CONTACT CENTER CORNER: Proactive Customer Contact, Leading-Edge Solutions

By Joe Outlaw

The available solutions to support proactive customer contact run the gamut from single function to multi-function, from stand-alone to fully integrated with other customer contact systems, and from premise-based to hosted. And, any combination of these capabilities and attributes is also available. 

Single Function vs. Multi-Function

Single function solutions or, more accurately, solutions with a small number of features/functions are at one end of the spectrum.  These can include basic alerting from most of the leading contact center vendors, including Avaya, Aspect Software, Cisco, Interactive Intelligence and Genesys as well as specialty or best-of-breed vendors, such as Envox for outbound IVR and MIR3, or Premiere Global, and Varolii for alerting. 

Excellent multi-function solutions, those that support a broad range of proactive customer contact applications (outbound IVR-based, automated dialing, alerting, customer feedback), are also available from the leading contact center vendors, listed above. 

Stand-alone vs. Fully-Integrated

There is still a healthy selection of stand-alone customer feedback solutions from vendors including: CDC Respond, Metatude, Qualtrics, Ransys, RatePoint, ResponseTEK, Statmetrics, Vovici and Zoomerang.  There are also a few stand-alone IVR platforms and automated dialers available, such as from Envox and SER.  But, as I mentioned earlier in this series, the demand for stand-alone or point solutions for proactive contact is fading as the recognition that more comprehensive approaches are more effective. 

Fully integrated proactive customer contact solutions are available from the leading contact center vendors, as well as from systems integrators who build the linkages between a set of third party components.

Premise-based vs. Hosted

Almost all of the leading proactive customer contact solutions are either premise-based or hosted. The economic trade-offs of these two alternatives are well known. Other considerations for choosing hosted services include rapidly changing technology and relative scarcity of experienced speech application developers -- in the case of outbound IVR applications, and seasonality or extreme peaks in demand --- such as for alerting services. 

Particularly Noteworthy

• Interactive Intelligence's Interaction Dialer now supports "skills-based dialing" which analyzes the requirements of the customers on the target contact list and selects/calls only contacts that can be effectively handled by the available agent pool.
• Aspect Software's Unified IP supports the broadest range of dialing options (preview, power, predictive, progressive and precision) and offers an optional Advanced List Management capability, which supports multi-tenant deployments and multiple dialers, at multiple sites, on multiple databases.

Part 1 in this series introduced the business drivers for proactive customer contact, Part 2 reviewed the leading-edge business uses of proactive customer contact solutions and services, and Part 4 will highlight proactive customer contact success stories.

Joe Outlaw is President and Chief Analyst of Outlaw Research, a firm that provides results-oriented analysis and consulting of the customer contact marketplace. The objective of Outlaw Research is building a community around the leading edges of customer contact -- the advanced strategies early-adopter companies are applying and the technologies and vendors they are working with.