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An Integrated Solution for Context-based Customer Experience Management

Table of Contents
Section 1: Introduction ........................................ 1 Section 2: What Is Context-Based Customer Experience Management .................................... 2 Section 3: Limitations Of Current Point-To-Point Customer Service Architectures ........................ 3 Section 4: A Next Generation Customer Experience Architecture .................................... 4 Section 5: Conclusion .......................................... 9 Section 6: About Avaya Aura Contact Center ..................................................... 10

David Bauer, Avaya Contact Center Architecture Mani Gopalan, Avaya Contact Center Marketing June 2010

INTRODUCTION
The next phase in customer serviceend-to-end customer experience managementis based on an evolution that is well underway in contact center infrastructure: from voice-centric contact centers to the addition of multimedia contacts and now to fully-integrated, context-based customer experience management. This transformation requires enterprises to fully adapt to changes in customer demographics, interaction types and evolve to offer consistent, satisfying interactions across multiple channels: voice, e-mail, IM, video as well as social networks. Moving to a customer experience management approach requires an infrastructure that is open, scalable and capable of bringing together state-of-the art multimedia contact handling and integration with enterprise applications, fully preserving customer context. Combined with sophisticated reporting and analytics, this infrastructure will enable enterprises to deliver differentiated, customer experience across all forms of contact and social media. This white paper describes the components of such an infrastructure, many of which have already been implemented by Avaya in the Avaya Aura Contact Center Suite.

WHITE PAPER

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WHAT IS CONTEXT-BASED CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE MANAGEMENT

Next-generation, context-based, customer experience management is the ability to streamline information, processes and communications to provide a consistent, high-value, result-oriented, end-customer engagement. The guiding principles of this transition include providing customer service centers with the ability to: Anticipate: By overcoming traditional communication barriers and leveraging realtime, persistent context for proactive engagement. Automate: Via communications-enabled business systems for effective voice and web self-service transactions. Accelerate: Through optimizing agent, expert, supervisor and self-service interactions, across channels, for efficient operations.
Improved First Session Resolution Improved Customer Satisfaction
Immerse the Agent into the Experience

Manage, Learn, Apply Orchestrate the Experience

Bring Full Context to Every Session

Improved Agility
Connect & Open the Enterprise Application Integration

Higher Revenue Lower TCO Increased Flexibility

At its heart, customer experience management is the ability to conduct an orchestrated customer engagement across all touch points. This is a multi-pronged effort that requires implementing the right technology, adapting work flows, creating context and expanding the scope of performance evaluations. To evolve and integrate their communications, information and processes, enterprises need to focus on these core components: Connected/open enterprise: Easily and cost-effectively integrate communications, information and processes inside the contact center and across the entire enterprise. Application integration: Integration of real-time communications with enterprise applications, information and processes. Orchestrated experience: Proactively manage all interactions across all media and modes, agent-assisted or self-service, including warm handoffs. Bring full context to every session: Collect, grow and leverage information about customers and their environment to improve the quality of every interaction and transaction.

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Immerse the agent in the experience: Provide a unified and contextual desktop to enable agents and experts outside the contact center with real-time information to address customer needs. Manage, learn, apply: Deliver a closed loop process for leveraging historic and real-time insights to manage operations and continuously adapt.

LIMITATIONS OF CURRENT POINT-TO-POINT CUSTOMER SERVICE ARCHITECTURES

Many contact centers today have taken preliminary steps (for example, screen pops) to introduce basic customer information. While these efforts have delivered value, they fall far short of delivering a scalable, cost-effective approach to orchestrating customer experience across all touch points: Inefficient to develop: Customer experience solutions on existing architectures require custom development that is expensive, difficult to build and maintain, and even then limited in its functionality (i.e., it is difficult to include a wide range of applications, such as end-to-end customer experience recording). Limited media flexibility: Existing custom-development solutions do not easily generalize to support contact channels beyond voice. Little context: There is little ability to incorporate recent contextual data in customer interactionsfor example from other enterprise applications. Limited scalability: A large customer service operation with thousands of agents would require a complex, hierarchical configuration, networking several nodes together and still not deliver a uniform experience.

