According to Pommie Lutchman, CEO at contact centre solutions provider, Ocular Technologies, the global contact centre market has for many years, up to and including 2009, been stagnating in terms of technology adoption and innovation. Since the beginning of 2010 though, a number of new concepts have evolved within the industry, with the focus shifting from an inward-facing, technology-focused strategy to an outward-facing, customer experience based ideology.

“This is no different in South Africa and many enterprises are now realigning their corporate strategies around the consumer experience. This is mainly due to the phenomenal rise in social networking sites, an online presence and the emergence of Web 2.0 methodologies. In South Africa at present, a number of innovative service- and solution providers are finding ways to integrate this reliance on the consumers online personalities and this can be used very effectively to target a specific audience and/or demographic,” he says.

In a presentation titled “Social Networking and Call Centres” put together by researchers Connie Crosbie, Rob Reid and Dara Renton, social networking is defined as “a network that is made up of people and links between people. So it’s all about how people can find and contact people that they want to reach through the people that they already know. And that makes it very different from a database. It’s the human connection.”

Showing the strength of this human connection, observer Dave Paulding states on online site, Call Centre Focus, that when someone tweets about bad, or good, service, it is not to one person but to a large number. That comment is out there, many people including potential customers and competitors read it, and it can be searched.

“Social media integration is significant and most certainly the new buzz term for the contact centre industry,” comments Lutchman. “This encompasses the ability for companies, once they have established an online presence through sites like Facebook, Twitter and Linked-In, to monitor any and all traffic, blog entry, complaint or compliment related to their brand, product or service, and proactively manage these on a daily basis. This has insurmountable positive consequences for companies wanting to get the edge over their competitors and has a possible target market in the billions, in terms of number of users, as opposed to the hundreds or thousands from generic websites and print media.”

To stay on trend, corporate business models are therefore evolving form being extremely technology-heavy and cost-focused to being very much in favour of the customer. This model is simpler to plan and implement as the technology and requirements are clear-cut. That is, what is it that our customers want?

Says Lutchman: “Those enterprises that answer the above question correctly, and base their corporate goals and objectives around the answers, have won half the battle in terms of winning market share. Case in point: Apple Inc. The Cupertino-based pioneers successfully mapped out, planned and implemented their products based on what the answers were to the question above. iPad anyone?”

In terms of future trends, Lutchman predicts that a high adoption of newer, simpler technologies that result in higher returns is on the horizon. “Sweating-the-asset has never had such a succinct connotation as it does in today’s post-recession marketplace and vendors that have this unique selling proposition as their business model will come out on top. In conjunction with this, cloud-based computing and hosted contact centres will certainly take a small slice out of the captive market, if the offering is secure and, with due respect to the business process outsourcing industry, managed effectively and efficiently.

“Another trend that may come to fruition, finally, is the emergence of South African based offshoring successes. This is mainly due to the new incentive offered by the Department of Trade and Industry, which promises a 20 percent reduction on costs, as well as substantial, multi-year incentives for companies offering business process outsourcing and offshoring services. It may just be what the industry has needed in order for us to gain market share over the likes of India and the Philippines. I wouldn’t hold my breath though, as this has been attempted before, and has failed dismally. Our only hope is that South African business process outsourcing providers see the benefit of the scheme and utilise it so that the industry may go out and market South Africa as the next ‘go-to’ destination for business process outsourcing and offshoring services,” concludes Lutchman.

“As part of our reseller agreement, Ocular Technologies will market, sell, and integrate the AudioCodes suite of products and solutions into our business,” says Pommie Lutchman, CEO of Ocular Technologies. “This is excellent news for our customers, as AudioCodes provides a range of innovative, cost-effective products.

“Moving forward, Ocular Technologies will be in a position to supply our clients with AudioCodes solutions directly.”

AudioCodes is a VoIP technology leader focused on VoIP communications, applications and networking elements, and its products are deployed globally in broadband, mobile, cable, and enterprise networks.

“There is a clear lack of focus in this sector in South Africa,” says Lutchman, “and Ocular feels it necessary to offer the local consumer world-class solutions. AudioCodes is the ideal partner for us in this respect, as the company’s solutions are an excellent fit for the South African landscape.”

AudioCodes High Definition VoIP technologies and products provided enhanced intelligibility and a better end-user communication in emerging voice networks. The company’s range of products includes gateways, multi-service business gateways, residential gateways, IP phones, media servers, session border controllers, security gateways and value added applications. AudioCodes’ underlying technology, VoIPerfectHD, relies primarily on AudioCodes’ leadership in DSP, voice coding and voice processing technologies.

