The real difference between a good technology and a great technology is the impact that it has on your customers. Does it help to drive customer satisfaction? Does it really help to increase revenues? Successfully managing customer relationships really depends on having a customer strategy. It is surprising how few companies actually think about their overall customer strategy. They go out and make a technology decision – they say, “We need some customer relationship management software, some sales force automation software, this other piece of technology,” and so on. Obviously technology is a very important part of executing on your customer strategy, but the first thing that you need to do is to really understand what the strategy is and then go deploy and implement whatever technology is appropriate. If you pick the technology first, you may wind up spending millions of dollars on front office technology and actually have decreased customer satisfaction. How did that happen? The company went out and deployed something without really trying to understand the problem that they were trying to solve. Respected market research firms like Gartner report on this very topic and we encourage business leaders to study what these experts have to say.

For contact center technology, there are a few clear differentiators that make for a stellar versus a non-stellar deployment. First, how does the technology rate in terms of integration, both with other products from the same provider and with third-party providers? No company today is a homogeneous environment. All companies have a heterogeneous set of products. We have made a conscious, customer-focused decision to tightly integrate our products with each other so that they work well together from the start so our customers can quickly begin to provide their customers with a consistent experience, no matter what channel. We also integrate with numerous third-party applications, including those of our competitors, because most contact centers are multi-vendor environments. As we talk to our customers and as they participate in a multi-vendor environment and understand how well our products work together and how well our products work with our competitors’ products, as often as not over time we actually end up displacing the competitors’ products – not because we don’t work well with the competitor’s product, but because the customer now sees tremendous value in a company that is so committed to making them successful that we have invested in competing technologies. Therefore, they choose us, and they standardize on us, because then they can dramatically lower their time to deployment, their return on invested capital, and their cost of ownership because they are getting all of their products from one vendor. They can pay a single support bill. All of their internal operations are dramatically simplified. By deliberately choosing a strategy around integration with our competitors’ products, we wind up winning in the long term against those competitors.

Another important point in addition to how the technologies integrate is how open the technology is. As an example, consider self-service or IVR (interactive voice recognition) which is a very popular technology due to tremendous advances in functionality and due to the fact the ROI is easily measured – which is very important in today’s environment. Traditionally this technology was proprietary and not based on open standards. Today, self-service technologies based on open standards are really the best choices for long-term investment protection and immediate ease-of-use. Businesses are recognizing that because they understand that this choice will give them the most flexibility and let them quickly and affordably adapt their application to suit their customers’ needs.

A number of years ago, we realized that open standards were really the way to go, and we designed all of our products to be open and standardsbased. We are fully supportive of web services and J2EE and many other open standards. This keeps the costs down for our customers and makes the administration, education, and support of the products easier, and it makes integration easier. There is a much easier migration path into the future because the customer is not stuck with proprietary legacy systems. We can’t emphasize enough how important openness is in today’s environment because people are looking to make the most out of their existing investments. They are really looking to evolve and to stretch out the total life of every investment that they have made.

The third and we think the most important point to highlight how these technologies can be differentiated is the choice of communication platform. Businesses need an integration platform that ties together all of their communication channels, all of their data from various sources, their work force, and their tasks. They have to do that across all communication channels, regardless of how a customer chooses to make a contact, whether it is a mobile device, a regular phone, a PDA, a website, or a PC. It doesn’t matter. The customer should be recognized by the system regardless of the communication channel, and enable the company to provide the right service.

One great example of this and the flexibility that is needed in a communications platform is one of our customers, Cox Communications. Despite all of the efficiencies that we brought to their operations, customers in some peak hours had to hold for longer than Cox wanted. Clearly, they could have added headcount to their support centers to handle the load, but since the load only increased at certain times of the day and the volume was somewhat unpredictable, they would have had to hire extra people who would only be really busy for a few hours a day. Instead, developed an innovative way for them to use their existing technology from us in a new way and, with their support, we actually have created a product out of our collaborative effort with them and it is called scheduled callback.

This is how it works – when the customer calls in, they get a response along the lines of, “Currently the wait times are five minutes. Would you like us to call you back in five minutes or would you prefer a call at another time that works better for your schedule? Give us the phone number that you would like us to reach you at and indicate your preferred time for a return call.” This allows the company to maintain the same level of staffing, but the staff can be used more efficiently throughout the day. Most importantly, customers are ecstatic about this feature because it gives them control and shows that Cox Communications values their time and doesn’t take it for granted, even if it is just a few minutes. It has dramatically increased customer satisfaction. Cox Communications benefits because they have reduced costs in three ways: they have used their available work force more efficiently, customers are not waiting on hold and racking up toll charges, and the system can allow a representative in a local area to call the customer back and thereby save further on toll charges. By being customer focused and partnering with an expert on customer-focused solutions, Cox was able to reinforce their own mission of being recognized as the best at what they do.