Analyst Perspectives

Transera is an established vendor of contact center in the cloud systems and analytics, and as I discovered at the Salesforce Dreamforce ’15 conference and during a recent briefing, it has added support for managing voice interactions for users of salesforce.com Service Cloud. Its core product, Global Omni-Channel Contact Center, now supports voice, email, chat and Twitter, which are managed centrally through a routing engine that treats all interactions in the same way. This ensures that companies have a central view of how interactions are being handled, and they can manage the rules to guide customers to the channel most appropriate for what they are trying to achieve and route the interaction to the most qualified person. An enhanced scripting engine allows users to script the ways in which different types of interactions are handled, and a recording engine captures all calls and makes them available for analysis. Transera also has added capabilities to produce real-time analysis of contact center performance through dashboards and analytics that show a single view across all sites and data sources. Operational and business metrics can be calculated using multiple data sources, and a variety of visualization capabilities enable the analysis can be displayed in the format most appropriate for a specific user and occasion. All the systems are available in the cloud and are scalable enough to support companies of all sizes, including those with centers in multiple sites.

To support its claim of an “analytics-driven contact center,” Transera has made significant investment in analytics capabilities. The first step was to ensure it could ingest all sources of data to be analyzed. Our benchmark research into next-generation customer analytics shows this is vital because companies want to include more sources and types of data in their analysis of interaction handling; the most often cited are customer feedback (by 54%), input from enterprise BI tools (55%) and all forms of interactions (42%). Transera’s Analytics-driven Customer Engagement product is able to ingest and rationalize all these sources. The system collects interaction records and agent activity records (for example, what agents do at their desktop) and stores them centrally in a “customer engagement repository.”  This includes capabilities to link the identifiers contained in different record types – for example, a telephone number from a call record, an email address from an email, or a Twitter handle – back to a single customer. This data can be combined with transactional data (for example, CRM records) to segment and profile customers, and to produce analysis of customer-related activities. It can also be used to derive further information about customers such as an overall customer rating and a validation rating. Finally the analysis can be used to drive actions such as managing queues, and advising agents on next best actions, how to resolve issues and up-sell opportunities.

Analytics also helps users set up rules to route interactions based on a number of criteria. There are performance routing (to the person most likely to achieve the best outcome for the type of interaction), skill-based routing (to the available agent with the best skills to handle the type of interaction), demographic routing (to the person most like to have affinity with the caller), status routing (based on the customer’s profile), value-based routing (based on the lifetime value of the customer) and service-level routing (to achieve the highest level of compliance with agreed service levels; this is especially relevant to outsourcing companies). Together these capabilities offer users a complete set of routing options that, if used wisely, can help companies provide customers with superior experiences and at the same time optimize interaction performance. Indeed our next-generation customer analytics research shows that more than half (54%) of companies using customer-related analytics have improved customer experiences.

Transera is a contact center partner of salesforce.com, and as such it has gone to some lengths to develop a special app that gives salesforce users capabilities to manage voice interactions within the salesforce environment. Like other partners Transera uses the salesforce Open CTI connector to support screen pop-ups, call control and click to call. Underneath these, it has built a range of capabilities to administer various interaction-handling tasks: setting up and managing agents, teams, sites, contact numbers, queues, roles and hours of operation. It also enables users to manage IVR call flows, routing rules, and reporting, recording and monitoring rules. It has been developed so trained business users can carry out both sets of tasks without significant IT support. The tools use intuitive point-and-click capabilities and can use preprogrammed components; this enables tasks to be done in minutes or hours that in my experience used to take hours or days to put data in the hands of business users. I recommend that salesforce users evaluate how these capabilities can improve the handling of voice interactions.

Running a contact center has never been easy, and the introduction of additional channels of engagement, more demanding customers and increased competition have made it even harder; in addition tasks now need to be done in real time. As companies look to improve their centers, start the journey towards omnichannel customer engagement, and try to get everyone in the organization involved with customer experience, I recommend they assess how Transera can help those efforts.

Regards,

Richard J. Snow

VP & Research Director