Copyright 2011 – Nixxis Group – All rights reserved.
Approach
Today’s business world is facing two major realities:Communication channels have evolved extremely fast
From the traditional letter and telephone calls, through e-mail and text messaging, to web self-service, MMS, videophone, there is undoubtedly more to follow at an even faster rate.
The new generations will drive us towards increasing use of these new channels. Not being able to respond to customers in a positive, flexible and efficient way, will lead to a substantial loss of (potential) business and market share.
Customers are becoming ever more demanding
They initiate contact through their preferred communication channel, demand responsive service and consis-tent answers through the channel of their choice.
A customer’s impression of your company is less and less influenced by corporate advertisement, but more and more so through his experience with the avail-ability and the quality of the company’s interaction channels.
Innovative solutions
Our mission is to develop and to offer innovative customer interaction. These solutions will allow organiza-tions to quickly meet the changing communication needs and behaviour of the customers and prospects who are becoming more and more demanding. In this way Nixxis users can make the difference with their competitors in continuously improving customer satisfaction and in reducing operational costs.
And this stands for simple call centre solutions as well as complex customer interaction solutions.
Nixxis Interaction Engine
The Nixxis Interaction Engine delivers the entire range of interaction tools into your present and future business solutions. Based on IP-technology and open interfaces, the Nixxis Interaction Engine is designed to function in a truly distributed and virtual mode. It offers unmatched productivity, flexibility and security, and turns the Call Centre into a virtual IP Interaction Centre.The solution is available for private deployment (intranet) or in ASP mode in hosted carrier class data centres. The complete web browsed solution allows easy deployment of home workers and new sites.
Agents, authorized supervisors and administrators can have access through simple IP connections.
Administration
The administration module is a corner-stone of the Nixxis Interaction Engine.
The whole approach of the system’s admin-istration is business oriented.
The administration module enables you to build business campaigns. These campaigns consist of a number of business related activities.
These activities are associated to queues that, will assign the interaction to an agent or a team of agents with the right skill set.
The administration user interface will allow you to:
• Create new campaigns
• Create and/or assign existing activi-ties to a campaign and define the corre-sponding detailed targets and skill set needed
• Create and/or assign new/existing queues to an activity
• Create and/or assign new/ existing teams of agents to a queue
• Create and/or assign new/ existing agents to a team
• c
Fully featured, flexible and easy to use
Business oriented approach
Supervision
Quantitative monitoring
The complete set of quantitative moni-toring tools verify if the operation respects the defined service levels, and notifies the supervisors and contact centre managers if this is not the case thanks to user definable alerts.
Activity views bring information on the associated queue.
For outbound activities the supervisor has a real-time view of the number of records processed, information on the number of used telephony channels, results, etc.
Detailed queue information gives a real-time overview of the number of calls, emails, chats,… in the waiting queue, the number of agents linked to that queue, the maximum waiting time, the average waiting time, etc.
The agent view monitors the agent status: ready, online, wrap-up, or pause.
Time spent in the current status is shown. Agent performance and results are shown.
At any time, one can zoom on details.
Operational monitoring
In addition to traditional quantitative supervision, a modern supervision tool should also monitor the business results. The level of compliance towards global and detailed targets is the only way to objectively evaluate the results and the evolution in time of campaigns, activities, and agent performance.
Customizable dashboards can be defined.
Qualitative monitoring
A supervisor can also perform quality moni-toring actions on the events as they occur. As an example, a supervisor can listen to a conversation, record a conversation, break into a conversation or pass useful informa-tion to an agent by sending a message.User definable screens
All supervision screens can be personal-ized. Each supervisor is able to create his own personal work environment.Assigning agents
Creating new agents is typically an administrator’s task, but supervisors can be granted the right to assign agents to teams and to update the team’s and agent’s individual skills.
Agent interface
The agent interface enables the agent to deal with different contacts simultaneously.
The agent handles several voice, chat or e-mail sessions and freely switches between these sessions.
The interface provides a set of toolbars at his disposal in order to handle his multimedia activities:
• Initiate a call • Transfer a call
• Put a call in conference • Hang up
• Record a conversation
• Put a call on hold • End the wrap up mode • Get in pause
• Send an sms • Start a chat session • Handle an incoming mail • ...
