Contact Management Magazine Issue 2 2018

THE CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE MAGAZINE ISSUE 2 • 2018

The

Operations Issue ❯❯How to achieve technology RFP success ❯❯Delivering one-stop contact centre and UC services ❯❯Versatile system supports McDougall

The Operations Issue

10 steps

to achieve contact centre technology RFP success

By Colin Taylor

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he process of implementing any new technology in your contact centre can often be daunting. So what is the best process for establishing which technologies are best aligned with your organizational goals and needs?

The first or “pre-step” is to establish whether to sole source or issue a request for proposal (RFP). A sole source procurement process can be defined as any contract entered into without a competitive process. An RFP, in contrast, solicits proposals from qualified vendors who you believe can meet the requirements of the organization.

But sole sourcing can be perceived to be a risky proposition. What if you have missed some detail or neglected to reach out to a leading provider?

The RFP process is a safer approach. Although more time consuming it allows you to assess all the major players in the market.

Here are the five reasons to issue an RFP: 1. Improve decision making, including getting more options before narrowing down to what works, avoiding jumping to conclusions without evidence and performing due diligence on major purchases and contracts.

2. Reduce overt bias both internal and external.

3. Increase the transparency of decision making, reasoning and clarity.

4. Ensure that all people and management involved are complying with steps, rules and regulations and reviews and have the authority to commit the organization to a contract.

5. For infrequent purchases RFPs reduce the issues risk of poor purchase and allows the decision to be broadly accepted.

The 10 RFP process steps

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Determine what are you seeking.

What will you ask for, who will you send the RFP to and how will you evaluate the responses? Unclear goals will produce unclear results. So ask yourself the following: • Why do we want this technology?; and 2 | Contact management

• What will this technology allow us to do?

Once you confirm what you want to do and/or achieve with the new technology you can begin to define your requirements. Building use cases provides granularity and will allow you to specifically see the opportunities and benefits of the new technology, namely: • Where you will use it?; • How it will be employed?; and • What benefits are expected.

• What is mandatory? - those required capabilities you can’t live without; • What is a nice to have? - features or functions that would be nice to have, but not mandatory; and • What is informational- interesting, but not required today? - capabilities that you would like to know more about, which could be desirable in the future.

Research solution providers Next, you need to identify the providers that you believe can deliver the solution(s) to help you achieve your goals.

Here are the first steps: • Ask you peers in similar organizations; • Reach out to your network for recommendations and guidance; and • Look online for solution providers, including checking out analyst groups like Gartner and Forrester.

In defining your requirements, it is important to weight the value of each function and capability. Examine if all the requirements are of equal value or importance. This will help you determine how to assign weighting value. You can use the “Mandatory”, “Nice to Have” and “Informational” with defined values, of 3, 2, 1 or you can add separate weights based on each requirement.

Ask the vendors to explain how they will meet your requirements: don’t just ask for confirmation. As there can be many ways to comply, a simple “Yes”, will not communicate as much information as requesting the detail on “How”.

Define and weight the value of your requirements The next step is to create a list of the desired features and functionality you want to see in the technology solution. It is important to determine if all the requirements are equally important or if some should be weighted as more important than others. Be sure to ask vendors for details on how they can meet the requirements. Sort them out as follows:

Define rules of engagement Defining the “rules of engagement” is crucial. One of the objectives of any RFP process is to eliminate bias and ensure that all vendors have the same opportunity to win the business.

You will want to mandate the vendor communication to only take place in writing, by email. This facilitates information sharing with all parties and provides an audit trail supporting the process. Do not allow

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Issue 2 • 2018

The Operations Issue vendors to communicate with anyone except as authorised in the RFP.

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Allow vendors to ask questions It is impossible to identify and answer all of the possible questions that could arise from reading an RFP. Vendors will have questions and you will need to understand and answer each of them. Many of the questions asked are likely answered in the RFP but vendors want to ensure a correct understanding.

Therefore, plan on a question period following the release of the RFP. Share the questions and answers with all vendors to eliminate any confusion or ambiguity that may exist regarding what you are seeking or how you intend to use the solution.