About Audiocodes
AudioCodes Ltd. designs, develops and sells advanced Voice over IP (VoIP) and converged VoIP and Data networking products and applications to Service Providers and Enterprises. AudioCodes is a VoIP technology leader focused on VoIP communications, applications and networking elements, and its products are deployed globally in Broadband, Mobile, Cable, and Enterprise networks. The company provides a range of innovative, cost‐effective products including Media Gateways, Multi‐Service Business Gateways, Residential Gateways, IP Phones, Media Servers, Session Border Controllers (SBC), Security Gateways and Value Added Applications. AudioCodes underlying technology, VoIPerfectHDTM, relies primarily on AudioCodes leadership in DSP, voice coding and voice processing technologies. AudioCodes High Definition (HD) VoIP technologies and products provide enhanced intelligibility, and a better end user communication experience in emerging Voice networks.

“All of this takes companies beyond workforce management and into workforce productivity,” he says.
He explains the term “workforce productivity” as being a concept which core techniques include: applying technologies that go beyond traditional forecasting and scheduling applications, empowering contact centre staff to take responsibility for their own contributions, and tying contact centre metrics to business goals such as growth and profit.
“The way the contact centre used to be managed, and still is for some, was by measuring seconds and counting beans. Managers who take this approach use workforce management software primarily for forecasting call volumes and devising schedules that get the most work out of the fewest agents. They use simple metrics, like talk time or number of calls handled, to assess agent performance. Reporting is primarily a process of proving to management that the centre has met its cost-reduction goals, not a process of using information to affect positive change. It is an inward-looking philosophy, with the ultimate objective being to please a tight-fisted CFO.
“Most centres are successful in accomplishing this – meeting and even exceeding their savings goals – but ‘bigger picture’ corporate objectives, such as winning customer loyalty and increasing revenue, often suffer as a result,” he says.
In order for the cost centre investment to yield the biggest return, workforce management practices and technologies should be aimed at empowering staff to make the largest possible contribution to achieving the company goals.
“With multichannel contact centres, consumers are more informed than ever and the competition is fierce. The only way to keep customers happy and acquire new ones is to differentiate on something other than price, and this means changing the way the workforce is managed,” says Lutchman.
He lists nine things every contact centre needs to know about workforce productivity. These are:
1. Reset goals to achieve greater productivity
The highly evolved capability of a workforce management solution to control costs is valuable, but not the only game in town. Workforce managers must also establish goals and metrics for reaching corporate expectations for business success and ensure new staff understands the importance of these productivity goals.
2. Institute best practices for productivity
Create a work environment that is conducive to productivity by automating clerical changes and empowering agents to, for example, view their own work schedules, easily request shift changes, arrange vacation time and schedule adjustments. Also institute real-time views of staff members’ performance for self-monitoring, and clarify and help them understand corporate objectives by tying contact centre metrics and processes to their performance goals.
3. Implement the right technology
Having the right technology makes it easier to manage the workforce and allows for the shift from cost-efficiency to workforce productivity. Importantly, workforce management solutions must be implemented and utilised with corporate/business goals in mind.
4. Understand the importance of analytics
The most valuable technology available today is analytics. In fact, workforce productivity equals workforce management plus analytics. It creates a structured process, through which a company can manage and improve its overall performance.
5. Focus on relevant statistics
These should be based on the strategic objectives of the company coupled with the overall objectives of the contact centre.
6. Draw information from business applications
The essence of workforce productivity is to enable contact centre managers to administer agent performance based on business goals. Pull information from multiple contact centre systems, sites, channels and data sources, such as business applications, payroll, HR and more, and combine these to provide true KPI tracking and management.
7. Match the data to the task
Each staff member should see the particular KPIs related to his/her function and, therefore, different views should be available for agents, supervisors, managers, executives or business owners and support staff.
8. Analyse for root causes
An analytical tool that dumps statistics is no more useful than traditional call centre reports. The tool must include navigational mechanisms that allow a user to drill down into the data and identify root causes of performance challenges and shortfalls.
9. Manage the infrastructure for optimal productivity
Lastly, analytical applications should be applied to more than just the contact centre and customer-facing business processes. Use them to analyse the management of the infrastructure to gain insight into trunk usage, glean data around Web site traffic and track and measure IP bandwidth. This way you will improve the productivity of both the infrastructure and workforce.

“The reality is that customer communications are shifting from interaction on the company’s terms to true collaboration on the consumer’s terms,” says Pommie Lutchman, CEO at contact centre solutions provider, Ocular Technologies.

