Setting the Stage

In most legacy contact centre interaction scenario's there is a heavy element of Identification and Verification (ID&V) required between the interacting parties. Overwhelmingly the onus of obligation to confirm ID is placed up the customer.

Do you ever receive a call from a contact centre, where the dialogue goes something like;

"Hello, this is Acme Bank calling, for security purposes can you please confirm you full name"
     "David Tidwell, what's this about?"
"Thanks, I'll explain why in a moment or two! Can you please confirm the last part of your postcode starting BS16?"
     "1FX"
"Just a couple more questions…."
     "AAAAAAAHHHHGGGG !!!" CLICK – hang up

As a customer, this experience is infuriating! The Call Centre CALLED ME, and now I have to go through 100 hoops; and they are already inconveniencing me right when I need it the least! The natural and easiest reaction for the customer is to simply hang up! I know; because I do it a lot on unsolicited calls made to me from contact centres.

What about scenario's where the customer has asked for a callback? I suggest in these scenario's the customer is EXPECTING the call/contact, but still may have concerns that they are actually talking to their bank. It is incredibly easy for PHISHING to occur even in voice interactions. How? I block my Calling Line Identity, and phone my TARGET consumer pretending to be their bank. I can FREELY challenge this customer for their full name, date of birth, address, zip (postcode), telephone number and even confirmation of account details by simply pretending to be their Bank.  It only requires minor levels of 'professionalism' and a practiced approach to PHISH in voice channels with some success.

Think about how easy this is to do! So, our line of argument for this concept of reversing the role of Identification and Verification is two-fold;

• It should make it easier for the customer to identify and authenticate themselves to the contact centre
• It should make it easier for the contact centre to identify and authenticate themselves to the customer

With Mobile solutions for Customer Service we have a new instrument that may make for an effective instrument to present SECRETS or TOKENS that are used in a variety of use cases for interactions driven by the CUSTOMER or interactions driven by the ENTERPRISE

Using Mobile Applications to present TOKENS or SECRETS to the Customer Services Team

The Anana Mobile Applications Solution for Customer Service now features the capability for the Customer to provide a secret or token as part of their CONTACT Request.  In the use case presented below, our Customer, Dave Tidwell requests a callback from Customer Service 

Step One – Booking the Callback and setting SECRET Token

Start the dedicated Customer Service application on the iPhone and go to the CALLBACK option.

Dave has selected the CREATE CALLBACK option on his Mobile Application.  In doing so he has provided all the appropriate details and has added a SECRET.  In this case that token is "anana". Dave's expectation is that when the Customer Services Representative calls him back that this token will be 'read-back' to him so that he has a tangible confirmation that the organisation is who they are purporting to be.  Dave presses on CREATE button and the callback request; including the appropriate token is transmitted to the Contact Centre. In this case, we transmit this information into Genesys 8.1 through the Genesys Mobile Solution and Anana's Composite and Atomic Services Solution for Mobile. (A RESTful interaction stack; more on this later!)

Step Two – Confirming CallBack Request is Active

Dave now confirms on his listed CallBacks that the callback is booked.

Step 3 – Confirming details of Callback

Dave has the choice to click on the scheduled Callback item and see the details (we could of course add lots of options for rescheduling, cancellation, changing tokens or means of callback from Voice, to SMS, to eMail to Twitter, to Facebook and so on)

You can see in the graphic above that we have APPENDED the SECRET TOKEN to the Subject of the CALLBACK.  It doesn't have to go here; but it makes presentation for the Customer Services interface in the Genesys Interaction Workspace slighly more intuitive.

Dave goes back to his HOME SCREEN in the Application and can see his pending CALLBACK request.  We can send NOTIFICATIONS in email, or directly to the Application to confirm 5WH (Who, What, Why, When and Where) so that Dave is kept up to date with the STATUS of his interaction request in real-time.

Step Four – Callback active and pending (The work item is being targetted in the Contact Centre)

Step five – Targetting a Customer Services Team Member to conduct the Callback

Meanwhile, depending on the business logic in the underlying routing strategy (either in Genesys Orchestration Server – ORS) in SC-XML or via alternatives such as the automation of injection into Outbound Contact Server (OCS) an agent is targetted based on the NATURE of the enquiry, customer segment, context and state of conversation (via Genesys Rules Engine – GRE), Context Server and Conversation Management and a ringing event occurs in the Contact Centre.