Scoring and evaluation The biggest mistake we see organizations make is that they have not defined how they will score and evaluate responses until after they have begun reviewing the responses. This can be dangerous as it creates a risk that the scoring and evaluation becomes influenced by one or more of the responses, possibly providing an advantage to one vendor over another.

Therefore, be detailed and specific when developing your evaluation scorecard: • Know how you will evaluate the RFP responses before you receive any; and • Define your scoring approach in detail, be specific.

Common evaluations elements include functional requirements, pricing, reputation and references, ease of use and support.

Caution: If you over-weigh one of these elements, the others become less important.

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When establishing your scorecard: • Don’t be influenced by the responses, to change your weighting; • Ask vendors clarification questions e.g. what are the set up and recurring charges?; • Ask vendors to provide a total cost of ownership (TCO), and calculate TCO yourself; and • Have more than one person evaluate the RFPs. It is easy to be influenced by vendor responses to cause you to want to add, remove or change requirements. But if we allow this, once we start reviewing the responses, we compromise the entire process. If there are great points you wish were included in the RFP, note it, and look for the same in the other responses or add it to your vendor clarification questions but don’t change the scoring criteria.

Evaluations should be completed by multiple individuals as not everyone brings the same experience, knowledge or attention span to the reviewing process. By enlisting multiple stakeholders in the review process, you will increase your odds of a good outcome. It is the dichotomy of scores that can add value to process, as the team will discuss why they awarded X or Y to a particular response which may present a different perspective than another person saw. All this discussion improves the rigor in the process.

Here are some sample requirements you may wish to include in your RFPs: • Security protocol; • Current and future language requirements; • Data ownership; and • System application programming interfaces (APIs).

Issue 2 • 2018

In the contact centre world we tend to focus on what we can do with the solution to improve contact centre and customer outcomes, but not so much on what risks a new technology may present from security or IT perspectives. But with the heightening dangers of cybercrime that could hurt customers and companies security is critical for contact centre technologies.

Therefore, be sure to engage these departments of your requirements.

Also, make sure the data is yours. And that you know how you will extract it if you ever choose to migrate to another solution.

Reputation and references Checking references is commonly not completed as this can be a time-consuming process and we assume that any reference will only say positive things about the vendor, but, this is not always the case. Reference checks may yield responses like, “I wish we had never selected this vendor” and “we signed the contract 2 years ago, but haven’t implemented, as the vendor still can’t get the solution to work as promised”.

When checking references, ask about: • The implementation process and team; • The cost and any variance or surprises; • The timeline; was there any slippage?; • Any surprises in the process; and • How well the solution met their needs.

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Research the vendors and to understand how have others rated them. Look for high-quality research and rankings such as from the analyst firms. Look for credible awards received and reviews of the solutions on websites, in discussion groups and online communities. See if the reviews are positive.

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Ease of use and support You will want to assess how easy the solution is to operate and manage and that you can make the changes yourself. Most organizations don’t want to acquire a solution that incurs a professional service charge each time they make a change. Ask about training and background required to manage and employ the solution. Ask if additional or advanced administrator training is offered by the vendor.

No matter the solution or vendor you will need to reach to support at some point in time. It’s important to understand how this will work and what it costs.

Most vendors offer a multi-tier support models and the cost of each will vary with the speed of response and accessibility to the support team.

• How do you get technical support e.g. portal, email, phone; • Are hours of support limited?; and • How are on-going professional services charged?

I advise over-spend on support in the first year. This is when we will be least knowledgeable and will have the highest degree of change thus assistance and support will be desired.

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Shortlist and vendor demos At this point you will want to down-select by creating a short-list. To carry too many vendors forward is time consuming and generally yields very little in terms of changing the overall ranking. Shortlisting the top two or three vendors can make a great deal of sense.

With each short-listed firm, you will want to set up demos of their solution, typically with web-based collaboration and conferencing applications. You will want to see how the solution operates, the different dashboards available to differing classes of users and assess its ease of use and flexibility. Get the entire team to attend the demo and ask the vendor to record the demo so it can later be shared with those who didn’t attend.