A NEXT GENERATION CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE ARCHITECTURE

Given the limitations of current communications architectures, the question is, What kind of infrastructure is needed to support end-to-end customer experience management? The answer is an infrastructure that is open, scalable and capable of integrating multimedia contact handling, enterprise applications and full delivery of customer context.

SIP/SOA/Web Service: Delivering the Persistent Conference Model

Session Initiation Protocol (SIP), in conjunction with open, standards-compliant Services Oriented Architecture (SOA) and web services, are critical enablers of this architecture, providing complementary and more capable methods of integrating communications, information and processes than is possible using previous technologies. Leveraging a SIP architecture enables a simpler, more cost-effective, more flexible and scalable model for application, context and multimedia communication integration across the enterprise. Decisions about what resources (people, data, applications, etc.) are needed to support an end customer are based on business need and not limited by technology.

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A SIP-enabled endpoint (phone, PC, smartphone, etc.) provides a range of informationpresence, availability, the types of media availablethat the contact center can use to select appropriate treatment. By making interactions session-based, participants can move across media while anchored within the session without being transferred or otherwise interrupted during the interaction. The result is a persistent conference for customer service interactiona significant change from point-to-point, single-media interactions in the traditional customer service model.
End Customer

Standards-based, simpler architecture Easier to integrate applications Interaction anchored at a single point and resources conferenced in
Analytics, Call Recording...other resources

Customer Speci c Data Reporting Insights

Self-Service

Session Context

Expert Assist

Persistent Conference

Intelligent routing based on knowledge of customer and the context

Agent Assist Recording

Host Data Exchange

More Cost-effective Development: SIP eliminates much of the pain associated with solutions development on existing communications architectures and simplifies the process of integrating applications such as end-toend customer experience recording. Web services interfaces can seamlessly access data within other enterprise systems, or deposit information into those systems. And because the application design environment is not unique to voice, these same web services interfaces can be used to exchange data with external systems regardless of the media a customer is using to interact with your enterprise. Because web services interfaces are fairly ubiquitous on enterprise applications and knowledge-base tools, this paradigm can be used to integrate all these systems into the multimedia dialogs and agent interfaces that are used to interact with customers. In addition, the standards-based approach to contact center integration encourages the development of an ecosystem of third-party application developers who can provide unique value by building web services interfaces to leverage their applications in the contact center.

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Contextual Information: SOA web services interfaces facilitate the delivery of contextual information that all can be used to better engage and satisfy the end customer. This goes far beyond traditional historical data and includes: Information about a poor experience in self-service that may have occurred in the last few minutes. Behavior analytics that can be accounted for in real timenot simply what the customer has indicated in previous interactions. Warm handoffsfrom agent to agent, agent to supervisor, self-service to agent, etc.to help eliminate data loss. In traditional transfers, on average 25% of all relevant customer information is lost.1 Information retrieved from back office systems and activities such as loan processing, insurance claim processing and service dispatchboth commercial and proprietary applications. Information from third-party applications such as Salesforce.com, Microsoft Dynamics, Oracle (Siebel), and SAP. These integrations in particular provide the rich contextual information that arms contact center personnel with complete knowledge of the customer. Enterprisewide Scalability: SIP architecture, when combined with Aura Session Manager, flattens and simplifies the configuration, introducing a new level of scalability. A configuration can now scale across the enterprise into several thousand agents and knowledge workers. This architecture is also call-server agnostic: agents and the supervisors get a uniform experience as the features are no longer limited to the features in the call server. Integrated Solution Suite: SIP and an open, standards-compliant Services Oriented Architecture (SOA) support the delivery and implementation of an integrated suite of solutions. An integrated suite is easier to deploy, operate and maintain than disparate solutions that were developed separately. For example, a common service creation environment can be used to develop workflows across both agent-assisted and self-service applications. Context and performance data can be more easily shared across the enterprise.

