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Three New Ways to Get Your IT Department to Embrace the Cloud

by David McCann on May 14, 2013 in 2013, Call Centers, David McCann, Industry News with No comments
Getting IT to Embrace the Cloud

Over the past decade, IT departments have been continually asked to do more with less while at the same time are tasked with delivering continued innovation. As the economy recovers, corporate IT and business unit leaders are fighting for a finite amount of resources. In most cases, the business units win and the IT team must implement new solutions with the same, or in some instances, even less budget than they had before.

Agile business units are unlocking these resources to fund customer-centric projects throughout the company, with a focus on enhancing the customer experience and reaching the increasingly digital customer. Unfortunately, the IT machine that enables these projects within the company goes untended. For instance, many business units want to ‘go to the cloud’ so that they can take advantage of the flexibility it offers. In fact, a recent Wired article points to cloud as a way for companies to develop a customer service platform that provides the flexibility needed to turn on a dime in order to grow with customer demands and evolving channels like mobile and social media. The article says that “these channels [mobile, social, etc.] are adapted on an ongoing basis at a rate that most on-premise solutions can’t keep up with from both a timing and cost perspective. The cloud can offer the needed advantages of flexibility and speed, and at a price organizations of nearly any size can manage.”

But, it’s not as simple as flipping a switch. There are several challenges that are stalling their move to the cloud, including:

  • Outdated systems that are costly and time-consuming to transition: many IT departments are still working on older, back-end systems which consequently are holding back deployments of new cloud applications.
  • Limited IT resources: Business units are jostling to get to the front of the line with IT teams but with fewer resources and a long list of to-dos, this can slow down the process. Executive endorsement and approvals can also add to the time it takes to get a project to the front of the queue.
  • Security and compliance issues: Internal review processes, especially for business units moving to the cloud for the first time, are slowing down deployments.

Eventually these challenges may work themselves out, especially as companies begin to re-examine their priorities and adjust business processes to better accommodate the demands of digital consumers and employees. There are three things companies should keep in mind today to address these:

  1. Share the love. Without a good foundation, a large structure will crumble. The same applies to corporations and their IT departments – without a strong IT foundation to support digital functions, companies may find themselves rushing to fill in unforeseen gaps and errors in consumer applications, in addition to a growing lack of flexibility and responsiveness to new cloud engines. For every non-IT project, companies need to set aside funds for internal IT departments to make sure they have the resources and systems required to both manage and integrate a new program.
  2. Think of your IT system in layers. Corporations do not need to move their entire systems into a cloud environment. Rather, businesses should explore creating a service-oriented access layer for cloud services on the front of older systems and applications. This eliminates the need to wholesale move systems to the cloud.
  3. Remember that cloud isn’t an all-or-nothing solution. With cloud computing, know that data will not exist just in one place, but linked across clouds and on premises applications, creating a hybrid world involving both types of systems. This enables companies to be more nimble and move data and applications between cloud and on premises systems to meet their needs.  Think data federation, encryption and rules in multiple places.

As a cloud-based SAAS supplier of Customer Interaction Management for the Fortune 1000, Varolii sees huge benefits being derived for B2C companies moving their customer engagement systems to the cloud. For our customers, cloud computing has reduced customer service costs, increased customer engagement rates results by up to 20%, and relieved the burden on tightly staffed call centers. In the long-term, the cloud will replace many of the legacy systems and infrastructure that companies have today. Looking to the future, the internal IT team will likely become a department focused on data governance and security, rather than managing where data lives and how it is processed.

Disruptive Technology - How Siri has Changed Call Center Automation

by Mary Cook on June 14, 2012 in 2012, Call Centers, Consumer Svcs, CRM, Mary Cook with 1 Comment
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Disruptive technology is not a breakthrough innovation. Though, it does make good products a lot better -- transforming what was historically so expensive and complicated that only a few people had access to it and making it affordable and accessible to a larger population.

Think back to the first mainframe computer. It cost millions of dollars to buy and it took years of specialized training to operate it. Only the largest corporations and universities had the luxury of owning one.

A few years, a few bright minds, and a few disruptive technology revolutions later, voilà -- the desktop PC is available to the masses. Then came the laptop, the tablet and the smartphone, which has brought technology to even the remotest corners of the world.

One of the latest trends to dominate the market is Siri (Speech Interpretation and Recognition Interface), an intelligent personal assistant and knowledge navigator that works as an application for Apple’s iOS. The application uses a natural language user interface to answer questions, make recommendations and perform actions.

What Does this Mean to Call Centers?

Consumer technology is changing the customer experience landscape for enterprise contact centers.  Your standard inbound automation may not be good enough anymore. Consumers are expecting a “Siri-like” experience – a natural-sounding conversation when they call their service providers.  So what are you doing to make your inbound speech experience better?