The screengrab above shows that we have configured our Genesys Contact Centre system to RING with a TOAST popup event for this media type.  The Customer Services Representative can see immediately that this is a CallBack interaction, from a Customer called Dave Tidwell, with a Subject of "Help" and the associated TOKEN or SECRET of "anana".  A quick click on "Accept" spawns the interaction proper on the Genesys Desktop in Interaction Workspace.  The agent will of course confirm the Contact Details and importantly the Interaction History to support context and the overall Customer Journey and Customer Experience.

Step Six – Customer Services conducts the Customer Requested Callback

Again, we present this key or token as attached data, and show it clearly in the associated interaction CASE INFORMATION.

Step Seven – the Customer Interaction Dialogue

"Hi Dave, this is John at the ABC Company calling you back as requested.  Your secret is "ANANA", how may I help you?" says the Customer Services Representative
     "Okay, Hi John, thanks for calling back, I have a question about my….." says our customer

Conclusion

The subtle injection of interaction TOKENS, KEYS or SECRETS can help both parties in the conversation.  It adds an additional layer of explicit security with is tangible, is dynamic, and may be easily injected by either party.  The Mobile device is the instrument that allows for the customer injection of ATTACHED DATA and context that "changes the conversation" and helps both parties enjoy a healthier, faster and more effective conversation.

Other Idea's that immediately come to mind

PCI Compliance

Payment Card Industry Compliance – when a customer needs to make a payment via the Customer Services Representative, for example, to pay a current bill, the Customer may easily do so privately on their own Application and on their own Device.  We can transport the attached data for AUTHENTICATION, Transaction ID and Verification Code via the application layer back to the contact centre.  At NO TIME does the CSR see, interact with or request the Credit Card Number, CVV – Card Verification Value or CVV2 (Card Verification Value Code).

Customer Alerting with TOKENS

The Enterprise needs to reach the customer.  In most environments today this is accomplished via OUTBOUND campaigns (dialers) against distinct groups of customer service agents that may even be external to the Enterprise (offshore or otherwise outsourced).  It may be far more effective for this requirement to reach the customer to be handled slightly less confrontationally and to improve the customer experience by sending a NOTIFICATION to the Customer Services Application indicating that the company needs to speak to the customer about their latest bill.  The customer can then acknowledge this request by suggesting the date, time, media and context of that planned conversation.  The results of the application level negotiation for the conversation may be easily pumped into Workforce Management and Schedules to that it is effective for both the contact centre and the customer.  Tokens may be used in this use-case in a similar way.

"Hello Dave, this is John at the ABC Company. Your secret is"anana". Thanks for making time to talk to us" Says John in the Contact Centre
     "Hi John, no problem, it was handy being able to tell you when I'd be free! What seems to be the problem? Why do you need to talk to me?" says Dave our Customer
"Dave, we noticed that your last payment didn't go through……" and so on

Dynamic Use of existing SMART Tokens for AUTHENTICATION mid-interactions

It is easily possible to transport the results of a smart TOKEN via the Application into these scenario's too.  Where Banks issue their customers with smart-fobs that allocate digit based authentication tokens these may be included in the application to provide short lifecycle authentication for high value transactions.  A Customer Service Representive may be able to ask the customer to enter their smart-pin in mid transaction for high risk transactions, for example;

"Yes, Dave, I can help you do the balance transfer. Because its over £1000 can you please activate our BANK Smart PIN and enter the digits in the mobile application now?"
     "Yes, no problem" Says Dave as he enters the 6 digits into his dedicated Banking Application
[We send this key via the application to the Bank Back end systems, and provide a validation token to the Agent and we update the Interaction Workspace Data to show this new state]
"Great, thanks for confirming that for me Dave, so you wanted to transfer £5000 from Savings to your Current Account?"

Anana has started work on a custom extension to the Genesys Interaction Workspace that will make it easier for Customer Services Representatives working with multiple screens and interactions to manage their screen estate. In current shipping versions of the Genesys Interaction Workspace all open interactions are docked into the footer of the main Interaction Workspace display. This is only visible if the Interaction Workspace has FOCUS. It completely disappears too when using the Interaction Workspace in Widget (minimised) Mode.

Anana’s Dockable Interaction Toolbar for Genesyslab will create a separate dockable/undockable interaction toolbar that may be freely positioned anywhere on the screen. Whilst the underlying interactions may be behind several CRM (Customer Relationship Management) screens or other back-office system screens it will be possible at a glance to see which interactions are open, and which one has the latest update from a customer in it. This will be particularly useful in any solution where the “Capacity Rules” allow more than a single interaction at a time on the desktop. This is typical for web-chat, eMail and SMS channels in the eServices capability of Genesys. The customer intra-prompt response times are slow enough for a single agent to handle 3 or more interactions at time concurrently.

