While the ASP model suffered a false start, it is re-emerging with vigor in the customer relationship management segment, offering enterprises, large and small, a contact center utility on an outsourced basis. A September 2003 survey of enterprises by Aberdeen Group shows 35 percent already use hosted CRM products and 85 percent would evaluate them when in the market.
Some offers naturally are coming from noted CRM players like Siebel Systems Inc. and IBM Corp., which jointly released Siebel OnDemand CRM in October 2003, while others are from startup service providers like Echopass Corp. However, there is a logical business case for telcos to offer contact center solutions as a managed service to their existing customers, shifting customer’s CPE expenditures to service expenditures. Several vendors of call center platforms as well as some service bureaus are enabling telcos to do just that.
Telcos can offer services on a dedicated platform akin to an IT outsourcing arrangement or on a shared platform operated internally or via service bureau.
Genesys Telecommunications Laboratories, a leader in the call center space, is enabling carriers like BT and NBTel to offer services to large enterprises off its platform. In this scenario, the telco operates and manages the platform at its facilities on behalf of the enterprise customer, tying into the PBX, contact center and PCs that are on the customer’s premises. It also can tie into a third-party, remote or after-hours call center. (This could be an additional revenue generator for telcos that offer telemarketing services.)
“When a telco becomes a managed services customer, they are a partner,” says Matthew Kresch, senior director of managed services for Genesys, noting some telcos have opted to leverage the Genesys reputation in the space by co-branding their offers. “We help them put together packages that are resalable.”
Kresch says he spent six months working on pricing models that fit the carrier’s minutes-of-use model. “They want to offer customers a fixed fee per month plus transport fees per minute and service fees per minute,” he says. Carriers license the platform from Genesys based on seats; some have also engaged in revenue-sharing with the software vendor. On one service feature offered through the Genesys platform, service providers have recorded an ROI of around 10 months.
For telcos that don’t want to get into the IT outsourcing business, there also are opportunities to sell hosted contact solutions through an ASP. XO Communications Inc., for example, announced in fall 2003 it will work with Echopass to provide a suite of telephone and Web-based contact interaction/ call center solutions delivered over the XO network and offered on a monthly cost-per-seat basis. These services include call handling and e-media features, such as universal queuing, skills-based routing, synchronized screen delivery, CRM integrations, e-mail response,Web-chat and Web callback. Management features include realtime views of contact center traffic, consolidated historical reporting, centralized administration, predefined service-level objectives and contact escalation features.
According to Echopass, some of the advantages to the customer of a hosted service over premises-based systems include:
- low capital expenditure, as customer-side requirements are a PC, browser and network;
- fast deployment because the infrastructure already exists; and
- scalability to increase or decrease capacity by adjusting the subscription parameters.
Because it is a telco, XO can facilitate the quick deployment of virtual centers and remote agents using its broadband communications options.
CosmoCom Inc. also is promoting its whitelabel shared platform to telcos, and claims it has more than a dozen service providers on board.Steve Kowarsky, executive vice president of CosmoCom, says that the benefit to the service provider of the shared model is somewhat analogous to that of the end customer in that all the costs are shared for the operation and maintenance of the software. Taking the analogy a step further, in January, CosmoCom launched utility pricing for its service provider customers.
The utility pricing program includes two basic modes — metered and unmetered. Under the metered plan, platform usage is measured by the minute. With metered usage, the number of concurrent agents or IVR ports is irrelevant; only the minutes used matter. Under the unmetered plan, agent positions and IVR sessions are licensed for unlimited monthly use. The peak number of concurrent unmetered agents and IVR ports during a month determines the cost for that month.
Datamonitor CRM analyst Peter Ryan predicts organizations will demand more “pay-per-use” pricing, and utility pricing from CosmoCom will help service providers respond — and demonstrate a compelling ROI for contact center on demand without risking financial well-being.
