Reducing Agent Desktop Complexity, As If by Magic –
The OpenSpan Platform addresses a major challenge almost
all enterprises have when interacting with their customers – empowering their
employees with the best product and customer information to quickly and
effectively answer their requests. I interviewed OpenSpan CEO Francis
Carden about OpenSpan’s unique approach to application integration, which is
dramatically speeding and simplifying the work of linking the often large and
diverse set of applications and data sources contact center agents need to help
customers. To download the .MP3 interview click here.
Francis Carden is President and CEO of OpenSpan, Inc., the enabler of the new
enterprise desktop. Global 2000 enterprises leverage the OpenSpan
Platform to integrate applications, automate business processes, extend
functionality and build new composite applications in order to realize
immediate value on their IT investments. Francis joined OpenSpan in March, 2005
after more than 20 years running multinational technology companies with a
special emphasis on integration technologies. Previous to OpenSpan, Francis
founded Pixel Innovations Ltd, a software integration services organization
that partnered with leading IT organizations such as IBM, Sun and Microsoft.
Francis also remains an active investor of U.S.-based technology companies and
resides in
Mashups Improve
Customer Experience –
SynerG is a among a
emerging set of solution providers applying innovative techniques to the
enterprise challenges of providing prospects and customers with accurate,
consistent, and timely answers to their questions and requests. I spoke
with CEO
SynerG Software provides a
unified business application that simplifies and streamlines how business users
interact with relevant information - combining disconnected solutions and
complex processes into a single application without modifying or replacing
existing solutions. SynerG’s unified business application leverages
mashup concepts to enable business users to customize and personalize the
application and data on the fly with minimal impact on IT - giving them the
control to rapidly respond to new business needs. SynerG’s unified
business application can help companies provide outstanding customer
experiences, enforce and monitor compliance with policies and procedures and
drive incremental revenue. SynerG was founded in 2005 and is a privately
held company. For more information, visit www.synerg.com.
Introduction
I am
We are here to discuss an aspect of customer contact most enterprises struggle
with -- how to arm their employees with the best customer and product
information to work most efficiently and effectively with customers. More
specifically the challenges which arise from the often large number of business
applications on contact center agents' desktops. Agents must learn to use
the applications, toggle between them to find or enter information, and in
effect become the middleware between the applications to answer customers’
questions and fulfill their requests. Of course, these activities
lengthen calls and after call wrap-up times. So there is a cost aspect to
the problem.
There is also a customer experience aspect to the challenge. First, there
is the complexity of dealing with many disparate applications, many of which
were designed for departmental needs - not for dealing with customers.
Next, is the varying motivation and skill levels of agents. And, throw in
the variety of what customers are calling about. All this leads to long
call times with customers too often getting incorrect or inconsistent answers
to their questions. I could go on, but let me introduce my guest.
Outlaw Research:
Welcome Michael. Would you describe how SynerG’s Unified Business
Application address these challenges?
Certainly, and
first of all, I appreciate you inviting me here today. The problem Joe
describes is fairly recognized in the industry. And to date, as an
industry we have done a pretty good job of storing a lot of information about
our customers. But, we haven’t figured out how to retrieve that
information in a very coherent fashion inside of contact centers.
At SynerG, we
provide unified business applications. The focus is on how we streamline
and rationalize the information that contact center agents are dealing with at
any one time. Our applications leverage all of the company’s existing
applications where customer and product data are stored to provide a unified
experience for the agent. The SynerG application is a fully transactional
system. It allows agents to see a true 360 degree view of the
customer and also update information about that customer. This is without
having to call IT or IT fearing the agents will break anything in the
back-office systems. We see this as unique. Real business values
are being delivered from the operational efficiencies of streamlining the
agents processes and from the revenue uplifts from cross-sell and
up-sell. With the right information at the agents’ fingertips, they are
much better prepared for these sales opportunities.
Outlaw Research:
Thank You, Michael. Now can we go into some more depth about how your
platform and tools work?
We leverage many of the service oriented architecture and business mashup
principals in our platform. We have created a complete business
application which does more than just display customer information. Some
of the things which are very unique about our applications are that we pull
information in on-the-fly from back-office applications and we do a just-in
-time federation of data and transactions.
A key value of our use of business mashups is the concept that business users
can find themselves in a situation with a customer in which they can’t
anticipate the customer’s need. We certainly have that situational aspect
to our applications which enables the rapid construction of answers for that
customer. We mix that with the core processes of our systems, which are,
for example, how you make a change to an address or how you place an
order. This is what differentiates us from the mashup applications you
usually see. A second differentiator is that our applications have that
IT level of security and manageability not found in typical mashups today.
In terms of customer examples, one of our customers is a well-known
casino. We have helped them to personalize their services across their
various properties. Their frequent guests spend a lot of money not only
gambling, but also going to shows and restaurants. This casino has three
different reservation systems, which makes it very difficult to recognize their
VIP customers across the business. We helped them rationalize their
customer data across the locations and to provide a much more consistent and
coordinated level of service, which makes a big difference in terms of the
loyalty of these most valuable customers.
Outlaw Research:
With your early adopter customers, where have they focused in terms of the
business cases for implementing your applications? Has it been mostly on
efficiency and cost reductions or on providing excellent customer experiences
and revenue enhancement?
We have found a mix in our customers’ business cases. I think most
contact centers today really want to provide higher levels of service and the
operational efficiencies they can gain from our applications is just an added
benefit. We have also found that more streamlined processes and
applications help reduce the time needed to fulfill customer requests and
respond to inquiries, which frees up additional time for agents to focus on
up-sell and cross-sell opportunities. So they haven’t had to take the
typical longer call time hit to do selling. For example, one of our
customers, a large cruise line, found their side-trips were often not fully-booked,
in part because they didn’t have the time on sales calls to go over the various
trips without making the order process too long. The time we saved them
in streamlining their reservation calls gave them back time to do that
cross-selling. The net result was a revenue uplift and a higher level of
customer satisfaction from the more complete travel experience.
Outlaw Research:
What would you say are the key reasons a company should consider SynerG vs. for
example, having their own IT staff or their favorite systems integrator build
the agent’s applications?
I would start with one thing which I think is very unique for SynerG --- we
didn’t start out as a technology company looking for a problem to solve.
We really started with a thorough understanding of what it is like to sit in
one of these agent positions and the challenges they face. We also
recognize that every organization’s issues are different. That’s how we
started as a company. The result is we find our customers appreciate that
we first learn about their business challenges before discussing our
solutions. We think this is very unique.
Our implementations are on average much faster and more cost-effective than for
companies to build their own applications. Our implementations are on
average about 3 months and even with as few as 20 agents, our applications
deliver a very fast ROI. Our applications are also designed to be
flexible and extensible into other areas in the organization.
Additionally, our applications are much easier to maintain than those typically
built in-house.
Outlaw Research:
Are there any industries or kinds of businesses you are focused on at this
point? Or have you found any pattern to your early adopter companies?
Today, contact centers are our focus and are very near and dear to our
hearts. However, we have found ourselves getting pulled into financial
services, travel and hospitality, sales, and HR. Our applications have
broad applicability in terms of business functions. But, as an
organization we are trying to stay focused on just a few industries where
customers see the highest value.
Outlaw Research:
Michael, Thank you for the update on SynerG. You can contact SynerG at www.synerg.com and Outlaw
Research at
info@outlawresearch.com. We
appreciate your feedback.
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