With higher capacity rules on a per-media basis it is clear that a simpler and more effective means is required to draw the CSR’s attention to the latest interaction, so that with a single click FOCUS may be drawn to the relevant underlying customer interaction.

We will post some screenshots of Anana Custom Dockable Toolbar for Genesys Interaction Workspace in the very near future.

Anana is really proud to have delivered 3 of the most prominent Genesys eServices Social Media enabled contact centre solutions anywhere in the European and African region over the last year or so. These include T-Mobile, Orange and Vodacom. We are also working on several others concurrently which are not quite ready for public attention! (More on these later!).

A very early requirement in these initial shipping releases was the ability of the customer services representative to originate new interactions to the customer over social media channels without requiring an existing OPEN interaction to respond against.

Anana’s first deliverable was a functional extension for Twitter Originate for Genesyslab 8.1 version on the Genesys Agent Desktop. This was then rewritten and rebuilt as a custom module for Genesys Interaction Workspace 8.1.200.xxx as described in video demo here in an earlier post.

We are now working quickly on another custom module for the Genesys Interaction Workspace 8.1 or higher releases that see’s the same underlying functionality and capability being extended to Facebook. This will allow the Customer Services Representative to create a new POST on the WALL or to add a new parent COMMENT to an existing topic thread in the absence of a parent interaction from an existing customer.

Whilst working quickly to realise these new functional capabilities within Genesys Social Engagement and the Social Messaging Server we work closely with Genesys Product Management and Engineering to effect the disclosure of the features and functions created so that they may be returned to the generic mainstream shipping products over time.

Tweet Originate is a custom Anana development for Genesyslab Interaction Workspace 8.1.200.16 on Genesys 8.1 with Social Messaging Server. It is a functional addition to the main shipping capabilities of Twitter as a media type for Social Media Customer Service. It allows Customer Services Representatives to conduct 3 typical additional functions in the following typical use cases;

1 – It allows the CSR to post an outbound tweet to the underlying Brand Twitter Account that doesn’t specifically target an individual customer
2 – It allows the CSR to initiate an outbound tweet to a new customer which has not yet interacted with Customer Services on the inbound side
3 – It allows the CSR to initiate an outbound tweet to a known existing customer

Use Case One
We have found our existing Genesys based customer deployments of Twitter required the ability for the Customer Services team to send a “Good Morning” or end of the shift tweet to their followers. Another use case could be a tweet to the timeline that recognises an event that touches a significant number of followers; for example, an Operating System Update available for their phones; or an outage or similar regional or national event.

Use Case Two
Could be triggered by a scenario where someone in another part of the business is very keen that someone in Customer Services reaches out to a customer who is talking about the Brand; but not directly at them. This form of escalation is quite common; where Customer Services may get an urgent request from Marketing or the Brand team to reach out to a Customer and offer assistance. “Could you please get one of the Customer Services team to reach out to Dave Tidwell @dave_t_pilot and assist him with the problem on his iPhone?”. In this case Dave may have been complaining bitterly about the device and/or the brand but not mentioned the brand directly. This is common too where your Genesys deployment is configured to pick up MENTIONS and Direct Messages but not to listen for keywords.

Use Case Three
Is typically triggered by a customer who might say “Okay, when you’ve got the answer from engineering can you please tweet me with the update?” The time lag between the original interaction and the subsequent response from the back-office could be minutes, hours, days or even weeks. Without Tweet Originate it is impossible for the agent to initiate a response to the customer as the previous interaction will have been closed.

The following video explores these 3 use cases in detail, completely narrated and described step by step.

All of the custom features included in this module are designed to fully harmonise and replicate usage of the Interaction Workspace by Agents on the inbound side. Some are subtle; for example, the lookup of the target customers KLOUT social influence score when the outbound tweet is initiated. This activity is conducted asynchronously so that a failure of score to return from KLOUT will not prevent the agent from doing the response; and will appear after the interaction has already been started. You’ll notice that perhaps in the video.

2011 has been a fantastic year for the Anana team. We have met all of our internal and external targets on all fronts. I couldn’t be happier! 2011 has been a year of incredible innovation and execution. In preparing ourselves to continue our activities into next year I thought I’d take a moment to capture the key-highlights of our year. Also, perhaps, the activities that have driven us through 2011 and a solid pointer into the momentum for 2012. I’ll try and end this piece with a forwards looking view to predictions for next year.

