This white paper is an attempt to introduce the reader to the Synthesys™ software platform by providing an overview of the functionality of the product and most importantly its positioning within the marketplace.

In essence, the requirement for such a product stems principally from the distinction between software applications dedicated to vertical markets (such as finance, insurance, media, etc.) and packages positioned horizontally across markets providing answers to problems that are common to all verticals (such as CRM, call centres, SFA, workflow, etc.). Synthesys™ is a typical example of the latter.

Insofar as contact centres tend to exist across industries, it follows according to the arguments presented in this paper that the techniques involved in the operation of efficient, modern and successful contact centres form a discipline in their own right. As such, specialised software that supports this discipline regardless of the vertical market it applies to is required.

Synthesys™ is precisely this type of offering. By providing a generalised and truly flexible environment that encompasses the width of this field through a wide variety of modules, tools and utilities it lends itself easily to providing an ideal tool for any contact centre regardless of size, structure or specific vertical market.

The concept of CRM has brought the subject of effective customer contact to the centre stage. Most organisations recognise now that being able to communicate efficiently and successfully with their customers is of paramount importance.

However, the solutions that have been on offer in this arena so far have fallen well short of the functional requirement of the modern contact centre particularly where agility and consistency of service are concerned. Also, the cost of CRM implementations has proven prohibitive to almost all but the largest of organisations.

Customer Interaction Management (CIM) systems and Synthesys™ in particular address this issue by providing an answer to the specific requirements of the contact centre market across all verticals. This is mainly due to the recognition that the techniques used to deliver successful customer contact within the context of a contact centre form a distinct discipline in their own right. Synthesys™ addresses precisely these techniques .

The first part of this paper presents a high-level overview of the architecture and functionality of the product and then proceeds to analyse the general Unique Selling Points of the system across all markets.

In the second part we look more specifically at six different horizontal markets within the contact centre space and provide a brief analysis of the positioning of Synthesys™ within each market, followed by a relevant case study.

Finally, in an appendix we provide a more light-hearted historical commentary of the parallel development of CRM and CIM and a brief analysis of the future of these two close yet significantly distinct disciplines.

The contact centre market has changed dramatically over the last few years. Following the CRM hysteria that took place roughly between 1998 and 2002, there is a growing realisation that large-scale CRM implementations have delivered no noticeable ROI, and in many cases ran out of steam before they could be fully deployed.

The dramatic decline in the fortunes of the large CRM vendors (Siebel being one of the most notable one, but by no means an isolated case) serve as proof that this trend is continuing, with most organisations now questioning the wisdom of pouring vast amounts of money into these never-ending projects.

Furthermore, it also became apparent over the last few years that although contact centres are perhaps the hub of customer contact within most organisations, the major CRM vendors have very little to offer in the way of specialised solution for the contact centre. The most that they appear to be able to provide is a modicum of CTI and some relatively clumsy attempts at contact centre specific functionality.

The reason for this state of affairs is that most CRM packages’ origins lie within the SFA (Sales Force Automation) world and not in the contact centre application world. As a result, any contact centre functionality that they may support is by definition a “bolt-on” which is nothing more than an afterthought providing the minimum possible that would allow them to claim ownership of a contact centre or call centre module.

It is therefore imperative to ask the questions: What is likely to be the next phase in customer contact? Is there anything that can deliver at a reasonable cost where expensive CRM solutions failed to deliver? Can the CRM investment still be leveraged while providing the agility and flexibility that contact centres vitally require?

The answer to all these questions is yes. Customer Interaction Management (CIM) systems are designed to deliver precisely in the areas where the large CRM packages fail to provide an answer. Synthesys™ is best of breed in this market. Moreover, Synthesys™ also provides it’s own mini-CRM solution, which allows it to be deployed where the CRM requirement is relatively light. Where this is not the case, Synthesys™ integrates seamlessly with most CRM systems to complement them and deliver the functionality that they do not support.

There is still significantly widespread confusion regarding the positioning of the contact centre within the enterprise. Many organisations still operate under the misapprehension that since the contact centre is simply an extension of the enterprise the software systems used elsewhere in the organisation with perhaps one or two “tweaks” would be perfectly suitable for use in the contact centre.

This is a mistake. The main reason for setting up a contact centre in the first place is to streamline customer contact, deliver consistent, quicker and more efficient customer interactions, achieve a higher proportion of first call resolution and achieve economies of scale due to dedicating less skilled staff to the task of interfacing with customers.

None of these benefits can be delivered if one expects the contact centre agents to use directly the same systems that the highly skilled back office staff typically use. Let’s look at some examples. An insurance company, for instance, would have complex and highly sophisticated insurance software that would allow users to perform a huge variety of transactions.

