A VIEW FROM THE CORNER OFFICE
The Momentum Continues…A
Record Quarter!
 By Ari Sonesh, CEO
-
The “lazy days” of summer are now behind us; and I hope everyone
had a good time enjoying the great outdoors.
While summer is a fun time for individuals and families, it’s not
so for business. Decision makers, away on vacations, don’t have the
time to buy, deferring their purchase commitments to the next
quarter. However, despite a typically slow summer, CosmoCom’s
revenue and profit both reached record levels in the third quarter.
The momentum is coming from
several markets:
Contact Center On Demand (CCOD) offered by service providers
(i.e., service providers offering call center technology as a
service) is heating up. Enterprises are now recognizing the
numerous benefits of purchasing a technology as a service as
opposed to owning, installing and maintaining technologies
themselves.
Another trend is “self-hosting”. Not every Enterprise wants
to outsource technology hosting, management and maintenance to a
third party. Nevertheless, these companies do recognize the
numerous benefits that come with virtualization of their call
center operation, along with the benefits of platform
“multi-tenancy”, i.e. the ability to implement numerous
different applications (different virtual call centers) on the
same shared platform. Essentially these companies are hosting
their own CCOD platform for the various applications within
their own enterprise.
Interestingly, despite the US “do-not-call-list” prohibiting
direct and outsourced telemarketers from cold-calling people on the
list, the outbound call center is booming. A significant portion
of our business is coming from outsourcers benefiting from the
all IP predictive dialer technology.
I expect these market trends to continue their momentum, fueling
our fast growth. With both customers and employees back from their
summer vacations and looking towards year-end, we are preparing for
the year’s fiscal (and calendar!) finish line…awaiting a grand
fourth quarter and an overall excellent year!
INTERTEC
FEATURES COSMOCOM TECHNOLOGY AT GITEX
A few weeks ago, from September 25 –29, Intertec Systems (a local
systems integrator partner in CosmoCom’s EcoCosm) exhibited at GITEX
– a leading regional telecommunications show in Dubaï, UAE. Intertec
offers cutting edge technology & business solutions to organizations
all over the Gulf region and in India. The group is focused on delivering
high-quality products and services in many critical domains
including contact centre solutions & outsourcing.
The event took place at the Dubaï World Trade Center and was well
attended. Many attendees visited the Intertec booth that featured
CosmoCom technology. Visitors got the chance to see live
demonstrations of CosmoCall Universe (CCU) Version 4.5 in action.
Highlights of the booth included CCU integrations with Heat,
GoldMine, and LANdesk for full technical helpdesk support. In
addition, attendees experienced an IVR multi-lingual application in
English & Arabic, and saw how easily this could be created using
CosmoDesigner.
This event was another example of the successful long-term
collaboration between Intertec and CosmoCom in the region. We look
forward to continued success together.
CONSULTANTS
CORNER
The Citizen as Customer:
Using Technology to Enhance Government
By Meir Yaniv and Erik Laurence -
The need for citizens to access government institutions for
information and guidance is as old as governments themselves. In
today’s modern society, governments all over the world provide more
services to more people than at any time in the past. To ensure that
these services are provided efficiently and without wasting precious
tax dollars, it’s now more important than ever for citizens to be
able to easily communicate with their governments and get the
information they need. In the UK, one of the Local Councils (i.e., a
local government responsible for a region of the country) has risen
to that challenge by implementing a Citizen Services Contact Center,
and has become our Customer Solution of the Month for September. Or
perhaps should we say “Citizen Solution of the Month.”
The Challenge
Before implementing the Citizen Services Contact Center, this UK
Local Council faced a typical problem. Like many regional
governments, they had dozens and dozens of departments providing
hundreds of different services, everything from school construction
to immigrant affairs to trash collection. In fact, they had over 200
different phone numbers that members of the public could use in
order to reach these various services.
From the point of view of the calling public, the only way to get
the information they needed was to haul out the telephone directory
to try to understand which of the hundreds of government offices
could provide the needed answers.
The result, of course, was typical: frustration on both sides.
Callers typically had to make multiple phone calls, while the work
of government office workers were often interrupted, many times by
irrelevant inquiries that were referred to other arms of government.
And even though the larger departments each had a small group of
people dedicated to answering the phones
And while many departments had a small group of people answering
these phones, the result was all too often the same: people calling
only to be told to call somewhere else.
Sometimes the situation was even worse. Frustrated citizens, fed
up with dialing multiple numbers or being transferred multiple times
from department to department, would dial the emergency services
number (000 in Europe, similar to 911 in North America). These
non-emergency calls clogged the 000 system, increasing the response
time for genuine life and death emergencies.
