Optimize Service Delivery Across the Enterprise to Achieve Bottom Line Business Benefits

intelligent workload distribution:

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IntrODuctIOn :

Optimizing service delivery across the enterprise to achieve bottom line business benefits ......................... 1

ArtIcLE :

SErvIcE DELIvEry OptImIzAtIOn: Increase Enterprise Efficiency and Effectiveness ...........2

BuSInESS SOLutIOn BrOchurE :

Genesys iWD ...............................................................................6

ArtIcLE :

Genesys intelligent Workload Distribution: considerations for the communications Industry ..........11

cuStOmEr StOry:

telstra transforms the handling of customer service requests in the back office with Genesys iWD ..............13

ArtIcLE :

meet customer Service Expectations Aligning customer Service Goals ........................................17

ArtIcLE :

Genesys intelligent Workload Distribution: considerations for the Insurance Industry .....................20

cuStOmEr StOry:

Leading German insurer implements Genesys iWD to break down organizational silos and harmonize workloads based on employee skill levels, task complexity, and SLAs .............................................................22

BuSInESS Q&A:

SErvIcE DELIvEry OptImIzAtIOn tESt: Is your customer Service Well-Integrated? ................... 27

AnALySt’S cOrnEr :

Leveraging the Best of the contact center ... Across the Enterprise By: Sheila mcGee-Smith ......................................................30

GEnESyS BuSInESS cOnSuLtInG : iWD rapid Business Assessment ....................................... 37

to stay ahead of the competition, businesses need to provide better customer service to ensure increased customer satisfaction and boosted revenue. In today’s competitive marketplace, customers hold the power,

and organizations that gain the ability to respond to customer requests in a timely manner will not only realize a competitive advantage, but will also be able to optimize costs and resources.

customer service delivery extends beyond the contact center into other organizational units of the business — such as branch offices, remote or home agents, mobile field employees, and especially to experts in the back office. While the contact center has seen improvements in agent productivity and operational costs, the customer-related activities in the business units located outside of the contact center haven’t kept pace. therefore, executives and managers are recognizing the critical need to align their customer service goals throughout the organization in order to maintain customer satisfaction and retention.

Genesys intelligent Workload Distribution (iWD) enables enterprise-wide customer service delivery, provides greater business efficiencies, and improves customer service by enabling users to quickly define priorities and service levels in real time — based on the business value of each task. this ensures that the right resources are proactively receiving the most critical tasks at the right time, and that the highest value tasks get completed first. Further, iWD provides the business with visibility and insights into team and individual performance, and allows them to pinpoint areas of improvement.

Genesys iWD is designed to deliver business benefits rapidly for a compelling return on investment. customers who have adopted Genesys iWD have enjoyed shorter time to market, lowered project risk, and increased customer retention. In fact, customers have realized benefits such as a 30% reduction in average handling time, a 20% increase in overall productivity, and a 15% improvement in customer satisfaction rates.

I am pleased to provide you with this booklet containing comprehensive insights on how Genesys can help you protect your investment, compete in a tough economy, and achieve your most important business goals ―— in 2012 and beyond.

— paul D. Segre president and chief Executive Officer, Genesys

Optimizing service delivery across the enterprise to achieve

bottom line business benefits

I n t r O D u c t I O n

GEnESyS intELLIGEnt WOrKLOAD DIStrIButIOn

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Service Delivery Optimization: Increase Enterprise Efficiency and Effect iveness

Your company likely has a contact center that efficiently and effectively handles customer interactions via telephone calls, as well as channels such as Web chat, SmS text, and

e-mail. yet, are you aware that just a fraction of the activities that are handled by the contact center impact the customer experience throughout your business?

In many industries today, including insurance, telecommunications, and financial services, as many as three times the number of employees who manage customer-related activities actually work outside of the contact center in line-of-business (LOB) areas doing such things as processing claims, managing sales orders, reviewing and approving new loan applications, and managing account inquiries.

Because customer service relies on resources outside the contact center as well as within it, all employees responsible for customer service delivery must work as efficiently and cost effectively as your contact center professionals do. this includes: meeting internal service objectives and customer-facing service level agreements (SLAs); improving resource utilization across the enterprise; and increasing business agility by empowering business users to respond to unexpected changes or new opportunities — all of which leads to an improved customer experience, increased loyalty, and reduced churn.

this article outlines the particular challenges facing service delivery operations — both within and outside of the contact center — and then describes the type of solution required to address these challenges.

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• a more expensive, yet oftentimes underutilized, workforce. personnel responsible for customer service outside of the contact center are generally expert workers and, as a result, are more highly paid than those within the center. Given that staff costs account for the majority of an organization’s total customer service budget, underutilization of these resources adds considerably to LOB operating expenses.

• a backlog of work. Amid squeezed budgets and cost-cutting mandates, the need to do more with less has caused many organizations to accumulate significant backlogs of work. these backlogs can be days or even weeks old — causing unacceptable delays in meeting customers’ needs, and often resulting in customer frustration.

• a proliferation of customer-facing channels and systems. With an increase in the number of customer touch points — including Web, fax, e-mail, SmS, chat, and phone — as well as systems to support them, employees manage tasks across multiple workbins and task lists. In addition, because individual employees will choose the next task, each will often have a different interpretation of the next most important task. the result may be that more important, or higher value, tasks are not quickly selected — and thus remain unfulfilled longer — which can negatively affect customer satisfaction.

• Lack of operational insights. Few organizations have sufficient visibility into operational performance outside the contact center — including resource availability — and, more importantly, into whether service is in fact being delivered to the expectations set with the customer or to service objectives set within the operations.

today’s Service Delivery challenges no matter what department they belong to, employees in increasingly decentralized, customer-impacting roles outside the contact center face unique challenges when managing human-related tasks that typically reside in the back office, such as:

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Enabling Service Delivery Optimization Beyond the contact centerAlthough they might not consider that they have much in common with the corporate contact center, functional LOBs in fact share many of the same principal goals when it comes to delivering customer service.

Enabling optimized customer service delivery is all about ensuring that the organization is operating in the most effective and efficient manner possible. Oftentimes people will confuse the two terms, but they are, in fact, focused on very different areas:

effectiveness is getting the right things accomplished. many customer service organizations today can be characterized as a decentralized operating model with many departments and lines of business loosely coupled by technology, systems, and processes with hand-offs but, in many cases, operating independently from each other.

efficiency is a measure of getting the most from your employees. As discussed earlier, the resources involved in service delivery go beyond the traditional confines of the contact center to resources across the mid- and back office.

Any improvement in efficiency and effectiveness will result in increased value to the organization, while also improving customer satisfaction. there is untapped potential in existing customer service delivery operations that, when properly leveraged, can provide additional capacity to the enterprise without additional costs.

Service Delivery Optimization has four key pillars:1. Increase employee performance across the enterprise. Like supply chain management solutions that provide benefits to the

manufacturing process and deliver just-in-time manufacturing, similar principles can, and should, be applied to the delivery of service to customers. An organization which has optimized service delivery will manage tasks from a single, global task list, across all channels and systems, and will prioritize and proactively distribute tasks to the right resource, at the right time, and at the right location.