You will then score then demos, employing you scoring model.

Final scoring The final step is to combine the scores from the RFP and demo to generate a final score or ranking. Then reach out to the highest scoring vendor and begin the negotiation.

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Colin Taylor is CEO and Chief Chaos Officer, the Taylor Reach Group www.taylorreachgroup.com. Colin has assisted companies including Aldo, Mercedes Benz, Reader’s Digest, Republic Services, National Bank of Australia and TD Waterhouse. Recognized as one of Canada’s leading contact centre experts, Colin has received 27 RSVP Awards for excellence in Contact Center Management from the Canadian Marketing Association (CMA). Recently Colin was Ranked #5 in The Customer Service 100 globally.

Contact management | 3

The Operations Issue

Cloud providers now delivering one-stop contact centre and UC services

By Elka Popova

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he compelling benefits of cloud architectures: more flexible capacity adjustment, more cost-effective support of remote agents and faster access to advanced features have led to more businesses moving their communications, customer care and other software workloads to the cloud. Frost & Sullivan research reports that the market revenue in North America for hosted/cloud contact centre solutions expected to grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 9.7% from 2016 to 2021.

But businesses are now looking for providers that can offer a one-stop shop for a broader scope of their needs.

An integrated set of cloud communications and contact centre solutions from a single provider delivers operational efficiencies and helps ensure greater usability. More specifically, businesses can reduce vendor management costs, ensure tighter interoperability and integration among different tools and better synchronize their technology upgrade cycles.

To address these market trends, many cloud communications providers are launching contact centre as a service (CCaaS) solutions, either through partnerships or technologies that have been developed internally or acquired from third parties. In turn, CCaaS solutions help providers differentiate themselves, generate additional revenues and create stickier services.

Several recent announcements from the unified communications (UC) as a service (UCaaS) provider community demonstrate increasing provider focus on delivering advanced and more tightly integrated contact centre capabilities as part of their cloud solutions sets.

UCaaS services include network-based services such as call control, voice switching, PBX, voicemail and unified messaging, instant messaging and presence, audio, web and video conferencing, and team collaboration and mobility. They also include the network infrastructure related to service provisioning.

The integration of UCaaS and CCaaS benefits both enterprise and contact centre users. UCaaS services can help augment the contact centre agent experience and deliver greater value to end customers (i.e., those interacting with a business contact centre) by enabling faster and more effective issue resolution via shared presence and use of more advanced collaboration tools.

8x8 Acknowledging growing customer demand for integrated, cost-effective UCaaS and contact centre (CC) solutions 8x8 announced a new series of service packages at Enterprise Connect 2018 that will be available in summer 4 | Contact management

2018. Including a lobby seat license, as well as a range of seat licenses, the new mix-and-match packages combine different telephony, UC and customer care features on one platform to address varying needs within organizations. The most comprehensive package will include the full set of UC and CC features.

8x8 will be enhancing its intelligent call routing, weave in contextual personalization for omnichannel services and provide speech analytics. It recently acquired MarianaIQ(MIQ), which brings deep learning capabilities and is part of the strategic investments it has been making in artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning.

Avaya Avaya launched a new contact centre cloud solution recently to boost the supplier’s value proposition in this market. The CC solution leverages Avaya’s acquired Spoken technology to enable a smoother transition for existing Avaya premises-based customers to the cloud. A new Avaya IP Office Cloud solution will also be launched in the near future that will expand IP Office consumption options.

In a surprising move, Avaya launched the Avaya Mobile Experience in the U.S. Through a partnership with a cellular provider, Avaya will operate as an MNO (mobile network operator) and will be delivering highly differentiated services to contact centres and enterprises. By porting their toll-free numbers to Avaya’s cellular service and leveraging advanced Avaya routing technologies, enterprises and contact centres will be able to receive more reliable caller ID and geolocation data. Avaya presently does not service Canadian numbers, but they are discussing it.