2010 Contact Center survey conducted by Webtorials, sponsored by Avaya

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Work Assignment: From Call Routing to Resource Selection

Contact centers have long benefited from intelligent Automated Call Distribution (ACD)-based call routing to take advantage of agent skills and equitably distribute customer contacts. A next-generation contact center takes the concept of resource selection and work assignment to a new level through the work assignment engine: a powerful platform that can evaluate interactions, work items and available resources using a far wider range of variablesincluding key performance indicators and business objectivesleading to more appropriate and accurate resource selection decisions. The powerful capabilities of the work assignment engine open the door to a wide array of new contact center functionality: Routing not just customer interactions but work requests through a universal queue (e.g., routing recent customer claim forms to check for validation). Incorporating key performance indicators and business value metrics connected to revenue, profit, cash flow, agent close rates, customer satisfaction levels, etc. Using contextual information about customer intent and value (for example, based on recent customer inquiries) to assign an agent to the interaction. The ability to make a wider range of work assignments using an expanded set of business value criteria across a single universal routing queue dramatically increases the versatility of the contact center as a business unit and as a contributor to overall enterprise performance. Assembling Resources: Using that same information, the work assignment engine directs the session controller to assemble additional resourcesagents, experts, self-service applications, etc. to be available as part of a conference. Self-learning: Taking into consideration a wide range of variables expands the opportunities for self-learning. For example, if the outcome of the interaction is not successful (a lost sale, a poor customer evaluation), the information gets fed back into the work assignment engine and factored into future resource selection decisions. Storing the Session: Once the interaction is complete, the context of the interaction is stored to form the starting point for the next time the customer contacts the business. Conducting consumer interactions through collaborative conference-based sessions and then maintaining a history of the interaction speeds average handle times and improves overall customer satisfaction rates.

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Enhanced, Integrated Self-service

Enhancing self-service is another key aspect of transforming traditional customer service into end-to-end customer experience management. Self-service options are significantly improved by the effective use of contextual information, i.e., replacing existing static dialogs with dynamic dialogs that more effectively incorporate real-time information about the customer or prospect. In addition, creating an open, universal queue for interaction via any media enables warm hand-off between self-service and agent-assisted interactions, enhancing the appeal of the self-service option (i.e., no more voice mail jail) and promoting an image of always-open-for-business.

Performance Management
The success of any experience management effort depends on the ability to gather and effectively deliver actionable performance intelligence to users, stakeholders and decision makers. This means erasing the traditional boundaries that separate real-time and historical reporting, analytics, workforce optimization, and communications, and delivering a unified application that reduces the time spent analyzing data and allows more time for improving performance. Performance management reporting needs to include the following: Real-time unified reporting: Event feeds that capture real-time measures for display on real-time dashboards: view trends, compare time periods, have notifications launched from a single place, taking advantage of dynamic filtering. Historical unified reporting: A central resource where data from various sources is staged and then, through extract, transform and load (ETL) tools, accessible via common keys. This includes end-to-end historical reports in daily, weekly and monthly versions for relative and specific time periods, as well as detail and trace reports for agents and contacts across data sources. Analytics: Go beyond reporting what occurred and provide insight into why it happened, using KPIs, reports, scorecards and dashboards. Analytics can take data from existing contact center reporting systems and combine it with business data or workforce optimization data to determine the effect of a given action. In the future, real-time speech analytics can be added that could influence the routing or processing of a contact. Workforce optimization: Provide the complete ecosystem with call recording, quality monitoring, work force management, eLearning, customer surveys and speech analytics. Multiple Work Items: Reporting enhancements help measure the performance of agents working on multiple work items. This presents a holistic view of agent performance to the supervisor.

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Unified Agent Desktop

Contact Center agents are most productive and effective when they are equipped with a desktop application that provides uniform access to all media, together with customer history and other contextual information, in an integrated user interface that carefully manages screen real estate and makes it unnecessary to move back and forth between different systems: It provides the ability for agents to simultaneously and seamlessly handle voice, Web chat, IM, e-mail, fax, text, etc. This not only improves customer accessibility but also enhances agent productivity as agents, for instance, can respond to e-mails when the voice call volume drops off during a shift.