Anana delivers solutions across two main lines of business. Our first of course is our Enterprise Contact Centre solutions unit.  How has this unit performed this year?  Not ignoring our ‘business as usual’ integration work, here are a few of our key milestones in the year;

1. We delivered a global virtualised contact centre solution for a household Brand. The heart of it was a SIP based solution, featuring the Genesys Voice Platform. Powered by Nuance Speech recognition, the Anana Speech Applications Framework (for VoiceXML and driving the Speech Recognition) its key highlight was service offerings in 17 countries supporting 12 languages concurrently.  Truly trans-continental call manipulation and custom telephony desktop and computer telephony integration
2. Our Anana Briefing Centre (ABC), a £1.4 Million (Sterling) investment went from concept to reality. The ABC is a state of the art demonstration and workshop facility that has allowed Anana, our partners and in some cases our ‘competitors’ to “Show” rather than “Tell” the 21st Century Customer Interaction Management capability of Genesys.  I think the most remarkable testament to the validity of the ABC is that our shortest lifecycle from first-view of the “Art of the Possible” to contract award for a large Bank in the Middle-East, who even flew all the way to the Centre for a Saturday workshop was 6 weeks!  By far though, the most telling thing that it has done, is to give our existing, as well as knew clients the confidence they need to proceed; and the ability to do so in record time-frames. Contact Centre projects are typically 18 months long; even in the pre-sales and sales lifecycle. 2011 saw our customers engaging, buying and deploying in weeks!  A high confidence in execution and delivery is a good place to begin new ways to engage!
3. We delivered the first Genesys Social Engagement projects in Europe, both with Tier 1 service providers that saw the first phases of true cross channel and multi-channel customer service go from concept to reality, including web-chat, email, Facebook and Twitter as customer service capabilities beyond inbound and outbound voice. We then went on to win a 3rd engagement in as many weeks with a Bank for the same blended eServices and Multichannel Customer Service capability.  Most remarkably we were asked to deliver one of these solutions, on premise for a Pilot in only 10 days.  We did it!  One of them is delivered in a hybrid Cloud; with Anana running all the technology, yet providing Desktop based access to Genesys Interaction Workspace over Xenapp.  Very cool stuff.
4. We delivered new mobile applications that bring customer services directly to the consumer smart-phone; including some cool concepts like reversing the role of the Contact Centre wallboard; showing customers how many agents were available for each media type so the customer could chose the means of engaging that made most sense and avoided delay.  This delivered customer service efficiency for both the customer and the customer services team.  A true win:win situation. The mobile app featured customer initiated ‘please call me back’, live text-chat and the ability for the customer themself to review their entire cross channel interaction history with their provider in real time.
5. We extended Genesys Social Engagement with several new features including Social Influence scoring and originate Tweet from the agent desktop without requiring a customer interaction and manipulated the Genesys solution to support Arabic language for Social Media interactions. Coolest use case derived was using Social Influence scores determined in eServices transactions to route Voice calls based not only on the assigned customer segment in Voice but their underlying Social Influence.  Let this be a sign of things to come!
6. We delivered new innovation in a hybrid self and assisted service customer service application for SMS.  A customer would interact with an automated Knowledge Management (FAQ) system by asking a question in SMS. If the customer then responds to the suggested response with another question, we take the ‘history’ of the self service interaction and offer the customer the opportunity to chat with an agent.  The customer continue’s to engage via SMS, but Anana technology takes those SMS interactions and delivers them to “web-chat” agents in the contact centre.  This is a twisted cross-channel conversation of course! The CSR is on a web-chat interface, and the customer is on an SMS interface; yet both can chat happily back and forth! This is an exciting blended technology capability; allowing the Enterprise to train once for Web-Chat in customer service, but extend other media through the same interface.  Not a big deal when you have to train 5 agents of course! But, what about the overhead if your busy hour team is 9000 agents strong?
7. We concluded our first Social Media and Customer Services contracted Business Consulting project that is already delivering the execution foundation for a significant project for one of our partners in early 2012.  This is new ground within the Genesys partner, Value Added Reseller (VAR) and Systems Integration Market.
8. We won some very large contracts in ongoing Mission Critical Customer Service platform and solutions support that give our customers assurance of Customer Service solutions availability 24x7x365 – the key thing is these mission critical support contracts are about yesterdays legacy technology support whilst in evolution to IP and SIP and Anana support operation has a hand on both at the same time.  Our customers are crossing the PSTN/TDM to SIP valley.  Anana is the bridge that is helping them to cross safely and with surety
9. We completed a very nice high-net-worth banking integration for one of the UK’s most prestigious Banks that integrated 1990′s mainframe with 2010 customer service platforms. Boy, I’d so love to say who it was for and why!
10. The Anana team stood side-by-side with Genesys and Alcatel-Lucent showcasing, demonstrating and tackling industry analysts and events all most if not all Contact Centre events in all themes eServices and Social Media related.  This included a humbling invite to showcase Genesys’ own technology to its European sales teams in Cannes in late summer.  That for me is the strongest vote of confidence in thought and market leadership with some of these leading themes.

