SUPRVISING MULTIPLE LOCATIONS

Advanced supervision and coaching capabilities.
Web access to all supervision functions is a keystroke away. Supervisors play a vital role as manager and coach, supporting their agents in providing superior customer service. Oracle Contact Center Anywhere offers the ability to listen in on calls without detection and whisper coach agents if required. Supervisors may join calls and view agents’ screens, providing them the ability to monitor Web chats or e-mail responses, and even take over agent screens.

Loss of Local Autonomy
Sharing technology across an enterprise requires all locations to share common hardware, software licenses, and phone lines. This fact tends to alarm local managers, who are naturally afraid that local concerns will not be effectively addressed on a shared platform. As a result, local managers are often reluctant to support technology centralization initiatives that will place their sites’ mission-critical systems in the hands of a remote IT department that isn’t accountable within their own local reporting structure.

The organization can, of course, attempt to bulldoze over the objections of local managers and implement the shared infrastructure. But local productivity may be compromised by the competing allegiances and obligations of a shared IT staff—and when problems arise, the local managers will be ready to point the finger at the remote IT department.

The good news: Oracle Contact Center Anywhere provides local managers with greater control over their virtual infrastructure than they had with their old premise-based systems. This is because Oracle Contact Center Anywhere offers a unique approach—even among vendors of multitenant solutions—which empowers companies to share contact center infrastructure across locations while maintaining local autonomy. (Confusingly, multitenant is often also used to describe technology-centralization solutions that don’t provide any mechanism for local autonomy. In the case of Oracle Contact Center Anywhere, however, multitenant technology enables and empowers decentralized control over shared technology resources.)

Lessons Learned from Commercial Service Providers
Today, a diverse group of commercial service providers rely on Oracle Contact Center Anywhere to deliver hosted call center services to their business customers. Since companies planning to migrate to shared infrastructures will inevitably have to address the same concerns that commercial service providers have already overcome, an understanding of those challenges and solutions can provide valuable insight.

Multitenancy is a concept that grew out of the experiences of large commercial service providers who sought to extend their brands into hosted or virtual communications infrastructure services. Their mission was (and still is) to eliminate the need for companies to deploy their own systems and IT staff at any corporate location.

To achieve this mission, some service providers initially focused on hosting dedicated systems on behalf of subscriber clients, but this managed-services approach delivered only marginal end-user value in terms of cost reduction. The inherent inefficiency of the managed-services approach also made early service provider offerings too expensive to capture any significant market share. It soon became clear that the missing ingredient was economies of scale—that is, achieving savings by sharing infrastructure across a large base of business subscribers—and passing on these savings to the corporate consumer in the form of lower prices. It also became clear that in the next-generation offering, all subscriber companies would have to be serviced from a common platform.

The first deployments of multitenant technology were rushed to market and relied on retro-fitted solutions based on older premise-based technologies. As a result, they relied on a single set of software executables to govern all “tenants;” meaning that the business logic of all “tenants” (individual business subscribers) had to be intermingled in common software executables. This approach accomplished the objective of enabling tenant-locations to share common licenses, hardware, and phone lines—but it also required local autonomy to be entirely sacrificed.

At that time, multitenancy referred only to data segmentation: that is, only the proprietary data of each tenant was segmented and kept separate. This approach enabled tenant locations to share common licenses, hardware, and phone lines, but it also sacrificed the ability to provide autonomy at the local level over technology-driven business processes and workflow.

The retrofitted approach had many other challenges. For example, since all tenant companies shared common back-end software processes, provisioning new campaigns or modifying old ones for any individual tenant might introduce new bugs for all tenants. Carriers called this the “new bugs for old tenants” problem, and it effectively prevented service providers from scaling their businesses. Multitenancy couldn’t deliver economies of scale if service providers were afraid of adding new tenants, and customer satisfaction suffered because providers feared the stability-related consequences of responding to the requests of their legacy subscriber tenants.

Soon, a new service provider technology paradigm emerged—the Oracle Contact Center Anywhere approach— to address the prior limitations and empower the delivery of hosted contact center services at scale. This new paradigm gave each tenant the ability to run separate software processes while sharing common hardware, licenses, and phone lines, so tenants could enjoy autonomous control over their own technology-driven business processes without jeopardizing the stability of the shared infrastructure or sacrificing economies of scale. Segmented software processes also enabled service providers to design custom integrations of third-party products for individual tenants without causing code bloat within the shared infrastructure.

The new paradigm also introduced the concept of integration by design, which allowed the diverse contact center technologies that once had to be cobbled together by integrators to be easily provisioned and modified on demand from browser menus. Of course, Web services were required to empower both nonstandard deployments and local integrations with third-party client software.