Oracle CRM Call Centre: The BT Conferencing Way

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1 business and management Oracle CRM Call Centre: The BT Conferencing Way By Andy Gray, BT Conferencing & Sarawoot Lienpanich, GloriSys Limited In BT Conferencing, our Call Centres have been out there for a long time. The Call Centre, in our perspective, is not a physical place but, from the point of view of function, places that make customers happy. In this view, the centre is the place where the customer goes to place an order, or to get help, or perhaps even complain. Our Call Centres are a combination of employees (agents) and systems, positioned to manage customer (and of course potential customer) interactions over the phone. The interactions are delivered by remote, real-time contact. An agent s ability to successfully handle customer calls is enhanced by the use of Call Centre technologies and appropriate CRM software. These systems support the agent s interpersonal skills with appropriate customer information, to enable a more satisfactory interaction with the customer. Using Oracle CRM, agents have access to more (and hopefully better quality) information about the customers and the companies. CRM implementations can be categorised into two types: Applications implementation, and Interaction channel implementations. Applications implementation is CRM functionality specific, i.e. Sales, Marketing, and Service. These are simple and straightforward to implement. On the other hand, Interaction channel implementation, i.e. Call Centre, , Web, and Mobile, is more complex, and normally involves technologies and infrastructure. We implemented Oracle CRM Interaction Centre, which is a suite for interaction channels ( , telephony-call Centre, web, etc). The Scope of Interaction centre covers multi-channels / multimedia how customers and organisations interact with each other. The implementation of Oracle CRM Call Centre, in fact, is to integrate two important networks: telephony and data. We will use the terms Interface or Connect rather than Integrate (although we will sometimes use telephony integration ). The reason is straightforward; an implementation of Oracle CRM Call Centre will never replace, or take control of, the existing Call Centre infrastructure. The implementation is to make Oracle CRM talk to existing infrastructures to provide the right customer information to the right people at the right time within the Call Centre environment. The Discussion This paper has no aim to explain the product functionality in detail or how to step-by-step setup the system. It does, however, describe how we implemented (and survived) Oracle CRM Call Centre for BT Conferencing (BTC). As the abstract suggested, this paper will demystify Oracle CRM Call Centre in a step-by-step manner, showing how we have done it. The discussion will introduce the Call Centre technology at high-level, then drill-down into interfacing existing Call Centre technology to Oracle CRM, infrastructure planning, developing the prototype, user acceptance test, and production migration strategies. There is an important assumption that you have already implemented CRM applications, i.e. TeleSales and TeleService. The CRM Call Centre will be implemented as a customer interaction channel on top of the CRM applications. Telephony Technologies Understanding the telephony is the first step toward the computer-telephony interface environment. The language of the telephone system technologies may be very different from a day-to-day Oracle Applications implementation life-cycle. The key technologies are: Automatic Call Distributor (ACD) Automatic Call Distributor or ACD is a core technology (still widely-used) for Call Centres. The concept of ACD is simple: to take incoming calls and move them to the right places. ACD is normally a major function of a PBX, and can be either a hardware and/or software implementation. Although there is massive hype around multi-channel interaction for CRM, ACD is still the heart and soul of the modern Call Centre. There are other related technologies in this space, such as IVR (Interactive Voice Response) and Skill Based Routing. Predictive Dialling Systems If ACD is the heart and soul of Inbound call handling, predictive dialling is the pinnacle for Outbound calling. Today s diallers are much more sophisticated than systems of bygone years. Predictive Dialling automates the entire outbound dialling process, with the computer choosing the person to be called and dialling the number. The call is only passed to the agent when a live human voice is detected. This means that Predictive Diallers filter out all (or most) non productive calls, e.g. busy tone and no-answer, before they reach the agents. Predictive Dialling can push an agent s performance to near 100%. This technology, however, is less humanised, and focused on mass consumer outbound calls. In our opinion, it is not the 33

2 most appropriate technology for businessto-business telemarketing. Computer-Telephony Integration (CTI) CTI technology enables us to interface two main networks voice and data through open standard protocols. CTI systems primarily act as middleware between PBX and computer systems (Oracle CRM, in this case). Oracle CRM, as a result, will not interact directly with the PBX. Instead, it talks to the CTI middleware. The middleware will, then, talk to the PBX to send requests, i.e. place calls, or to receive information, i.e. incoming calls. Oracle CRM has out-of-the-box integration with two major players in the CTI market, Cisco ICM ( sw/custcosw/ps1001) and Intel/Dialogic CT Connect ( csp/products/ctconnect/index.htm). We recommend CT Connect. It is simple to configure, works well with Oracle Call Centre Connectors (a component of Oracle Interaction Centre), and, more importantly, its licence cost is reasonable approximately 20,000 per server. Properties of Calls