April 2001

BY BROUGH TURNER

Meanwhile there are other technologies that are driving real improvements in customer relationship management today. I'm referring to some specific uses of voice over IP (VoIP) technology and to the emergence of high performance speech technology (speech recognition and speech synthesis). If you are planning evolution for a call center, look to speech technology in the near term and wait a bit on click-to-talk.

STATE OF THE ART TODAY
Automatic call distributors (ACDs) -- either as custom systems or as custom software for general purpose PBXs -- have been evolving for at least two decades. Until a few years ago, this innovation focused on improving agent productivity for voice telephony with such advances as computer-telephony integration (screen pops), distributed call centers with load balancing, and skills-based routing where calls are routed based on individual agent qualifications.
At the same time, an entire industry has emerged providing CRM software -- standard software to manage customer information and support the entire customer relationship. But until recently, call centers bought their ACDs from leading vendors like Aspect, Avaya (formerly Lucent's Enterprise Business Unit), and Nortel, and they bought CRM software from vendors like Siebel and Clarify. Integration between these systems was largely done on a customer-specific basis. In the past three years, the leading vendors of ACDs have all become "CRM portal" vendors with substantial CRM capabilities of their own, and they have integrated their systems with software from leading CRM vendors like Siebel. Nortel has actually acquired CRM vendor Clarify.

Today, all eyes are on the Internet, and concepts like blending Web integration and e-commerce with the call center have become the hot topics. Some of the proposed new features are useful immediately and some will take years to pay off.

MULTIMEDIA CONTACT CENTERS
While traditional call centers focused on telephony, today's multimedia call centers also include e-mail and customer interaction via text chat (instant messaging). The term "multimedia" is rather grandiose as it implies video, which isn't real today. But the idea that agents can answer e-mail or participate in text chat between voice calls is certainly viable in some applications. It does require skills-based routing, as not all voice telephony agents will be able to compose a coherent sentence for a text chat session. But mixing telephony and e-mail and/or text chat can be useful in many contexts.

VOICE OVER IP
Voice over IP (VoIP) technology is yielding significant benefits in some areas; for example, in distributing agents -- allowing them to work from home while keeping all the benefits of being at the corporate office, namely access to voice telephony, screen pops, e-mail, and supervisor consultations. Today's systems even maintain critical management tools such as performance monitoring and conferencing, allowing remote supervisors to train, assist, or be part of the customer escalation path. Adequate voice quality is possible, even over the "public" Internet, if we only need to support a closed user group.

Today, if all agents are connected with adequate local access bandwidth to the same Internet backbone provider as the corporate office, there are ISPs who will provide service level agreements that guarantee better than 99.5 percent packet throughput and less than 90 ms delay (within the United States). These performance levels are more than adequate for toll-quality voice service. Obtaining cable modem or DSL service for agents at home is becoming viable in most parts of the country and virtual private network (VPN) software can guarantee privacy for call center operations. So VoIP can support CRM applications today. In many cases, de-centralizing the call center in this way not only saves money but also helps retain agents.

SPEECH TECHNOLOGY
Many call centers use some form of interactive voice response (IVR) as a front end. IVR helps keep customers on the line when agents are overloaded and in some cases it provides what the customer is looking for without any agent involvement. However, most IVR systems have a highly structured user interface that only works for those customers who are willing to use DTMF button presses to navigate a tree of menus. Pair this with the fact that more callers, especially for business applications, are inbound from mobile phones, and you have revised requirements for IVR applications that today often don't allow the time for removing the handset from the ear to find and punch a DTMF button. Now there is an emerging alternative.

Over the past few years, there have been dramatic advances in speech recognition technology. Companies like Nuance, SpeechWorks, and Philips are providing speech recognition capabilities for new applications like voice portals that allow users on conventional telephones, including mobile phones in particular, to access public Internet or private corporate network content. The technology is still not perfect and a lot of work is involved in developing the scripts and defining the allowable customer interaction. It is now possible to interact using speech rather than DTMF tones. The new speech recognition technology, together with newer speech synthesis technology, is showing up in so-called "voice portals." Companies like BeVocal and TellMe are providing telephone access to Internet content, and Yahoo! is providing its Yahoo! Mail customers with telephone access to their e-mail with modern speech technology, simplifying the telephone user interface. This same technology is applicable to the call center, allowing a new generation of front-end IVR applications to automate the most common transactions and significantly reduce the load on live agents. Order of magnitude cost savings are possible, not to mention improved customer satisfaction for those customers who get their questions answered without waiting in queue.