Did You Say “Egg Freckles?”

  1. A famous Doonesbury cartoon from 1993 shows Mike using the handwriting recognition feature on his PDA with hilarious results. Don’t risk an “Egg Freckles” experience with your call center automation.If you are still using DTMF (Dual-Tone Multi-Frequency, or touch tone) IVRs (interactive voice response), look at the business case around using ASR (Automatic Speech Recognition). If you don’t know where to start, email me.
  2. If you are using ASR, is it conversational? Are you able to ask open-ended questions? Do you ever have to repeat questions to your consumers?
  3. And, if you are deploying a conversational ASR, consider taking it up a notch and deploy silent guides to improve your IVR containment, opt-out and completion rates.

PCs, PDAs, Smartphone, Siri. What do these disruptive technologies have in common? They’re personal and customized to the user. Do the same with your call center automation and you can’t go wrong.

The Humanity in Automation

by Mary Cook on April 19, 2012 in 2012, Call Centers, Mary Cook, Varolii News with 1 Comment

People often ask me why I left a swashbuckling life of consulting around the globe to come lead Varolii’s Call Center Practice. Varolii is a Software as a Service (SaaS) company that provides cross-channel customer interaction management solutions for the digital world. A far cry from building call centers.

When I joined Varolii almost three years ago, we specialized in outbound proactive communications– automated messaging, if you will. I had never used automation before, so Varolii intrigued me. But what made me fall in love with Varolii was the quality of our interactions. Through using carefully crafted messages, combined with ten years of best practices and using communication methodologies such as the science of influence, Varolii was really holding “conversations” with their customers. We weren’t just blasting messages; rather, we executed interactive dialogue with customers. To add to this, Varolii possesses an interaction design department that employs professional studio voice talent. So Varolii’s outbound communications sound amazing, as well. Not to mention, the patented technology that is behind all of this automation wizardry is a blog on its own...

Why I fell for Varolii
So, here is the kicker. I fell in love with Varolii because, to me, we offer an amazing product that, although is an automated interaction solution, focuses on what is most important – the humanity of it all.

The most important element in the call center is our agents. Human agents. And although Varolii specializes in automation, we focus on quality automation. To me, our outbound interactions are like having a bunch of perfect call center agents – always on time, always in the top quality ranking, easily re-trained, and measureable. Furthermore, when companies use our outbound interaction solutions, not only do they get these perfect “avatar agents,” but they actually reduce resource requirements for their own human counterparts in the call center – which leads management to either free up some operating expenses or reallocate resources for other queues.

How we kept it fresh
Most recently, we launched a new product called Varolii 360, a product I am personally very passionate about. Varolii 360 offers a seamless end-to-end experience across both outbound and inbound channels (voice, text, email and smartphone) with personalized interactions, consistent branding, self-service options and complete reporting and analytics.

Varolii 360 combines automation with human-assisted speech recognition for a more efficient interaction. Silent human “guides” direct the automation in real-time, correcting misheard responses or redirecting the ASR. Guided speech is more affordable than full time agents, provides more efficient self-service options, and reduces customer frustration and opt-outs.

Through our conversational customer interaction management system, we deploy a unique hybrid model combining the best of two worlds: automated and human. Our Guided Inbound feature combines automated speech recognition with real-time, invisible human intervention for superior accuracy and caller experience. And we bring all of the same interaction design and media talent to the table on our inbound solutions as well.

Varolii realizes that automation is an important call center technology that can make a difference in contact centers. But what they REALLY understand is that automation must provide the most meaningful, human-like interaction as possible. They understand that, in order for automation to work, they need to focus on the conversations themselves and the quality of those conversations. Albert Einstein once said, “It has become appallingly obvious that our technology has exceeded our humanity.” I think Varolii got it right – we made sure humanity is imbedded within our technologies.

Varolii Interaction 2012 - Get in the Loop

by Mary Cook on February 28, 2012 in 2012, Call Centers, Industry News, Mary Cook, Varolii News with No comments
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Varolii’s user conference, Interaction, is a week away. This is my third trip to Interaction, and I cannot tell you how excited I am to be heading to Las Vegas. Plus I needed an excuse to play the slots, and now I have one.

In addition to flirting with Lady Luck I fully intend to get ahold of every juicy morsel of information that is being presented this year. I am really looking forward to Closing the Loop — Varolii 360 and Let’s Make this Clear: The Power of Guided Speech to Transform the Customer Conversation. I’ve written a lot about the technology being used to change the customer’s call center experience and I can’t wait to share its magic with you in person.

Varolii Interaction 2012 is being held March 5th to 7th at Loews Lake Las Vegas.  The conference will be filled with valuable insight that can be used to facilitate better and more forward-thinking customer interaction management strategies.