An ideal strategy for Call Centres is to provide the right person to respond to customer needs. The best way is to route the calls to agents whose skills can satisfy customers demands. Customer demand can be pre-determined by Properties of calls which normally are: Customer s phone numbers (via Caller ID (CLID) but normally are businesses PBX access number or switch-board number ) Our telephone numbers that customers call (DNIS or Dialled Number Identification Service) Information gathered by an IVR when the call is first received. This can be from phone buttons pressed by customers in response to prompts such as Please enter your TAR number follow by the hash key or may be via Voice Recognition systems that allow people to speak their request. Such systems normally use a structure that guides the caller in how to respond. E.g. Is that for today, tomorrow, yesterday or another day? Strategies Implementing CRM Call Centre is costly and prone to fail due to several factors, for example, unrealistic scope and lack of infrastructure readiness. Nonetheless, the implementation failure could be prevented if you have the right strategies. The strategies depend on your budget and internal/external environment: and more importantly, they are driven by the business objectives. Nonetheless, when setting your strategies you need to remember the following: Set the expectations correctly Be aware of what you really need Plan ahead for your infrastructure. Set the expectation correctly Set the expectation correctly by having a realistic and achievable scope. The project team must evaluate existing business processes with an eye on the present and a look to the future. Both technical and business goals establish parameters with which the system can be measured. Most importantly, scope it carefully using a step-by-step approach, and make sure critical success factors are clearly defined. Be aware of what you really need Ask yourself the following questions: What does a day in the life of Call Centre agents and their manager look like? What tasks do agents currently complete? What could be done better with CRM? What are we trying to achieve or improve, e.g. Key Performance Indexes for the business? These questions will help in creating business processes and scenarios. This includes day-to-day operational procedures, system procedures, information flow, etc. A clear picture of the business processes will eventually lead to solid requirement definitions, and ultimately a sound solution. Plan ahead for the infrastructure The infrastructure implementation takes time and a fair amount of investment. Preparing the infrastructure early is as important as having clearly defined scopes and requirements. Make it very clear how and where you want to connect telephone system to your Oracle CRM. The telephone system is an independent piece of technology; you need expert help to create the infrastructure. You need to evaluate the technologies and their suppliers. Other implementation parameters can be costs, time, existing network providers, and in-house skills. Scoping As with any implementation, the scope is very much dependant on business drivers and risks/benefits analysis. For Call Centres, it should include consideration of your PBX capabilities and compatibility. In most circumstance, there will be no economic justifications to buy a new PBX to match your pre-determined scope. Creating a mission statement and setting achievable targets are the starting point. They will limit you to work within your project parameters and pre-defined goals, and allow you to consider all possible conceptual solutions for your business needs. The following mission statements are extracted from our scoping document: The mission of this project is to provide Telephony capability to inbound telesales and outbound campaign team who are currently using Oracle CRM. The implementation of the functionality is relating to an implementation of Oracle CRM Interaction Centre and improving our telephone system infrastructure. The implementation in this phase will only implement formal Call Centre for the TeleMarketing and TeleSales team. It is both Inbound and Outbound Call Centre with pre-defined, separate groups of inbound and 34 Oracle Scene Issue 17 Spring 2004 / The UK Oracle User Group Journal /

3 outbound. As a result, the implementation is not a Blended Call Centre. The implementation of inbound is limited to telesales team only. The call transfer feature of Interaction Centre will be used where the telephone systeminfrastructures are permitted. Additional functionalities will be implemented in TeleSales, Marketing and CRM Foundation to employ telephony. In our scope, depending on current infrastructure, we need to upgrade the PBX to control software to Release < > and install additional hardware. This includes creating new CTI infrastructure which require a network link between servers and PBX. It is considered as a part of Infrastructure Scoping. The responsible team is < >. When the mission is clearly defined, the scope will follow automatically. In our view, the scope is to expand the business-oriented mission statement into technical, implementation-oriented statements, for example: The implementation of Oracle Interaction Centre is a Single Site Server architecture where all Oracle Telephony Manager functions are available in a single interaction centre site. The implementation site is < >. More importantly, the scope is limited to Passive, Non-Distributed mode with either Static or simple Rule Base Routing based on DNIS number Besides, initially, there will be no IVR integration since our Nortel Meridian telephone system has already employed CCR module, which provides us with a complex ACD routing. To be able to define the above scope, you need to know some key product implementation options as follows: Passive or Active The implementation can be in Active or Passive mode. In