September 2006

Donna's View
Donna Fluss is the founder and Principal of DMG Consulting LLC, a firm specializing in customer-focused business strategy, operations and technology services for Global 2000 and emerging companies. Ms. Fluss is a recognized thought leader and innovator in CRM, contact center and real-time analytics. For over 23 years, she has helped end users build world-class differentiated contact centers.

Every year, we at DMG Consulting produce an annual Quality Management/Liability Recording Product and Market Report. This year's edition tops 400 pages and covers every aspect of this market. The Report is the authoritative guide to the quality management and liability recording market, vendors, products, pricing and market share. It analyzes all applications in this dynamic growth market, including Quality Management, Liability Recording (TDM and IP), Surveying, Coaching and eLearning.

2006 - 2007 Quality Management/Liability Recording Product and Market Report

This year's Report features more than 40 vendors, including in-depth company and product profiles on market leaders and contenders Envision, etalk, NICE, Verint, VirtualLogger, Voice Print, Witness and Wygant. It also addresses new vendors and solutions entering the market from contact center infrastructure providers and stand-alone companies. The Report is written from the perspective of an end user - which is what I was for 14 years before crossing over to the market analyst "dark side" - and is intended to help contact center and technology managers make the right choices for their operating environment.

This extremely informative and helpful Report will save you thousands of dollars and considerable time in selecting or upgrading your QM/recording application. It will help you find the right partner and solution, one that is as dedicated to your success as their own.

QM/Recording Market Delivers Innovation and Benefits for Contact Centers

The QM/recording market is one of the most innovative in the contact center sector. What makes this market so exciting is that each year vendors deliver enhanced solutions that offer new benefits for companies. Every time a component of the market seems at risk of becoming commoditized, the leading vendors figure out ways to enhance their solutions. A few recent examples include:

IP recording solutions that simplify and streamline call logging
Coaching applications that greatly enhance communication between agents and supervisors (a tool intended for supervisors and agents)
Speech analytics solutions that structure customer interactions so that managers throughout the enterprise can understand what's on the mind of your customers

During the past few months, we've seen the introduction of workflow-enabled quality assurance applications - this is the first time in years that we've seen significant enhancements in the traditional QA function. These new tools automate many of the manual tasks involved in doing QA evaluations and allow supervisors to spend more time helping customers and agents.

QM/Recording Solutions Extend Beyond Contact Centers

QM/recording solutions have begun to be discovered in areas of the enterprise beyond the contact center. Several innovative modules are capturing the attention of managers in departments such as sales, marketing and operations. Speech analytics applications are used primarily to find the root cause of calls. Contact center performance management modules help to align the goals of the contact center with the executive suite and other departments, as well as to produce scorecards measuring adherence of agents, teams, sites and the overall center to departmental and corporate objectives. Additionally, smaller businesses (e.g., professional offices, such as doctors and lawyers) are discovering that recording is a cost effective way for them to minimize risk and liability exposure.

The Market Needs a New Name

One area where the QM/recording market is challenged is its name. With the introduction of so many high-value applications, QM/Recording is no longer either an adequate or an appropriate description of these products. Workforce optimization is a newer title used by some vendors to describe these suites, but it has such a negative connotation - who wants to be optimized? - that it's difficult for many end users to accept. Since the market is increasingly analytics-oriented, the solutions could be called customer analytics suites, but this sounds too passive. Operational customer analytics (OCA) is another option, perhaps the best at this time, but it doesn't seem catchy enough. Any reader with a recommendation is invited to share it with me at donna.fluss@dmgconsult.com. If the name you provided is selected, we'll send you an iPod to thank you for your contribution.

Expect Future Innovation

The future of the QM/recording market looks strong, as vendors are making substantial investments in R&D and users are buying at a brisk pace. Innovative modules are extending the value of QM/recording solutions and new features are being added to existing suites. As a result, end users have a lot of good choices when selecting an application, whether for the first time or as an upgrade. What we need now is a good name for this market. To learn more about leading and contending QM/recording offerings, see DMG Consulting's 2006 - 2007 QM/Recording Product and Market Report, available at www.dmgconsult.com, or by calling Deborah Navarra at 516-628-1098

Regards,

Donna Fluss

Principal, DMG Consulting LLC

09/03/2006	Contact Center Quality Monitoring - Best Practices For Chinese Companies
08/04/2006	Ask The CRM Expert: Questions & Answers - Remote call center agents can offer cost savings and other benefits (SearchCRM.com)
08/02/2006	eLearning for the Enterprise (destinationCRM.com)
08/01/2006	The Why Factor in Speech Analytics (destinationCRM.com)
07/26/2006	The Relationship Between CRM and CEM
06/14/2006	The Contact Center Security Challenge

Can you provide some pros and cons for hosted contact centers - I'd like to know what to expect and what to avoid.

Hosted contact centers started to capture the attention of the market at the end of 2004. Hosted offerings are not new, but what was new back in late 2004 was that many of these solutions had become almost as feature-rich as the leading premise-based contact center infrastructure environments. This changed the overall landscape of the contact center market and gave end users a new alternative.

There are both pros and cons to hosted contact centers. The pros include:

Low start-up cost, small cash outlay
Relatively small monthly payments that come out of the operating budget instead of the capital budget
Vendor is responsible for system installation, implementation and ongoing maintenance
Up and running quickly with full-featured implementation
Cost effective and feature-rich support for a small shop
Many browser-based offerings that require little on-site technology
Ongoing technology refresh without forklifts or major disruption to the operating environment
No need for in-house contact center technical expertise
Few in-house technical resources required to support the switch
Easy to scale up and down
No network costs or application expertise required to support multiple sites and at-home agents
Standardized functionality and best practices can be implemented across departments or an enterprise
Can walk away from implementation without a big financial write-off

The cons include:

Hosting for an extended period of time, approximately 3 to 4 years, eventually costs more than purchasing the technology outright
Total dependence on the vendor to provide a high level of service reliability
Not all of the switches are as functionally rich as the leading premise-based offerings
Need to find a service provider that is capable of meeting your organization's requirements
Quality of service, cost and speed of enhancements are subject to changes in hosting vendor's financial position or business strategy
The service provider may not be as responsive as an in-house team and it may take days to make simple changes
Must depend on vendor to implement new features as you require them
Hosting vendor may not be willing to support unique requirements
May be challenging to integrate the hosted solution into your operating environment
Data security and backup are no longer under your direct control

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