Here are a few of the sessions that I can’t wait to attend:

  • Mobile Matters: Maximize Your SMS & Smartphone Investment.  Mobility is becoming ubiquitous in the minds of consumers. If you are still viewing SMS and Smartphone as alternative technologies, you’re missing huge opportunities to connect with your customers.
  • Peak Performance: Better Insight, More Control. You asked for it. You got it. Varolii’s dynamic duo, Performance Insight and Performance Manager, give you the campaign controls and analytics you need to monitor, manage and evaluate your customer interactions more effectively and efficiently. Learn more about the powerful controls, monitoring and custom reporting that PI and PM offer to help you drive greater value from your interactions and use this knowledge to shape a profitable engagement strategy.
  • Engaging Today’s Mobile Customer – Integrating Text & Smartphone into your Customer Interactions. You know that contacting customers through their mobile devices is critical to the success of your communication strategies, but how do you start? Learn why reaching consumers on their mobile device is critical to improving your communication performance, the legal hurdles you’ll need to overcome, and step-by-step instructions on setting up an opt-in consent program for contacting customers on their mobile devices.

I have some last minute packing to do before jet setting to Vegas. I hope that you’ll be able to join us at Varolii Interaction 2012. You will walk away from the conference with a greater understanding of how to deliver a better customer experience within your call center interactions.

Varolii 360 - The Best of Both Worlds

by Mary Cook on February 21, 2012 in 2012, Call Centers, CRM, Varolii News with No comments

As we know, many of our inbound call centers still have cumbersome automated IVR processes that lead many customers to hang up in frustration. In an inbound environment, 20% of customers scream “agent” or press zero within an IVR menu, while 30% choose the wrong direction within the IVR, either intentionally or unintentionally. Adding on top of this 50% IVR fall out, the typical automated speech recognition (ASR) engines don’t have the intelligence to personalize inbound calls to a particular customer, or auto-correct a customer’s verbal input if it is misunderstood. So the chance of your customer experiencing a “successful” customer effort or engagement score is already at odds.

So, Varolii came up with some ideas on how to fix this problem.

What started out as a drawing on a whiteboard nine months ago has turned into a customer interaction management system that makes you pause and take notice. In seventeen years in the call center and customer experience realm, this is one of the few pieces of call center technology that I see as a “game changer” for customer interaction management.

Our newest product, Varolli 360, offers customer interaction capabilities that can be leveraged to create a complete customer experience across both guided inbound and proactive outbound interactions.  This little gem revolutionizes the way that you do business by solving customer problems faster (i.e., reduced AHT), and in return upping the ante where overall satisfaction is concerned.

So – what is guided inbound?

Guided inbound allows speech recognition to become a truly valuable contact center technology. It allows you to enrich your customer interactions.

Varolii’s new inbound solutions leverage guided speech recognition and advanced personalization to assist the customer through their interactions with you, while delivering a more robust inbound experience. Rather than rely on old systems that are subject to failure, we’ve adopted a new approach.  With guided inbound capabilities, silent ‘Guides’ monitor up to 10 calls simultaneously and are able to jump in when speech recognition fails, or correct the customer’s utterance in order to help the customer to self-serve. These ‘Guides’ can direct the automation in real-time, correcting the misheard response or redirecting the speech recognition engine as needed.

With this conversational hybrid approach, your customer is offered more efficient and personalized self-service options, which subsequently reduces frustration and opt-outs. It also eliminates the customer repetition of answering a question twice and guarantees a smoother transfer to a call center agent when required.

For ten years, Varolii has proactively communicated with customers to meet their needs with our outbound communications applications through voice, text messages, emails, and smartphone applications.  We make ourselves available to assist your customers via the mode of communication that feels the most comfortable for them, which leads to a more personal and satisfactory solution to handling their interactions. Varolli knows that “interaction” and “customer experience” are not events, and therefore they shouldn’t be treated impersonally. So we have taken our magic and applied it now to inbound interactions, as well.

"Better engagement, better outcome" is Varolli’s mantra for Customer Interaction Management. Joining and coordinating technology and applying expertise to get results are what make us a success. Learn more about Varolli 360. To read more about product specifications, click here.  Feel free to email me directly at mary.cook@varolii.com for more information.  I’d love to hear from you!

The Cloud - What is it? Should my call center be there?

by Mary Cook on December 19, 2011 in 2011, Call Centers, Mary Cook, Varolii News with 5 Comments

Cloud computing is a groundbreaking technology that has made possible the provision of computing as a service, as opposed to a product. cloud computing The Cloud What is it? Should my call center be there?

