The ContactSuite Story - Contact centre CRM from the ground up
You may have noticed on our website that Telnet has now made
our in-house CRM solution, ContactSuite
available as a standalone product (ie you can use the product without needing
to first be a contact centre or Octopus client). I thought it would be a good time to blog a
little about what ContactSuite
actually is and where it came from.
What is it?
If you’ve read the whitepaper (Here)
then you’ll know that it’s a CRM (Customer Relationship Management ) solution,
the essence of which means that it can track incoming or outgoing contacts (that
we call “interactions”)
and, if you need to , arrange
collections of interactions together (into what we call “cases”), all while
relating these to a database of customers.
Sounds easy right?
Well if you read my blog on disaster recovery, one of the things I
mentioned was that it was always the simple everyone-must-have-these-kind-of-problems
things that vendors told you they didn’t have a solution for! This led us over the years to time and time
again conclude we had to build our own contact centre focussed solution rather
than pick something up of the shelf.
One if the main requirements that we had of a CRM solution–
was one of flexibility and ability to react to new requirements. We also had to make sure we could integrate
into our telephony system (even if it changed or got updated) and allow us to
manage a very complex mix of different inbound and outbound processes and
staff.
A quirky requirement was also that it must be easy to
integrate other CRMs – either through a database or API, or embedded in the
screen. It must of course be incredibly
fast – wasting time on the contact centre front line is quite literally wasting
money, oh, and it had to do all this and be completely web based (relying on no
software other than a web browser installed on the client)
Humble Beginnings
Nearly everything we do at Telnet seems to have a “humble
beginnings” story, and the application that became our core CRM is certainly no
exception. We have in fact been using
ContactSuite, or one of it’s predecessors
(Call Manager and Client Manager) for over 13 years.
Then and Now - Client Manger circa 1999 vs ContactSuite |
In the early days the main driver was a tool to create
outbound campaigns and use our Zeacom phone system as an autodialler. Gradually other functionality was added
including inbound calling (screenpops), agent management, knowledge management,
email/fax/SMS, “customer centric” CRM capabilities and so on until we had a
very feature rich suite of applications.
Head in the Clouds?
“Cloud Computing” in my opinion is a much overused and
overhyped terminology. Most people,
including tech pros, fail to really understand what it is despite everyone
being told this is the way of the future.
In reality there is little new in the tech world, and “Cloud Computing”
has really been around forever (depending on your definition).
One premise of the current crop of cloud offerings though
really struck a chord with us when we started to use
ContactSuite at our remote
Octopus (itself really a “cloud” solution) sites. Traditionally
ContactSuite was an installed
Windows app, and this started to be a challenge to support once it was outside
our own walls – managing update rollouts and testing against hardware and
networks outside our direct control became much harder than we’d hoped.
The solution was to look at the “cloud solutions” in the
marketplace, including some, like Litmos and Basecamp, that we were already
using ourselves. There were two key
traits – they required no installation on the client machine, and they worked
completely within a web browser.
Webification
The natural progression was for
ContactSuite to become a web
application – but was that even possible?
ContactSuite used a variety of technologies – such as a local client
based plugin for the telephony platform, real time communication with servers to
generate screen pops and client side plug ins for various applications we’d
developed over the years. Turning this
into a web application wasn’t going to be easy!
Our biggest worry was speed – was it even possible to use an
event from the phone system to generate in a web based application, in real
time, where time was money, a “screenpop” for an agent to correctly greet a
caller without delay. Our reference
examples were actually social media sites, which use real time chat – we thought
if they can do it, why can’t we?
We had an ace up our sleeves though, personally knowing the
founder of a successful kiwi born cloud company gave us the chance to get a
handle on all this, and, crucially, to work with him to get a working model of
our biggest challenge – the CS Screenpop.
Armed with this, and Telnet’s skilled dev team (including a new member
with a background in web based CRM design), the project had it’s first beta out
within months.
The Final Product?
ContactSuite (or CS2 as it’s known in house) has been in
prime time operational use now since early 2011 and has come a long way in that
time. One of the original principles of the project was that one of the
benefits of a “cloud” application, other than keeping it simple for the users,
is that you can apply principles such as continuous integration to allow for
incremental improvements, without needing significant rewrite or “new version”
deployments. The analogy of choice here
was Gmail – Do you know what “version” of gmail you use? – no improvements
happen all the time and users get the benefit of all these incremental
improvements without the “forklift” upgrades needed by other products.
ContactSuite is improving all the time – the latest
innovations due to hit the application in September/October being an all new
knowledge management engine, with better search capabilities, all new content
creation tools, and “social knowledge” support (using the brains of your users
to improve the quality of the information at hand.
ContactSuite has been, and continues to be an exciting
product to work on – and has taken Telnet to a new level. Making this available to everyone is the
next level of progress as I’m sure we’ll be tasked with once again solving more
“simple problems” that nobody else can.
Our ability to integrate with other platforms, and dedicated in house
configuration and dev team are pretty excited to see what new challenges lay
ahead!
If you want to have a look at
ContactSuite or see how it
might help your business, drop us a line at one of the places in the “contact
us” page and we’ll set up a meeting or webinar to go through it
Steve
Labels: call centres, contact centres, customer service, IT, Knowledge Management
<< Home