Executive Interviews : Review On 2006/2007 From Bruce Dresser

What has been the greatest challenge the contact center industry has faced in the last 12 months?
From devastating typhoons in the Philippines to paralyzing blizzards in Colorado, corporate and call center executives were once again reminded during 2006 of the damaging effects of a business being down for even a few minutes. Whether it’s a call center that monitors parolee whereabouts or a healthcare call center fielding important medical prescription usage questions, the need to be live and operating 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year is no longer a luxury in the call center industry, it’s an absolute requirement. Companies with call centers that experienced down time or even potential down time due to technical glitches, natural disasters and/or other disruptions last year should be re-evaluating their existing call center infrastructure. While Echopass provides protection against such interruptions, our whole industry would be better served by offering solutions with always-on guarantees and stringent SLAs that ensure these disruptions can’t occur.

Other major challenges in 2006 seem to be driven by customer requirements to satisfy both agent effectiveness and customer satisfaction. These include improving customer service issues (increasing call response time, effective call routing), incorporating systems that enable a business the ability to grow (or shrink) through seasonal periods or company growth, and expanding open, robust frameworks beyond traditional call center functionality with CRM applications and ERP systems. At Echopass, we’ve continued to evolve our solutions to even further address these challenges and improve our agent and end user customer experience.

Another challenge we’ve seen and still see is with companies that have call centers that are locked into long-term contracts. In these instances, the companies that are still “in contract” with hardware vendors are often mired in the inflexibility of their systems, and unable to adapt to their own changing needs and issues. Being locked into a contract without the ability to change features, scale up or down, adapt to a changing environment, or otherwise working within an inflexible system can negatively impact customer service and retention. Because Echopass is both cost effective, has a demonstrable ROI, and by design gives our customers all the flexibility they need, we’ve been able to win new customers by having them abandon their hardware based call center and move to our hosted call center solution. Still, grabbing the attention of a prospect under contract and having them understand the benefits of moving out of (even a bad) contract remains a challenge for Software as a Service providers.

In 2007, what do you think will be the top priorities for (a) contact center managers and (b) company executives?
(a) As previously mentioned, the need for uninterrupted 24x7 service is not an option — it is a requirement. In 2007, stringent service level agreements (SLAs) ought to be a top priority for contact center managers. Additionally, improving the overall customer experience and optimizing their internal workforce are likely to continue to be concerns for the contact center manager. We anticipate that many more contact center managers will explore the benefits of SLA backed, “always on” hosted solutions as the trend toward on-demand call centers continues to manifest itself.

(b) We think that the priorities for company executives this year will continue to be lowering operational costs while simultaneously improving customer experience, and demonstrating a strong return on investment (ROI). In addition, and as this last year taught many executives, evaluating business continuity plans and ensuring a disaster "prevention" strategy is in place instead of disaster recovery will be a focus area.

What do you believe will have the biggest impact on the industry over the next 12 months?
All the major analyst firms — including Gartner, Frost & Sullivan, Yankee — have identified the market migration trend toward hosted models, and each has demonstrated research and statistics to support this trend. So, in addition to the upgrade cycle driven by what seems to be a delayed Y2K hardware replacement necessity, this year we'll also see the increased demand for and adoption of hosted call centers. As a result, both premise based and hosted vendors will need to clearly differentiate their businesses, their value propositions, and their market offerings. Fortunately, this is good news for Echopass, as we’re well positioned in the distributed enterprise market and we continue to take market share and beat incumbents such as Aspect, Oracle, and Avaya.

What impact have "external events" even had on your company, and how have you adapted your business?
Natural disasters and technology disruptions have forced companies to re-evaluate their on-premise technology and consider the value of guaranteed on-demand solutions in light of these external events. In the wake of both typhoons and epic snowstorms, Echopass was able to help our clients avoid business disasters by ensuring their operations were "always on" during and after these damaging natural disasters hit. These disasters were awful for anyone in the affected area to have to deal with. Fortunately, none of our clients and their staff suffered any personal injuries during these natural disasters, and because of our hosted technology, each of our impacted clients was able to continue their business without skipping a beat.

Regulatory or other types of compliance are other external forces that have had an impact on the clients Echopass serves, particularly in the financial services and healthcare industries. For example, whether it’s specific to Sarbanes-Oxley and HIPAA, our customers are assured their call center operations comply with the regulatory standard. In addition, the fact that Echopass is SAS70 certified has been extremely important for many of our clients in these and other vertical industries, as well as with our government clients.

Do you feel the service you personally get as a customer is better or worse than it was a year ago?
In many ways, customer service has improved. As an executive for a hosted call center company that also provides integrated CRM and other integrated applications, I’m pleased when companies I deal with as a customer have taken the time to integrate their customer service organizations which makes doing business with them more efficient and more pleasant. Personally, I've also found “off hours” web-chat and other Internet-based self service options are very helpful to me.

However, I remain amazed when forced to communicate with "siloed" customer services groups that have yet to invest in this or other types of integration and therefore create a tremendously negative customer experience. As an example, the times you have to call back a company and the new agent has no record of your previous call, or they didn’t receive your email, or you get transferred or escalated and have to start all over again. No customer should have to go through this headache. At Echopass, resolving this kind of problem is a key driver of what we do, as ultimately we’re helping our customers perform better in the customer service business. Our end-to-end integrated service focuses on multiple angles of customer service and serves the needs of three different but important customers: call center agents, end users and business owners. Partly because all of us are customers too, Echopass understands the importance of an integrated end-to-end customer service solution with its call center foundation, and this is why we continue to expand and improve the components woven into our EchoSystem platform.