an Active implementation, Oracle takes over the control from the ACD/PBX. In passive mode, the ACD/PBX system completely handles the routing and queuing of inbound calls. Oracle Telephony Manager does not monitor, or respond to, routing requests from the switch, and Oracle s skill-based routing is inactive. As calls arrive at the agents extensions, Oracle Telephony Manager monitors the calls and captures any associated data (for example, CLID, DNIS) for screen popups. Our recommendation is, where possible, to implement Passive mode. It is simpler, and, more importantly, it does not take the controls away from ACD/PBX. Remind yourself that your telephone system is very important to the business, and having it working 100% at all time is much more important than having a stateof-the-art CRM Call Centre system. Single or Multi-Site Oracle Interaction Centre comprises two main components: Servers (run-forever, standalone Java applications/processes which perform specific tasks, e.g. Universal Work Queue server) User Interface Front-Ends and Administrations In a Single Site environment, the servers are logically grouped together in a server group. The servers communicate within the same server group only. Although they are in the same server group, some of the servers can be replicated or distributed across multiple machines for scalability. The Multi-site setup is only used when you have multiple PBXs, probably located in multiple physical locations, and they are functionally independent, i.e. from different PBX manufacturers. However, you can implement Passive Mode Single Sites with multiple ACD/PBXs by using Networked ACD feature of your PBX. This means the PBX can place calls into another PBX ACD queue. Most modern PBXs do have this feature. Outbound Dialling Method A dialling method is the mode by which the system dials the customer telephone numbers as it passes the records to the agents. Outbound dialling methods vary, depending on the technology the business wants to implement. The common types of the dialling methods are: Manual - The agent initiates all dialling from his or her own telephone set Preview - Oracle sends a customer profile record to an agent prior to placing the call. This gives the agent time to review the call activity for a particular customer before clicking the dial button on the Oracle softphone Progressive - Oracle dials the customer s number as soon as the agent receives a new lead from the campaign lists. The customer information is displayed while the number is being dialled Predictive - Predictive dialling calls customers in mass numbers. Voice Detection Units will detect human voice and route the calls to agents. Predictive dialling eliminates the need for agents to handle unproductive calls, e.g. busy lines. The dialling method depends on your budgets and volumes of calls. Our implementation does not use Predictive dialling. Predictive, in our opinion, is not humanised and the VDU plus associated switch hardware alone costs around 10,000-20,000. More importantly, we need to increase PBX capacity and add more telephone lines, which may cost 100,000s. Infrastructure If managing infrastructure is your responsibility, make sure that you know what you need. Managing infrastructure is extremely important, and normally requires third parties. If there is a team dedicated to support the telephone system, make sure they are informed and aware of possible change or upgrade of the system. If you can, make them a part of the implementation team. 35

4 The following diagram illustrates an example of infrastructure you may need. Please observe that our Meridian PBX control software Release 24 with CCR (Custom Call Routing) is not certified by Oracle. Surprisingly, it works smoothly. The reason is that the CTI interface provided by the switch is unchanged in later releases, and that is all the Oracle software really cares about. servers with less than 15 minutes downtime. Oracle Modules Knowing the key modules of CRM Call Centre is the starting point for the infrastructure subproject. There are two main modules, namely the Advanced Inbound and Advanced Outbound modules. Advanced Inbound is compulsory for CTI enabled Oracle CRM. Advanced Inbound As the name implies, Advanced Inbound manages inbound telephone calls. When the PBX receives a phone call and places it in an ACD queue, it also signals the CTI middleware. The CTI middleware then passes the call details to Oracle via Oracle Call Centre Connectors server (a C++ lists and caches, the Dial Server manages list records to and from the agent. If the calls are unsuccessful, e.g. busy, the Dial Server will return records back to the cache. Due to the small volume, the servers for Development and UAT are standard Pentium 4 PCs with 256 MB RAM and 40 GB hard drive. The CTI Middleware Servers are Windows 2000 systems with Dialogic CT Connect installed. To save investment, the Development and UAT systems use an Evaluation Copy, which can be downloaded from Intel/Dialogic website. The production machines, however, are rack-mounted NT servers with the following sizing: Fig. 1 Our System Landscape Table 1 Sizing for 100 users Purposed Hardware OS CTI Middleware Server NT Server 1CPU 512MB 40GB DISK Windows 2000 Call Centre Server (Inbound) NT Server 2CPU 2GB 40GB DISK Windows 2000 Dial Server (Outbound) NT Server 1CPU 512MB 40GB DISK Windows 2000 From the diagram, there are two elements Oracle CRM and Non-Oracle elements. The Oracle elements comprise two main hardware components: the Dialler Server is simply an outbound call processing machine, the Call Centre Server, the inbound routing machine. Depending on your implementation and load, the Dialler Server is an optional server. The Non- Oracle elements are the PBX switch and the CTI middleware. Check with your PBX manufacturer and Oracle what additional hardware and software components are required to make your PBX