CoreDial CoreDial recently acquired Voice4Net, a cloud contact centre provider, to further enhance its portfolio and deliver greater value to partners and customers alike. The acquisition has culminated with CoreDial releasing the CoreNexa Contact Center. It offers omni-channel inbound and outbound, multimedia functionality including IVR, email ACD, chat, SMS and call back in queue. CoreNexa also provides call recording and workforce management.

Dialpad At Enterprise Connect 2018, Dialpad launched a CC solution built on Google Cloud Platform. Dialpad Call Center provides analytics tools to monitor agent productivity and customer data. It also delivers customized email or SMS alerts on key metrics such as wait times, queue length and abandonment rates.

Dialpad will be adding sentiment analysis, call transcription, automated note taking and coaching.

It recently acquired TalkIQ, which provides real-time speech recognition and natural language processing technologies.

Fuze In March 2018, Fuze announced an expanded partnership with NICE inContact and a new partnership with Five9. The provider believes that possessing a broader selection of CC solutions will allow it to better address specific customer needs. These partnerships complement Fuze’s existing, internally developed CC offering. Fuze Contact Centre is a voiceonly solution providing an integrated experience for businesses deploying Fuze’s suite of applications. For larger or more complex environments, Fuze has been offering customers NICE inContact through a strategic partnership established in 2015.

Issue 2 • 2018

The Operations Issue Nextiva Announced in late 2016 and rolling out through 2018, Nextiva is building service CRM, customer-to-business chat, surveys and email marketing tools directly into the NextOS platform. Based on the pricing and business model of its analytics tools, Nextiva will allow customers to add these new pre-integrated capabilities individually, based on their specific needs at competitive pricing.

RingCentral At Enterprise Connect 2018, RingCentral announced enhancements to its CC offerings. More specifically, the company announced integration of RingCentral Contact Centre with RingCentral Glip team messaging and collaboration as well as a new RingCentral Pulse service.

Contact centre agents can use existing RingCentral Glip teams or create new ones to access a broader pool of subject matter experts and leverage multiple channels—voice, video, messaging and screen share—to interact with them. RingCentral Pulse uses intelligent bots to monitor important contact centre metrics in real time and provide automated alerts and notifications to key stakeholders via RingCentral Glip.

Star2Star Star2Star currently has a new multi-channel contact centre solution in beta testing that will be launched in the coming months. Internally developed and based on the same underlying technology as Star2Star’s hybrid and pre-cloud communications solutions, the new offering will allow tight integration and improved collaboration

across contact centre agents and enterprise experts. The new offering will integrate with both Star2Star’s hybrid UCaaS solution and its new pure hosted solution.

Combined with Nexmo APIs, these solutions can be used standalone or integrated with Vonage’s CC solutions.

Twilio

To increase revenues industry providers must capitalize on the growth opportunities in cloud contact centre market by addressing existing demand for end-to-end, single-vendor communications and customer care solutions by launching cloud contact centre services. Providers can acquire cloud CC companies or partner with third-party providers in order to bring such capabilities to market quickly.

Alternatively, providers can develop these capabilities internally.

At Enterprise Connect 2018, Twilio further diversified its portfolio and disrupted the market with the launch of a full-fledged CC solution.

Twilio Flex combines the capabilities of Twilio’s network and platform with a contact centre graphical user interface. Out of the box, Twilio Flex supports multiple customer-care channels including voice (including WebRTC-enabled in-browser voice), video, text messaging, Facebook Messenger, Twitter, LINE and WeChat.

Vonage Vonage launched two new differentiated customer-care offerings at Enterprise Connect 2018.

It introduced skills-based routing and sentiment analysis tools that provide building blocks for businesses to create their own routing plans and analytical views of customer interactions and agent performance.

Conclusion

Elka Popova is vice president and senior fellow, Digital Transformation at Frost & Sullivan (www.frost.com). Elka’s focus is with enterprise communication and next-generation technologies.

Her expertise spans a broad range of industry sectors including enterprise telephony and messaging, unified communications and collaboration, hosted/cloud-based communications and SaaS, and SIP trunking and VoIP access services.