2. adhere to internal service level objectives. Service Level Objectives can be either internal or external. If they are internal they are often objectives set for teams that link back to a bonus program. If external, they are communicated to a customer and tied to a service level agreement, and may have penalties for missed delivery. In either case, there is an expectation on operational performance for the delivery of service, and a goal to achieve it. An organization which has optimized their service delivery

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operations will be managed based on the service level of the task and value to the organization versus the underlying system, work-bin, or channel.

3. Increase visibility into operational performance and compliance. you can’t manage what you don’t measure! unless you measure operational performance, you don’t know if it is getting better or worse. Sure, your customers will tell you if it is getting worse — but by then it is too late — you’ve lost them. In the end, you can’t manage for improvement if you don’t measure to see what is getting better and what isn’t. An organization which has optimized service delivery operations will have a comprehensive set of processes and task-based statistics providing insight into business performance, and can compare against key performance indicators defined by business users. these business insights must be available in real time and historically to see trends over time.

4. Increase agility throughout the enterprise. Business agility is the ability of a business to adapt quickly and cost efficiently in response to changes in their business environment. these changes could be as a result of a new market opportunity, a launch of a new product and associated process, or a competitive threat. An organization which has optimized service delivery will invest in business applications that increase their business agility, and empower business users to sense (through the business insights discussed above) and respond through a highly configurable environment, without having to engage in large scale It projects time and time again.

recommendationheads of customer care, customer service personnel, and LOB owners who are challenged to manage significant backlogs of tasks, adhere to service level agreements according to customer or regulated mandates, or need a faster time to value through business user empowerment for configuring and managing tasks, should immediately explore how an optimized service delivery environment is enabled through Genesys iWD.

Genesys iWD delivers business benefits quickly for a compelling return on investment (rOI), shorter time to market, lower project risk, and increased functionality for a true competitive advantage, enterprise-wide.

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Genesys intelligent Workload Distribution (iWD) ensures the seamless execution of business processes throughout your organization.

in today’s challenging economy, it is critical that companies have the ability to manage and optimize resources by determining common agent skills and prioritizing workloads, as well as to efficiently manage customer

interactions and tasks across the entire enterprise, in order to provide the very best customer experience.

Genesys intelligent Workload Distribution (iWD) solves this challenge with a business application for dynamically prioritizing the distribution of work tasks to the people best suited to handle them. Built on the powerful and proven Genesys customer Interaction management (cIm) platform, Genesys iWD provides out-of-the-box functionality designed specifically for the business user that integrates resources, contact center capabilities, and internal business processes — and quickly delivers business benefits as well as shorter time to market, lower project risk, and increased level of functionality.

thE BuSInESS AppLIcAtIOnGenesys iWD works in concert with existing enterprise software applications such as Erp, Bpm, and crm, as well as homegrown legacy systems, to create a single, global task list, which is sorted based on business value. Only with a global task list can the enterprise ensure the right resources, regardless of location, are proactively receiving the most critical or highest value tasks, regardless of media-type or system, at the right time.

Efficiently managing customer requests requires an understanding of the business context of the request. For example, the associated business process, product requested, or value of the customer making the request are important criteria for calculating and routing to the right resource based on business value.

BuSInESS SOLutIOn BrOchurE :

Genesys iWD

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With Genesys iWD, enterprises can effectively manage all customer service resources and business processes across the enterprise, going beyond the walls of the formal contact center and into other areas of the business like branch offices, remote or home agents, and experts in the back-office. Genesys iWD improves service delivery efficiency, increases the effectiveness of the workforce, and ensures those tasks completed provide the most value to the organization — enabling a shorter time-to-market, lower project risk, and increased level of functionality when compared to custom development.

FunctIOnALItyGenesys iWD spans three main areas: capturing tasks, calculating task values, and distributing tasks to resources in the front and back office, or to external outsourcers.

BuSInESS OrIEntAtIOnAt the heart of Genesys iWD is a set of features and functions, designed for business users, to more effectively manage tasks in the organization and provide the business agility required in today’s competitive marketplace.

Business context configurationGenesys iWD offers a flexible configuration based on organizational context, such as departments and business processes, against which tasks are managed and reported on. Adding new departments or business processes is a simple matter of configuration by a business user.

Service Level Agreement-based rulesthe Genesys iWD SLA rules ensure that tasks are completed according to the SLA defined by business users. SLA rules quickly order the list of tasks from most important to least important, based on business value. Because information related to a task can change, iWD automatically re-assesses tasks throughout its lifecycle, ensuring the most important are at the top of the global task list.

Distribute

Calculate• Business Rules• Service Level• Business Value• Priority

• Front Office• Back Office• Outsourcer

Capture

• Workflow Tasks• Documents• Faxes• Virtual Tasks

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task managementOperations managers and team Leads can: view tasks captured, view task history, hold, resume, cancel, and modify task attributes.

BuSInESS InSIGhtSGenesys iWD offers a comprehensive set of task-based statistics providing insight into business performance and compares against key performance indicators configured in iWD by business users. Business insights are available both in real time and historically.

Business Rules Configuration for Service Request Business Process

rEAL-tImE StAtIStIcSDesigned for operational managers, iWD provides real-time, task oriented statistics together with voice interactions in Genesys cc-pulse.

hIStOrIcAL & AnALytIcALGenesys iWD also provides a comprehensive set of task-related schemas enabling summaries and aggregates required in support of business strategies. When connected to existing enterprise data marts, including Genesys Infomart, analysts gain access to comprehensive views of the entire customer experience.

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Resources & Skills

Business Processes

GenesysCIM

iCFD

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Doc

Client

Voice

iWD

CRM

BPM BPM BPM Doc

CRM

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End to End Process

Business Domain Business Applications (CRM)

Business Process Management (BPM) Document Management Systems

Service Delivery Optimization Centralized Work Distribution

Real-time Prioritization Performance Monitoring

Task HandlingResource / Skill Awareness

Proactive Delivery Process/ Media Blending

Intelligent workload distribution of the right tasks, at the right time to the right resource

genesys iWD vs. BPMGenesys intelligent Workload Distribution complements Existing process and Workflow Infrastructurestypically, workflow and business process management systems statically route work items or tasks to queues from which agents and workers “pull” work, often selecting the specific tasks they prefer to deal with.

Genesys iWD enhances routing by additionally utilizing real-time knowledge of the task, individual skill sets, and availability and utilization of the workforce, thereby enabling the dynamic and active distribution of tasks to harmonize load peaks across the organization. As such, it acts to complement existing process infrastructures, plus allows the blending of tasks with voice calls.

Genesys iWD also provides additional transparency on customer service level agreements (SLAs), independent of transport media. With the added visibility, iWD provides insights into optimization and the ability to provide excellent customer service.

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BEnEFItS

Workforce Optimizationproactive distribution of tasks increases resource utilization and improves service delivery without adding additional resources.

SLA FocusDelivery of service based on service level agreements defined by the business, ensuring continued customer satisfaction.

Business AgilityAdjust and fine-tune service delivery, whether of a new promotion or a competitive situation, immediately.

Business Insightsreal-time and historical data for continuous business improvement while ensuring compliance with internal service delivery targets and KpI’s.

From concept to productionShorter implementation time, increased functionality, and lower risk than custom development.

Business Application DomainService Requests, Claims, Loan Apps

Communication Domain

Voice, VoIP, IVR,Web Chat, Email ....

