Automatic call distributors are so much more sophisticated
than the technology of old. No wonder, then, that we’ve asked three
specialists – Apsect Software, Sabio and Storacall Voice Systems – to
detail exactly what you should think about when buying an
up-to-the-minute ACD.

Buying an ACD that’s built to last

By Isabel Montesdeoca, senior director of marketing – Europe and Africa – at Aspect Software (www.aspect.com)

Research
shows that the telephone is still Europe’s most important customer
contact channel. The “2006 Aspect European Contact Center Satisfaction
Index” interviewed 1,000 consumers across Europe and found that the
phone accounted for 66% of their last customer interactions, compared
with 33% by e-mail and 2% using web chat. Among UK consumers the phone
was even more dominant, accounting for 72% of customers’ last
interactions. Efficient call routing, queuing and contact management is
clearly a key business tool to improve customer satisfaction, reduce
expenses, gather market data and increase revenues. Key things to look
out for when buying an ACD include:

1) A user-friendly and intuitive developer interface

This
is important in order to rapidly create, deploy and modify applications
to meet changing business needs – and also to create sophisticated
routing scenarios as needed.

2) Sophisticated call routing options

This
enables you to route contacts based on agent skill sets, real-time
conditions in the contact centre, priorities that your business
managers define, data delivered from the network, information entered
by callers, data in enterprise customer databases and so on.

3) Flexible voice processing

This
enables you to route calls based on caller input – using dual-tone
multi-frequency (DTMF) or speech input, as appropriate – as well as
provide interactive voice response-based ‘automated’ phone services as
customer needs dictate.

4) Real time and historical reporting

Look
to combine this function with tools and templates that allow you to
create standard or bespoke reports, and display stats on screen or
distribute them to users anywhere on the corporate network in order to
effectively measure and improve performance.

5) Network-agnostic functionality

It
is important to have the ability to operate in a proven,
mission-critical time division multi-plexing (TDM) environment and an
Internet protocol (IP) environment. Equally, you will want to be able
to migrate from TDM to IP as business requirements demand.

6) Virtual contact centre support

The
ability to run a multi-site operation – possibly involving home-based
workers – using the same business rules that apply to a single site
operation is pretty important nowadays, as is the ability to centrally
manage that multi-site operation with robust system management and
administration capabilities.

7) Flexibility

Providing
scalability (up or down) as well as the ability to incorporate or
manage any outsourced functions as part of a central operation, should
the need arise, is a good thing to look for. Think, for instance, how
useful this will be when seasonal outbound activity increases.

Advanced queue management

ACDs
that provide customers with estimated wait times and offer up a queue
management system, such as scheduled call back, are also incredibly
useful.

9) Business continuity features

These
should take advantage of redundancy options, such as a hot stand-by
server, redundant shelf controllers, and extended battery back-up, as
well as offering remote performance notification. However, make sure
they run on a scalable, secure and reliable platform – one capable of
supporting mission-critical operations.

10) Simple management and administration tools

These
make it fast and easy to manage hardware, agent groups and team
assignments, system functions and settings, call routing administration
details and alert messages.

11) Standards support

Ultimately,
these help to protect your investment. Does your chosen ACD use an
industry-standard operating system such as Windows? Does it support
simple network management protocol (SNMP) to help you manage each
contact centre system as a node on your network, as well as monitor ACD
status and activity? These two questions should be seriously considered
when purchasing an ACD.

Finally, remember that your ACD should
do more than simply ensure calls are delivered to the right resource,
quickly and efficiently. It should also enable you to: develop
call-routing applications quickly and modify them on the fly as
business needs change; deploy agents cost-effectively, independent of
location; scale easily as your business grows; and manage IP-based and
public switched telephone network (PSTN)-based agents from a single ACD
platform.

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The questions that are most critical for your purchase

By Adam Faulkner, founding director at Sabio (www.sabio.co.uk)

At
Sabio we’re finding that many of the organisations who bought a new ACD
system, or who upgraded their existing technology to get through the
Y2K crisis some six to seven years ago, are now finding that their
current ACD systems are holding them back in terms of their ability to
improve customer service levels.

A lot has obviously changed
during the intervening years, not least the widespread deployment of IP
technology and the advent of new developments such as virtualisation

and emerging technologies like session initiation protocol (SIP). Given
that most organisations’ investment in their existing ACD technology
has now been written down, many businesses are now looking again at the
ACD market and considering their options.

When it comes to
optimising the performance of key peripheral solutions such as
interactive voice response systems (IVRs), diallers and multimedia
systems, it’s important for contact centres to be at least running
current ACD software versions to make the most of the latest versions
of these peripherals.

While earlier generation ACDs were
typically dedicated boxes that would be installed either on their own
or ‘piggybacked’ on to a company’s telephone system, today’s ACD
systems come in many different guises and are generally moving towards
a software-based product that acts as a hub for a range of different
contact centre solutions. There’s a broad range of different ACD
technologies available, from traditional TDM solutions, through to
application-based ACDs and the latest IP-based systems.