Auto-suggest capabilities can be provided so agents can quickly deliver professional responses to inquiries. Automatic tracking of the response usage helps optimize development of effective communication. Context-sensitive IM handling makes it possible to identify and highlight keywords in incoming IMs. Dynamic keyword groups can be defined and then associated with a group of experts. When the agent clicks on a keyword in an incoming IM, it automatically brings up a buddy list with a corresponding list of experts, facilitating consultation and improving first call resolution. A unified agent desktop based on web services simplifies integration with a range of enterprise customer relationship management systems, sales management systems, and knowledge-base tools. Application designers can develop dialogs that seamlessly access data within other enterprise systems, or can deposit information into those systems and make it all available on the desktop.

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Presenting multiple work items to agents improves agent productivity, allowing agents to be engaged with activities beyond just customer interactions. The addition of multimedia provides much needed variety to agent interactions, improving the work environment and morale compared to a voice-only contact center.

Monitoring Social Media

A full-fledged customer experience management solution must be capable of monitoring social media to identify mentions of a company or product in the blogosphere, Twitter or on social networks. Automated tools can scan for specific references, filter out spam, perform further relevance analysis and deliver only pertinent posts that require immediate attention. Agents can be selected to handle the posts based on their skills and knowledge or identified by keywords used in the customers social media posting. The automated tools can also tap contact center reporting and back office reporting systems to identify who the customer is, based on their e-mail address, Twitter handle, or other information that your enterprise may have in your records. Past history with this customer can also be delivered to the agent as part of the contextual information for the agent to analyze.

CONCLUSION
A huge shift in customer service is underway, brought about by changing demographics, new technologies and new forms of communication and interactionnot the least of which are the still nascent social media networks. To meet customer expectations and mitigate customer satisfaction risks, companies need to focus on how to evolve their customer service infrastructure and manage customer satisfaction expectations. Achieving this goaldelivering true context-based, experience management across any mediarequires an open, scalable infrastructure that brings together disparate and disconnected databases, business processes, and communications channels. Companies that can effectively shift their focus to address the new realities of customer service experience management will win the game and lead their market. Avaya is already implementing many of these capabilities in its Avaya Aura Contact Center Suite and is committed to remaining the industry leader in enabling enterprises to maximize their customer service performance.

About Avaya Aura Contact Center

Avaya Aura Contact Center is a standards-based, software-only solution that enables agents and knowledge workers to efficiently and effectively collaborate with customers and partners across multiple media types. A central component of the Avaya Aura Contact Center Suite, Avaya Aura Contact Center provides a robust set of tools for managing the customer experience, delivering exemplary service, generating profitable revenues, asserting the brand identity and establishing a level of experience management that supports competitive differentiation. Avaya Aura Contact Center utilizes Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) capabilities to improve connectivity and establish seamless, persistent, collaborative multimedia interaction sessions. Open web services allow companies to integrate contact center workflows with databases and business applications, providing agents with real-time and historical contextual information that can improve the effectiveness of interactions and the rates of first-call resolution. A sophisticated resource selection and work assignment capability evaluates contact requests and work items across multiple variables, and selects and assigns them to the most appropriate resource over an open universal queue, significantly expanding the scope, capability and value of the contact center to the enterprise. Comprehensive reporting capabilities can be used to evaluate performance and obtain the early insights that help companies adapt to changing conditions. Avaya Aura Contact Center Suite delivers on our commitment to Protect, Extend and Grow existing customer investments. For more information on experience management and Avaya Contact Center solutions, please see: http:// www.avaya.com/usa/topics/contact-center/

About Avaya
Avaya is a global leader in enterprise communications systems. The company provides unified communications, contact centers, and related services directly and through its channel partners to leading businesses and organizations around the world. Enterprises of all sizes depend on Avaya for state-of-the-art communications that improve efficiency, collaboration, customer service and competitiveness. For more information please visit www.avaya.com.

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