Genesys iWD

Genesys CIM

CustomerService

ResourcesInternal or ExternalCapture

Customer Touch PointsTasks and Interactions

Service Delivery OptimizationMore Efficient and Effective Enterprise

Engaged EnterpriseProactive Assignment

Calculate

Distribute

S M T W T F S

Genesys iWD automates the prioritization and distribution of work tasks to the people best suited for the service delivery

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considerations for the communications

Industry

GEnESyS intELLIGEnt WOrKLOAD DIStrIButIOn :

are offline order conflict resolutions costing your company too much time and money? Do you dedi-cate too many employees to manually fixing service exceptions? Does slow resolution

result in customer churn and stiff penalties for not meeting service level agreements (SLAs)? Do inefficient order processes slow down your introduction of new products and services and negatively impact Average revenue per user (Arpu)?

If so, you are not alone. most communications service providers are experiencing these same challenges. Service providers must compete in a dynamic and competitive business. to succeed, your order handling and service exception management processes should be as efficient as possible. however, these processes are difficult to manage because of poor resource visibility and efficiency during the multiple handoffs and numerous interactions with various information sources before resolution.

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As a result of order handling and service exception management inefficiencies, challenges are mounting for service providers:

Soaring Operational Costs - the notion of straight-through processing represents the ideal to which many communication companies strive. however, front- and back-office order fallout requiring costly manual intervention is happening more frequently as communications companies are rolling out more and more services that add to complexity and transaction volume.

High Customer Churn - Annual churn rates for telecommunications companies average between 10% and 67%. customers today regard communications services as a commodity and change providers for many reasons, including poor service and expensive rates. Service exceptions cause delays that lead to customer dissatisfaction and contribute to increases in operational costs that make it difficult for the service provider to remain price competitive.

Frequent SLa Violations - communications companies often have very short time windows for meeting SLA requirements. Expensive SLA violations repeatedly occur because service providers lack the real-time and comprehensive ability to identify which orders are about to miss SLAs, and they lack the ability to adjust work assignments quickly enough to prevent violations.

Delayed Product and Service Rollouts - the communications industry is characterized by new and converging products and services. however, inflexible and inefficient order handling and service exception management

processes make it difficult to realize Arpu potential and to keep up with demand without adding additional resources that erode profits.

clearly, the challenges you face are significant, but Genesys can help. Our intelligent Workload Distribution (iWD) can decrease processing times, streamline workers’ inbox demands, lower operational costs associated with these activities and — most importantly — improve customer loyalty.

Genesys intelligent Workload Distribution will bring you several key advantages:• Ensures the efficient delivery of consistent customer service across all commu-

nications channels by optimizing the routing of work items across an integrated pool of resources — front office, back office, home, remote, branch, offshore, or outsourced

• reduces operational costs with the effective utilization of all enterprise-wide resources, while optimally matching the task, priority, and person

• Avoids over- and understaffing by harmonizing the workload throughout the workforce, thus preventing load peaks and troughs

• provides superior customer service — and increases the speed and quality of business processes — by providing visibility and control into all interactions, legal and SLA compliance, work items, and resources across the organization

• Offers a comprehensive set of current day and historical task-based statistics to provide you with insight into business performance and comparisons against key performance indicators

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telstra transforms the handling of customer

service requests in the back office with

Genesys iWD

telstra, Australia’s largest telecommunications and information services company, provides a comprehensive range of fixed line,

mobile, broadband, Internet, and pay tv services. telstra’s contact centers handle customer requests regarding adds, moves, and changes of these services by raising a ticket in the customer relationship management (crm) system.

most of telstra’s provisioning and customer service requests are then automatically processed via an Alcatel-Lucent Operations Support and Business Support System (OSS/BSS). however, the various systems that support these service requests also identify a number of jobs per day that fall outside its parameters for automated processing, and these are treated as ‘exceptions’ that require back-office staff to process.

With approximately 1,000 staff, telstra’s product Activation & Assurance department provides the technical service desk to support the company’s residential and business customers. predominantly based in melbourne and Sydney, the department typically processes around 25,000 new customer service requests and account modifications per day. A component of this workload is the ‘exceptions’ from the automated processes.

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the need to meet customer due dates and maintain compliancethe organization needed a cost-effective solution to proactively and efficiently manage the workload of the staff allocated to the exceptions handling process. In the current mode of operation, the system required between two and three employees to manually allocate the exceptions jobs (tasks) to the ‘work-bins’ of the various individuals within the department, and team members were then required to assess, prioritize, and complete the jobs manually.

Staff allocated to this role had varying skills and skill levels ranging from task specific experts to generalist type skill sets across a broad range of systems and products. the resource pool also included agency staff which provided the business with the ability to grow or shrink, based on customer demand. this further complicated the task allocation process, and often led to a backlog of tasks and compromised service level outcomes.

Winning hearts and minds

Although telstra knew it needed to improve its performance in handling exceptions, it wasn’t able to secure the granularity of information from their existing systems to pinpoint exactly what areas of the process were failing, why they were failing, or how. reports available to middle managers and supervisors relied on aggregated data from telephone time logged against calls, and didn’t accurately reflect nor provide the transparency required to optimize delivery. they, therefore, struggled to identify the changes needed and, as a result, contacted Genesys to propose a business review.

Genesys set out to win the hearts and minds of telstra’s senior and middle managers by identifying areas where process latency could be improved. to overcome any resistance to change, Genesys first had to clearly demonstrate that optimization via increased visibility of performance and improved distribution was the correct approach. Genesys worked with Keven Allen, General manager at telstra, to apply the right approach to the department’s unique way of working.

After one week, Genesys iWD already had people thinking about what they could do to improve, and that is success in itself.

Keven Allen, General Manager at Telstra

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“I was very interested in what Genesys had to say because they talked about helping us through a journey that would prevent repeat back-office work,” says Allen. “I found it very difficult to pigeon-hole Genesys’ approach and I was surprised by the potential outcomes of the changes proposed. Genesys claimed it could increase efficiency, and I simply said ‘prove it’.”

Initial study initiates move to Genesys iWDGenesys personnel worked with telstra’s product connect staff to conduct a Business review of their activities, sup-porting business processes, and business planning capabilities.

A full assessment of the information indicated that efficiency could rise by between 15% - 30%. Genesys demon-strated during a proof of concept that implementing intelligent Workload Distribution (iWD) software to manage the way exception jobs were allocated would lower task times, spread the workload across staff more effectively by dynami-cally prioritizing the distribution of work tasks, and automate the distribution of work.

Genesys iWD works in harmony with existing software applications such as Enterprise resource planning (Erp), Busi-ness project management (Bpm), and crm and legacy systems to create a single global task list that allocates jobs by business value, urgency, and skill requirement. telstra could therefore ensure that the right staff received the right jobs at the right time, and achieve significant efficiency gains without the need to re-train or shift staff from the existing customer management systems.

pilot trial indicates rapid return on investment

Following a successful proof of concept demonstration, senior executives at telstra authorized Genesys to conduct a pilot of the solution.

During the six-week pilot, telstra implemented a like-for-like parallel environment with Genesys iWD to replicate previous business practices and learn about iWD capabilities. Data from the pilot trial indicated that service activation and provisioning had indeed improved by 22%, reinforcing an earlier time and motion study’s initial estimate.

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By optimizing the process further, forecasts point toward a rapid return on investment, with iWD releasing approximately 20 full-time equivalents (FtE) to handle alternative tasks.

managers at all levels could now see how improvements could be made and were convinced of Genesys iWD’s potential. “After one week, Genesys iWD already had people (management) thinking about what they could do to improve, and that is success in itself,” states Allen.

