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!

Interactive Voice Response is “Art” not “Science”

Background

For the last 25 years or so of my career much of the specific focus has been on Interactive Voice Response (IVR). That includes stints running Sales and Marketing for a Speech Recognition Vendor (Vocalis) with its own IVR platform, then as a specialist in Directory Assistance which of course had a strong play in call “Topping and Tailing” on IVR (Personalized Agent Greetings and Automated Number Release…”The Number you require is [Readout Digits]”; (Varetis, now Volt-Delta).  Then a pretty long stint delivering solutions heavy in IVR with Periphonics (Nortel Networks). Then a few years with VoiceGenie. After that a good long stint with Genesys as their Global Sales Operations Director; running Genesys global efforts in Sales Operations for the Genesys Voice Platform.  (GVP just got cited for the 7^th year running (Garnter) as the leading IVR platform.  I like to think I had a hand to play in the success of that platform. ) Perhaps, after all these years with a key focus on IVR I can claim to know a little about it.

So, in this post, I’ve tried to collate 12 key highlights that underpin a successful IVR solution. Not from the perspective of the Vendor or Platform, but from the perspective of the IVR end-user; your customer!  These highlights are presented without priority or any relevance to their ordering.  As a whole, I argue, if you focussed just a little of your next IVR project on these highlights then your IVR solution will be well on its way to being ‘one of the better IVR solutions in the market’!  For the ‘highlights’ I’m concentrating the lines of consideration around the Genesys Voice Platform. It’s the platform we current integrate and deliver solutions with here at Anana, and I spent the last 7 years of my life helping to build, mould, shape and manipulate its capability to its current market position as the Best IVR Platform in the Market.

IVR – Highlight One – Ease of Use

The user must find the application Easy to use.  It must be intuitive, easy to understand and it must be absolutely convenient to the needs of the customer.  These sound like simple expectations; but they are very hard to meet without very careful human-factors analysis.

IVR – Highlight Two – Integrate

The IVR must be integrated into the business, the back-ends, the call-centre, such that its role is complementary to the logic and business process in operational customer care.  The IVR must be aware of the ‘current call centre load’ and be able to adapt dynamically to the pressures on the assisted service side of the call centre.  If queue lengths are long (wait times) then let callers know and offer alternative treatments (call-backs, Virtual Hold Technology – VHT).  When presenting a caller to the agent after a self-service interaction; make sure that the history/context and state in the IVR dialogue is presented to the Agent so that they DO NOT ask the same questions again!  IVR, without CTI and Screen-Pop is not doing its job!  The transition from self-service to assisted-service must be seamless, and help the caller.

IVR-Highlight Three – Make it Fast

It must be fast.  Your customers have called you for a reason.  They want something now, not in a while.   Todays market is a market driven by instant needs and little patience.  So, fast means the IVR must be QUICK, it must expose the caller options that they are likely to self-serve for, and they should be able to get to the options they need quickly and without going through ‘hoops’. Menu’s and options should be intuitive, and no more than 3 wide by 3 deep; especially for Dual Tone Multi-Frequency (DTMF) based IVR solutions.  The intra-prompt latency should be negligible.  If swapping from one dialogue state to another, say, moving from one prompt set to another element of the dialogue then the prompt latency needs to be measured in 10’s of milliseconds; not seconds!  I once did a study of human perceived latencies on the telephone, and 500 milliseconds felt like a ‘lifetime’ to the participants!  GVP for example offers intra-prompt latency of as little as 13 milliseconds; this is NOT detectable to the human ear.  If you click a link in your browser and it takes 5 seconds to render the next page; not a big deal.  Use the same interface latency in IVR and your callers will hang up before the next prompt plays.

IVR-Highlight Four – What is your Brand?