Look for deep contact centre experience

Before
considering technology issues, it’s important to establish that any ACD
vendor you work with has both the capabilities and experience needed to
work in the specialist contact centre sector. That sounds obvious, but
ACDs are all about handling business-critical calls from your
customers, so it’s simply not smart to underestimate the importance of
a vendor’s proven capability and their ACD’s reliability. This means
finding a solution that offers 5×9 levels of reliability, and a vendor
with the pedigree to match.

You first need to establish that the
ACD solution you’re being offered can actually give you the business
benefits you’re after. Has the vendor implemented the same solution for
other similar-sized organisations in your market sector? How long have
they been in the contact centre sector? They may have strong IP
expertise, but contact centres demand deep voice and applications
capabilities – your vendor needs to demonstrate both.

Also, how
many agents do they actually have already successfully using the
solution that you’re about to invest in? If the answer to any of these
questions seems vague, just walk away.

The next major
consideration depends on the type of contact centre you’re currently
operating. If you’re building a new contact centre in a green-field
location, then you’ll get better scalability if you go for a purely
IP-based ACD approach. If, however, you’ve got an existing contact
centre infrastructure with an ACD in place already, then you need to
find out whether your ACD vendor offers a hybrid approach – combining
TDM and IP technologies in a single environment – that would allow you
to share some of the benefits of IP while still retaining your existing
ACD investment. This is a key issue, as some vendors don’t offer this
flexibility.

You should also check that your ACD vendor offers a
clear, forward-thinking technology roadmap. Technologies such as IP are
still evolving so, for example, you need to find out where your vendor
stands on open protocols such as SIP, and gain an understanding of
their attitude to future technologies.

Accommodating trends such as virtualisation

IP
isn’t just a technology, it can have a fundamental impact on how your
business operates, effectively allowing you to virtualise or pool staff
resources across your organisation – whether they are contact centre
agents, branch workers, back-office staff or home workers. A new ACD
solution will play a key role in managing this shift towards
virtualisation, and you need to ensure that your ACD technology partner
is able to help you take advantage of this shift.

It’s also
worthwhile understanding some of the major technology shifts that are
currently driving change in the ACD sector. You can now download an
open source, SIP-enabled IP telephony server, load it on to a standard
PC and attach an IP handset that you can buy at Tesco or PC World.
Technically, that’s an IP phone system with routing capabilities –
admittedly not one that could run an enterprise contact centre – but
the fact that this technology exists can have an impact on your
negotiations for a new ACD system.

The decision to upgrade or
exchange your ACD should depend on the future roadmap of your existing
ACD, your relationship with your solution provider over the lifetime of
your ACD and, most importantly, whether or not it can manage your
organisation’s future growth plans. This has always been true, but now
pressures from open source and IP-based solutions are leading to a
highly competitive ACD market with extremely attractive pricing. And
that means there’s a lot of smart buying opportunities out there for
informed ACD customers.

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Everything you need to know on ACDs

By Andy Cowhig, sales manager at Storacall Voice Systems (www.storacall.co.uk)

An
ACD is a specialised telephone system that is designed for the rapid
answering of a high volume of inbound calls in to a company. It differs
from a typical telephone system or ‘PABX’ as used in the office, in two
major ways:

1) A PABX is designed to have one or a few
operators/receptionists who answer all incoming calls and direct them
to the right person. An ACD is designed so that all the users or
‘agents’ are put in an answering group and are fed incoming calls,
thereby relieving the bottleneck associated with having an operator
having to answer all calls first before transferring them to the right
department.

2) The basic assumption in a PABX is that only a
small proportion of all the PABX extensions will require an outside
line, which is why a typical office PABX could have 50 extensions but
only 12 outside lines. An ACD is the opposite in that the assumption is
that not only will ALL the agents be on the phone at the same time, but
in order to use the advanced queuing features of an ACD, there will be
more outside lines, or ‘trunks’, provided than there are agent
positions. Although there are many variations, a good rule of thumb is
that one should provide 50% more trunks than there are extensions. So
in a 50-seat call centre, installing 75 trunks would allow all 50
agents to be talking on the phone, while allowing 25 additional calls
to queue within the ACD.

So, what questions should you ask of
your supplier? This will depend primarily on the nature of the
business, the size of the call centre and the number of different
services that are managed on the ACD. Naturally, an IT helpdesk of ten
agents will tend to have a different requirement to a 30-seat customer
service call centre, which may differ again from a 300-seat outsourced
call centre. In order to assist someone in defining their own
requirements, I suggest that you ask yourself the following questions:

How large is my call centre now and how large is it likely to grow over the next three to five years?