“there are insights about both tasks and staff that allow me to achieve optimum results and alter the behavior of staff,” says Steve Symons, Operations manager in telstra’s product connect department. these include looking for ways to reduce delays at the workers’ desktops, redesigning reports to develop employee efficiency, and improving information for supervisors and team leaders to help manage the work-force more proactively.

moving toward productionthe successful 80-seat pre-production trial proved that it wasn’t necessary to manually distribute and allocate the jobs flagged as exceptions — Genesys iWD did this automatically. moreover, because jobs are automatically allocated and dynamically prioritized, missed deadlines were significantly reduced.

By employing iWD’s optimized ‘pull’ feature, each agent receives five of the most important jobs allocated according to their skills profile. Job processing times have been reduced and currently stand at five to six minutes and, when each job is finished, iWD replaces it automatically so that agent always has five jobs to select from.

iWD has also helped team leaders gain visibility into workloads. they can measure task completion rates, average handling times, and workers’ logged hours and view completed jobs over 15, 30, and 60 minute intervals. In addition, managers can monitor overdue tasks and control job transfers between agents. As a result, the process’s Key performance Indicator (KpI) of jobs completed accurately and to time has risen from 90% to 94% for staff currently using the system.

“With jobs actively prioritized we can now review performance in real time rather than monthly, which allows us to proactively manage exception processing. We are looking forward to further savings as we roll-out Genesys iWD further, and the next stage is to implement the first 650 full production seats,” concludes Keven Allen.

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meet customer Service Expectations by Aligning customer

Service Goals

Customer satisfaction is ever more critical to the health of a company’s bottom line. In fact, for many companies, delivering excellent customer service is the last remaining competitive differentiator.

therefore, you must strive to not only meet, but exceed, your customers’ expectations.

While customers’ service level expectations can be tricky to measure and are affected by many things, the answer to one question is almost always key. customers want to know “when?” When will the company ship the order? When will a field technician make a repair? When will an insurance claim be approved?

the simple fact is that companies that consistently leave customers uncertain about their ability to deliver a service or product on time (that is, according to the customers’ expectations) risk losing those customers.

Why do companies often fail to deliver against expectations, and what steps can companies take to ensure that expectations are consistently met?

the answer is that, all too often there’s been a missing link in their strategy: they’ve failed to integrate and optimize customer service across the entire enterprise. this means they’re not consistently managing and delivering against common service objectives — from the contact center to all the back office functions that make up the customer service supply chain.

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An all too common scenario: Lack of front- and back-office alignment Imagine the following scenario: A customer orders a new service and desires to have that service installed in time for a special occasion. the front office, i.e. the contact center, assures the customer that the service request will be processed immediately so that the service can be installed in the requested timeframe.

yet, the deadline comes and goes with no service delivered and no communication from the service provider. you can be absolutely certain that, because service level expectations were not met, this customer is ripe for churn and the only one who will benefit is your competitor.

Why did this happen? In this and similar situations, it’s most likely because many back-office tasks — such as managing sales orders, processing claims, reviewing and approving new applications, and scheduling service provisioning — require a human to fulfill the request, but are not managed by customer value, business value, or due date.

Back-office workers are likely manually selecting or “cherry-picking” tasks that don’t represent the highest value to the business. plus, the business lacks the visibility to understand how tasks are being performed.

Whatever the scenario, if a customer request is not handled using common service level objectives across the organization, or if back-office personnel lack the effectiveness and efficiency needed to ensure a timely response,

the back office could directly or indirectly be responsible for a bad customer experience. this not only puts customer satisfaction at risk, but in some cases, by not meeting the customer due dates, the company could face compliance fines, lost or delayed revenue, higher operating costs, and other negative bottom line impacts as a result.

using common Objectives to Link Across the Organization What companies need is far better alignment between the different teams handling customer service. For example, the front office needs to be empowered to make time and service commitments based on customer and business value, and to set reasonable expectations that the company can and will deliver on. the only way for the front office to be able to do this is to base these expectations on company service objectives that it knows the back office is prepared to fulfill.

For this to work successfully, companies should begin by creating an enterprise-wide business strategy that defines common objectives throughout the customer service lifecycle.

these common objectives ensure that everyone involved in customer service delivery is aware that the goal is not only to drive customer satisfaction, but to strive to meet broader business objectives, such as pulling in revenue faster and complying with industry regulations. But there’s one more ingredient needed for this recipe: a way for the back office to optimize what it does so that service level objectives can be met each and every time.

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Enabling the Back Office to Deliver Against Objectives to deliver against service expectations, back offices require an automated way to segment, prioritize, and route tasks to the best-skilled workers based on common objectives across

the enterprise. until recently, this type of technology has only been available in the contact center. now there’s a solution that also brings these capabilities to the back office: Genesys intelligent Workload Distribution (iWD).

For nearly 20 years, Genesys has been a leader in the contact center space. We’ve helped contact centers in top organizations across all industries worldwide to efficiently and cost-effectively identify, prioritize, and route customer interactions, thus ensuring delivery of stellar customer service. now, Genesys iWD allows you to apply this industry experience and best practices to enable an optimized service delivery from anywhere in the enterprise.

Genesys iWD dynamically prioritizes the distribution of work tasks based on customer value, compliance requirements, common service objectives, and other business goals. Working in concert with existing enterprise software applications such as Erp, Bpm, and

crm, as well as homegrown legacy systems, Genesys iWD creates a single, global task list. Only with a global task list can the enterprise ensure that the right resources are proactively receiving the most critical or highest value tasks, regardless of media-type or system, at the right time and right location.

And with Genesys iWD, management gains the transparency and consistency it needs to truly drive measurable improvement across the complete service delivery process — ensuring that customer expectations are consistently met on time, every time.

the Bottom Line Impact on customer SatisfactionBy aligning these groups with common objectives and optimizing service delivery with automatic prioritization and distribution of work tasks, you can ensure that:

• your service objectives can be met

• you can measurably improve performance, cut or maintain costs, and adhere to higher service level objectives

• you gain the agility they need to respond to changing market and customer needs

the bottom line results will be high customer satisfaction and loyalty, reduced customer churn, improved employee productivity, greater business agility, and increased revenue.

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considerations for the Insurance Industry

insurers must compete in a mature and competitive market, but to succeed, your claims and under-writing processes should be as efficient as possible.

most insurance companies are experiencing the same issues:

• Workers’ inboxes are overflowing with unfinished claims and underwriting tasks

• customers are lost due to slow processing times

• paper-intensive tasks are costing your company too much money

• you are lacking the ability to track and monitor complex claims and underwriting processes

these challenges are difficult to manage because of poor resource visibility and efficiency during the multiple handoffs and numerous interactions with various information sources before resolution.

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GEnESyS intELLIGEnt WOrKLOAD DIStrIButIOn :

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As a result of claims processing and underwriting inefficiencies, challenges are mounting for insurers:

• High Operational Costs - high claims processing costs and unacceptable underwriting expense ratios erode profitability. For example, claims processing can consume as much as 80% of the running costs of a typical general insurance company.

• Low Customer Satisfaction - customer loyalty and retention are often affected by an insurance company’s inability to process and settle claims in a timely manner. underwriting delays frequently result in lost business as your customers seek out faster decisions from competitors.