The Solution
To solve the problem, the UK Local Council opted for a “horizontal
implementation” that would take care of all departments from day
one. Similar to the 311 approach taken in New York City and other
North American cities, they deployed a single call center to front
end all departments and field inquiries from all callers. And while
they didn’t opt for a single number like 311, they did consolidate
the existing 200 numbers into about 14, taking care to forward all
of the old numbers into the new ones. While they could have
consolidated all the numbers into a single number, they decided that
using the dialed number combined with IVR as routing qualifiers was
more efficient than using IVR alone as a routing qualifier. And even
if a caller calls the wrong number, there is no need to redial
another number, as all numbers lead to the same call center.
The majority of the agents were split into two “generalist”
groups: One group handled regular inquiries directed to 11 of the
phone numbers, while the other group handled higher priority social
care calls directed to 3 of the phone numbers. Note that the system
is virtual, and not all agents are physically located in the same
place.
To make the agents generalists, they equipped them with a general
information database, which, after three months of operation,
enabled them to answer 60% of the inquiries directly. Of the
remaining 40% of inquiries, the majority were quickly and
efficiently escalated to the right specialist agents. The specialist
agent would receive the transferred call with all relevant data that
was already collected by the generalist, reducing or eliminating the
need for the caller to re-explain himself or herself. A small
percentage of inquiries were transferred to specialists that were
not agents on the system using external numbers.
The Results
Just as with the 311 system in New York City and other US cities,
the positive benefits of such a system have been well documented,
and this a classic example of a real win-win scenario.
The process of communicating with government has been greatly
streamlined for callers and the government alike. Calls now go to
the right resources, getting the right information to the right
people right away. Government office workers now no longer have to
interrupt their important work to apologize to members of the public
that they’ve called the wrong number. And people feel they now have
a more responsive government, that there’s someone to call who will
listen and, more importantly, resolve their issues.
The region also saw a significant reduction in 000 emergency
services calls, which enabled emergency operators to dispatch
emergency services more quickly.
Finally, the Local Council is now in a position to use
information provided by the call center to hold departments
accountable for service delivery, as well as to spot trends that
help them better identify and get to the root of complex problems.
To have thousands of eyes and ears informing the Local Council of
what’s wrong, unclear or doesn’t work, with a centralized authority
sorting and indexing all of this, gives the region a unique chance
to know when, how and where to serve its “customers!”
The Future
There are many plans for expansion, but the primary goals at present
are to:
- Increase the percentage of calls that are handled by
generalists without integration. This will be done by
integrating additional databases and providing additional
training to the agents.
- Have the externally routed escalated calls go to specialists
that are agents on the system, either on a first call basis, or
on an escalated basis. This will be done by equipping these
specialists as agents on the system.
Beyond these goals and looking further to the future, the Local
Council would like to establish a partnership with other government
departments including fire, police and ambulance services that will
enable to better pass calls back and forth. After seeing how easy it
was to implement their two tier generalist/specialist system, they
believe that a virtual system where all the government bodies can be
contacted is the ultimate future of the Citizen Services Contact
Center.
| This story was featured in the September EcoCosm Newsbrief
and
is an example of some of the unique content available to
Consultants and partners in CosmoCom’s EcoCosm. If you are a call center consultant and would like to learn about
EcoCosm,
please see our CosmoCom
EcoCosm Consultants page. Or if you know a call center
consultant that could benefit from this program, please pass this
invitation on to them to join our program
|
REPORT FROM
ACCE
CosmoCom exhibited at the Annual Call Center Exhibition (ACCE) in
Seattle the first week of October. This is the second year that CMP
has put on this particular show, and for the second year our booth
was alive with activity. Visitors experienced live demos of
CosmoCall Universe 4.5 in action, including the enhanced web agent
and CosmoTracker, and had their questions about hosted and virtual
contact center answered by one of our specialists.
In addition to keeping on top of the booth traffic, CosmoCom Sales
AVP, Roman Lewis moderated a panel entitled “Multimedia in the
Contact Center.” Among the panelists was Tom Mitchell, VP and CTO of
ABS Associates, Inc., a leading provider of helpdesk managed
services, desktop life-cycle services, managed hosting services, and
consulting and network services, located near Chicago in Rolling
Meadows, IL. Tom explained how CosmoCom helped ABS achieve its goal
of developing a virtual, multimedia contact center that allows ABS
to hire homebound and physically challenged employees. With the
CosmoCom software, ABS is able to place their outsourced helpdesk
agents at the customer's site, yet still have complete reporting and
monitoring control of the agents, an achievement that interested
many attendees at ACCE.
|