This
is an important question as some ACD systems are primarily designed for
larger call centres and require a significant amount of initial
investment in the main system ‘tin’ compared to an ACD designed for
smaller call centres. Conversely, some smaller ACDs cannot expand
beyond a certain number of users. Therefore, ask your supplier what
their typical system size is and ask to speak to three references of
the same size.

Aside from cost of initial outlay, the size of a
call centre also defines the tools required to manage the call centre.
A large call centre will have a large number of agents that require
managing and monitoring. The supplier should be asked about how many
simultaneous supervisor screens can be provided, and what additional
tools can be used with the product to assist in managing the call
centre, such as real-time displays, wallboards, and tools to aid staff
rostering. (See “Will I be able to use third party products?” below.)

Who is calling me and why?

A
call centre that is handling sales calls from prospective customers
will have additional requirements to that of an internal IT helpdesk.
For example, if a customer is ringing around for a quote on their car
insurance, they may only give your call centre a limited time to answer
the call before abandoning it and calling the next number on their
list, whereas an IT helpdesk for internal staff is more likely to be
patient and await an answer to their problem – even if they have to
wait for five minutes or more. For this reason, companies often adopt a
service level that is appropriate for their business.

For
companies that require a particularly good service level, ask the
supplier about what indications there are to show when callers that
have been waiting too long, such as alarms – either visual or audible –
that can alert the supervisors to enable them to react in time to
prevent the caller abandoning the call. Some ACDs can indicate this
using wallboards or, more common these days, plasma screens that change
colour when certain thresholds are exceeded.

Will the system allow me to add additional functionality and capacity?

Investing
in a small ACD system for your department may have been fine when you
initially purchased it for your internal helpdesk. But what if the
company requires you to take on additional services – for example,
handle calls that were previously handled by the Slough office? Can
your system be expanded in capacity? Can more agents and more telephone
lines be added?

Also be sure you understand the upgrade costs
before investing in a new system as many suppliers will charge you
significantly more to upgrade once you have their product installed, on
the basis that you are unlikely to throw theirs away and will therefore
pay whatever the supplier is asking for the upgrade. In addition, think
about adding additional functionality, such as call recording. Some
ACDs require a separate box to be added; in others it is simply a
software feature that can be either included in the system or charged
for with an additional licence fee.

Will I be able to use third party products?

This
is particularly important in a larger call centre where the business
may require a particular functionality to be available to the call
centre which is not provided by the ACD itself, or where the solution
proposed by the ACD supplier is not the preferred solution. Is the ACD
based on open standards so that the call centre user can be confident
they have not chosen an ACD which is difficult and expensive to
integrate with third party products?

Typically, the ACD supplier
will have their own preference for third party products and will
partner with other suppliers so that the ACD supplier can provide you
with specialist functionality, such as workforce management, call
recording, quality monitoring and so on. But do your research and see
how many third party suppliers include your preferred ACD in their list
of ACDs they integrate with. This will stop you having to limit your
options later.

What demands will be placed on me for statistical reports?

Ensure
that it is easy to customise or create new reports easily. Even a small
call centre can receive a demand for the unexpected when it comes to
reports that go to management. This is particularly important if you
provide call centre services to other clients, as in an outsourced call
centre, as no two people will require exactly the same reports. Ensure
you understand how easy it is to create new reports and that they can
be exported to other packages for presentation, such as Excel and
Crystal Reports, for example. Also, some ACDs restrict you to a set of
data that you can report on, whereas others allow you to chose any data
stored in the ACD’s database.

Will I require non-ACD users to be able to log in as agents remotely?

The ability to have external users logging in and taking calls is important for three reasons:

• To help manage peaks of calls.
• To provide a disaster recovery plan in crisis situations, such as building evacuation.
• To
  be able to have staff working from home. Ask the ACD supplier how this
  is achieved and what tools are provided to manage the remote workers.

Will I have technical staff available to perform all the administration of the system?

A
large call centre will often have dedicated technical staff to make
changes to how the system works, but a smaller call centre may not.
Ensure that changes can be made easily and quickly and ask what skills
are required to do so. A smaller call centre should be able to make any
changes to call routing, change announcements and add services without
having to rely on the ACD supplier to send an engineer.

If the IT infrastructure changes, will I be have to throw the ACD away and buy another one?

If
the company moves premises, or decides to change its IT infrastructure,
will the ACD be able to move with those changes? A good example might
be that the ACD was originally purchased using analogue lines, but now
is required to work with ISDN lines or voice over IP (VoIP). Ask the
supplier what type of lines it supports and what is involved if your
infrastructure changes.

What about support?

Most
call centres, particularly customer-facing call centres, have very
little tolerance for downtime. Be sure that your maintenance contract
is suitable and ensures you are covered for at least your hours of
opening. Also ask your supplier to be very clear about their definition
of ‘response times’. If the unthinkable happens and your ACD has
developed a terminal fault, now is not the time to discover that when
they quoted a four-hour response, they did not mean that an engineer
will be with you in four hours, but merely that they will call you back
within four hours.