• Workforce Resource Challenges - Because of the high salaries of claims adjusters and underwriters due to a talent shortage, your key challenge is to achieve greater capacity without increasing headcount.

• Regulatory and Service Level agreement (SLa) Violations - Fines and penalties, as well as legal distractions for dealing with regulatory and customer SLA violations, repeatedly occur because insurers are unable to standardize complex tasks and facilitate team-wide transparency into interactions.

clearly, the challenges you face are significant, but Genesys can help.

Key capabilities of iWD:

• real-time presence of the availability of resources

• Dynamic distribution of workload

• virtualization options for the organization

• Business value-based prioritization and distribution of work

Genesys iWD Benefits:

• manages and optimizes resources by determining common employee skills and prioritizing workloads, which helps improve customer service while reducing expenses

• Increases operational control and efficiency across the enterprise, which lowers costs

• Enables the centralized distribution of work from multiple systems, which provides more complete information and a single view of all tasks, and allows for improved employee efficiency and more informed decision making

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Leading German insurer — huK-cOBurG — implements Genesys

iWD to break down organizational silos and

harmonize workloads based on employee skill levels, task complexity,

and SLAs

the huK-cOBurG Insurance Group (huK) is one of Germany’s largest insurers, with revenues of nearly five billion euro, and before-tax

profits of 443.9 million euro (2008). huK offers comprehensive personal injury, accident, life, health, and home loan offerings for private households. to improve its customer service delivery operations for its nine million customers, ensure better access to service representatives, and optimize internal resources, the company has chosen to execute the Genesys intelligent Workload Distribution (iWD) solution.

In the first stage of the implementation, a customer service center (cSc) with approximately 1,200 employees was set-up to optimize the workload distribution of calls and written documents, and to serve as a single, large virtual service center that can adapt rapidly to changing situations. the initial result has already been an impressive 20% increase in productivity. upon completion of the solution rollout, 7,000 employees will be able to use these capabilities to accomplish service tasks.

the challenge: managing customer interaction volumes and resource allocation huK receives ten million pieces of paper correspondence, two million faxes and e-mails, and around ten million telephone calls each year. But because the employees were organized and split into dedicated silos by insurance segment, such as motor, liability, health, etc. — and because the handling of written communication tasks and telephone interactions was also organized separately — the result was an inequality of workload assignment among

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huK-cOBurG

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employees. In addition, employees were “cherry picking” their assignments — seeking to only work on tasks from the work caseload that they really wished to handle — and not necessarily focusing on the right task at the right time.

In addition to dealing with the enormous quantity of everyday queries, employees also had to try to manage changing workload peaks. For instance, there are periods or seasons when sudden waves of inquiries occur and it is difficult to balance and plan the agents’ workloads; for example, in the fall when car owners have a window of time to change their insurance policies, or when inquiries regarding automobile insurance swell in response to political policy incentives to purchase new vehicles.

What’s more, “We exclusively use our own sales offices for field sales and stationary marketing, instead of using agencies, traveling representatives, multiple agents, or brokers,” explains Dr. christian hofer, chairman of company Organization and Information technology at huK-cOBurG. As a result: “All customer inquiries — whether regarding applications, cancellations, claims, or simple information requests — are directed straight to us. therefore, our highest priority is to ensure our customers have optimal access to service representatives.

“to properly manage inquiries on this scale and improve customer service delivery, we required more balanced resource planning and a fair workload distribution approach among the employees,” says Dr. hofer, “but this is not a trivial task to accomplish.”

customer survey results: What consumers wantA number of customer surveys and a study conducted by an outside institute determined that huK was largely meeting its own claim of being a customer-oriented insurer, but several areas for improvement and action had become clear.

“Although the friendliness and integrity of huK employees were regarded as strengths, many customers said that they desired better access to employee-assisted service, as well as more comprehensive, individualized advice, even during first contact,” explains Dr. hofer. “customers wanted us to extend needs-based personalized offers, and the feeling that we cared about them, without seeming to only to push sales.”

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the surveys also made clear that cross-selling and up-selling should be better exploited, and that it is important to identify and match the right opportunity with the individual need. “unfortunately, according to benchmarks, we had a cross-selling quota that corresponded only to the market average,” states Dr. hofer.

choosing a flexible solutionhe and his team gave great thought to developing a plan to provide for a fairer and more equitable distribution of case handling in the future. First, it was essential to prevent the cherry picking of cases. Although the preferences and strengths of the service employees could continue to enter into the distribution of jobs in the future, certain priorities, like customer desire or nature of the inquiry, should be taken into stronger consideration. “to better manage peaks and volume, we needed a service concept solution that offers us maximum flexibility,” says Dr. hofer.

A tender was placed for a solution that could manage both telephony and written documents in a comprehensive manner. ultimately, the company selected Genesys on account of its good price-to-performance ratio, its scalability, and the good results obtained in performance tests. “What particularly convinced us were Genesys’ good service references,” recalls Dr. hofer.

the company has rolled out the new application step-by-step, starting in the spring of 2009. the Genesys iWD solution proactively assigns and distributes all customer interactions and tasks, and offers possibilities for further optimization through comprehensive reporting and analytics.

With the Genesys’ iWD solution now in place, inquiries via all access paths — letter, fax, telephone, and e-mail — can be integrated and distributed equitably and, at the same time, employee accessibility is high, even during peak workloads.

The strategy of integrated workload distribution is a complete success. We have achieved a growth in productivity of around 20%, whereby the entire project will pay for itself within two years.

Dr. Christian Hofer, Chairman of Company Organization and Information Technology, HUK-COBURG

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the advent of the customer Service centerthe customer service center (cSc) was created to enhance the cross-selling and up-selling of additional or higher-value products. the 1,200 well-trained employees of the cSc work at seven locations, and take on the First Level Support in an inter-case and inter-division manner. Since the implementation of the Genesys iWD solution, this is now managed like a single large virtual customer service center.

Genesys iWD creates a global task list that enables business users to manage cases via a graphical user interface so that they can be categorized, prioritized, and dynamically reprioritized. the highlight: the cSc flexibly manages all telephone inquiries and written documents, which, in the past, were scanned or, in the case of e-mails, centrally collected in one location.

“If the cSc’s capacities were oriented only toward telephony, an optimal workload would never be possible,” explains Dr. hofer. “therefore, the cSc does everything.” What’s more, “the cSc employee has full access to the customer data and can thus initiate the proper measures. cross-selling and up-selling could not function otherwise.”

callers are prequalified by means of a two-step interactive voice response (Ivr) system. the Ivr directs both common inquiries, such as concerning auto insurance, as well as more complex inquiries regarding other insurance divisions, such as life, health, and home building savings. By leveraging Genesys iWD, the queries concerning the more complex products or services are directed to the suitable specialty area, where the appropriate workflow is initiated for further internal processing, or an advisory appointment is scheduled by the representative. And, if the volume of telephone calls increases — at peak times, up to 400,000 calls per week — colleagues from the specialty areas, in addition to the 1,200 regular cSc employees, answer the calls to help balance the workload.

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Fair workload distribution, and first call and task resolutionthe quantity of workload cases to be assigned and distributed to each employee takes into consideration, among other things, the number of telephone calls taken in past intervals, average processing times and — depending on the type of case — the value of the customer, personal skills, presence, workloads, and service levels. In this way, a fair distribution of the work to the employees is also made possible.