What is your Brand? How do you ‘look and feel’ from your callers perspective?  What Persona or Character should your IVR have?  What Personality?  Upbeat? Traditional? Conservative?.  Have a look at the brand logo on the right.  You instantly recognize it right?  Now, think about this question hard….”If you were to call this company right now, and their IVR answered you, what would you hear? Male Voice? Female Voice?  Can you see where I’m going with this consideration? Even the most mundane question like that is profound!  Get it wrong and your IVR solution will sound wrong, feel wrong, and will suffer less ‘adoption’ by your users.  They won’t be able to tell you why they “Don’t like it”….but often, underneath all the SCIENCE is the mere fact that the ART of meeting the callers ‘expectation’ has failed to be met.  Give the BRAND question a huge amount of thought. Call Anana’s vConnect Auto-Attendant on 08444 999 888 (UK) or +44 8444 999 888 (Internationally) and listen HARD for Brand, Persona, Look & Feel.  This interface wasn’t created in 2 minutes! Yes, its driven by Speech Recogntion too!

IVR-Highlight Five – Do not TRAP

Do NOT trap customers.  The IVR should SOLICIT the caller engagement but NOT TRAP them in the IVR.  As soon as your IVR comes over like a trap it will be negated, avoided, or zero’d out.  If transfer to the Customer Service Representative is an option in your dialogue, make it the FIRST one!  You’ll be surprised how few of your callers will immediately take that route.  We have all seen the huge PRESS activity on how to avoid IVR, and get through them; with cheats, backdoors, or even scripts on the Web that help the caller get to the Customer Service Representative quickly.  The IVR has a supporting ROLE; not a jailers role!

IVR-Highlight Six – Audio is a poor communications channel

Audio is the weakest means that humans have for communicating with each other.  In any person to person communication a full 93% of what the parties understand about the communication is driven by NON-VERBAL-COMMUNCATION Stimuli.  What they see, know, interpret, and perceive drives what they understand.  Audio is WEAK.  Only 7% of what people understand in any dialogue interaction comes from what they HEAR!!  The other 93% comes from other cues.  Over the years I have done transcription on human responses to IVR questions as part of dialogue tuning exercises and I have seen some hilarious, but business defying responses coming back from callers.  Some still cause a rib-tickle.  Funny these responses may be, but they kill the business case for your IVR if you ask the wrong questions in the wrong order and solicit the right response and the wrong time!

IVR-Highlight Seven – Interaction History and State

Integrate the IVR with other Self-Service Channels.  If a customer places an order on the website, and subsequently phones in to check the progress of the order it must be up-to-date and timely.  Better still, a transaction started but not completed on the web channel should be easily continued on the IVR!  Sounds difficult right?  No, it isn’t!  What can your IVR do today, if say, a caller phones in having managed to get about 50% of their way through a complex interaction on the web, for example, they are half way through completing a TAX RETURN, and find that they cannot understand the next question.  If they phoned to get specialist support (yep, you have no web-chat or co-browse either!) then does your IVR say, “I can see that you are half way through your Tax return, you appear to have stopped at question 18, is that why you are calling?”  This type of complex interaction history across channels has been available with GVP since 2006.  We are now in 2011?  Have you looked into this yet?  It has a huge and profound impact on cross-channel communications, and managing conversations with your customers as “interactions”.  Genesys has sold this concept as the “intelligent Customer Front Door” – iCFD, and subsequently as the “Conversation Manager”.  These capabilities are exciting, actual, capable, and deliver an extremely rich customer experience.  Have you ever been doing a complex IVR transaction that failed for reasons beyond your control?  Say, for example, you were in the middle of conducting a funds transfer over your local Bank IVR system.  You mobile signal decayed, and you lost the signal.  How much effort do you perceive in phoning back in, going through all the hassle of Identification and Verification, to have to start the WHOLE damn transaction all over again from the beginning.  Wouldn’t it be much better for you to hear “Hi, welcome back, we see you were recently attempting a funds transfer; would you like to continue where you left off?”.  Now that is profound!  It has a massive impact on the “Customer Effort”  – remember, the lower the effort, the less likely you are to lose that customer (See Customer Effort Score tags in our blogs for more information on this theme)

IVR-Highlight Eight – Make it Fun

Your IVR solution does not have to be dry, boring, and sterile. There is nothing wrong with making it shine by making it fun to use.  Make it memorable, different. Consider different forms of dialogue for different demographics. Many of our IVR solutions here at Anana use different personas for different age groups of users so that the experience maps to the expectation, language, cadence, intonation and dialect of the end-user.

