Q&A: Barry O'Sullivan Discusses the Customer Interaction Network: A New Model for Contact Centers

By Charles Waltner, News@Cisco

Few companies would argue the vital importance of the customer contact center. Customers are increasingly likely to interact with a company by phone or email, rather than in person at a store. According to a recent study by Purdue University's Center for Customer-Driven Quality, 92 percent of U.S. consumers form their image of a company based on their experience with the company's contact center, and 63 percent will stop using a company's products or services based on a negative contact center experience.

With this in mind, Cisco is constantly developing new ways organizations can improve their contact center customer interactions while continuously increasing their return-on-investment. Cisco approaches this task by developing new products that can harness the flexibility, low-cost, and capabilities of a modern Internet Protocol (IP) communications infrastructure. Cisco has a vision for where they see the market going that they have dubbed The Customer Interaction Network. Cisco recently released enhanced solutions for two areas of a Customer Interaction Network: the IP Contact Center (IPCC) product family and the Intelligent Contact Management (ICM) product family.

Barry O'Sullivan, vice president and general manager of Cisco's Customer Contact Business Unit, recently spoke with News@Cisco about the concept of the Customer Interaction Network and the recent updates to Cisco's contact center product portfolio.

What is the Customer Interaction Network?

Barry O'Sullivan: The idea of a Customer Interaction Network is a distributed, IP-based, intelligent information network including a continuously evolving suite of innovative multi-channel services that deliver responsive and streamlined customer exchanges, helping create much more effective customer service. The Customer Interaction Network extends customer service capabilities across the entire organization, giving businesses a more integrated and collaborative approach to customer satisfaction.

The Customer Interaction Network is what Cisco sees as the next chapter in customer service. Over the last few years call centers have evolved to become contact centers. Now, as customer service agent resources become more and more decentralized and contact channels continue to evolve to multiple channels, the concept of a Customer Interaction Network is becoming more appropriate than the older "contact center" concept. The Customer Interaction Network is about the new ways to manage customers, customer information and customer service resources. Ultimately, The Customer Interaction Network is about creating greater productivity and efficiency, improved customer interactions, greater customer satisfaction, reduced costs, and impressive returns on investment.

What are the components of the Cisco contact center offerings?

Barry O'Sullivan: Cisco's portfolio includes the IP Contact Center (IPCC) product family, the Intelligent Contact Management (ICM) product family, and the IP Interactive Voice Response (IP IVR) product family.

What specifically is IPCC and what is new in IPCC Enterprise Edition 5.0?

Barry O'Sullivan: Cisco IPCC Enterprise, as an integral part of Cisco AVVID, delivers intelligent contact routing, call treatment, network-to-desktop computer telephony integration (CTI), and multi-channel contact management over an IP infrastructure--including inbound and outbound voice, Web, and email. By combining multi-channel automatic call distributing (ACD) functionality with IP telephony in a unified solution, IPCC Enterprise enables companies to rapidly deploy a distributed contact center infrastructure. IPCC Enterprise Edition 5.0 includes such new features as universal queuing, interruptability, outbound campaign management, multi-channel integrated reports, streamlined multi-channel administration, and common agent configuration across channels.

What specifically is ICM and what is new in ICM Enterprise Edition 5.0?

Barry O'Sullivan: Cisco ICM Enterprise 5.0 is an intelligent, multi-channel routing system that delivers an integrated suite of capabilities that enable a company to interact with its customers via phone, Web, and email across an enterprise running various contact center functions, including automatic call distributor (ACD), private branch exchange (PBX), interactive voice response (IVR), and database and desktop applications. ICM interoperates with a variety of TDM platforms while providing a smooth migration to IP. ICM Enterprise 5.0 includes such functions as multi-channel routing and queuing, reporting, real-time statistics, and common agent configuration across channels.

What makes Cisco's contact center products better than other options?

Barry O'Sullivan: Cisco's contact center products and architecture provide unmatched customer service deployment flexibility and workflow integration. By using Cisco's contact center offerings, businesses, for example, can deploy contact center capabilities over both TDM and IP networks; use single site or multi-site contact centers; use customer service agents both within and outside of a primary site; choose between premise and hosted contact centers; run contact centers over centralized or distributed environments; support multiple chains of communications; integrate with multiple contact channels; and integrate with multiple types of applications, including knowledge bases, enterprise directories, and CRM software.

Also, the Cisco offerings provide end-to-end systems for facilitating the migration from legacy contact center technology to more flexible and cost-effective standards-based IP technology. And since Cisco's products are built on open standards, they can work in multi-vendor environments with legacy circuit-switched and packet-switched telephone systems. Such integration capability helps customers make use of their existing legacy contact center investments while progressing at their own pace towards a more cost-effective and productive IP-based contact center infrastructure.

Charles Waltner is a freelance writer based in northern California.