In addition, primary cases with the highest priorities are assigned to the employees first — and maximum value is placed on incoming “offer inquiry” cases. “A customer who calls in response to an offer is worth his or her weight in gold,” acknowledges Dr. hofer. “We respond immediately to these queries, and today have achieved an accessibility rate of 99%.”

the entire communication is documented and any ongoing workflows to other areas are initiated. telephone calls last, on average, four minutes, the subsequent processing another two minutes. “We now have a successful first call resolution rate of more than 80% of all cases,” says Dr. hofer with satisfaction. “the strategy of integrated workload distribution is a complete success.”

conclusionthanks to the functionality offered by Genesys, it is possible, among other things, to optimize: workloads in the customer service center; average call lengths; case completion quotas; and minute-by-minute employee accessibility. the ability to provide timely information to customers has increased, and employee satisfaction has also been bolstered.

“We have achieved a growth in productivity of around 20%, whereby the entire project will pay for itself within two years,” Dr. hofer calculates. In view of the convincing solution, all operating units of huK-cOBurG, with a total of around 7,000 employees, are to be switched over to the Genesys iWD solution in the coming two years.

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Is your customer Service Well-Integrated?

to meet service level agreements (SLAs) and ensure customer satisfaction while reducing or maintaining costs, companies need to integrate and

optimize customer service across the enterprise. this means aligning those responsible for customer service delivery — both in the contact center and the back office — so they work together as efficiently and cost effectively as possible.

Ask yourself these questions to see how well your organization is positioned to deliver optimized customer service.

1. Do your contact center and back office have common customer service objectives?

Yes: you’re on your way to optimized service delivery. taking this first step means that your entire organization is aligned towards the same customer service goals.

No: the back-office processes that require a human to fulfill a customer request may not be running as efficiently and effectively as your contact center. And, if the contact center and the lines of business are not working toward the same targets, customer service can suffer, along with staff productivity.

Not Sure, Tell Me More: Defining common customer service objectives for the enterprise ensures that everyone involved in service delivery is aware of the goals. For instance, your company might have a goal that the front office will respond to customer inquiries within one hour and the back office will process credit applications within 48 hours. With a common service objective like that, the entire organization will strive in concert to meet the same SLAs, compliance requirements, and business goals.

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Service Delivery Optimization test:

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2. can your back office personnel deliver against service level objectives?

Yes: Great, that means you’ve found a way to prioritize and distribute the workload for maximum worker efficiency and effectiveness.

No: many companies have customer service tasks that are handled by skilled workers in the back office. unfortunately, the back office may be lacking the best practices and technology needed to handle these tasks in the most effective and efficient manner. For example, work backlogs that represent days or weeks of delayed service; workers who “cherry-pick” tasks; and a lack of visibility into overall operational performance can cause your organization to miss goals in a way that leads to a bad customer experience.

Not Sure, Tell Me More: If customers are complaining; if you compete in a regulated industry and are being fined for non-compliance because service was not delivered according to mandated SLAs; or if corporate objectives aren’t being met, your back office may be the bottleneck. to improve productivity, ensure no customers are slipping through the cracks, and prioritize tasks so that service level objectives are met, you need a dynamic, intelligent workload distribution solution that aligns customer service activities across your business.

3. Is there visibility across all your customer service processes?

Yes: you’ve positioned your company to deliver exceptional customer service. now, besides the contact center and the back office having visibility into customer processes, is management able to easily view how well the organization is performing?

No: With little visibility into customer processes, bottlenecks can occur with no one noticing until customers begin to complain. plus, the contact center cannot provide answers to customers’ questions such as: “Where is my application in the process?” or “When will it be finished?” With careful integration of all the business areas responsible for customer service, companies can deliver the visibility needed to identify issues before they cause customer dissatisfaction or non-compliance fines.

Not Sure, Tell Me More: Although your contact center might have successfully achieved visibility into performance through the availability of real-time and historical statistics, is this the case for your back office? For example, would your order management department benefit from knowing how many orders for a particular product are overdue? Or how well they’re meeting key performance indicators (KpIs) that mandate 80% of orders to be processed within four hours of receipt? By achieving visibility across all your customer service processes, your frontline contact center can have a better handle on the status of customer service requests, and expedite the resolution of the ones that are of top priority to your business.

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4. Do you have a way to measure and improve productivity across the customer service lifecycle?

Yes: Excellent, you can optimize service delivery while controlling staff costs. you’re primed for future growth and changing customer expectations.

No: companies need to be able to measure and monitor whether customer service objectives, SLAs, and regulations are being met by customer service staff. An automated system such as Genesys intelligent Workload Distribution (iWD) provides the visibility into operational performance that management needs to truly measure improvement.

Not Sure, Tell Me More: Do you know where bottlenecks are occurring and why? Do you have a way to measure back office productivity? Often organizations have the technology in place to measure and manage contact center productivity, but lack that capability for other parts of the organization involved in customer service. For optimized service delivery, companies need a solution that integrates resources, capabilities, and internal business processes across the enterprise.

Score: If you answered “no” or “not sure” to any of these questions, you may be missing an opportunity to optimize service delivery, improve productivity, and deliver exceptional customer service.

Genesys can show you how to optimize service delivery across lines of business and the contact center. Genesys iWD improves business efficiency and customer service with real-time prioritization of tasks and interactions from a broad range of enterprise work sources. the bottom line results are greatly reduced costs, improved service levels, and increased customer satisfaction.

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By: Sheila mcGee-Smith, Founder of mcGee-Smith Analytics

A n A Ly S t ’ S c O r n E r

one of the main themes in the enterprise communications market in the past few years has been deploying unified communications (uc) and

leveraging the presence technology it delivers across the organization in order to ensure a superior customer experience.

But uc doesn’t solve another prevalent issue standing in the way of providing first class customer service — the need for better efficiency and consistency in real-time back-office and order fulfillment processes in the rest of the organization. While these back-office processes are equally important in the delivery of service to customers, they often do not perform with the same the level of effectiveness and reliability — resulting in sub-optimal customer care.

this paper examines the best practices and capabilities of the contact center and the value in extending them across a broader set of service delivery processes and resources in the organization.

contact center Attributes Worthy of replicationWhat contact center functions could also prove valuable if extended to additional job roles related to customer service? these can easily be summarized in three words: queuing, routing, and reporting.

Queuing — a defining activity of contact centers — is certainly a function that easily translates to non-contact center activities. Queues exist because resources are limited compared to the demand on those resources. In contact centers, queries that arrive when all agents are busy are queued until an agent becomes available. therefore, couldn’t such things as insurance claims,

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Digital Subscriber Line (DSL) orders, or customer mortgage refinancing applications each benefit from having a sophisticated queue model applied to them, based on the value and priority of the item, as opposed to today’s very loosely adhered to model of first in, first out?

Basic contact center queuing assumes a center with equally skilled agents and homogeneous calls. In practice, however, agents may not all be equally trained, and centers may handle different types of interactions. Further, agents generally only handle a subset of the interaction types that are served by the contact center. this means that the software has to be sophisticated enough to route calls only to agents that are skilled at serving specific interactions.

two kinds of problems are solved using skills-based routing — agent selection and interaction selection. With the agent selection problem, when a particular type of interaction arrives and two or more agents are idle, there has to be a rule to decide which agent should receive the interaction. With the interaction selection problem, when an agent becomes idle, and one or more interactions for which the agent has the required skills are waiting to be served, the software must be able to choose which interaction to serve first.

