Inova LightLink Command Center

As call centers are pressured to reduce costs and increase efficiency, their need for comprehensive, well-organized performance data grows. And in this volatile economy, the ground beneath managers' feet shifts frequently. Frank Ortiz, vice president of sales and marketing at Inova, told CRM Buyer Magazine that merger and acquisition activity prompts many of his company's customers to seek ways to manage multiple call center facilities from a single command center.

Ortiz said he has walked into several large call centers that had people assigned to do nothing but sit and watch multiple screens to monitor volume and activity, and identify possible trouble spots. That scenario, he said, obviously calls for a different approach.

Tethering Data

Inova's LightLink suite is a middleware product designed to tie together the many disparate data sources that large call centers rely on to manage activity and measure performance. Ortiz said his company's typical customer is a blue-chip enterprise with several customer service facilities.

Some of the many data sources from which LightLink can glean information include the following:

• ACDs (automatic call distributors), including Aspect, Avaya, Nortel (NYSE: NT), Rockwell, Apropos, Centergy, Interactive Intelligence (Nasdaq: ININ), Perimeter and Teloquent
• Predictive dialers, including Avaya and Eshare
• CTI (computer telephony integration) systems from Cisco (Nasdaq: CSCO) and Genesys
• CRM systems, including Vantive, Remedy and Clarify
• ODBC-compliant databases
• HTML pages, through LightLink WebStream

The company also can build custom interfaces to accommodate legacy systems.

Need To Know

The LightLink system creates notification messages whenever the customer company's defined parameters are exceeded. Those notices can be sent to individual customer service representatives, managers or executives through a variety of channels, including personal computers and wireless devices.

This is the trend in call center management, Deloitte Consulting partner Nidal Haddad told CRM Buyer -- gathering data so that decisions affecting overhead, costs and revenue can be made on solid information. Consolidation of contact centers is one approach, he agreed. However, the facilities themselves need not be consolidated for the information to be aggregated and made available to those managers who need it most to run a center's daily operations, Haddad argued.

Outsource Neutrality

Although the debate over whether or not outsourcing is the right approach to customer service rages on, Ortiz said that his company's products work equally well in a variety of situations: "We provide real-time monitoring," he noted, "whether the customer is pushing information out to an outsourcer or whether our customer is the outsourcer itself."

For example, ClientLogic is an outsourcer that employs more than 5,000 representatives at 12 different facilities to handle incoming volume for about 30 companies. Dan Clark, director of network operations at ClientLogic, told CRM Buyer that deployment of the LightLink command center allowed him to streamline his control center's monitoring equipment from 13 computers down to a single wall of consoles.

"We fancy ourselves like Switzerland," Ortiz said. "If a company is having trouble pulling information out of a Genesys system, for instance, we can do customized reporting and lay Genesys and Cisco information side-by-side."

The information server that takes in data and sends out notification messages has a set license fee of less than US$10,000, according to Ortiz. However, an implementation's price tag will vary according to the number of data sources used -- the charge is about $2,500 per data source for a perpetual license. An average project phase comes in around $100,000.