This can be described with the help of an example that has become somewhat cliché, but is nonetheless a fairly good one - especially when it comes to explaining to a newbie the concept of Cloud computing.

In Cloud computing, software, information, shared resources, etc., are provided to end users in a manner similar to that utilized by utility companies to provide a utility (e.g., electricity) to their consumers. A network (usually the internet) is used for this purpose in a fashion resembling an electricity grid.

Applications are made available for access by the Cloud computing providers through internet. It should be noted that the software and data is stored at, and is retrievable from, a remote location. Therefore, these applications can be accessed through desktop PCs, mobile devices, etc.

Now - the million dollar question: Why are companies (of all sizes), businesses and other organizations switching from traditional computing to Cloud computing?

And why should others follow their lead? Let’s discuss. . .

What are the advantages of switching from traditional computing to Cloud computing?

The primary advantage of Cloud computing is that it enables companies, businesses and other organizations to reduce spending and save money by minimizing inherent IT and support costs.

This might not be the biggest advantage offered by Cloud computing, but it is undoubtedly the most sought after advantage, especially in the case of relatively smaller enterprises.

Other advantages of Cloud computing include its ability to meet business demand for speed, better security, scalability, ease of access, and better disaster recovery.

What is the difference between SaaS, PaaS and IaaS?

What exactly is SaaS and in what manner does it differ from PaaS and IaaS?  One is bound to encounter these terms while reading about Cloud computing, and the seemingly slight difference between the three can make it tough to tell one from the other.

saas paas iaas The Cloud What is it? Should my call center be there?

As we briefly discussed earlier, a Cloud computing system generally offers three kinds of capabilities to its users: namely, computing, storage and management:

Computing: A Cloud computing system has a lot of computing power at its disposal, thanks to the costly high-end hardware (processors, etc.) procured and installed by the Cloud computing provider.

Storage: A Cloud computing system also allows users to store their data onto its hardware.

Management: A Cloud computing system provides various Application Programming Interfaces and other management capabilities to enable users to specify, organize and queue various tasks for processing.

Now let’s see what IaaS, PaaS and SaaS really are.

IaaS, or Infrastructure as a Service: In IaaS, the Cloud computing provider only supplies the necessary infrastructure or hardware (servers, storage disks, etc.) and the users are responsible for installing the necessary platform.

PaaS, or Platform as a Service: In PaaS, the Cloud computing provider supplies the necessary infrastructure, as well as the necessary platform(s) to the users.

SaaS, or Software as a Service: In SaaS, the Cloud computing provider not only supplies the necessary hardware and platform, but also provides various sorts of software.

Call Center SaaS or Cloud-based Call Center Systems

Nowadays, numerous companies, businesses and other organizations are switching from on-premises call centercloud 5 The Cloud What is it? Should my call center be there? systems—commonly referred to as “brick and mortar call centers”— and other traditional systems to cloud-based call center systems.

The primary motive behind such migrations is a financial one. Cloud-based call center solutions are not only relatively cheaper but also much more cost-effective and cost-efficient. Nevertheless, call center SaaS has numerous other advantages too.

Advantages of Cloud-based Call Center Systems

Call centers are multifaceted, with multiple technology layers, multiple communication channels, multiple business processes and functions, different agent skill sets… we are again, complicated. And sometimes, what we think of as a simple change in one call center process or system has a “ripple” effect across all of these existing layers. So we are sometimes cumbersome. We therefore are often unable to either adapt or expand quickly enough to support our always-evolving customer experience journeys – especially with the innovations in the mobile market.

Many cloud-based call center systems provide all-in-one call center solutions that include essential software such as IVR, IP-PBX, ACD, call recording and monitoring, workforce management, performance management, outbound messaging and delivery of reporting to management in a highly integrated fashion.

Scalability and flexibility are two inherent advantages of cloud-based call center systems. These include the ability to add or remove agent seats and the ability to enable or disable certain applications or certain features of an application within seconds. Many companies are moving to cloud applications to help them respond to the rapid advances in today’s market environment while simultaneously removing many of the high costs and hassles of maintaining complex internal systems.

Cloud-based call center solutions are often not only comprehensive, but they also are state-of-the-art and can support new and leading-edge processes and best practices. Many come with pre-built API interfaces to common CRM and other software solutions.  Naturally, the benefit of minimal hardware and software costs is a plus for companies, as well. Along with no up-front capital investment, it is clear why many executives are looking to cloud solutions.

As Richard Bach said, “A cloud does not know why it moves in just such a direction and at such a speed... It feels an impulsion... this is the place to go now.  But the sky knows the reasons and the patterns behind all clouds, and you will know, too, when you lift yourself high enough to see beyond horizons.” So don’t be afraid to reach for the skies in your operations and land on a cloud.

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