Richard this has been very helpful, thanks very much!

Snow – No problem!

This year is not as easy as some. Gone are the heady days of CRM news, like in 2005 when all this took was throwing acquisitions, such as the Aspect-Concerto and Oracle-Siebel deals on a list, on a list with innovations, like CDI and Microsoft CRM 3.0. Even the top CRM stories of 2008 were easier to define.

But while the year was light on major acquisitions and suddenly-hot technologies, it was not without its shake-ups and developments. With the dust slowly settling on the market leaders and the major suite vendors firmly in place, 2009 became a time for everyone, including users, to regroup and map out where they’re headed. We start with the vendors:

Microsoft grows up

The year saw Microsoft CRM add its one millionth user and take Microsoft Online international. With the recession looming over 2009, Microsoft also took the opportunity to target Salesforce.com and Oracle CRM On Demand users with a special price promotion. It wasn’t alone either. Obviously sensing that price was a competitive differentiator, Microsoft and SugarCRM both took steps to make CRM cheaper, simpler and cloudier.

SAP heads for the clouds

Meanwhile, SAP’s roadmap took a familiar turn. The applications heavyweight announced plans to not only roll out its full SaaS-based business suite Business ByDesign to full production, but to add multiple business applications on-demand including sales automation, travel and expense and services management. However, for all its commitment to on-demand, SAP had very little to say about its existing on-demand CRM product. Neither did anyone else.

It may not matter. Some customers are obviously happy with SAP’s existing CRM applications. Coca-Cola is using SAP CRM to roll out the ordering system for its new beverage dispenser.

 Oracle straightens out its CRM roadmap

Oracle, tied up for years bringing together the spoils of its acquisition spree under the Fusion Applications umbrella, made some headway in 2009, announcing that the first set of Fusion Applications will be released this year, including sales and marketing modules. Oracle’s CRM roadmap includes a heavy dose of social CRM as well as long-awaited features such as running Siebel in Outlook. Paul Greenberg shared his take on the CRM roadmap and Siemens seemed to be happy with Oracle’s CRM direction. Siemens dumped a number of SAP projects in hopes of standardizing its CRM systems on Oracle.

Salesforce makes a platform push

Salesforce.com continued its rapid rollout of CRM features, teaming up with Cisco for a contact center in the cloud and pushing its Service Cloud, which features Twitter integration. CEO Marc Benioff spared no expense on marketing it, buying up a huge booth and staging a presentation at Oracle’s own conference.

But it wasn’t all just about the vendors.

“Cloud” gets a little cloudier

Confused about the difference between hosted, on-demand, SaaS and cloud applications? Direct your frustration to the man cited above (who is now calling Salesforce.com a “cloud company”). But it’s not just Benioff. Sage and Consona announced plans this year that will add a little more to the cloud CRM confusion. With the emergence of offerings from Amazon, Microsoft and others, it’s now possible to own the software but rent the infrastructure. It’s only getting more complicated.

Users test out their social CRM strategies

Clearly, the term of the year goes to “Social CRM,” thanks largely to the vendor and analyst community (more below) that have helped push the term beyond the early, simpler days when it was called CRM and Web 2.0 or social networks. For all the hype and confusion, 2009 marked a year when businesses started listening and formulating a strategy around social CRM. For example, Xerox embarked on a social media monitoring program and JellyVision Labs has begun leveraging social networks to help it sales force. SearchCRM.com also managed to add a couple columnists to help readers sort through the noise. Allen Bonde has been writing about social CRM from the marketing perspective while Paul Greenberg is tackling real world examples of social CRM and the strategy behind them.

CRM software sellers get social medicine

If 2009 was a year in which businesses began experimenting with social CRM, it was also the year the vendors in the market jumped in with both feet. RightNow bought HiveLive to round out its social offering, NetSuite partnered with InsideView to get social with its CRM and ERP suite. Salesforce.com, not only added integration to social networks via the Service Cloud, it promised to deliver a collaboration platform with Chatter. Again, SearchCRM.com turned to Paul Greenberg who compared several of the emerging social CRM products.