“This new generation of customers, of all ages, is using social tools and demanding communications anytime, anywhere and across any channel, resulting in companies taking advantage of unified communications, mobility and communities and collaborating with partners and other vendors.”

He adds that these changes are also fundamentally changing the contact centre, and that enterprises are breaking down the silos between the contact centre and the rest of the enterprise. “Enterprises are creating plans to comprehensively interact with customers using unified communications and collaboration to facilitate the conversation,” he says.

Unified communications improves business productivity through communication that is focused on people, their availability and willingness to communicate, rather than which tool or device to use. It is a solution platform that allows streamlining of business process steps that cannot be automated.

“Unified communications in the contact centre is about keeping the customer in the equation and enterprises should thus be focusing on communication in order to enable its customer-facing processes such as sales, collections and service. Fortunately, enterprises need look no further than their contact centre,” he says.

Yet, if unified communications is the answer, what is the question? “Companies are continuously being challenged with doing ‘more with less’ in order to maximise every resource. The promise of unified communications, first, and most importantly, is therefore increased productivity. Second, it is about streamlining processes,” says Lutchman.

Art Rosenberg (http://unified-view.blogspot.com) offers a framework for identifying these productivity enhancements: micro-productivity – individual users can save time by accessing information and people more flexibly and faster and; macro-productivity – the ability to achieve greater business process efficiencies by all users in a given group.

“Lastly,” says Lutchman, “It is about enhancing the customer experience. That is, it is the differentiator between excellent companies and those that are merely ‘good’.”

“The Three ‘Ds of Customer Experience” by authors Allen, Reicheld and Hamilton outlines companies delivering superior customer interactions as such: they design the right offers and experiences for the right customers; they deliver these propositions by focusing the entire company on them with emphasis on cross-functional collaboration and they develop their capabilities to please customers again and again.

“Revisiting the original question ‘why unified communications’, there is an increasing body of evidence that the technologies of unified communications, applied with the goal of communications-enabling businesses processes, can have a direct impact on the value a company can deliver to its employees, to its customers and, ultimately, to its shareholders. Improving productivity and streamlining processes can make it easier for a company to deliver the ideal customer experience.

“The reason enterprises should start with the contact centre is because the contact centre has already developed disciplines that enterprises can apply to their unified communications strategy in order to ensure that the customer is part of the equation. The success of the unified communication strategy will ultimately be measured in terms of the customer experience,” concludes Lutchman.

“Together with the recent release of Unified Communications Applications from Aspect Software, Ocular Technologies now provides a more complete UC Ready products and services package. A selection of the most popular UC Ready headsets and desk phones from Plantronics are immediately available through our sales channel,” says Ebrahim Dinat, chief operations officer at Ocular Technologies.
According to Duncan Barnes, channel manager at South Africa’s reseller of Plantronics products, Headset Solutions, the company has always seen Ocular Technologies as a strategic partner in the African contact centre environment.
“With Ocular Technologies extending its specialist skills into the UC market, it allows us to jointly ensure that local customers get the best technology solutions enabled by best-of-breed end user devices. Ocular Technologies has proven itself through its ongoing passion to drive business value for its clients as well as service of the highest level.
“Having Ocular Technologies as part of our value added reseller (VAR) programme supports Plantronics in its African strategy to deliver devices that are recognised for their sound quality, reliability and comfort, thereby fostering better business communication and efficiency, regardless of where professionals are working,” he says.
For contact centre workers, every day is a whirlwind of conversations where they provide expert help to a steady stream of customers. Each caller might have very different needs, and workers are under constant pressure to provide effective, personable service as quickly and efficiently as possible. Dinat says the contact centre workers thus need robust tools that can withstand constant daily use and are comfortable to use for long periods of time.
“These tools also have to be able to reduce background noise, protect against sudden loud sounds and also provide crystal clear audio quality at both ends of the line. With the Plantronics offering, the Ocular Technologies UC Ready headset programme for Aspect UC Applications provides proven products that have a strong reputation in the industry and provide superior voice quality and reliability to enhance the day-to-day operations of a call centre. In addition, these products have been optimised for use with Microsoft Lync Server, which assures the highest usability and seamless integration,” concludes Dinat.

