Lawrence P. Mark, Chief Technology Officer, SER

NewsBlast Please tell us about your career. How long have you been with SER?

Larry Mark With over 25 years of experience in technical development and managerial experience and as chief technology officer for SER Solutions Inc., I lead the strategic planning and technology direction initiatives for the company's software solutions including contact center, integrated document management and intelligent document recognition and data capture. Before joining SER, I was chief technology officer and a member of the board of directors of VorTecs Incorporated, acquired by SER in March 2003. Earlier in my career, I was technical director for EIS International, Inc. (acquired by SER in 2000) where I provided technical direction, innovative design and development for various product lines establishing new revenue streams for the company.

NB The Aspect®-SER partnership is being called a Strategic Convergence. What does this mean?

LM The Aspect/SER partnership is unique because it combines the leading inbound and outbound technologies from both companies into a tightly integrated solution, an industry first. This is unparalleled in the industry and addresses market demands for a unified, best-of-breed contact center solution.

NB What are some of the problems associated with having separate outbound and inbound systems?

LM For over a decade, industry leaders have touted the virtues of a blended contact center: the ability to leverage resources across inbound and outbound activities, maximize productivity, enhance service levels and reduce expenses. Yet the successful and seamless integration of these core contact center competencies has remained an elusive goal. Many so-called "blended" centers failed because the ACD, the outbound dialer, and the call management software were separate technology silos and impossible to manage. By far, the lack of consolidated reporting has proven the most significant shortcoming - often forcing a contact center to operate inbound and outbound calling as distinct business lines, each with its own reporting data. Additionally, call switching has been hampered by an outbound-centric view and administrators and agents have been forced to use separate interfaces for inbound and outbound activities.

NB What are the advantages to having a complete and integrated contact center portfolio?

LM One of the advantages of the Aspect/SER integrated contact center will be that contact center operators will now have a holistic view of the contact center. By tightly integrating SER's Call Processing System™ (CPS) with Aspect's Enterprise Contact Server (ECS), contact centers will be able to intelligently manage inbound and outbound call management across multiple telephony switches common to enterprise environments. The value to the organization of the calls in queue and not simply the total number of calls will be leveraged to provide a far more sophisticated approach to movement of agents between inbound and outbound activities.

NB How does a customer benefit from this partnership?

LM The integrated solution will be able to determine when and how to alter agent activity based on a robust set of factors to ensure inbound service levels are achieved while outbound campaign goals are met. With this solution, companies will be able to optimize resources through value-maximized inbound/outbound call management, optimize every customer interaction, improve customer satisfaction and provide consistent, personalized service across all contact center channels.

NB What are some of the issues surrounding quality monitoring today?

LM I think everyone agrees that delivering superior customer service is essential. However, today's method of ensuring quality call handling by agents is a costly and time-consuming operation and often a hit or miss proposition. To ensure that customers receive a high level of service, many contact centers typically employ quality assurance managers who monitor a random sampling of calls. However, listening to a random sample is, at best, a balancing act between the desired quality goal and the expense of a large staff of reviewers. Although it is desirable, contact centers do not monitor every call using today's methods since they incur considerable costs due to the significant number of personnel required to listen to all calls. Even when using a playback feature to listen to calls at double or quadruple speed, quality monitoring is extremely time and labor intensive. The key to a superior quality monitoring program is the ability to review 100 percent of calls without the associated time requirements and financial costs.

NB What is the difference between the quality assurance solutions you provide vs. simply recording calls?

LM Simply recording calls has little to do with quality monitoring. Quality monitoring involves someone actively listening to the recorded calls to review the calls for script adherence, achievement of Key Performance Indicators and overall call quality. Our solution, SERTAINTY™, automates quality monitoring activities to evaluate and directly improve agent-customer interactions. SERTAINTY works in conjunction with call recording systems and utilizes state-of-the-art speech recognition technology to listen to and flag only those calls that actually need to be reviewed by a supervisor. Now, rather than monitoring only a small fraction of all the calls made in the contact center, a contact center can perform highly accurate, automated evaluations of all customer interactions based their specific business needs.

NB How does your technology integrate with existing components in the call center?

LM SERTAINTY is designed to work along side a contact center's current recording applications thereby eliminating the need to forklift your current technology infrastructure. In addition, by delivering extremely accurate, high-speed audio processing and search capabilities, these innovative solutions enable contact center operators to dramatically reduce the costs associated with their quality monitoring operations.