Contact Center in-a-Box

Why CIM + CRM = CIRM

During the past decade, the call center has been a bonanza for the professional services industry. Every call center project triggers a lot of work for the consultants – let’s just call them “MegaConsult.” First the feasibility and initial planning study. Then the CRM selection and implementation and the CIM selection and implementation, with CIM often meaning separate selection and implementation for ACD and IVR. Finally and greatest of all, the project of knitting these three elements together into a coherent whole. It’s no wonder that the professional services cost of a serious call center project is measured in multiples of the cost of the underlying hardware and software products it includes. The figures typically run to 3x, 4x, 5x, and more. A cost of 10x is certainly not unheard of.

And that is not the worst of it. The worst of it is that these expensive projects are risky and prone to failure. The worst of it is that after all this, the customer calls, gets the IVR, keys (or speaks) his customer/credit card/account/confirmation/record locator number, and later reaches a live agent who says, “Hello, what is your customer/credit card/account/confirmation/record locator number?”

If you have ever said to yourself, “there must be a better way,” you are not alone. But until recently, not many have succeeded in finding it. A bonanza for the consultants, a burden and all-too-often a sad story for the customers – all this is about to change because of the “next big thing” in the contact center industry, CIRM. CIRM, or Customer Interaction and Relationship Management, is the combination of CIM, typically the ACD and IVR components of a contact center, with CRM, the customer database accessed by agents in the contact center. A slightly catchier phrase that captures the essence of this important new combination is, simply, “Contact Center in a Box (CCIAB).”

What makes a CIRM system a true CCIAB? The answer to this question is far beyond just a list of all the separate items that are found “in the box” – the IVR, ACD, CRM, CTI, WFM, recording, etc. You’re looking at a CCIAB when you open the box and you only see one thing in it, one thing that does all of these functions in a unified way. The whole idea of a CCIAB goes beyond integration. There is a lot of integration work that goes into the making of a CCIAB, but the customer experience in a real CCIAB is not one of integration. It is one of unity.

Built-in lines of communication between IVR, ACD, and CRM for effective self-service, and for screen pops when calls do go to agents, is a start. But it’s only a start. The unity can go a lot farther than that. Call flow definition in a CCIAB recognizes these elements of call treatment, but does not force the user to define them separately. Rather, it allows the user to define call flows the way callers experience them, as a continuous series of events that built logically upon each other, whether these events take place in the context of IVR, ACD, or CRM.

The same is true of agent definition. In a CCIAB, the user only defines an agent in one place. Not two, three, four, or more times – separately to each of the telephone ACD, CRM, email management, CTI middleware, recording, workforce management, and compliance systems. When your administrator documentation for adding an agent is 30 or 40 pages long, you know that you don’t have a CCIAB.

It almost goes without saying that if the “CC” stands for “Contact Center,” the CCIAB includes seamless ability to queue and route and deliver calls of all types – telephone calls, web calls, voice mail, and email – to all agents. Queuing is unified across call types, with priority control so that message communication automatically fills in the valleys between the live communication peaks.

Recording, reporting, workforce management – all of these are presented to the customer as aspects of a single entity. The same concepts, the same terminology, the same data elements, are referenced across the entire spectrum. Recording system databases include calls of all types and media. Reports that require input from multiple subsystems obtain this information invisibly to the user. Agent workloads and performance metrics are analyzed including all types of calls in one place.

It sounds good, and it is good, and what, you might ask, is making this possible now, after all the man-centuries invested in one-off contact center projects that did not achieve this level of unity? After all, no single company is about to combine all of the intellectual capital needed to create such a product. At the end of the day, there are still specialists.

First, as always, there is an increasing demand. SME companies want to keep up with the best customer care practices of the largest companies, and need a more cost effective way to do it. Many high end customers are also fed up and looking for a better solution. But in addition to demand, you need technology that can meet the demand, and distribution channels that can deliver and support products based on that technology.

One important technology development behind the CCIAB is that ACD and IVR platforms have broken out of the proprietary, closed architecture environments that characterized them for so many years. Companies like CosmoCom are building their ACD and IVR applications on industry standard computer platforms. They are using widely understood software development technologies and open, object oriented APIs. They are also leveraging the unifying power of IP as an alternative to legacy, telephone-only circuit switching. With these techniques, products can be more unified and full-featured in themselves, and at the same time, more easily integrated with other products by a qualified OEM.

Which brings us to the next important point. The CCIAB is an OEM’s product, and the emergence of CIRM systems will mean the emergence of newly empowered OEMs in the contact center industry. The analogy might be companies like Dell, OEMs that source chips, motherboards, disk drives, etc. from a variety of suppliers and put them together into unified systems under their own brand name.