The status of the current contacts is presented to the agent in an intuitive way. Moreover, the agent will dispose of both contact related information and the history of previous contacts. Nixxis provides an agent toolbar using all those functions without any integration
with the existing agent user interface. This toolbar can be modified; every agent can change it as he wishes. The agent interface gives access to scripting tools, software packages or bespoke applications.
Where integration is needed, a set of API’s is available in order to integrate those buttons with the existing agent’s user interface.
The agent interface is a “one-click deployed fat client”: once downloaded , the application will verify and download new versions on its own!
Automatic call distribution
Distribution
Rather than a traditional automatic call distributor, the Nixxis Interaction Engine serves as a flexible automatic interac-tion distributor for phone calls, e-mails, sms and fax.
Agents are team members.
Teams can be allocated to distribution queues allowing interactions to be routed to an agent of the right team: team based routing.
Assigning skills to agents allows handling interactions in a more sophisticated way: skill based routing.
In a team, agents can handle multiple skills across the interaction channels. The Nixxis Interaction Engine will perform the routing to the agent with the appropriate skills. The Nixxis Interaction Engine can go further than this skill based routing.
The Nixxis Interaction Engine can
investigate the potential value of the call, and match this with the cost of the appropriately skilled agents. The call will be routed to the agent with the lowest cost, wherever his site may be. This is called profit based routing.
This potential value is not static but can evolve depending on the elapsed time or on information captured through the IVR.
Even though the routing mechanisms are sophisticated and totally appro-priate, they remain easily manageable.
Multichannel contacts distribution An answer to the needs of the new generations
Dialler
The Nixxis outbound dialler can initiate the calls using the following dialling modes:
• Manual Dialling • Preview Dialling • Progressive Dialling • Power Dialling
• Restricted Power Dialling • Predictive Dialling • Call backs only
Multiple simultaneous
call list dialling
Features offered by Nixxis’ outbound management include Multiple simulta-neous Call List Dialling.
The outbound dialler can analyse all call lists and transfer the communication to the appropriate agent with the appro-priate script pop-up or agent interface. Agents may participate in several simul-taneous outbound campaigns. This is certainly interesting when the end of call lists is reached and productivity is going down.
The outbound dialler can merge call lists and will transfer the communication to the appropriate agent with pop-up of script or other agent interface. This makes it possible to deal with all end of list call backs while reaching the objectives
without affecting productivity.
Intelligent end of call list
management
Nixxis uses dynamic call list filtering in order to improve the efficiency of your outbound activities.
Global analysis and
reporting
Call lists are not static files assigned to a specific calling activity. All activities of a business campaign use a common contacts file. The call lists use subsets of
that contact file depending on defined criteria.
The notion of multi-wave campaigns allows other activities (inbound calls, emails, other outbound activities) to impact on the status of the contact and create a condition by which that contact should be added or removed from the call list.
This global contact file allows the combi-nation of activities resulting in a global analysis and reporting.
Multiple call modes Simultaneous call list dialling Intelligent end of call list management
Reporting
The Nixxis Interaction Engine keeps track of all events occurring on the engine. It maintains a historical database with all information on what agents are doing and on what is happening with the different communications as they occur, using an open data model.
Next to the main historical database, data is synchronized with a data warehouse.
This data warehouse can combine data extracted from the main historical database and data coming from other business databases. Historical reporting is done on this data warehouse. These reports cover both the operational aspects and the business results of your operations.
No heavy reports are extracted straight from the main historical database. This is avoided to ensure performance of the main system.
A set of predefined standard reports is provided.
Those reports are customizable and can be launched through a report scheduler.
Using report publishers the different reports can automatically be published on web-sites or intranet sites. They can also be mailed at a specific time to the
people who need the reports, or they can automatically be printed.
Export facilities are available in different formats (.xls, .pdf, etc.).
The reporting interface offers digging, filtering and drill down analysis facilities. All commonly used reporting engines (e.g. Cognos, Business Objects, Crystal Reports, …) can be used to access the data warehouse.
Using these reporting engines, logical models are built upon the physical
database.
This way of producing reports gives the complete flexibility needed to interpret interaction centre results in the way that better suits your management’s requirements.
Evolutionary reporting
Totally open data models
Export facilities in multiple formats
Profit based routing
Over the years, routing strategies have been developed to improve productivity and quality of call centre operations in a structured way. Productivity is improved by routing incoming calls to the longest available agent, while quality is improved by routing incoming calls to that agent who has the best profile to answer the call from a knowledge perspective: the call is routed to the agent with enough knowledge to be able to answer the call, and who will be available in a reason-able time.