And the No. 1 CRM story of 2009?

Remember “doing more with less,” that trite little term that meant management still wanted you to work as hard, get as much accomplished, and bring in as much revenue, only with less resources? Well that had CRM practitioners focused on…

Saving money

There was no shortage of advice on how to save. Gartner offered both five low cost contact center infrastructure projects and five low-cost CRM strategies. Forrester suggested ways to mine more value from existing CRM implementations while others started to see CRM outsourcing as more attractive. Marketing got in on the action as well. Forrester analyst Suresh Vittal suggested the recession could reshape MRM and marketing while Gartner suggested now might be a good time to buy MRM.

Others may argue there were bigger stories or more important developments (and we welcome that feedback), but from our perspective that was the best of 2009. Here’s hoping 2010 is a little easier and a lot more profitable.

I spoke with the president of DMG Consulting last week about her recent report, which identifies two new markets in contact center technology — customer experience analytics (CEA) and desktop analytics (DA). Fluss predicts the number of CEA implementations to approach 1,000 by the end of 2011. She expects the number of DA seats to exceed 1.5 million during the same period, that’s growth of 100% in 2009, 50% in 2010 and another 50% in 2011.

Now one might question the relevance of a consulting firm defining a market segment and then predicting its growth, but Fluss contends that people questioned her years ago when she started following speech analytics in the contact center — and that’s turned out pretty well so far. As for customer experience analytics and desktop analytics?

” We see the coming together of marketing and service,” Fluss said. “It’s analytics — not reporting on steroids — that are going to drive that. The last really exciting thing we had [in contact center technology] was speech analytics. DA and CEA are also in that category of high value. They’ve been struggling to find their niche and I think they’ve come to the point [where] they’re real.”

And while there’s likely little appetite for investment in the contact center in the next year or two, given the current economic climate, that optimistic growth prediction is a factor of the current size of the market and the savings these applications can produce, Fluss said.

Desktop analytics, tools that measure departmental performance and the agent’s experience with desktop servicing applications, has been used by IT departments for years, Fluss noted, but when it comes to determining how well agents are serving customers, there’s a big difference between running quality assurance on a couple hundred calls out of one million a month and using analytics.

“If you’re an agent and all of a sudden there’s latency in response time of a second to two, the impact to the agents is significant, but if you don’t have a way to measure it, you’ll never know,” she said. “Desktop analytics provides that transparency and supplies savings from 1 to 5%. I think desktop analytics is just a gift.”

Desktop analytics vendors include Knoa, eGlue, Iontas, which approach the market from the application side and Verint and NICE, which come at it from the contact center side.

Customer experience analytics measure the customer experience during IVR, self-service and Web interactions, adding in agent supported situations and fulfillment of the request, Fluss said.

“We have vendors that claim to do one and two but nobody who’s closing the loop yet, with fulfillment, but that’s what we need to do,” she said.

CEA vendors include: ClickFox, eGlue and EnKata, Iontas, Merced and Nuance.

“It’s about call reduction and reductions to average handle time,” Fluss said. “What’s the contact center mentality? Do more with less. That’s why this is a gift.”

Still, getting funding for the contact center remains a challenge. According to Gartner’s annual survey of more than 1,500 CIOs, attracting and retaining customers dropped from their second highest business priority to fifth this past year.

Yet Gartner warns that despite the economy, companies need to redouble their efforts to extend tools, training and compensation to customer service representatives, particularly when it comes to extending channels.

Gartner predicts that by 2012, managing Web interactions will be a core competency of the contact center with customers expecting customer service reps to know everything about them at the time of interaction – down to their recent Web posts in relevant online communities.  That means by 2014, standard practice in 30% of contact centers will be to have two monitors on each agents’ desktops.

Companies like Comcast have already started down that path. I interviewed Frank Eliason, about his company’s online service initiative last week.