CLICK TO TALK -- THE NEXT STEP?
Click-to-talk is being touted as the next advance. When combined with Web collaboration -- allowing call center agents to push Web pages to their customers during a call -- click-to-talk will be a powerful technology for future CRM applications. However, it will take longer than expected to achieve widespread adoption, especially with residential customers. There are several problems. Today, most residential connections are still via dial-up. This provides limited bandwidth for VoIP. Also, while Internet performance within a single ISP's backbone may be adequate, most Internet connections go through multiple ISPs and experience congestion, resulting in best-efforts packet performance that is not adequate for a toll-quality phone call.

Of course a Web site can ask the Web surfer to enter a phone number and await a return phone call, but this is cumbersome and only works with those Web surfers who have an extra telephone line. Finally, while many home computers have speakers and may have been sold with a microphone, relatively few have microphones connected. All this will change over time, as microphones become integrated with monitors and more people sign up for cable modem or DSL service. According to projections, there will be between 24 and 28 million broadband-connected people in the United States within three years.

As an aside, click-to-talk with Web collaboration is not appropriate for every Web site. The argument in favor says it will reduce the number of Internet shoppers that abandon their carts before they check out -- something that happens with more than 50 percent of e-shoppers today. However, it is not clear that providing access to a live agent is the solution. Some e-shoppers are just browsing and never intended to check out. In addition, many successful Web sites, such as Amazon.com, are able to offer low prices on the basis of very low transaction costs. Adding click-to-talk would increase their transaction costs and change their business model. So it is not a universal panacea, but there are many circumstances where click-to-talk will be useful once it is more widely deployable. Business models that already involve customer support will benefit along with those pure Web businesses that can offer premium service to their most important customers.

One piece of good news is you don't have to "fix" the entire Internet in order to get Quality of Service (QoS) that is good enough for useful click-to-talk. Companies such as L.L. Bean and Lands End, who may want to integrate their catalogs on the Web with click-to-talk functionality, will be prepared to pay for voice QoS if it can reach a significant percentage of their customers. So, just as special overlay IP backbones have emerged to enhance the performance of their customers' Web sites, we can expect to see special overlay IP networks that provide call centers with "voice QoS" out to points-of-presence that are as close as possible to the ultimate customer. A normal backbone ISP provider practices so-called "hot-potato" routing in which packets are passed as quickly as possible to the next ISP. A high-performance overlay backbone keeps its customers' packets on the premium overlay backbone until they are as close as possible to the ultimate consumer before passing them to that customer's ISP. This technology exists today, so as soon as there are enough consumers with broadband access and working microphones, we can expect to see such services emerge.

Of course, once the network has the ability to support full-duplex voice, it will also be able to offer half-duplex video. If this happens, consumers will not only be able to click to talk to an agent, but will be able to see the agent as well (again, not an advantage in all cases). But all this is three to five years away.

LIVING UP TO THE HYPE
So, over the next three to five years, as cable modem and DSL services proliferate, and consumers get real multimedia PCs with microphones that are actually installed and enabled, we can expect click-to-talk applications to be deployed for many, but certainly not all, Web sites. Meanwhile, there are real technologies that continue to transform the call center-CRM market today, improving efficiency and improving the customer relationship. These include customer support via e-mail chat, work-at-home agents via VoIP, and dramatically improved telephone access to corporate information and to automated transactions based on the latest advances in speech technology. These applications will provide substantial benefits to the call center and the consumer without the wait.

Brough Turner is senior vice president of technology at Natural MicroSystems. For more information, visit the company's Web site at www.nmss.com. E-mail to the author (addressed to brough_turner@nmss.com) is also welcome.

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