IVR-Highlight Nine – IVR is not SCIENCE

With modern IVR’s like GVP the baselines of the platform are based on standards. Standards driven by wide consortiums of input points across the industry. VoiceXML, Media Resource Control Protocol (MRCP), Call Control; CC-XML, Web Services etc all create a common foundation upon which to build effective IVR solutions; almost to the point where the applications are transportable across IVR systems.  However, the fact that the science is no longer platform or vendor proprietary does not change the difficulty of doing IVR well.  It simply moved the projects from being “Science and Engineering” heavy into the “Art of Interactions”.  Today, good IVR is about Art. Anyone can create a basic IVR dialogue using VoiceXML. It can be done quickly.  It can be done BADLY with even more ease than ever before in the market.  So, picking the right IVR platform is still important; but more important than that is to pick the right SKILLS to deploy the resulting man-machine interface well!

IVR-Highlight Ten – IVR is not an excuse for bad queuing processes

Most relevant market available call centre technology from leading vendors puts a significant focus on queuing.  In simple terms; parking a caller in a manner that allows them to wait for the next available resource to handle their enquiry.  If you use your IVR as the queuing mechanism then you should very carefully consider its role and what you do with the caller when they are in the queue.  Do NOT tell them “You call is important to us, please wait, there is a 15 minute wait time……you call is important…..”.  There is a disjoint isn’t there between trying to tell the caller that their interaction is important but still opting to tell them that it isn’t important. Play appropriate treatments.  Consider inserting relevant media updates; for example, if you know the identity of the caller, it is easy to play TWEETS or FACEBOOK status updates to them from their friends, followers etc.  If the queue state is known to be lengthy, then offer simple call-back option, even if not as deliberate as ‘place holding’ in the queue with the Virtual Hold engine on GVP.  It is cheap to queue on IVR electronically; doing it badly is expensive to your customer relationship!

IVR-Highlight Eleven – Type of Input Interface

To deploy or not to deploy Automated/Automatic Speech Recognition?  There are many cases where Speech Recognition offers a great benefit, not only to the business but to the caller.  Complex menu’s may be offered, complex inputs can be gathered from the caller, and in some cases complex interactions may be handled with ease.  Higher tiered speech recognition capabilities also include “Natural Language” capability; with suitable design and implementation these can offer incredibly user-intuitive user interfaces.  It is for example, next-to-impossible to collect complex mixed alpha-numeric inputs from callers in DTMF based inputs only.  For example, a Canadian or UK postal code. Complex Account Numbers and so on cannot be modelled easily with any surety in DTMF inputs.  The main lesson; do not try to achieve the role of each domain with the other; for example, asking a caller to “Press or say One” to make a choice.  Your IVR should be clear and the caller shouldn’t have to be TOLD what to do.  If well designed it will be inherently OBVIOUS what to do for the largest proportion of your customers.

IVR-Highlight Twelve – Make the IVR Relevant

The IVR has a tough job to do. It works 24x7x365, doesn’t have a Union, and doesn’t take vacations. It is the first thing your customers meet when they approach your company over the telephony channel.  Please make sure that your IVR is RELEVANT and does everything that your customer needs and expects 100% of the time.  Many IVR systems have disjointed dialogue structures that have grown ‘organically’ over time; often at the hands of many.  These joints in flavour, functionality, human-factors, design, voice-talent and brand are obvious.

Summary

IVR has the capability to offer the Enterprise absolutely huge returns on their investment (ROI).  Often the ROI of an IVR is calculated in as little as a few weeks!  Good ROI though is not an excuse for badly deployed, designed and implemented IVR.  IVR is your front-man. IVR is your customer front-door. IVR has the perfect capability to link seamlessly and be deeply integrated into your business systems, business rules, contact centre and workforce management systems so that it acts as an integral element of your overall Customer Interaction Management Strategy. It’s role is to reduce CUSTOMER EFFORT, not increase it.  It’s role is not to prevent your callers speaking to your Customer Service Representatives. It’s role is to help them do their job more efficiently, effectively. CSR’s that enjoy complex interactions with customers are happier than those dealing with routine, mundane, boring and repetitive interactions.  Allow your IVR to reduce the burden of the routine interactions; and make sure that the right customer, at the right time, gets to the right resource in your Enterprise with the right attached Data.  The lower you make your customers effort, the less likely they are to leave you!

