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!

Further to our recent post describing the development of the first concept Customer Services application on the iPhone we are pleased to continue our exploration of this theme with a video of the application in action.

Anana will be showcasing a version of this application at the premier Call Centre Expo in London next week. Please pop by and ask to see it in action in real-time. We’ll be able to show both Customer Services Representative as well as the Customer Experience from the same place at the show.

For best results make the player below fullscreen and select the HD Mode On format for the video.

As part of our continuing exploration of all things relating to the cross-channel Customer Experience we have been doing some work creating a “bridge” between the Genesys Platform Software Development Kit (PSDK) and other media formats and devices.  The latest exploration is in the form of an Apple iPhone application that acts as a gateway into customer services from the popular Apple device.  We have created a range of Atomic Web Services that allow us to populate the iPhone with a Customer Services Application that brings the consumer into the Contact Centre!

What type of features are available?

Our initial exploration of the capability includes an ability for a customer to initiate a chat session, request a callback (with options to see currently booked call-backs and reschedule them) and an option to review their own entire interaction history with the Customer Services Team across all channels and media.  We are particularly interested in the option to publish a customers own interaction history for them to their device so that they have instant access to the ‘single version of the truth’ and recorded by ‘Customer Services’ across all interactions with the customer over time.  This attitude could be a significant catalyst in bringing the customer themselves into the Customer Services activities; empowering them with the same view of activities, potentially improving loyalty and also reducing churn propensity.

Architecture

The architecture is based on sound design principles, utlising out-of-the-box shipping Platform SDK capability expressed by the underlying maturity of the Genesys solution framework and Atomic Web Services.  Anana has written a suite of Atomic Services that enable a range of media and interactions via the Genesys SDK into the framework.  Currently written are a few of obviously many Atomic Services libraries that enable for a huge and very interesting range of customer service applications to be enabled on literally any device; including smartphones, set-top-boxes, internet ready TV.  Anana has completely separated away the presentation logic away from the underlying data-architecture using Atomic Web Services. Therefor any presentation device capable of using HTTP is available for this type of service expression.  HTTP requests arrive from the device to the Anana Atomic Services, and we respond back typically with JSON (Java Script Object Notation).  This allows us to manipulate the presentation layer back to each device type with remarkable flexiblity.

We had the pleasure of hosting a large scale demonstration and briefing of the Genesys 8 Customer Interaction Management Platform to approximately 35 delegates yesterday. A very hectic, busy, noisy and fun day indeed.  The briefing featured a full review of;

• Genesys Inbound Voice on SIP Server with IP endpoints
• Skills Group – Customer Care, Sales, Accounts & Billing and Customer Support CSR skill teams
• Genesys chat – live customer service Chat Interaction Management (Genesys Web Chat)
• Genesys Agent to Agent instant messaging (IM)
• Genesys Email Interaction

We had intended to demonstrate a range of contact centre scenario’s, but by the time we’d described how a call is placed into the call centre with all of the interactions between the SIP Server, Universal Routing Server (URS), Statistics Server (Stat Server) and the new Genesys Media Server (Stream Manager replacement) to do something simple like play an announcment which is time sensitive, e.g. Good Morning, Good Afternoon etc, we found the briefing taking its own direction; driven by active and engaged interaction with our client who immediately bombarded our team with hundreds of questions, immediately trying out what had just been learned and explored.

It was powerfully effectve to show and explore how Genesys CCPulse, Stat-Server, Infomart and Genesys Advisor alongside statistics and performance tools inherent to the Genesys Agent Desktop (GAD) and Interaction Workspace all worked together to provide a total and complete view of operational performance.  Especially impressive was making changes to routing, skills and queues (applications) in real-time and observing the impact immediately on how the call centre performed.

I think the client especially enjoyed seeing the ultimate change in the modern call centre.  They are, after all, typically associated with the engaged and deliberate management of inbound telephone calls and outbound telephone calls.  What is newer, is embracing any media or any inbound channel with the vehemence and rigour of telephones; but now applied to instant messaging, email, web-chat and voice, not as conversations, but as interactions!  It suddenly became clear to most why Genesys calls this the “Customer Interaction Management Platform” because it is all about managing Interactions; not just telephone conversations!

We also had a breakout discovering Alcatel-Lucent Unified Communications Suite, MyTeamwork and the brand new IC Phone!  Very cool stuff!

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.