For example, an insurance claim might require someone licensed in a specific state. A DSL order for an existing customer may be easier to process, while processing orders for a new customer may be more difficult, therefore requiring a more highly skilled agent.

But how do we judge the effectiveness of queuing and routing work items to employees? real-time and historical reporting systems allow line supervisors and managers to manage the day-to-day running of the contact center. they also allow a company to have a proactive view, ensuring that activity is aligned to business objectives.

contact center reporting solutions allow management to identify processes or personnel issues that, if addressed, could lead to improved performance. For instance, a catalog company agent with a consistent call handling time that averages four minutes suddenly spikes to seven minutes. real-time reporting screens that can recognize and highlight the change help management quickly uncover systematic issues, such as a catalog that dropped before the agent has been trained, and lead to a timely resolution of the issue.

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In addition, the benefits of reporting could also be easily applied to a wide variety of work tasks in a business. While it is nice to know that x number of faxes, e-mails, or orders were processed in a day — the typical amount of detail available — that does not give management the information they need to understand how performance can be improved, to perhaps x plus 10% of items in the same or even less time.

What crm and Bpm Solutions are missingOne might imagine that existing software solutions already address the issues outlined above. Don’t customer relationship manage-ment (crm) and business process management (Bpm) solutions already provide a way to optimize business processes? Let’s look at these applications, the reasons they were developed, the value they provide and, finally, where they can fail.

Before crm applications began to appear, customer information tended to exist, if at all, in multiple and distinct databases. the basic idea behind crm is for an organization to collect, in one place, every piece of information it has about a customer. the crm application then allows the organization to plan, implement, and analyze their marketing campaigns, identify and prioritize sales leads, and manage customer contacts — whether in person, within customer call centers, or over the Internet. crm applica-tions are designed to give all customer-facing employees a complete view of customer information, and provide sales agents with the tools they need to successfully cross-sell and up-sell.

Bpm leverages technology to automate, coordinate, and monitor the interactions between disparate business processes — the activities that yield some value to the enterprise. For example, the business processes that compose the accounts payable function yield

value because an enterprise must pay its bills on time to remain in business.

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most approaches to Bpm focus on how the disparate business applications can be integrated to share data to support transac-tion-intensive processes — processes which ideally involve minimal human intervention.

many of these business processes, however, require a substantial level of human involvement, including activities such as claims processing, loan approval, accounts payable, and telephone company line provisioning, just to name a few. In these cases, the same issues that plague manual systems can cause automated systems to fail. Bpm initiatives often deliver less than the projected return on investment because few processes can be completely automated, and those that can will have a percentage of exceptions and fallouts requiring manual intervention.

In fact, while Bpm and crm solutions provide value, what is typically missing is a real-time element. most existing solutions are limited to focusing on processes that can be optimized and managed using technology with little or no insight into any required steps completed via human intervention. At best, crm and Bpm solutions alert a human of the need to complete a process step, but generally then remain queued, in “wait mode,” until the human completes the process.

When human Latency Becomes Business Latencythe term “human latency” first began appearing a few years ago, no doubt in reaction to a world where processes that were sup-posed to be automated still became bogged down at times. It refers to a situation where a business process simply stops while waiting for human response and action.

An example of human latency might be a telephone company system that delivers a service establishment order to a work bin but, instead of being the typical single line for a single business, it’s a complex order requiring tens of lines in multiple locations. Because it looks more complicated than any other task in the bin, worker after worker chooses a different task to work on. As a result, the order that has the greatest potential revenue — revenue that doesn’t begin to accrue until service is established — remains in the bin, hour after hour.

A more widespread problem is the inability of organizations to identify, process, and respond to incoming e-mail messages in a timely manner. most organizations that encourage clients to use e-mail do not have a good way to manage those communica-tions, particularly how to discern which ones have time-bound consequences.

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In these situations human latency is causing a business latency — a lag between the moment that important business information be-comes present and the time when an organization intelligently acts on it. Business latencies are causing organizations to lose revenue, productivity, and customer loyalty. there is an urgent need to find ways to minimize and manage both human and business latency.

managing task AssignmentOne of the key issues leading to human and business latency is the notion of workers having the latitude to pull work items from a collection of tasks to be done, as opposed to having that work pushed to them. A pull paradigm is in place when individuals are made aware of work items that require execution, and the items are assigned to a shared work list. the commitment to undertake a specific task is initiated by the person rather than the system. When push methods are used, work items are allocated to specific individuals by the system.

the problem with pull control is that the pace of work is determined by people who can select which item to handle and when to start. In a push model, it is possible to not only select a specific resource, but the one most appropriate to the task (for example, not allocating “experts” to work on simple tasks, and ensuring that the most valuable and highest priority tasks are completed before simpler, less valuable tasks).

paired with this traditional inability to assign work in an optimal fashion is the inability of current solutions to evaluate the

performance of individuals relative to one another. If mary and Jim take wildly different amounts of time to complete 10 work items, is it because they work at a different pace, or because the work items each completed vary in complexity or — most likely — some combination of the two? In the absence of answers to these seemingly basic questions, customer service suffers.

Early Service Delivery Solutionsreturning to the notion of the contact center, calls (or e-mails or chats) are typically just the beginning of a process that begins and ends with the customer. having the ability to route, report, monitor, and measure the front-end of the process, without also having the ability to apply those same metrics and standards to every phase of issue resolution, results in sub-par customer service.

An approach to the problem of prioritizing and distributing work — known as service delivery optimization — began to appear in 2004. Service delivery solutions sought to improve how businesses managed their value-producing people.

But customer service is technology intensive. It requires complex and expensive It infrastructure and systems. A typical company has interaction routing, a voice portal, outbound dialing software, a recording and quality monitoring system, SmS servers, workforce management applications, crm, and a complex Web site for both delivering information and accepting transactions and customer inquiries, along with a host of vertical-specific support systems. these systems generate a huge amount of raw data every hour. Almost all of this data is trapped in disparate systems, which makes it very difficult for managers to discover how the customers are treated by the contact center, self-service, Web site, and back-office channels.

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Such a complex environment and set of systems does not give business managers the flexibility to fine-tune the application based on changing business conditions. While some Bpm and even crm vendors position their solutions as helping companies address the issue of managing front- and back-office processes more holistically, the solutions themselves are often as complex as the problems.

Agile Service Delivery Optimization What has been needed is an easy-to-administer software solution that can apply what’s best about the contact center to the entire service delivery process. It would be one that works with existing systems, including Bpm and crm, and optimizes the distribution of work to resources within the orga-nization. And it would also be one where time-to-value is short and the path is clear. In evaluating a solution for time-to-value and agility, ask the vendor for a demonstration. If all a company can show is a series of diagrams, with databases, applications, and servers connected with two-way arrows, you will spend a lot of time and expense on integration planning and consulting.

An agile service optimization delivery solution with a user-friendly, browser-based tool allows the vendor to ask the company about the types of tasks a company has and how they want to prioritize them. It lets the user add new rules and work types on the fly and change priorities in real time. It is more about the business needs and requirements than technical design and architecture.

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Extending Genesys Excellence with intelligent Workload DistributionGenesys understands the potential for extending its core capabilities to activities outside the traditional contact center, and has for several years offered a capability for managing non-contact center tasks with the Open media feature of its customer Interaction management platform. In 2009, Genesys extended this capability with a software application that provides out-of-the-box functionality designed specifically for the business user that integrates resources, contact center capabilities, and internal business processes.