Workforce Management – Then And Now
The Way It Was
Of all the people who work in the contact centre, workforce managers have perhaps been the most inclined to focus on internal efficiency. They frequently cite the fact that 60 to 70 percent of contact centre expenditures go to pay and support contact centre staff, mostly agents. To operate within budget, they take aim at that 60 to 70 percent, adopt practices that reduce it, and measure the success of their operations by how little they spend.
Managers who take this approach use workforce management software primarily for forecasting call volumes and devising schedules that get the most work out of the fewest agents. They use simple metrics like talk time or number of calls handled to assess agent performance. Reporting is primarily a process of proving to management that the centre has met its cost-reduction goals, not a process of using information to effect positive change. It is an inward-looking philosophy, and the ultimate objective is to please a tight-fisted CFO.
Most contact centres, for the most part, have been successful in accomplishing this, meeting and even exceeding their original goals. But enterprise goals, such as winning customer loyalty and increasing revenue, often suffer as a result. With the focus on getting more work out of fewer people, the relationship between managers and agents is too often adversarial. Dissatisfied agents can make life miserable for supervisors and the experience of dealing with the company unpleasant for the customers. If an agent is measured strictly on talk time, for example, he may not care whether he solves a customer’s problem, as long as he wraps the call up quickly. And in this negative environment, high turnover is common, virtually ensuring that customers will be served by agents in training rather than experienced ones. Company accountants might be happy, but hardly anyone else is.
In some extreme cases, the contact centre goals are actually at odds with the company’s overarching goals. Who, after all, is the best agent in the contact centre? The one who answers the most calls, or the one who sells the most products? What benefits the company most, saving 20 seconds on a call, or winning a customer for life by using those extra seconds to create a memorable experience?
It is time for a paradigm-shift in the Workforce Management industry – time to understand that the Call Centre Workforce can operate in an entirely new way, and those that benefit are not just the “pencil-pushers” and “number-crunchers”.

The Way It Should Be – Measuring Performance and Managing for Productivity
Ironically, that 60 to 70 percent spent on staffing, so often used to justify savings-based contact centre practices, is probably the best argument for replacing them.
After all, shouldn’t the biggest investment yield the biggest return? Why not aim your workforce management practices and technologies at empowering contact centre staff to make the largest possible contribution to the company’s most important goals?
The call centre has evolved into a multichannel contact centre, and business drivers such as increased competition, globalization, and more demanding customers have changed the business playing field. To stay competitive today, businesses have to take a different view of the contact centre – as a key contributor to revenue goals – and contact centre managers have to change the way they manage the workforce. The emphasis has to shift from Workforce Management to Workforce Productivity.
What is workforce productivity? It is the active management of processes, technology, and people to achieve growth. Contact centres should continue to use workforce management solutions just as they always have to staff efficiently and keep costs down. But they must also go beyond efficiency and apply the resources of the contact centre to enterprise revenue objectives. Productivity must permeate every aspect of the contact centre – its goals, its practices, and its technology.
In order to achieve this, the following key points need to be actioned, each with own set of distinct advantages in the shift to a Productivity-managed Workforce:
• Reassess and define new Productivity Goals and Metrics
• Define and maintain Proper (but realistic) Productivity Practices such as Real-time Monitoring and tracking, Agent Empowerment etc.
• Evaluate and restructure Productivity Technology such as ACD, IVR, eWFM solutions and Reporting Tools
• Document and Implement Productivity Analytics to evolve from Workforce Management to Workforce Productivity (which in actual fact is just WFM + Analytics)
• Shift focus to Relevant Statistics, not just any data you can get your hands on.
• Draw information form various business applications, enabling contact centre managers to administer agent performance based on business goals rather than solely on quantitative metrics.
• Match the Data to the Tasks, so that agents can see clearly how their productivity affects their KPIs.
• Develop a defined, managed process of Root Cause Analysis for each anomaly that occurs within the Workforce Planning and subsequent Performance
• Develop and implement Integration Points into Business Applications, extending the power of the Workforce Productivity to beyond the traditional Contact Centre Technologies

Conclusion
There is a paradigm shift happening. Customers are more knowledgeable and more demanding than ever before. To remain competitive, companies have to differentiate themselves based on the customer experience they deliver. The key to achieving this exceptional experience is to rethink the way companies measure contact centre agent productivity and how they define success. This means contact centres have to go beyond focusing on cost savings and become revenue contributors.
With the right strategy and the right technology, contact centres can go beyond workforce management to workforce productivity. They can tie contact centre metrics to business goals and empower their staff to be aware of and take responsibility for their own contributions to the larger picture of what success means for the entire organization.
It’s time to rethink the way they manage their most valuable resource, their Human Resource.

Contact us now to Request a Proposal for Aspect Software class-leading Workforce Management solutions

October 06, 2008 – With personnel strikes, power failures and broken or stolen cables becoming common anomalies in South Africa, organisations are more aware than ever that planning and preparation, particularly with regard to critical business structures such as contact centres, is of the utmost importance.