Reach marketers & financial executives Our magazines are must-reads for key executives in core corporate competencies.

To advertise or get more information and media kits: Mark Henry 905-201-6600 ext 223 | 1-800-668-1838 | mark@dmn.ca

Issue 2 • 2018

Contact management | 5

The Operations Issue

How a versatile system supports McDougall’s programmes

By John Amrhein

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s one of Canada’s most experienced and leading contract research organizations (CROs) for over 30 years, Toronto-Ontario based McDougall Scientific delivers valuable insight to biotech and pharmaceutical clients across all phases of their clinical trials.

With timely, accurate data and analytics, McDougall helps them expedite their time to market while decreasing development costs. Known for delivering exacting insights, we work closely with companies to understand their business requirements, aligns with their regulatory strategies and mitigates risks to deliver a vital statistical strategy for their product development.

Every successful clinical trial relies on expertly managed data operations. McDougall’s intelligent system ensures consistency and regulatory compliance while providing expertly managed data collection and validation.

Our innovative technology ensures efficient statistical designs that expedites workflow and mitigates risks, resulting in a smooth, efficient and trusted operation from start to finish.

Business need and challenge McDougall designs the clinical trial study and data collection instruments, executes the trial, cleans the data, analyzes it and finally reports the study and results to the Health Canada’s Therapeutic Products Directorate, the 6 | Contact management

U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) or to the European Medicines Agency. A portion of each clinical trial is conducted blindly where one algorithm randomly assigns a placebo or test drug to a patient/test subject.

McDougall also works with supply management. For example, a specific hospital may go through six drug kits and need to order more. We will prevent these inefficiencies by programming unique algorithms into the system to measure and track kits at each stage: shipping, delivery and integration.

In 2011, McDougall conducted an online search of interactive voice response (IVR) systems. We selected several vendors to receive a formal request for proposal (RFP).

First and foremost, we sought a system that had to be validated and could be implemented in a regulated environment. We needed a system with continuous availability for clients via fail-over, high availability

or another suitable technology.

McDougall is a growing business, so we also sought technology that allows for multiple IVR applications as well as additional telephony features that could be used by our offices.

Second, the IVR project plan called for professional services. McDougall needed a vendor with comprehensive developer and system manager training that would guide users through the implementation process as well as ongoing training.

We had other requirements including: 1. Compatibility with our virtualized IT infrastructure.

2. Application development not requiring unique or rare developer skills, but instead using a “modern” or common language or graphical user interface.

3. Integration with McDougall’s MS SQL Server database system and with web applications Issue 2 • 2018

The Operations Issue including (interactive web response (IWR) and electronic data capture (EDC).

4. Support for four to 10 simultaneous calls from clients via one or two incoming telephone lines.

5. Supports outgoing faxes and emails.

The Enghouse solution Enghouse Interactive’s Communications Portal (CP) met McDougall’s high-level requirements at a reasonable price.

The Enghouse CP is an open, standards-based platform with integrated application development and management components that significantly reduces the time, cost and complexity of deploying voice and Internet Protocol (IP) communications solutions.

The CP system empowers business communication through voice self-service solutions, including: • IVR and interactive video and video response (IVVR); • Outbound dialing; and • Speech-enabled self-service systems.

In addition, the system also offers: • SMS and email; • Standards-based voicemail; • Contact centre solutions, including intelligent routing applications and screen pop applications; • Unified communications solutions, including standards-based voicemail systems and applications.

They combine traditional voice, IP telephony, video messaging, SMS, email and fax communications; and • Visual self-service solutions via web browser, smartphone, mobile or other connected devices.

Prior to CP, McDougall was using a Nortel system reliant on a PBX that was no longer supported by the vendor, which raised concern about service continuity. The new CP system, with a cold stand-by, has improved our business continuity and the service level agreements the company can offer their clients.

At the time of the RFP, McDougall was migrating office phones to voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) via session initiation protocol (SIP) and the new IVR had to be compatible with it. We also required a vendor with solid support, including training along with an extensive quality software development and maintenance process and schedule.