Genesys has announced a service delivery optimization solution, called intelligent Workload Distribution (iWD). By leveraging the core capabilities of the Genesys customer Interaction management platform, Genesys is working with companies to extend a wide variety of business tasks, rigorous practices, and results typically found in the contact center.

About the AuthorSheila mcGee-Smith, the founder of mcGee-Smith Analytics, is a leading communications industry analyst and strategic consultant. With a practice focused on the contact center and unified communications markets, ms. mcGee-Smith works on a daily basis with both solution providers and enterprises to help them develop strategies to meet the escalating demands of today’s consumer and business customers. ms. mcGee-Smith’s views on the communications space can be found in her weekly blog at www.nojitter.com.

ms. mcGee-Smith has spent twenty years in the communications industry, including 12 years with the new Jersey-based analyst firm the pELOruS Group. prior to joining the pELOruS Group, ms. mcGee-Smith held sales management, market research, and product management positions at At&t Dun & Bradstreet. She received a bachelor’s degree from Barnard college, columbia university and an mBA from the Kellogg Graduate School of management at northwestern university.

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Genesys Business consulting

Our Approachmost organizations we consult with want to know the answers to these questions:

• “how does iWD specifically fit into my business?”

• “how can it address my challenges around process management and performance?”

• “What are the financial, strategic, and operational impacts of implementing this?”

to respond to these queries, Genesys Business consulting has developed a specific service offering called the iWD rapid Business Assessment (rBA).

the goal of the iWD rBA is to provide you with an in-depth understanding of how iWD can impact your business and solve your business challenges around processes, resource management, and perfor-mance, so that you can make an informed business decision on how to move forward.

the iWD rBA is built on the Genesys Business consulting Framework, which means that the process-es, methodology, and approach we use are tried and tested, and have produced successful outcomes for over 500 clients worldwide across of variety of industries and lines of business.

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Our methodologythe iWD rBA methodology is built on our process capability maturity model (pcmm), which is predicated on industry pro-cess management best practices. We use the model to: conduct a current state assessment; develop an ideal state model with specific details on how to manage and report on process performance; conduct a high level gap analysis; and provide recommen-dations in a structured manner.

the goal is to raise your processes to a level of capability to support your overall business objectives, and to function consis-tently within the standards you have set as measured by SLAs.

the pcmm includes five stages of process capability and maturity, as detailed below.

Silo Operation

• Nil to Limited Visibility of

1. Demand 2. Staff (Nil)• Silos, Non-virtual

Operation• Channel/Work-bin

Oriented Distribution

• Volume Driven Planning & Scheduling

• User Driven, Manual Reporting

Presence& Visibility

• Real-time Presence of:

1. Demand 2. Staff• Centralized Work

List• Workgroup Routing• Task Value

Prioritization• Informed Planning &

Scheduling• Reliable Reporting

Metrics

Consolidating Performing Optimizing

• Full Virtualization (Enterprise Service Delivery Platform)

• Extended to include Partners and BPO partners

• Blended Realtime and Non-realtime Interactions

• Pay for Performance Outcomes (Outsourcer or Internal KPI)

• Leverage Spare Capacity (Blended Workgroups)

• Multi-skilling; Cross-training of Staff

• Differential Service; Prioritization

• Schedule Adherance• KPI Alignment

• Partial Virtualization (Shared Services Model)

• Skill Competency Routing

• Automated Optimization

• Enterprise Segmentation Alignment

• Work and Schedule Adherance

TIME

BE

NE

FIT

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What you can Expectthe iWD rBA process is comprised of four key steps: planning, Site visit, Analysis, and Delivery. these steps take place over the course of approximately 1-4 weeks, with the duration dependent on the number of processes that are selected as part of the rBA, and the complexity of the client’s environment.

Week DaTeS keY STePS aCTIVITIeS

Wk 0 tBDplanning

(1-3 days)

• Scoping/process selection• Onsite schedule and client resources identified• Logistics• request for process maps for the specific

processes selected as part of study

Wk 1 tBD Site visit

(2-10 days)

• Kick-off meeting• iWD presentation for all client participants• conduct Interviews & workgroups to review pro-

cesses as part of study• Observations, data & information collection• Summary

Wk 2 & 3 tBD

Analysis(5- 10 days)

• review of data collected while onsite with client• review any outstanding questions; client to

provide clarification on any outstanding items

Wk 4 tBDDelivery(1 day)

• Deliver Final Document to client in a presenta-tion estimated to take about 2-3 hours

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commitmentGenesys Business consulting is committed to quality and producing an optimal result for our clients. therefore, we request that our clients commit the resources and information necessary to assist us in completing the iWD rBA in an agreed upon timeframe.

In order to make the process as smooth as possible, we have detailed a list of resources typically required to fulfill the scope of the iWD rBA:

• executive Sponsor -― responsible for the outcomes, project success

• Project Liaison ―- facilitate meetings, logistics, planning, schedules, documentation

• Line of Business Managers -― owners of the resources required to fulfill the process

• Process Owners -― responsible for process improvement, measurement, reporting, etc.

• IT Managers -― responsible for Bpm, crm, or vertical specific technology around process

• agent/analyst/Resources -― responsible for day-to-day work, process execution

the total amount of time that the client should allocate for any given resource might be 3-4 hours over the course of the engagement, depending upon the role and responsibilities of that resource.

the resultAt the conclusion of the iWD rBA, the client will be supplied with electronic copies of all project materials included in the final deliverable. the final deliverable represents the culmination of iWD rBA activities, and includes the following key pieces:

✓current state opportunity assessment & impact

✓process capability as modeled through our pcmm

✓Assumptions

✓Ideal state process model for processes studied (includes task, performance, and resource management)

✓Gap analysis

✓recommendations prioritized & ranked

✓Business case with investment criteria, solution benefits, & rOI/tcO analysis

✓Action items/Action list for planning purposes

For more information about genesys Business Consulting, please contact us at: BusinessConsultingWW@genesyslab.com

BAcK tO DIrEctOry l nExt ArtIcLE

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iWD videos

take a look at our videos and learn how to get the most out of Genesys intelligent Workload Distribution (iWD) to provide the very best customer experience that ensures increased customer satisfaction and boosts revenue.

See how Genesys intelligent Workload Distribution can transform your back office processes and deliver dramatic results for you and your customers.

Watch the demo

Discover the benefits of putting your customer at the center of your sevice delivery strategy with Genesys intelligent Workload Distribution.

Watch the video

Watch and learn about our other Genesys solutions

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intelligent Workload Distribution demo

intelligent Workload Distribution: Delivering happy customers

Genesys video resource Library

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Genesys is the world’s leading provider of customer service and contact center software — with a 100% focus on customer experience and mission to save

the world from bad customer service. With more than 2,000 customers in 80 countries, Genesys is uniquely positioned to help companies bring their people,

insights and customer channels together to drive today’s new customer conversation. Genesys software directs more than 100 million interactions every day

from the contact center to the back office, helping companies deliver fast, simple service and a highly personalized cross-channel customer experience. Genesys

software also optimizes processes and the performance of customer-facing employees across the enterprise.

For more information visit: www.genesyslab.com, or call +1 888 GENESYS.

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