One of the largest considerations for our Anana Briefing Centre is modelling and replicating traffic scenario’s in actual call center environments. With 2000 Genesys agent positions, across all lines of multimedia, multichannel, eServices we have a complex modelling problem at hand. Remember, those channels are inbound voice, outbound voice, inbound email, outbound email, inbound SMS, outbound SMS, agent-to-agent chat, agent-to-supervisor chat, transfers of all channels, web chat, web co-browse, email…..the list seems endless.

How will Anana model actual traffic patterns and scenario’s for the operational call-centre?

We propose using 3 tools to model inbound traffic to the call centre;

1. Anana Agent Telephony Desktop (BOT)
2. SIP-P
3. Cyara Solutions

Cyara Solutions is teaming with Anana with a slight twist to the usual value proposition in testing and monitoring the Genesys Call Center Software Framework into one with us holistically targetted to SIMULATION of call center traffic. 

By linking the Cyara solution with the custom Bot and SIP-P test capabilities at Anana we are able to light up all 2000 agent positions with real-time, actual load, and representative traffic for a wide range of industry verticals.  Cyara is working closely with Anana to express the capability fully within the Anana Briefing Centre.  The Genesys Framework and Customer Interaction Management Platform is SIP Server based, and we’re running 1996 seats as ‘simulated’ Genesys agent positions, and the remaining 4 positions are physical positions in the call centre suite.  Paul Pearson, our Platform Practice Lead is busy creating models of traffic and interactions across all channels and media, and exporting configurations for each; so that Anana can reset the call centre back to a default operational state; and then quickly reset again to, say, the operational needs of an airline call centre, a banking call centre, a retail sales call centre, a Government Call Centre or any other required situation.

Traffic and Load Testing

We are commonly requested to conduct large scale / operational load and peformance tests of the Genesys solution. We conducted one recently using a combination of the Anana Bot’s and SIP-P scripting, taking one of the largest Genesys installations in the UK from its baseline required 6 CAPS (Call Attempts per Second) to over 20!  Load testing of planned configurations will be an important compenent in the Briefing Centres’ tasking; I can see that happening already!

Self and Assisted Service Modelling

We’ll be modelling transactions on the common inbound channels in both self-service and assisted service scenario’s. For example, an inbound call to the call center will be simulated by our tools on the Genesys Voice Platform (GVP) using our modelling tools, to interact in real time with the self-service dialogue, then returning that call instance to the Genesys Routing Engine (URS) to select an agent based on location, skill and availability. There’s a good chance that the call is forwarded to an agent in the dummy-pool, but even there, the call will be simulated in the interaction with assisted-service, by modelling key-strokes, inputs, screen-pop, CTI, interactions and delays associated with all the facets of call presentation to the agent; and his or her subsequent interactions with the caller. We’ll even model post call wrap-up, and other administrative tasks that stop that customer service representative becoming ready again in the pool of targets for the next call.

As you can see, all this traffic will build real-time as well as historic reports; allowing Anana to help its clients understand actual “What if?” scenario’s in managing and testing operational changes in real time. For example;