In the service provider and Carrier Telecommunications business we had a great year too!

• Anana was selected out of the entire ecosystem of global “Applications Enablement” partners to assist Alcatel-Lucent at the IMS World Forum in Barcelona. It is an absolute honour for Anana to be aiding and abetting €17Billion company in showcasing their own capabilities to Global Audiences
• We completed the integration for its4u – the Anana Social Media and Voice Mail solution that links the dial-tone at the voice messaging event with the subscribers voice prompts.  Replacing the old and rather stagnant Voice Mail experience with one where the caller hears the latest Social Media updates of the mailbox owner before leaving a message.  This is a hybrid solution using Anana speech applications framework and the Genesys Voice Platform, Nuance Speech Recogntion, Ivona Text-to-Speech and the Converged Messaging System (CMS) and Messaging Applications Broker from Alcatel-Lucent.
• Anana has been formally selected by Alcatel-Lucent as an applications partner for innovation with the Converged Telephony System, the CTS (5420) and the IP Multimedia Subsystem with Alcatel-Lucents Agility API sets.  We are working closely together to showcase extreme innovation in manipulation and subscriber controlled telephony with integrated Voice User Interface, Graphical User Interface (web 2.0) that will be shown to the world for the first time at Mobile World Congress early next year.  This is really exciting stuff, but can’t talk about it too much yet!  Again we are offering a hybrid technical solution that uses the best in breed core Carrier equipment in the IMS core from Alcatel-Lucent, with the Genesys Voice Platform (for media in VoiceXML and call control in CC-XML).  Imagine a web2.0 dashboard with all your friends in it; like your own social dashboard. Click and drag your friends onto the ‘conference table’ and you’ll all be instantly on your own conference party line.  Sound Cool?  That’s just a small snippet out of the technology we are building in this space.

Looking ahead to 2012

Should I be bold and predict what I think are going to be the key things going on in the Contact Centre markets in 2012?  Perhaps; let’s see how accurate these turn out to be;

• Permira acquisition of Genesys Telecommunications labs will manifest itself through intense market engagement and focus on the key current drivers in Customer Service. These will be;
• Intense investment in Mobile Applications for Customer Service and Customer Interaction Management as such a high proportion of the consumer markets are now armed with smart devices
• eServices power-play for email, SMS, web-chat, web-callback and Social Media to rapidly evolve. Why? I think the Enterprise will learn very quickly in 2012 that they have to listen and engage WHERE their customers are trying or preferring to reach them, and secondly, they have to LISTEN and ENGAGE where customers are talking ABOUT them – both of these will work in harmony to force the enterprise to offer a holistic and channel intenstive customer service capability
• We will see a general increased focus on the role for customer services and customer care as it relates to Social Media as a paradigm. The enterprise will recognise for its full effect the “New Voice of the Customer”. 2011 saw the early adopters begin to define best practice and physical and technical capability to execute. 2012 will be the year where the rest of the market realises how far behind they are falling and how fast they will have to move to catch up. Not as a special business practice; but as a wholly and deeply integrated customer service capability in the core of the incumbent customer operation
• Twitter will relax their 1000 tweets a day and 250 direct messages a day limits for certain enterprise entities – making it possible for BRANDS to offer customer service on Twitter. 2011 saw the Enterprise facing a tough problem. 100,000 customers are tweeting at us with customer service queries but I can only respond to a maximum of 300 an hour, and even then only 1000 in any 24 hours.  This is a huge problem in late 2011 for those engaging in “Social Customer Service” and I hope and trust that Twitter will offer BRANDS the ability to execute in 2012
• Facebook will be less about BRAND broadcast and become more a platform to ‘engage’ with the customers who “LIKE” the brand
• Google+ likely to become the second Social Platform
• Our customers will be asking us to integrate YouTube and YouTube comments into customer care
• Anana is going to spend a lot of time and energy helping the Enterprise align and bring together the three key drivers of “customer engagement’
• Marketing & the Brand
• Online and Digital Strategy
• Customer Operations, Customer Service and Customer Care

On that note, Merry Christmas to to all our Customers, Partners and friends, and best wishes for 2012! If 2012 is only half as wild as 2011 it will still be a great year! Let’s see how the predications shape out through the year!