On the other hand, the insurance system is not likely to offer less skilled users ways of achieving the most common transaction quickly and efficiently while on the phone. It also probably has no CTI, it provides no real statistics on agent activity, allow the call centre to collect marketing data or cross-sell and up-sell efficiently. It is not likely to have any outbound campaign management functions, live call centre monitoring tools, ad-hoc reporting, call scripting and myriad of other functionality that is contact centre specific.

The point we are making is that contact centre software has become a discipline in its own right. We are not simply talking about telephony-related functions, but a deeper philosophical difference between an enterprise application (such as finance, insurance, travel, etc.) which is data-centric and a contact centre application which is process-centric.

In other words, contact centre applications need to focus on process, in order to provide the benefits that contact centres were supposed to deliver in the first place. In the course of running such streamlined processes, the contact centre applications need to interact with many enterprise systems, but only deliver to the agent information that is relevant and at the relevant moment.

It also needs to allow the contact centre managers to manage these processes and monitor performance, while constantly striving to deliver further and further efficiency gains in a pressurised environment.

In the same way that enterprise workflow systems can streamline the macro business processes within a large organisation, CIM systems are there in order to streamline the micro business processes of handling a customer interaction session be it over the phone, via email, web-chat, or any other channel of communication.

CRM (Customer Relationship Management) is a much-abused term. Its origins can probably be traced to the early 1990s when Sales Force Automation (SFA) and Contact Management (CM) systems vendors were seeking new markets for their products and identified an opportunity of expansion into the lucrative field of what was then known as Data Warehousing, Customer Databases, and Marketing Databases.

The general idea was that the enormous wealth of information that large organisations were accumulating regarding their customers and prospects was being severely under-utilised due to the inability of these large database systems to deliver this information directly to the people that needed it most, i.e. the customer facing staff such as the sales-force, customer service, the call centre and eventually the web.

As a result, somewhere around the mid 90s, software companies started to emerge offering large monolithic packages that would replace the old Data Warehouses and Customer Database systems with what has been known ever since as CRM systems. The late 90s saw a phenomenal growth in this market, fuelled partly by the IT bonanza that was later to be known as the “dot.com bubble” combined effectively with a frenzy of marketing hype of evangelical proportions.

By then most people were talking about CRM not as a technology, but as a philosophy, an ideology and almost a religious cult. In a matter of a few years most large organisations had a “Director of CRM” or at least a “CRM Project Manager”. It seems to me that terms such as “CRM Chaplain” or “CRM Tzar” wouldn’t have been far off the mark.

The big idea was to put the customer at the centre of the enterprise and make everything else depend on it. And as ideas go, it is not a bad one. After all, customers are the most important thing for any company. Being able to provide excellent and personalised customer service regardless of which channel the customers choose to contact the company through would certainly deliver higher customer loyalty and recurring business.

The problem was not the idea itself, but the way in which it was to be made into reality. Most, if not all of the established CRM software vendors in the first big wave of such systems advocated a “big bang” approach to implementation, that is to say a wholesale replacement of most existing systems with a shiny new CRM system provided by themselves and implemented by their appointed system integrators.

The result was in most cases disappointing and in others outright disastrous. CRM implementations took years to complete and the costs spiralled into many millions. As a result, the return on investment was negligible or non-existent. For very large organisations, this was not such a big problem. The costs could be buried deep into the more obscure corners of the balance sheet and the new system could be branded a resounding success.

In recent years, as CRM is beginning to become relevant to the SME market, a new approach to such systems is emerging. Software vendors, such as Noetica, are providing a common sense alternative to the big bang approach. Such companies have their roots firmly in contact centre technology and have been busy throughout the CRM hype years developing a parallel field known today as CIM (Customer Interaction Management).

What is CIM then? It is a way of managing the way in which your customer-facing staff interact with your customers or prospects. As opposed to CRM systems, which are data-driven (i.e. allow customer facing personnel access to customer data without necessarily guiding them as to what to do with it), CIM systems are process-driven. This means that data is delivered to the agent as and when the process that they are involved in during their conversation with the customer requires it.

The CIM approach to CRM is an organic one. It is based on the principle that an organisation does not have to replace all their existing back office systems in order to achieve the benefits of CRM. By simply wrapping a layer of CIM around such existing systems the same effect can be achieved at a fraction of the cost and with dramatically less disruption to the business.

Furthermore, CIM systems have many functional advantages over CRM systems, since they have been designed for structured customer contact and have their roots in the contact centre world. They provide such tools as rapid campaign deployment and excellent contact centre management tools, not to mention the elegant ways in which they integrate seamlessly into the existing infrastructure.

The future of CRM lies with these types of lighter, cheaper and agile solutions that can provide enterprises of all sizes access to the benefits of CRM without the expense and risk related to the old style monolithic systems.