Call-Center Management with a Human Touch - A Growing Market?
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Exony is
only one of a group of vendors that develop specialized CCPM products. Others
include Aim Technology, Aspect Software, Enkata, Merced Systems and Verint
Systems. Performance management. Fluss says, relies on specialized data-access
and reporting tools from relatively mainstream vendors, such as Business
Objects,
SPSS, Cognos and Hyperion.
While the
market for CCPM accelerated during 2007, awareness and demand for the whole
category of tools still lags behind business-intelligence and reporting tools
that more obviously give contact center operators an advantage in dealing with
customers, Fluss says.
Good data
integration is critical to any contact center, but comes in two distinct flavors,
according to Sami Akbay, vice president of product management and marketing at
real-time data replication and integration vendor GoldenGate Software, which
runs half a dozen contact centers in different parts of the world.
“First it’s
important to have 24-hour continuous support, so the ability to pass
information from one call center to another is critical,” he says. “Customers
want support 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, but they also want to talk to the
same person they talked to last time, who knows their systems and their
problem. But if they can’t talk to Joe in one call center, you’d better make
sure his twin brother Jim knows what Joe told the customer and how to address
the problem.”
The other
level of data integration is designed to allow contact center agents to upsell
customers based on their past activity. Customers who call a cable company to
buy pay-per-view access to a soccer game will be much more likely at that time
to buy a subscription to all the games than they would be the next day, Akbay says.
“When I
call [the company], I’m engaged and interested. If [company employees] have to
wait 24 hours to find out that I might be interested in this other product and
they call me, I’ll be doing something else and may not be interested at all,”
he says.
“Of the
companies we talked to, even those that really hated their vendor said they
would never run a contact center again without a CCPM,” Fluss says. “It was a
striking finding. It’s still hard to know which indicators to pay attention to;
even with CCPM, you have to think through your KPIs. But CCPM makes it a lot
easier.”
Respondents
to DMG’s survey said the payback time for a CCPM system was generally between
six months and 12 months, and that the quantifiable benefits would eventually
equal two to three times the original investment.
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