It is crucial for any company supplying customer services to have a disaster recovery plan in place. Obviously, compliance with regulations such as Sarbanes-Oxley is key, but almost more important is ensuring that client satisfaction is never compromised due to the loss of both customer support and subsequently revenue that this can lead to.

Disaster recovery plans must also facilitate procedures in such a situation without exorbitant associated costs. There are a number of factors that should be taken into consideration when building a comprehensive disaster recovery plan, including technology, processes and people. Simply diverting calls to another branch is not always the best option. More than one branch of the same company could be affected by the same disaster at the same time, in which case the “plan” is useless.

As a contact centre technologies and CRM service provider, Ocular Technologies assists customers in identifying possible disasters and determining the impact on the organisation, especially on mission-critical systems. By personally visiting sites and understanding business processes, our consultants provide guidance on how to manage redundancy and recovery processes, as well as recommending appropriate, cost-effective technology options.

Some contact centres opt to replicate their technology by duplicating all applications at a remote location. Although this solution is ideal, it can be an expensive exercise. Another approach is the disaster rental option, which entails a vendor like Ocular hosting a duplicated system for a customer on similar technology and renting out seats as and when needed. If a customer’s contact centre needs to shut down, its agents can temporarily move into the vendor’s offices and operate from there. In fact, Ocular can guarantee up to 99.9 percent uptime with redundancy.

While companies with no plan in place frantically try to divert calls and reroute dialling when a disaster happens, it can be a totally different scenario when being proactive instead of reactive. The most important point is to make sure that your business practices are aligned and working well in any situation and from any site.

It’s not enough to have just the technology backed up though. You also need to have processes in place for every possible type of disaster and the contact centre agents must understand the plan. With the high staff turnover that contact centres typically face, it is essential that agents receive sufficient training and are prepared for any possible situation.

Therefore, a disaster recover plan needs to be tested ideally once a month or at least on a quarterly basis, to ensure that the duplicated databases are up to date and the processes run smoothly. This involves going into disaster mode by shutting down the main site, moving all agents to the remote site and operating from there for a day. All the money, time and other resources used to develop the perfect disaster recovery plan are worthless if the plan is not updated continually and tested regularly.

Situations outside of organisations’ control can result in business disasters, but this need not be the case. By proactively implementing an effective disaster recovery plan and appropriate technology, businesses can limit disruptions in customer service and keep revenue flowing despite unfortunate events.

According to Pommie Lutchman, Ocular managing director, this will expand the company’s customer interaction management solutions and enable it to cater sufficiently for contact centres of all sizes.

“Altitude’s offerings are illustrative of the future of the contact centre industry. It provides innovative products for a broad range of platforms and protects existing investments through interoperability. This, together with its fast deployment cycles, signifies clear cost benefits for our clients,” he explains. “We are confident that this partnership will contribute to both Ocular and Altitude gaining new successes in this market.”

Says Shlomo Harari, Altitude Software president – APAC: “Ocular Technologies is a prominent player in the contact centre space and we are thrilled about working with its team of contact centre experts. We believe that our product aligns well with the South African call centre and business process outsourcing (BPO) sector, providing a valuable proposition to businesses in a country that has proved to be a popular and growing outsourcing destination.”

As an Altitude Software partner, Ocular now offers the Altitude uCI suite of customer interaction management solutions for customer service, help desks, collections, order desks, proactive marketing, sales and service as well as business process management. Altitude uCI supports both open and proprietary VoIP solutions, leveraging the detailed know-how of the contact centre operational aspects, from agent coaching to IT management.

According to Lutchman, the solution manages and improves customer relationships in a wide range of contact centres, from SMEs to large multi-site organisations with a special focus on contact centre outsourcers.

“Since Altitude uCI was engineered to improve the overall productivity of contact centres and integrate easily with enterprise front office and back-office systems, it delivers significant cost, revenue and intangible benefits with a limited upfront investment.

The latest Altitude uCI 7.5 release includes a number of features that will strengthen the contact centre’s ability to embrace industry-wide change. Its IP nature natively supports distributed operations, including home-based and remote agents, streamlines IT investments and optimises human resources. It further offers proactive customer service features and friendlier voice self-service applications as well as provides managers with the tools to centrally design and deliver flexible service-delivery models,” he says.

In 2007, Altitude Software was honoured with a CRM Excellence Award in recognition of the company’s outstanding achievement in Customer Relationship Management as well as an Excellence Award for outstanding achievement in IP communications with Altitude IP Contact Centre. The Altitude Fast Script Builder has also won an award for Product of the Year in 2006.

“Altitude Software has proven itself as a market leader with a solid track record and we look forward to introduce its products into our market,” concludes Lutchman.