Call Center BPM

The more I learn about business process management, the more I realize that BPM is a green field -- just sitting there awaiting the plow, especially in specific verticals. That point was brought home to me last week during an interview with Robb Duke, senior marketing director for InteractiveSoftworks.

His company provides solutions for the call center environment. From my other life -- as editor of Sourcingmag.com, a Web-based publication about outsourcing -- I know that the more sophisticated call centers are as automated as you can get. Apparently, automation doesn't equate to continuous improvement.

Duke just returned from a major call center conference, IQPC's Call Center Summit, where it was peddling its BPM wares. A large percentage of people who came by the booth had no idea what BPM was. Putting a good face on it, Duke concluded, "It was certainly a good opportunity to educate."

InteractiveSoftwork's products include the company's "bread and butter" offering, VoiceNet, a unified contact center solution; Interactive Server, a middleware application server built for Microsoft-centric shops; and the newest release, Metaphor BPM, a process design and business process execution engine. The latter was the reason I wanted the interview in the first place.

Metaphor BPM enables call centers to quicken the pace of change in their operations. Duke provided an example.

"If a call center has a customer and that customer sells cell phones, the cell phone company will say, ‘I want you to make outbound calls. I'm selling five models of cell phones. These are the features. These are the questions I want you to ask. These are potential answers. Here's how you handle objection handling.'"

That involves the creation of a script for agents to follow.

Then maybe the cell phone company decides to remove one product from that offering or it'll want to change the price of one of the models. The applications being used by the agents, says Duke, "are developed by a lonely IT guy in the back. It takes four or five days to program the application" (not because the programming takes that long, but it's probably just one task of many on that person's to-do list). That means the agents have to stop calling because that application needs to be changed.

In the call center world, says Duke, "this is agent downtime when you need to push a new application out." While the agent is still being paid by the contact center, the cell phone company isn't paying when the agents aren't making those outbound calls.

Metaphor BPM enables the company to use a single workflow script that can be pushed real-time as the information needs to be modified. A supervisor can go into Visio and modify the process to reflect the workflow as the client now wants it. Modifying the Visio diagram will modify the application too.

As in many other BPM situations, this puts control of that process tweaking into the hands of the business people, so that the IT staff can focus on the major automation efforts.

My conversation with Duke also clued me into something else: We may find that the most effective BPM solutions are those that come out of the companies making and selling the specific vertical programs in a market, not from the companies that focus exclusively on creating the end-all/be-all BPM suite.