Key Issues Related to Consistent Customer Service Across Channels

If your company is to benefit from consistent customer service across channels, here are the questions you will want to answer:

• Has your company taken the time to understand the customer service methods most preferred by your customers? Whereas there is a value in reviewing current customer service statistics, it also is necessary to provide incentives for target market customers to participate in focus groups. These focus groups aim to obtain additional, valuable information concerning consistent customer service requirements.

• Has your company formulated a clear vision that articulates a consistent customer service strategy?

• Has this vision and strategy been communicated effectively to internal customer-facing personnel as well as to external customers?

• Do the current customer-facing processes support consistent customer service across channels or do your processes need to be adjusted or even reinvented?

• How will your company effectively train customer service agents to think outside of silos (e.g., I am responsible for handling telephone inquiries whereas you are responsible for handling e-mail inquiries), and to be desirous of participating in your multichannel support efforts?

• Will your current telephone network (PSTN) allow for consistent customer service across channels, or should you be implementing emerging IP network technology that is capable of effectively integrating both voice and data information?

This last question is important, as well as complex. Today's customer service technology is in a transition phase, and the IP network initiative has the potential to transform the way customer service centers will be set up in the future. Most of today's customer service centers currently have two networks, an IT network on which their computer and their data runs, and a telephone network that Lucent, Siemens, Nortel, or others provide, which has all of their call routing functionality on it and which tends to be proprietary. Many middleware vendors currently offer CTI integration between these two separate networks but the middleware solutions are not cheap and may take considerable time.

Here is where Cisco's emerging IP network product offering comes into play. Cisco is suggesting that two networks are unnecessary and that the hardware switch-oriented nature of a PSTN bucks the trend of the emerging switchless data world. Cisco wants to provide a solution that supports a company's telephone as well as data network needs within the customer service environment. In February 2001, Cisco launched its IPCC (Internet Protocol Contact Center) offering, aimed at allowing customers to seamlessly transition from traditional PSTN applications to new world integrated IP applications (e.g., unified messaging, integrated Web collaboration, instant messaging, chat). Cisco openly admits that it is in the process of testing its IPCC offering within a high-volume environment, and that IPCC's current strength is more in its integration capabilities rather than the richness of its feature set. Cisco can expect stiff competition from Avaya, Nortel, Siemens, and 3Com, all of which are committed to offering their own IP network solutions.

There are several issues that should be considered related to the IP network alternative:

• There is a large installed base of customer service centers that currently run their customer services over a PSTN. Despite technical shortcomings of PSTN telephone switching equipment (e.g., the inability to support multimedia customer interactions such as voice, chat, e-mail, browser-sharing, call-me-now, etc.), the large installed base of customer service centers may be, for financial reasons, reluctant to dispose of their telephone switching equipment (never mind their reluctance to get rid of their green screen applications) and to replace it with an IP network. To be sure, vendors that currently sell PSTN products are not necessarily promoting this transition.

• Using current PSTN technology, a customer service supervisor can monitor customer voice calls but cannot monitor integrated voice and e-mails in real time. Using an IP network, simultaneous monitoring is feasible.

• By moving to an IP network, a company incurs at most a one- or two-minute network carrier charge (two cents per minute) while the call is passed over to the IP network. Compare this to a PSTN call whereby the company incurs this two cents per minute carrier charge during the entire voice call until the calling party hangs up. Net result: potentially significant cost savings per customer call.

• In the IP world, there really is no such thing as queuing, so when a packet gets sent in an IP network it goes across the wire and it looks for an IP address. When it finds the address, it expects to be consumed. But what if that IP packet is voice; how do you queue voice?

Up to now, there has not been a way to queue voice packets on an IP network, which is what most customer service centers need in order to provide consistent customer service across multiple channels. Here again is where Cisco comes into the picture. By purchasing Geotel, Cisco now offers a new IVR and queuing functionality within the IP network.