1. What happens to my service levels if I add web chat to a pool of agents handling inbound voice?
2. If I increase the amount of traffic going to self-service what is the impact on my workforce management strategy?
3. If I change my business rules for when should my routing strategy push calls to my outsourcer what is the impact on my own call centers performance?
4. What is the impact on my customer service representatives of adding co-browse, web chat and email to inbound and outbound voice?
5. I’d like to test without pressure what my customer service representatives think about migrating from Genesys Agent Desktop to the new Genesys Interaction Workspace
6. We are adding new “applications” (In Genesys terms these are queues) to my contact centre. How do I add these new application to Genesys Advisor and set the appropriate Key Performance Indicators? (KPI’s)
7. We are thinking about adding Conversation Manager (UCS – Universal Contact Server) so we can offer the intelligent Customer Front Door (iCFD) to GVP applications; and share the Conversation Manager capability with the Web Server so that a failed transaction in self-service on the Web Site can be offered from the point it was left at on the IVR when the caller next phones in. How is that done?
8. I’m thinking of using Network SIP Server as well as SIP server alongside my Alcatel-Lucent OmniPCX Enterprise edition? Can I test the high availability and fail-over scenario’s? How can I ensure calls will always make it to my agents?
9. I would like to run my call center on SIP server only without an ACD (Automatic Call Distributor) or PBX (Private Branch Exchange). I want to see what happens when a SIP server failure occurs? What is the customer experience and impact of a failure of one of the SIP Servers under full call center loading?

This could be a very extensive list of scenario’s!  Our new Briefing Centre is getting its first large scale use this coming Wednesday and we’ve been rallying like ants to get the final bits ready.

If you have a particular call center scenario that you are interested in testing or modelling then please don’t hesitate to give us a call. We’d be delighted to help you explore the capabilities.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=osvb7Cz5Qs8 This is a hilarious Seinfeld clip that I have often used to show a scenario where Speech Recognition (ASR – automated speech recognition) definitely has a role.  Anana has delivered some of the highest density complex speech applications available anywhere in local markets; and we know at least 120,000 people are using our speech solutions every day!

There is a lot that you can achieve with a Dual Tone Multi-Frequency (DTMF) based IVR dialogue; but that soon runs out of room for complex transactions; especially when you follow the ‘rule-of-thumb’ that a DTMF menu should be no more than 3 items wide x 3 items deep (the 3×3 rule!).

I must have seen this video clip a hundred times or more since it was first used to describe the ‘role of speech recognition’ in certain scenario’s; and I still think it is hilarious.  There’s another Seinfeld clip of going out for a coffee with a lady who works as voice-talent for an IVR vendor; that one is hilarious too.  I’ll post that one soon.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=95aJ6fMw5eI I like this video from ANZ (in Australia). It’s light, funny and topical.  Watch the video yourself and see what you think.  For me, some of the key observations are;

1. It focusses on Automation – using Robots to replicate the traditional function of the IVR
2. It is chaotic – flailing Robots heading in all directions
3. It features ‘aggression’ ….”Exterminate, Exterminate!”

The video is right though. Most Interactive Voice Response (IVR) is poorly designed, doesn’t focus on usability and the applications are often complex having grown organically over a period of time.

Anana focusses heavily on the appropriate blending of assisted and self-service. IVR especially in the form of GVP (Genesys Voice Platform) is very carefully deployed so that the experience is appropriate for our clients customers.  With todays technology and interfaces Call Centre is no longer about Science, but is about Art!  Yes, VoiceXML and CCXML make it easy to deploy IVR applications on almost any platform. Being able to use these standards ‘technicall’ does not mean you have the capability to do it well! (Think about the analogy – anyone can paint if they have a brush and some paint; but that does not guarantee a good outcome. The art of customer care. The art of interaction management. The art of getting people what they need, when they need it is like hiring a really good artist to paint exactly the picture you want. More importantly its about painting the picture your customers expect to see! 

We use the Genesys iCFD, “intelligent Customer Front Door” and Conversation Manager capabilities; mixed with business rules and requirements of the client to ensure that the moment customers hit the call centre, via whatever channel or media, that they feel important, recognized, valued and that their ‘effort’ in conducting their enquiry or transaction is going to be easy!  Blending attractive user experience with quality customer care, reducing the customers effort (real or perceived) and the effective management of your resources are the keys to succesfull call center operations.

We focus on design and experience and work backwards from that to deliver extremely succesfull call center solutions for our customers. Hopefully we’ll never deliver a call centre that even slightly reflects the ANZ video!