When Call Centers Go Bad

Photograph by Ha-Wee.

Sales force automation (SFA) is thriving, running on-premise and in the cloud, in part because one SFA application can support complex sales activities. Log on, enter or retrieve the required information, and you’re ready to sell.

The call center environment, in contrast to SFA, is much more complex, even when running service in the cloud. That’s because, instead of your salespeople calling—or calling on—the customer, they call you. So in addition to integrating CRM, back-end systems, your private branch exchange (PBX) for incoming calls, and agents’ landlines or VoIP-based calling (especially for work-at-home agents), you also need:

• Computer telephony integration (CTI) to do a “screen pop” showing a call center agent the name and details of the person who’s calling.
• Interactive voice response (IVR) to identify callers, reduce costs and resolve issues with minimal—or no—live agent interaction.

Providing great customer service, besides having top-notch customer service agents, requires integrating and making all of the above components work well together. But too often, it instead adds up to one big headache.

The Perfect Call Center Storm

Several years back, for example, one of Innoveer’s high-technology clients integrated its Siebel CRM software with third-party IVR and CTI software. But about six times per day, often at night when call volumes peaked, the call center software would crash for 10 minutes, booting customers out of call queues. For a company selling items worth hundreds of dollars and taking 1,000+ calls per day, the result was lost revenue and no small risk of customer defection.

The culprit? Small memory leaks, which in the high-production environment eventually added up to a system crash. These memory leaks resulted from the underlying third-party call center software and components having been designed for slightly different versions of Siebel—one for 7.7.0.1, another for 7.7.0.2, and so on. Meaning, no simple fix existed.

Murphy’s Law Alive and Well

Unfortunately, no one offers a great soup-to-nuts call center. Telephony systems are complicated, proprietary, not yet open, and difficult to test at high volumes. Furthermore, your vendor for every required component—CRM, PBX, IVR, CTI and so on—will often differ, and their software not be quite compatible.

Holding Out For A Hero

Arguably, call centers are ripe for a savior, and help could be on the way:

• Oracle CRM On Demand: With version 9, added a virtual CTI connector, which lets organizations more easily bring voice, voicemail, email and Web channels into the on-demand service picture. Meanwhile, IVR enablement via SOA offers new types of self-service and on-demand possibilities.
• Service Cloud: For this salesforce.com service offering running on Force.com, the company, together with Cisco, announced a Customer Interaction Cloud, aimed at SMBs, which is an out-of-the-box, SaaS-based call center.
• Asterisk: Run this open source call center software on an inexpensive Linux server, and for a few hundred dollars (including a digital-to-analog converter), you can have a working call center.

Upsides to cloud-based and open source call centers, besides their relatively low cost, are that they’ve been designed from scratch, which means they could potentially work much better than the call center technology kludge that’s become common today.

Downsides, however, include a dearth—so far—of plug-ins to make them work with your internal network, IVR software and all of the other modern call center requirements. To integrate SaaS-based service with your on-premise systems, you’ll also need to start opening firewall ports. From a security and privacy standpoint, that can expose you to data hijacking and potential break-ins, including browser cache attacks.

The Collective Power of Frustration

Will open source technology and SaaS call centers solve today’s call center technology issues? With so much collective frustration over call centers, they’re the safe bet for how we’ll make the next big step forward toward creating easy to integrate, useful and headache-free call centers.

Learn More

Mastering customer service, regardless of whether it’s running on-premise, in the cloud, or as open source software, requires treating the call center as a strategic asset. Furthermore, until you get your customer service business practices and self-service sites in order, from a service standpoint also forget social networks.and don’t worry about Twitter.

SaaS Seeking Large Enterprises

As the cloud expands, it's extending SaaS to even the biggest businesses. Photograph by doug.siefken.

Large + Complicated = On-Premise CRM?

Why not run CRM in the cloud? In other words, why not use SaaS CRM applications, provided they deliver—as they typically do—more rapid procurement, easier manageability and a lower total cost of ownership, compared to on-premise CRM applications?

Well, size may be one factor. Many people’s perception is that SaaS doesn’t work well for large enterprises. But in fact, we’ve found that SaaS solutions are quite a good feature and functionality fit for many organizations, large or small. As the list of salesforce.com customers shows, many heavy hitters are SaaS devotees.

On the other hand, SaaS isn’t the best fit for every organization, and especially large organizations with quite complex requirements. For example, we’re currently helping a large legal information services provider to adopt a new CRM system. Based on our recommendations, the company is implementing an on-premise application, in part because it needs to integrate its CRM software with various back office, order management and provisioning systems. The goal: to enable the company’s sales force to quickly move from quote to order, and then organize product delivery, all from within the CRM application. Building this is relatively complicated, technologically speaking.

Given that technical complexity, as well as the required integration, this type of project is not a great fit for SaaS—at least not in 2010.  I include that caveat because, going forward, we do see more projects of this nature—technically complex CRM implementations requiring advanced functionality and integration—being well served by SaaS.

Redefining the CRM Choice: On-Premise or SaaS

A little over one year ago, Innoveer released its guidance about when to use SaaS versus on-premise CRM software: The New CRM Choice: On-Premise Software or SaaS.

The gist is that in 2008, SaaS CRM applications didn’t offer as many features, or as much functionality, as on-premise applications. For projects with a greater degree of technical or organizational complexity, on-premise CRM software was the better choice.

But that equation has been changing rapidly—and will continue to do so—as cloud computing evolves, further extending SaaS and providing greater business benefits. CRM analyst Denis Pombriant explains:

The Cloud [has] three parts: infrastructure as a service (IaaS), software (SaaS) and, now, a development platform (PaaS). (…) The new ubiquity [of computing access] spawned by Cloud Computing — all three components — is spawning new, fast and, above all, mobile business processes, not just applications.

In other words, SaaS is now just an application layer—albeit with some minimal accompanying tools—in the cloud. To which the cloud adds an infrastructure layer (servers, storage and bandwidth from the likes of Amazon and Google) and platform layer (such as Force.com). Altogether, these layers can make any SaaS application much more useful and easy to work with.

Bigger Clouds, Greater Benefits

As cloud computing expands, it makes SaaS more extensible, useful and cost-effective. Hence my prediction is that SaaS CRM will evolve to become more deeply connected with the expanding cloud ecosystem. In other words, organizations of any size will be able to support much more complex business processes, at lower cost, using SaaS CRM applications.

In 2008, we said that “CRM projects must now begin by answering this fundamental question: on-premise or SaaS?”  Today, however, the question is simpler: Why not use SaaS? And as the cloud evolves, in another three or five years, will we even bother to ask?

Learn More

When weighing the pros and cons of on-premise versus SaaS CRM software, assess functionality requirements, organizational structures, costs and long-term goals. For more information, see our aforementioned white paper, The New CRM Choice: On-Premise Software Or SaaS.

Finally, want to know which SaaS CRM software is best? See our CRM Software Smackdown.