Intelligent routing strategies will aim to combine both quality and productivity aspects in the routing decisions. The first routing algorithms were based on “group based routing”. In “group based routing”, incoming calls are presented to a defined group of agents and any available agent in that group can take the call.
This concept has a major limitation because an agent either belongs to a group or does not. It is very difficult to indicate whether a particular agent has more knowledge on a certain topic than another.
The only way around this, is to create a complex mechanism of overflow from the initial group to another group (e.g. to a group of less trained agents), but once
the overflow is activated, an agent from the initial group is no longer able to handle the call.
The introduction of “skill-based routing” improved the ability of the call centre manager to organize the call centre by enabling him/ her to add knowledge aspects to the agent definitions. On the one hand, calls can be presented to more than one group at the same time, hence overcoming weakness of the obsolete overflow mechanism;
On the other hand, an agent is allowed to be available in more than one skill (group) at the same time.
Furthermore, parameters can be set to define the degree of knowledge that every agent has for a particular skill. This enables a much more accurate decision during the routing process.
“Service Level Agreements” are imple-mented in call centres in line with the possibilities of the routing mechanisms available on the installed equipment. Typical SLA’s define the percentage of calls that need to be answered within a predefined number of seconds. Other SLAs define both the average and maximal waiting times allowed. Most SLA’s implemented in today’s call centres have a quantitative nature. They control time-related aspects for answering the incoming calls. Qualitative measure points, e.g. did the customer get the correct answer or was it necessary to transfer the customer to a more experienced agent, are rarely found in SLA’s.
SLAs. Not only do they expect to be answered timely, but they also expect to get an accurate answer on the first contact.
Call centre management requires cost reductions and more value out of each contact.
Both imperatives call for increasingly complex routing algorithms. Today one wants a call to be measured against estimated value, and routed to that agent who can yield the correct outcome out of the call in the most cost efficient way.
This becomes even more important when adding new aspects such as agents’ delocalization to low cost countries, or allowing for new media that require to be treated and measured in the same way as traditional phone calls.
In some cases there is even a need to blend the different media. Value becomes the decision driver and one wants to have the best and most cost efficient agent to handle a particular demand.
Taking someone who is overqualified not only represents a higher cost, but can also result in the non-availability of
Implementing “profit based routing” by using traditional skill based routing means that a skill has to be defined for each value-range. This will result in an enormous number of skills and waiting queues making the life of the contact centre manager and supervisors simply impossible. It will even be less cost efficient because a dramatic increase in the number of skills will cause an increase in the required number of agents with the ability to handle all defined skills.
Profit based routing therefore has to be implemented as an extension to skill based routing. Every demand is then evaluated on value. This can be done by a set of interactive questions using an IVR, or by customer identification
completed, the demand can then be transfered to the appropriate skill. In addition, the cost of every agent who can take the demand is calculated (it is the sum of the cost of the agent and the cost of transferring the demand to the particular agent).
Both figures are put together and the most appropriate, cost efficient agent is chosen to handle the demand.
Profit based routing responds to both the customers’ and the contact centre management’s expectations. As it remains easy to administer, profit based routing will change the way contact centres are operated, resulting in lower costs and more satisfied customers.
IVR
(Interactive Voice Response)
Nixxis offers a complete range of latest-generation interactive voice response servers.
Interactive voice response servers are not isolated from information.
In addition to their privileged link with “Nixxis Interaction Engine”, vocal applications can also access external databases (SQL Server, Oracle, etc) and Web services (HTTP/XML, SOAP, etc). Vocal applications can go from the simple playback of messages to highly sophisticated applications and be used in many contexts, including caller identification, completely automatic applications such as “Phone Banking”,
the output of recorded messages, and so on.
These applications can be generated in three different ways:
Generation by model
Nixxis supplies various vocal application models suitable for routine situations. The administrator defines the messages to be played and the rules to be applied for each choice such as, for example, a choice of language and a choice of service.These models enable a user with no particular technical skills to configure IVR scenarios.
The applications generated by this
method meet a large majority of IVR requirements.
The descriptive method
When we refer to the creation a vocal application by describing the expected information and the possible inputs for receiving them, Nixxis relies on the VoiceXML standard.This method enables rich applications to be generated where information can be entered
“in disorder”, by telephone keys or by voice recognition alike.