Randomization and drug supply management at McDougall is automated via IVR and IWR. It provides client value by delivering just-in-time enrollment-driven supplies to study sites, thereby lowering costs and optimizing supply inventory.

Enghouse Interactive’s IVR and IWR has a global reach and is eminently flexible. It has allowed us to customize applications to meet such unique client needs as: • Facilitating adaptive designs including dose escalation; • Implementing complex randomization allocation and trial supplies management schemes; • Capturing Patient Reported Outcomes (ePRO); • Conducting surveys; • Recording patient trial status such as reasons for failing screening; • Executing emergency code break procedures; • Sending automatic notifications and confirmations triggered by specific actions or events; and • Email confirmation of subject randomization.

Benefits and results Since the system’s implementation in 2013, McDougall Issue 2 • 2018

has seen several positive results. For example, when sponsors of studies needed to set up new clinical sites, we would only need to supply them with phone numbers. In addition, McDougall has developed key business metrics in time and on budget. We have more efficiently addressed complex randomization schemes and drug inventory management, as well as system availability.

For randomization research participants, McDougall clients have called the IVR application to randomize: • Cardiac patients on the operating tables waiting to receive stents; • Pediatric dental patients in the dentists’ chairs awaiting treatment; and • Patients with diabetic foot ulcers.

The system retrieves information stored in the EDC by using web application programming interfaces (APIs) and web services. When the data originates in the IVR the system also pushes data to the EDC from the IVR. For drug supply management, the IVR has alerted clients when supplies were: • Due to expire and had to be replaced; • Below supply thresholds and had to be replenished; and • Coming from multiple depots and requiring tracking from those sources.

The new system also ensures scalability. This includes auditing trials, securing access, the ability to adhere to requirements, testing and confidence in the system’s development lifecycle.

In conclusion, Enghouse Interactive has helped us differentiate ourselves from our competitors by providing an innovative technology solution that resolves important business issues of our clients. Enghouse Interactive’s Communication Portal automates manually intensive procedures and eliminates risks to data integrity, the foundation of clinical research.

John Amrhein is vice president, McDougall Scientific. He joined McDougall in April 2008 and functions in several capacities, including: managing employees and service delivery, supervising IT service providers responsible for maintaining McDougall’s computing infrastructure and running McDougall’s business development and sales activities. Prior to joining McDougall, John was Senior Statistician at SAS Institute (Canada) where he taught statistics and programming and consulted with clients in health care, pharmaceuticals, retail, manufacturing, finance and government. Prior to joining SAS, John was a mathematical statistician with the U.S. Department of Agriculture where he designed probability-based surveys of the U.S. agri-business sector.

New Gold Line hosted contact centre solution generating results GL CloudConnect (GLCC), the enterprise division of the Group of Gold Line of Markham, Ontario has deployed the Enghouse Interactive Contact Centre: Service Provider (CCSP) as the platform for its new cloud contact centre offering, GLCCaaS. CCSP is a multi-tenant hosted cloud contact centre platform. The solution has been integrated with Gold Line’s GLSIP trunking and its GLPBX hosted PBX offerings. And it has enabled Gold Line to meet increasing client demand for enterprise cloud solutions.

“This new cloud service, through partnering with Enghouse Interactive, affords Gold Line the opportunity to extend existing relationships and be the single-source partner for all of our customers’ needs,” said Essie Nouraee, GL CloudConnect vice president, VoIP technology and services.

One such customer, Global Mentoring Solutions, Inc., (GMS) a leading provider of outsourced IT help desk managed services, sought GL’s assistance after its existing cloud contact centre provider failed to deliver the flexibility and commercial model it required.

Since deploying GLCCaaS in November 2017 the company has realized greater flexibility and cost savings that has enabled the company to reinvest in expanding operations into new markets.

“The GMS contact centre operation is not a static environment and the cloud platform we were using impacted every touchpoint of our ever-evolving customer care and call treatment processes,” said Wayne Goldstein, GMS president and CEO. “GLCCaaS’ value proposition was clear and compelling, as it offered the scalability we needed and the agility to adapt and effectively manage our business.”

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