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Eyretel Contact 7000 Supports Virtual Contact Centers for Companies Implementing Multi-Site Distributed Operations

With trend towards distributed contact centers, concept helps deliver consistent unified customer experience; System provides for tracking of accumulated customer experience through multiple agents across multiple contact centers.


Leatherhead, UK and Calverton, MD - November 21, 2002 - According to Eyretel plc, a global provider of voice and data recording, quality monitoring and analysis systems for the optimization of contact centers and other customer contact environments, the movement towards multi-site, distributed contact centers will lead contact center executives to consider the implementation of 'virtual contact center' recording, monitoring and management architectures, if their end-user customer experience is not to suffer.

The trend towards distributed contact centers has been growing for some time, but is now accelerating. According to a recent Gartner Dataquest survey* of contact center decision makers in North America, the percentage of organizations that expect to have multi-site or work-at-home agents will increase from 19% to 44% over the next two years. A distributed contact center is one where customer phone calls, emails, etc., are routed - transparent to the customer - to any one of a number of human or automated agents, who may be located in separate buildings, in different cities and perhaps even in different countries.

"There a number of business reasons that drive companies to look to distributed contact center operations, including cost reductions, risk mitigation strategies, follow- the-sun operations and the need to operate multiple centers acquired through corporate mergers and acquisition," said John Bourne, Eyretel's Executive Vice President, Global Marketing and Corporate Strategic Alliances. "For example, from a risk perspective, it's better to have more than one center capable of handling customer contact and, from a financial perspective, outsourcing some of your operations to Canada, Ireland, the Philippines, India or to less expensive cities may make compelling business sense. "

Speaking to the technical implications of multi-site operations, Bourne continued "The routing of phone calls or customer transactions from one location or agent to another is very well understood and readily handled by today's switching systems. But from the customer's perspective, they don't really care who answers their call or where they are located. All they care about is consistently getting the right result, quickly, efficiently and with the minimum hassle." There are basically two types of distributed operations: the first where geographically distributed agents are all basically performing similar functions and the second - the multi-tier approach that is often seen in support hotlines and third party verification - where different people, who may be in the same or different locations, handle different phases of the interaction with the customer. In this second case, it is important to track, record and measure the complete end-to-end, accumulated customer experience, even if they are transferred between multiple agents and even across multiple contact center sites. In order to deliver complete consistency of the customer experience, regardless of how many agents interact with the customer and where they are located, Eyretel's Contact 7000 architecture has been designed to provide contact center executives with a unified single 'virtual contact center' view across any number of physically distributed in-house or outsourced contact center operations.

"The need for a true enterprise architecture is not driven solely by contact center needs. With companies increasingly centralizing IT operations, the information systems infrastructure of contact centers - especially regional centers - are also becoming IT 'dark sites'," continued Bourne. "That's why the typical 'silo' approach - with a stand-alone recording system per location - cannot really support virtual contact center operations. Although these loosely-connected sets of systems can be 'glued together', it's tremendously inefficient and does not scale well." Leveraging features that have been production-proven in Eyretel's current Release 6 Enterprise products, Contact 7000 provides a means to monitor and manage multi-site agent quality as a single unified environment. Eyretel's Contact Unify recording middleware and Contact Atlas advanced networked indexing and search software provide for cradle-to-grave tracking, recording and monitoring of customer interactions - regardless of how many human or automated agents they interact with, how many times they may have been transferred or put 'on-hold' and regardless of where in the world the agents are located.

Using Contact 7000's web-enabled interfaces, recorded end-to-end interactions can be readily located, retrieved, played and analyzed from any location on the customer's secure network, regardless of where the agents or supervisors - are based. For example, contact center management teams, including quality scorers, can have access to all necessary information from remote offices, from home, or wherever they happen to be.
This allows companies to manage and optimize their distributed contact operations as a single entity - ensuring consistent, high quality and efficient handling of customer operations. The Contact 7000 architecture is also flexible enough to handle hybrid situations where a company may treat a combination of in-house and outsourced contact centers as part of a unified virtual center. With outsourced operations, Contact 7000 allows clients to select and review the customer interactions that their outsourced provider agents are handling - at any time - via secure web-based network links.

This unified operating view - with its enterprise-wide archival and retrieval capabilities - allows companies to observe and learn from agent best practices across the entire organization through the sharing of benchmark and example calls. Among the Eyretel customers who have implemented distributed contact centers are the Inland Revenue in the United Kingdom and Blue Cross Blue Shield of Minnesota and Blue Cross Blue Shield of Rhode Island in the United States. "Today, we see virtual contact centers implemented across distributed centers, each with several hundred agents or more, but Contact 7000 allows these concepts to be applied just as easily to small centers with a handful of agents in each," continued Bourne. "This adds tremendous flexibility to the concept of the virtual contact center, allowing companies to make use of non-traditional agent pools, such as branch office staff, or home-workers for example as a peak hour extension of the contact center. With high bandwidth Internet Telephony available in the home, we believe that it's just a matter of time before we begin to see virtual contact centers, where substantial portions of the agents are home-based - either full-time or part-time."

 
Editorial Contact:
Richard Bevis
Eyretel plc
+1 301 586 1905
richard.bevis@eyretel.com
 
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