IP-Enabled, and to talk to the CTI middleware Oracle has certified for your telephony platform. For example, from the diagram, Meridian Link version 5 is required for CTI on the Meridian Switch. The system landscape for the Call Centre is a mirrored system, for example, two CTI servers, two Outbound servers, and two Inbound servers. We decided not to have hot backup because the servers keep no databases. If they fail, we can migrate Inbound and Outbound servers to any NT program running along side CTI middleware). Other server processes will be contacted, and the call information passes. The Active Mode servers will determine which is the right agent to receive the calls. When determined, the call will be placed into the agent work queue via Universal Work Queue, and the screen will pop up with the customer details from the database. Advanced Outbound The main objective of Outbound is to make Oracle CRM place telephone calls for you. The main application of Outbound is telemarketing. Each telemarketing campaign has a call list and a group of agents who will make the telephone calls. When the agents login to the system and campaign, Advanced Outbound will start feeding the call details on the agent screen and place the calls. Unlike Inbound, much of the Advanced Outbound functionality and integration happens through database. While Outbound Central Server manages the call Prototype The very first step of the prototype is to demonstrate to the business that it is the reality. This means that the Oracle CRM prototype system must be able to talk to your telephones. The quick-win solution has to be made in the first prototype. Our first prototype system has very basic functionalities: Screen-Pop Screen-pop tells you, on Oracle CRM screens, who is calling you and their details from the database. Mobile telephones provide a good example of screen-pop capability. When someone calls you from their mobile and their telephone numbers are saved in your SIM card, your mobile telephone will display the caller s name. This means it gets the telephone numbers from the network and searches through its own database (SIM Card). Screen-pop in Oracle CRM has the same principle: receive call properties from CTI middleware, search the database, 36 Oracle Scene Issue 17 Spring 2004 / The UK Oracle User Group Journal /

5 then pop up the details. It is a basic capability of Advanced Inbound, and, not surprisingly, it is the most common objective of many Oracle CRM Call Centre implementations. Preview Dialling The preview dialling demonstrates basic Advanced Outbound to the business Oracle CRM delivers a customer record telephone to you ready to dial. Preview Dialling is based on call lists which are a part of marketing campaigns (Oracle Marketing Online). When an agent executes a campaign schedule, Advanced Outbound feeds records to him/her. The screen will pop up the customer information, and ask the agent whether s/he wants to make a call. When the agent hangs up and wraps up, the next call will automatically be displayed. Functionality can be added, depending on the business and your project parameters. More prototype systems can be developed. As with most implementations, it starts from a prototype system and ends with user acceptance test. The life cycle will be the same as other application implementations. Go Live User acceptance test, production migration, and support are straightforward. The user acceptance test can be incorporated into existing TeleSales or TeleService test strategies. The testing processes should include how Oracle Interaction Centre interacts with your PBX systems, for example: UWQ correctly identify DNIS (the number that customer calls) and CLID (the number that customer makes a call from) Calls are picked up from ACD queues, and UWQ correctly routes the calls to right agents Screen pop is working ok Outbound agents are being fed with call records and Progressive/preview is dialling the correct customer number Call recycling works correctly. Post go-live issues are normally concentrated on infrastructure stability and performance (not business or software features issues). Well-managed stress test and infrastructure fallback strategy are the key. The core CRM business systems, i.e. TeleSales and TeleService, must be able to work with or without CRM Call Centre. This means whenever you have production issues, you must be able to shut CRM Call Centre down without any severe impact on day-to-day business operations. Having the PBX systems working, remember, is far more important than having Oracle CRM Call Centre. Conclusion You may have some doubts your PBX based Call Centre has been working, and you wonder why you need CRM Call Centre. The answer is quite straightforward: a PBX does not have an enterprise database, containing all the complex customers and company backend information. Your ACD is and will be the core mechanism for one of the most important customer interaction channels, the telephone. Oracle CRM Call Centre will bring your customer information to the right agents at the right time. The technology and the applications are ready. Implementing them is more challenging, but still achievable even if you do not have Call Centre background. Considerable care during the implementation will lead to a successful project. About the Authors: Andy Gray is the Oracle Applications program manager for BT Conferencing. He is experienced in program management for large-scale projects, particularly for the Telecom environment. Andy can be contacted at Gray Andrew.gray@bt.com Sarawoot Lienpanich is the Oracle CRM product specialist and UKOUG CRM Special Interest Group Deputy Chair. He has successfully implemented Oracle CRM 11i for a number of high-profile customers, i.e. Siemens and British Telecom. Sarawoot can be contacted at sarawoot@glorisys.com Special thanks: John Godfrey, UKOUG CRM SIG Chair, for tirelessly editing this paper. 37