Gartner issued a release this month, identifying four areas contact centers need to focus on to create a higher impact at lower costs: personalized customer assistance; better contact center application design; integrating Web interactions into the contact center; and speedy and accurate service interactions so agents can more quickly navigate multiple channels.

All of this sounds sensible and it’s hard to argue with the fact that companies that commit to their customers and contact center now will reap the rewards when the economy turns around. I’m just curious if the money and initiative will come and if it does, just who was able to convince senior management to spend it and how.

This isn’t the first downturn Greg Gianforte has seen. Gianforte, who founded RightNow Technologies in 1997, emerged from the last bust with a public company and in this podcast shares some of his thoughts on the current economy, what it means for RightNow and its customers.

Bozeman, Mont.-based RightNow, which offers Software as a Service (SaaS) CRM and has its roots in eService software, may be better positioned for a downturn than other software companies.

Gianforte has also been on the road visiting customers since January and shares what they’ve been telling him and how their priorities have changed in recent months.

In this 16-minute podcast listeners will hear:

• The motivation for Gianforte’s visits and how he’s found the time to conduct them

• What he’s learned from RightNow customers

• What prospective customers are interested in during the downturn

• Details on RightNow’s latest release

• What unified communications means for the contact center

For more on SaaS CRM and contact center software:

See a demo of RightNow software

Learn why organizations are paying greater attention to their SaaS CRM SLAs

Transforming an organization’s customer service operations is never an easy task, particularly for one as old as Loomis AB, which got its start picking up and guarding money from banks via stagecoach. Yet, as the Houston-based vendor told us, it can be done.

Wayne Sadin, CIO of Loomis, joined the company to help make the transition, which included swapping out Salesforce.com for Oracle CRM On Demand, adding Oracle’s Contact Center Anywhere and tying it all back into the Oracle E-Business Suite.

In this 20-minute podcast, appropriate for both business and IT professionals, Sadin explains:

• How he overcame his skepticism about software as a service

• How Loomis makes accountability to customers a priority throughout the organization

• Loomis’s method of distributing customer information through its Oracle system

• More about the organization’s data governance model

• The migration path from Salesforce.com to Oracle CRM On Demand

• What Sadin would have done differently

Think the days of email as a useful customer service channel are over? Esteban Kolsky, vice president and practice leader at Kana Software and a former analyst with Gartner, says he’s seen customer service via email make a comeback.

Companies are finding that, for some service requests, email is both cheaper and more effective than phone support. Drawing on his research as an analyst and experiences since joining Kana, Kolsky offers best practices and market insight.

In this 15-minute podcast, listeners will learn:

• How — and why — email is re-emerging as an effective channel for customer service.

• How companies are leveraging automated email service.

• What metrics to use when measuring email service initiatives.

• How the 80/20 rule applies to email service.

Rob Bois, analyst with Boston-based AMR discusses SAP’s latest release, the outlook for CRM suites and spending in the year ahead.

He’s joined by Elana Anderson, independent analyst with NxtERA Marketing, who shares her thoughts on marketing technology in 2008, including behavioral targeting, getting past the hype of Web 2.0, mobile marketing and the role of the CMO.

John Ragsdale, research vice president with the Service and Support Professionals Association, also joins the conversation. John gives his predictions for Web self-service and its effects on customer service, leveraging user communities, wikis and the job outlook for customer service.

Program guide:

• (00:01) Rob Bois
• (20:14) Elana Anderson
• (32:29) John Ragsdale

In this podcast he discusses the future of customer self-service technology, its evolution from a tactical to a strategic imperative and how vendors in the self-service market are innovating. He also shares his take on highly customized “microsites” that allow companies to create personalized pages for customer e-service and the growing importance of “click-to-call” customer service technology.

Feinberg, a PhD, is also a consumer psychologist and professor in the Department of Consumer Sciences and Retailing at Purdue. He teaches courses in consumer behavior, retailing, “e”-retailing, CRM and leadership.