The programming
method
Possibly used in combination with the models or the descriptive applications, this method is addressed to people with programming knowledge.
It enables advanced integrations and a total control over the course of the flows. The applications are written in a .NET computer programming language (C#, Visual Basic, etc).
Preventive monitoring
The Nixxis monitoring services allow for
monitoring of all hardware and software
components within the Nixxis platform.
Thanks to the web-interface as well as the alert notification, a technical support person has all the information he needs to detect, analyse and react on growth as well as technical issues.
The service can monitor a range of hardware items ranging from CPU load and memory usage to disk and fan activity.
From a software point of view, the service monitors the availability of the different services as well as their performance. The services can also monitor opera-tional values such as call volume so that hardware decisions can be based on this. Not only does the monitoring service allow to monitor servers, but it also checks network equipment and connectivity. Monitoring of these types of services is done through SNMP while full featured monitoring on servers can be done through either SNMP or by installing a monitoring client.
The monitoring client also allows for addi-tional features such as remote command execution, based on received triggers.
Furthermore, the client offers passive monitoring in situations where full access to the server might not be available. In this
c a s e ,
the monitoring client
reports its data back to the monitoring server, and reconfigures itself based on change requests through the main server.
As the service is fully web-based, access to the monitoring can be allowed from any type of workstation, and different user levels are available to allow different types of access groups.
Triggers and alerts can be acknowledged to notify fellow support people that an action is being taken, and servers/ services can be put into maintenance mode to avoid notifications when work is performed.
The monitoring service can send out alert notifications for different types of media such as email, sms, etc. But the service also offers a powerful remote command execution to allow for automated repairs of a system.
SLA monitoring
as well as historical views of (perfor-mance) data is obviously fully integrated into this system.
Thanks to this monitoring service, Nixxis and its partners are able to react quickly on issues as well as pro-actively avoid
them, or take measures against
unex-pected growth , etc.
Detect, prevent, analyse and react immediately
to any issue!
Recording
The Nixxis solution contains recording functionalities that can be initiated by the agent, a supervisor, the script, at random, or by default.
Recording can encompass the complete conversation or can be activated on demand, at a specific moment in the conversation. It can be rule-based, or triggered by specific events.
A way of recording consists in auto-matically recording all conversations, leaving the agent the choice of saving if appropriate.
This allows keeping track of complete conversations even if an agent decides it is worth recording during the conversation.
Both voice and data can be recorded. A qualification can be assigned to each record. It is linked to the call and is shown during a search. Call related data (customer profile) may also be viewed. Search criteria are varied:
• Campaign, activity, agent
• Type of call (inbound,...)
• Date and time
• Calling number
• Destination number
• Call qualification
The user interface shows the following data sets:
• Starting date and time
• Calling number
• Call duration
• Call qualification
• Comments
• Scoring allocated by the reviewer
Each reviewer may allocate a score to a call, taking into account various scoring criteria. In case of play back, his own scores will be presented. Reports will offer a global view of the scoring allocated by distinct reviewers.
While listening, the functions available are:
• Play / Fast forward / Pause
• Volume setting
• (Re)allocation of a
call qualification
• (Re)allocation of a score
• Adding / Amending a comment
Simple and flexible recording and search
A competitive quality control tool
Scripting
A lot of call centres have been confronted with the following dilemma: The built-in scripting tool for their call centre solution is too complex for non-IT people and does not allow trained IT people to create scripts with all the complexity that they would like to use.
This is why Nixxis has created 2 scripting environments: an integrated scripting tool for non-IT people and a complete set of templates built in Microsoft Visual Studio for advanced IT staff.
The Visual Studio tools offer the advanced IT staff the capability of extending the standard templates to suit their needs.
The built-in scripting tool has direct access to the campaign and activity definitions as they are defined using the
standard Nixxis Administrator.
All database fields and campaign quali-fications are available in the scripting environment: no need to change the script when an additional qualification is defined on the campaign level! In addition, the complete set of appoint-ment scheduling functionality needs only to be configured in the Nixxis Administrator.
The script will automatically recover all definitions and will take all administrator modifications into account without having to modify the script.
The Visual Studio Templates allow devel-opers to program complete programs without having to integrate the Nixxis features campaign per campaign.
The different libraries can be easily used and re-used for different campaigns. Nixxis provides its customers with sophis-ticated scripting tools, which allow them to choose the best suited functionality, whether for the advanced computer user or for users who have little under-standing of computer technology.
