Cisco Unified Expert Advisor

This white paper, intended for business decision makers, describes how organizations and businesses can harness the power of presence to improve their customer care. Covered topics include:

For many people, "presence" means no more than the little colored icons next to people's names on the buddy list of their Instant Messaging (IM) client. Is someone available? Is the person away? Does this person prefer to not be disturbed? This information is useful, and indeed many modern business users would be at a loss without Instant Messaging and its straightforward application of presence technology.

Figure 1 depicts presence icons on an IM client.

If presence has proved its worth in facilitating communication between business users, what then is its value in improving interactions between businesses or organizations and their customers? How can presence technology improve customer care? An obvious answer - already in practice, whether officially or unofficially - is for traditional contact center agents to have an IM client that allows them to chat with fellow agents or even with subject matter experts outside the contact center. This setup gives traditional agents an opportunity to get answers to live caller questions that may fall outside their areas of expertise. It is often called the "buddy-list" scenario, because agents typically have an IM client populated with one or more buddy lists of experts, grouped by their areas of expertise.

The buddy-list approach can improve customer care. Contact centers that use this approach, especially those of smaller organizations and organizations with limited product or service offerings, can significantly improve the customer experience. It is important to remember, however, that efficiency and ease of use are important even in smaller contact centers, making the case for task-streamlining measures such as providing a chat window within the agent desktop, so that the agent does not have to open a new application while on a call with a customer.

Even with time-saving devices such as chat integrated into the agent desktop, the agent buddy-list approach still has numerous potential concerns, however. For example, who should populate the agents' IM buddy lists? If the agents themselves do it, how do they know who the best experts are for answering different sorts of specialized questions? What if buddies do not agree that they are experts in a given area? How should experts be grouped on the buddy lists if they possess more than one useful skill? Or how would buddy lists best represent the fact that some experts are, in fact, better than others, or more willing to answer caller questions?

These concerns are largely procedural ones that are easily solvable. Beyond procedural challenges, however, consider the usage challenges facing traditional agents equipped with an IM client and a buddy list. When agents are on the phone with a caller, do they really want to have to scroll through buddy lists to find the right expert for consultation? Presuming they find one or more available experts, how will the agents enlist their aid - use IM with them sequentially, or scatter ten IM queries simultaneously to ten experts and be satisfied with the expert who answers first? What if 500 agents put a particular product development engineer on their buddy lists, and then a dozen of them try to send an IM query to this individual with different questions at the same time, while other experts are left alone?

Or what if the best way to address the caller's problem is to simply bring the expert in on the live call? Now the agent needs to worry about the expert's phone number, and the possibility of misdialing it. Finally, consider that many contact center administrators prefer that their agents do not use Instant Messaging clients, because they believe that IM chat can be a distraction.

Although it is true that creative providers of contact center products have developed ways to mitigate some of the problems with buddy lists, it is also true that presence technology can do much more for customer interactions - if we broaden our thinking.

Consider now a scenario wherein a contact center agent is on a call and the customer has a specialized question that the agent cannot answer. Instead of bringing up an IM client, searching for available experts, sending them IM queries, passing on customer data, etc., what if all the agent has to do is perform the equivalent of pressing a button on the agent desktop software application that says, "I need help on a call from an expert with this skill"? At that point software takes over; it looks for candidate experts based on their previously configured skills and current IM presence state. The software can select candidate experts using multiple selection strategies such as expert skill rankings, caller and expert location, time of last-answered call by the expert, etc.

Figure 2 depicts a sample automated expert-selection process.

When a candidate expert is identified, the software automatically (that is, without any action from the agent) sends an instant message to that expert through the IM client the expert is already using, such as, "Are you available to assist on a call with Ms. Caitlin Sanchez, customer number 123123?" The software application automatically populates the customer name and ID. The expert can answer "Yes" or "Y" in the IM client, at which time the software can dial the expert's phone (at a preconfigured number or a number the expert enters in real time through the IM client) and bring that expert into the call with the agent and the customer.

If multiple candidates are identified, the software can send the IM invitation message to them sequentially in preference order, or it can contact them all simultaneously, and select the one who answers first (and then inform the other candidates that their help is no longer needed). Either way, the expert can assist the caller (and the agent), and when the expert is done, the agent can remain on the call with the customer to finalize the interaction. Alternatively, the agent can consult with the expert while the caller is on hold, and then return to the caller with the answer (while the expert returns to normal activities). In another variation, the agent could simply forward the caller to the expert, and then take the next incoming call.

Returning to the concept of identifying candidate experts in preference order, consider that an intelligent expert-selection system can automatically find the most competent, available, and willing expert having a needed skill, while falling back to less-competent experts if necessary -down to a configurable minimum. In some cases, organizations might even choose to have the "lesser" experts help standard callers, while the best experts handle premium callers.

Figure 3 depicts an example of how experts declare their willingness to handle a call.

Notice in this scenario that there is no IM interaction between the agent and the expert; indeed, the agent does not even need an IM client. Nor does the agent need to know which experts possess which particular skill sets, because that information is maintained by the expert-selection software. This scenario greatly reduces agent training requirements and helps ensure that expert selection is performed in a consistent, scalable manner. All the agent needs to do is indicate, "I need help", from a button on the agent desktop and then the expert-selection software takes care of the rest. Customers get the help they need on their first call into the contact center, instead of hanging up in frustration.

Now consider a final scenario, where callers first interact with a self-service interactive-voice-response (IVR) system and then, based on their responses and selections, are connected to an expert who can help them with their problem or question. In such a scenario, neither traditional agents nor even a contact center are required; all that is needed is the IVR for initial call handling and the expert-selection software already described. This solution is ideal for smaller businesses in that it allows them to provide powerful customer care without the expense and upkeep of a formal contact center. It is also ideal for intraenterprise use, such as an internal help desk or human resources hotline.

Figure 4 depicts expert-provided customer care without a contact center.

Although presence in the contact center may simply take the proven form of agent buddy lists, such an approach has limitations. A simpler, yet far more powerful solution can be accomplished by using presence as part of an automated expert-selection system that allows traditional agents to request expert assistance with just the click of a button. Such a system can also be combined with an IVR system to allow experts to provide customer care without the need for a traditional contact center.

Scenarios like these are integral to the future of customer care, and they are available today with products such as Cisco^® Unified Expert Advisor, which increases first-call resolution and caller satisfaction by allowing presence-enabled experts anywhere in the business to assist and collaborate with callers. With Cisco Unified Expert Advisor, formal contact center agents can request expert assistance on a call with just the click of a button, or request expert help through an automated self-service application. Either way, Expert Advisor combines experts' availability with innovative skills-based routing technology to automatically select the right expert or experts for each call.

For more information about Cisco Unified Expert Advisor, please visit: www.cisco.com/go/ea.