InformationWeek
Defining The Business Value Of Technology
October 4, 1999
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The integration of knowledge management into its call center may also reduce the time it takes to get new call-center operators up to speed, as well as reduce employee churn. "Right now, everything is head knowledge, what we call 'nogginware.' If a lead tech [person] walks out the door, all of his knowledge goes with him. It's brutal," Stellmon says. By archiving best practices, DecisionOne can more quickly train new agents on the proprietary software platforms they may have to support.
Access To Back-End Information
Many companies want to give their agents access to multiple databases. "The information our call-center agents need to do their jobs resides in three to five different systems that they have to manually access," says Tim O'Mara, assistant VP and general manager of voice engineering at National City Bank in Cleveland, Ohio.
Information useful to National City call-center agents is stored in customer-relationship management databases, Web servers, and other systems throughout the company. Access to the various systems is clumsy at best, requiring call-center agents to log on to different systems-each of which has a different type of interface.
This month, however, the company plans to deploy Lucent Technologies' CRM Central 2000, a Windows NT-based platform that links automatic call distribution systems with Oracle software, SQL databases, SAP applications, Web servers, mainframe systems, and other back-end systems.
"CRM Central 2000 pulls together data from all these systems into a single place and presents information to call-center agents in a way that they are able to manage," says O'Mara. "It pulls together systems that have traditionally stood on their own and combines them into one single point of control that can be easily manipulated, rather than having to manipulate several different applications from several different points in several different languages."
It is this type of tight integration with existing back-end systems that IT managers will have to incorporate into their call centers. No longer isolated departments within the enterprise, modern call centers are becoming the focal point for customer service and interaction. Agents must have quick and easy access to the servers, mainframes, and legacy systems that contain accounting, billing, product, and other information. They must also be able to communicate with each other, drawing from a common knowledge repository that helps them provide better service to customers. And they will need the ability to communicate with customers using whatever medium the customer wants. Together, these capabilities define the new modern call center in the Internet Age.
Archiving and providing easy access to best practices reduces the length of customer calls, which directly affects DecisionOne's bottom line. "We can reduce call time, and when call time isn't reduced, we can increase the quality of the service we do," says Stellmon. "In the past, a technician might provide a solution that is more or less effective than another technician's solution. Now, by accessing the knowledge base, all the answers should be the same."
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The modern call center, however, needs access to more than just a knowledge-management system with best-practices data. Some companies are finding that agents need access to multiple back-end systems to provide the best service to customers. The way this is usually done is via computer-telephony integration, a common-but not always implemented-feature in call-center systems. As a customer's call is routed to an agent, computer-telephony integration software lets the automatic call distributor connect to an accounting or other type of database and let the agent see all the customer information he or she needs on-screen
Computer-telephony integration is notoriously difficult to implement, particularly if a company's call center uses and accesses systems from multiple vendors. At J.D. Edwards, for example, callers enter their customer identification number using telephone keypads. Then the InterVoice-Brite interactive voice response system accesses the customer's records stored on an AS/400 host and provides this information to the agent's screen. But when the interactive voice-response system hands off calls to the Siemens ResumeRouting software, the customer ID number is not transferred with the call, requiring the agent to ask the caller for the number. J.D. Edwards plans to implement middleware to resolve this glitch within six months.
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