Nortel, Witness aid call centers

The desire to implement flexible staffing options and optimize employee performance is driving many of today's call center-related IT investments.

Every Fortune 500 company has at least one call center, and each employs an average of 4,500 agents across their sites, according to McKinsey & Co. Companies that maximize the usefulness of their call centers - by acting strategically and making judicious technology investments, for example - can increase revenue from call centers by 20% to 35% and cut costs by 15% to 25%, the research firm estimates.

To help companies improve their call center operations, Nortel and Witness Systems recently added to their respective call center product portfolios. Nortel's latest software initiative is designed to let companies more easily tap experts outside the call center to handle customer inquiries on the fly. Witness Systems' new suite combines workforce management, quality monitoring, e-learning and performance management features in a single, unified package.

With Nortel's Expert Anywhere software bundle, companies can direct customer calls to the most appropriate employee, whether that employee works in a call center, branch office, retail store or home office. Businesses can add company experts to their pool of customer service agents during peak times or to handle specific high-level questions, for example, without having to hire more call center agents or expand their call center facilities.

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The desire to implement flexible staffing options and optimize employee performance is driving many of today's call center-related IT investments.

Every Fortune 500 company has at least one call center, and each employs an average of 4,500 agents across their sites, according to McKinsey & Co. Companies that maximize the usefulness of their call centers - by acting strategically and making judicious technology investments, for example - can increase revenue from call centers by 20% to 35% and cut costs by 15% to 25%, the research firm estimates.

To help companies improve their call center operations, Nortel and Witness Systems recently added to their respective call center product portfolios. Nortel's latest software initiative is designed to let companies more easily tap experts outside the call center to handle customer inquiries on the fly. Witness Systems' new suite combines workforce management, quality monitoring, e-learning and performance management features in a single, unified package.

With Nortel's Expert Anywhere software bundle, companies can direct customer calls to the most appropriate employee, whether that employee works in a call center, branch office, retail store or home office. Businesses can add company experts to their pool of customer service agents during peak times or to handle specific high-level questions, for example, without having to hire more call center agents or expand their call center facilities.

"It's about being able to tap into certain individuals of high skill sets without making that person physically sit in a contact center," says Roxann Swanson, vice president and general manager of multimedia applications at Nortel. The foundation of Expert Anywhere is Nortel Application Center, a SIP-based platform for IP-based call centers that combines speech recognition, unified messaging and collaboration functions with common management and reporting tools.

In the past, it's been tough to get visibility to certain kinds of experts outside the contact center and immediately determine their availability to assist with a customer call, Swanson says. With Expert Anywhere's presence and routing capabilities, an agent can find someone who is available and appropriately skilled to pass a call to, regardless of their location. "You can make that connection immediately," she says.

For its part, Witness Systems unveiled a product suite called Impact 360, which is expected to be generally available by year-end. The suite integrates Witness Systems' existing quality-monitoring applications with workforce management software the company gained in its $75 million acquisition of Blue Pumpkin, which was finalized in January.

By combining the two feature sets, Witness Systems says it can help companies link previously disparate systems and streamline key management functions. For example, the Impact 360 software could automatically send training requests to the scheduler and assign learning sessions for an agent if the call recording and evaluation tools identify a problem with the agent's customer interactions.