Questions and Answers from our Automated Desktop Webinar

webinar-qa-185 Many questions were asked at last week’s webinar so we have listed them below with the corresponding answers.

Q: What does “CSR” stand for? (Slide 3 of the Open Span presentation)?

A: Customer Service Rep

Q: the format of the demonstration appears to be US – is this available in the UK?

A: OpenSpan has over 120,000 seats all around the globe, OpenSpan is an international company with customers in the USA, UK, Germany, South America, Singapore, Australia to name but a few!

Q: Is it widely used within contact centres?

A: OpenSpan was primarily aimed at contact centres because this enterprise group is extremely focused on metrics and productivity improvements across many touch points (from the IVR to call recording to training to performance in general). OpenSpan is the missing piece because it enables massive productivity benefits to a group that understands the ROI on any of the many ROI points that OpenSpan provides. Today, OpenSpan is offering similar productivity benefits to banks (front and back office), healthcare (payers and providers), ISV (software developers need integration to stuff they don’t own!), knowledge management, BPM, BAM and BPOs. Anyone with a task to automate is a prime target for the OpenSpan technology.

Q: What is the current usage of Open Span?

A: Any manual workflow that is managed by a real-time user is a prime use case for OpenSpan. Users’ tasks are extremely manual. We argue, business users are very manual today which given they have a computer seems to not make sense. However, when you look at a task undertaken by a user, it is clear that if you could automate some or all of these manual processes, from 1% to 100% productivity gains, it is not hard to imagine that the use cases are almost limitless.

Q: Also, contact centre outsourcer, could the 53 second improvement have been further improved?

A: Yes, we have seen from 1% to 100% productivity improvements (moving to 100% unattended automation in some cases). The iterative approach of the OpenSpan technology means you see ROI very quickly and can focus on the biggest and quickest to implement pain points first. We have some customers that have implemented over 15 projects in this iterative manner. Productivity gains are often immediate but that goes without saying if you believe OpenSpan can build and deploy in weeks, not years. Equally, since we are so quick, OpenSpan prospects see the value quickly for themselves – if it wasn’t real, we’d have no customers! Over 120,000 seats prove it works, no doubt!

Q: Interested in the Large Wireless Service Provide where you have reduced AHT by 42% – can you provide further detail around this case study?

A: We can include the case study for anyone who would like a copy.

Q: We seem to be talking large contact centres. Is it available to small CCs?

A: The smallest group we’ve automated workflows for is probably in the 50-seat range. The largest is the 20,000+ seat range. OpenSpan is a product. In the past, you only got the kind of results you’ve seen here if you threw big services bucks at it. By being a product, it doesn’t matter if you automate a process for 1 user or 50,000 users, you can see results quickly. One customer automated a manual process to integrate 5 applications in a trading system. The automations took 3 weeks to build and were in production resulting in 90% reduction in labour required to do the same job.

Q: Can we integrate email, chat, calls and crm into this application?

A: OpenSpan can automate most applications that an end user uses, regardless of what it is. i.e. Chat, IM, ERP, CRM, provisioning, billing, front office, back office, contact centre. In fact, since OpenSpan is a product, you point it at the application, whatever it is and it’s likely you’ll be able to automate it. This is true for applications you own, you don’t own, Cloud, SAAS,Fat, Rich, Thin and even apps that are 20 years old or 20 minutes old.

Q: Does this solution have the capability to provide a unified reporting capability on customer contact volume, contact media and contact reason to provide insight for forecasting and planning purposes?

A: Yes, OpenSpan can report back on anything it does. It can also consume other data or push data for use in other reporting technologies. OpenSpan reports what’s been missing for years – and that is, what are the users doing on their desktops – exactly. Not just a screen or voice record but it can report on every interaction with every app, right down to field level.

Q: What real-time monitoring capability is there on activity and volumes of contact, first-contact resolution, etc?

A: Since OpenSpan provides monitoring of almost every aspect of agent activity, the level of granularity you can now get for these kinds of use case reports is endless. Not just on first-call resolution or transaction times but in context to exactly what each agent did, in each of these use cases. Comparison between agents, contact centre groups based upon call types and transactions is now a breeze and to a level of granularity never seen before.

Q: How is the introduction received by agents at the coal face?

A: Without exception, agents love it. Agent turn-over is reduced because it is easier for them to make their own personal goals and company-set goals if they focus on the call, and not the complex application workflows. I’m sure you’d agree, if you could do your job quicker, with fewer errors and less training, you’d be more satisfied knowing you’ve satisfied more customers, up-sold (where applicable) more relevant transactions and achieved your own goals more regularly, so you’d be happier in your job.

Q: If one app within the open span build goes down, is this a dependency that crashes the system?

A: You can easily detect and build that into your solution. A down application could be an accepted part of a workflow and if you built that in, you could report the downed system instantly to operations, you could take data off-line or work with cached/alternative data (if applicable) or you could cache the data for when the system comes back up. It’s up to you how you build your automations but building this is automatic, as opposed to agents just saying, “Can you call back, my system’s down” and will lead to everyone being happier.

Q: Can the solution integrate data from excel, pdf files?

A: Yes. Virtually any application.

Q: Does this system migrate with a telephone system as well like a caller identification ?

A: Yes, be it through the CTI API or direct to the screen pop application (or both).

Q: Is the application scalable depending on the existing seats and the plans in place to add more seats. How complex is the process if it’s scalable?

A: The light weight runtime can be installed on 1 user or 50,000 users across 20 locations. The automation (solution folder) is pulled down automatically on demand so deployment is as easy as it gets. We have customers that cover almost every deployment configuration conceivable. It’s very easy to configure.

24 Sep 2009

Filed under Call Centre News , Webinars