Customers today have a broad spectrum of communication channels to choose from when looking for financial-based services. However, most consumers would stop using a company's goods or services if they had a bad experience. To remain competitive, financial institutions are challenged to raise service levels by being more responsive, accessible, intuitive and adaptive to customer needs with the staff and resources they have available to them. Firms generally cannot afford to train or license agents to be experts in everything. They therefore must improve customer satisfaction with first contact resolution, by enabling real-time access to expert resources anywhere, anytime, while maintaining consistent service levels during peak call volumes.

Contact centers integrated with self-serve voice portals are important resources in serving financial customers, looking for location, account or product information and services. SIP-enabled real-time converged communications can positively impact both the top and bottom-lines in interacting with customers over various electronic media. But what is SIP? SIP, the Session Initiation Protocol, forms the basis of the industry standard IP-centric converged communications architecture. SIP is a signaling mechanism to establish and control interactive sessions between two or more entities over an IP network, from a simple two-way telephone call or an instant message exchange, to a collaborative multimedia conferencing session. SIP does not dictate the details within a session but instead negotiates interaction based on the capabilities of participants. SIP can transform the customer experience, by allowing contact center agents to reach out to expertise across the financial institution to experts, regardless of location, device, type of network access, media content, and more quickly resolve the customer's inquiry. This is a major enabler of increased customer satisfaction, loyalty and retention, since most consumers form an opinion about a company's image through their interaction with its contact center.

Contact Centers- Where We've Been

Historically, contact centers have gone through three substantial phases of evolution. In the beginning, contact centers were simply based on automatic call distribution. The focus of the second phase saw the introduction of skill-based routing, out-bound telemarketing, web center portal technologies that expanded skill-based routing to fax and email, and comprehensive reporting and management capabilities. The third phase is the virtual contact center, with agents distributed across the enterprise and beyond (i.e., off site-sourced), built on an IP telephony infrastructure. This not only delivers telephony agent and networking features, but for the first time allows financial institutions to meet their business continuity and disaster recovery requirements for this important service delivery channel. Virtualization provides increased business agility through just-in-time staffing in serving unpredictable demands, can lower real estate costs by decreasing demands on centralized facilities, and in the case of home agents can improve employee satisfaction and staffing retention.

Where We Are Going -The New SIP-Enabled Contact Center

We are now at the cusp of two additional phases of contact center evolution, characterized by SIP-enabled contact centers and SIP-enabled consumers.

Phase four incorporates SIP-enabled contact centers, and represents a service transformational opportunity for financial institutions, whether in the retail or institutional side, covering brokerage, insurance, or banking environments. It provides improved collaboration among company representatives within the virtual contact center, and thus enhances the company's ability to meet one of its business imperatives: to up-sell and cross-sell customers, to increase penetration of services and products and provide more service based stickiness across its customer base. This effectively moves the firm ever closer to the trusted advisor role and effective owner of relationships. Collaborative capabilities are built on a converged desktop that provides a seamless experience across business-grade telephony and multimedia capabilities, which include secure instant messaging, video conferencing, page push and application sharing. These same capabilities can be used by management to monitor, coach and better train contact center agents.

It doesn't stop here! SIP-enabled contact centers create the opportunity to tap experts across an organization, expanding the resource pool to better service customers responsively and quickly. This 'expert anywhere' customer service strategy is accomplished by defining expert groups outside of the formal contact center, which are brought in by agents on an as-needed basis. For example, an agent, who identifies a customer need for more detailed product or service information, can use presence to identify available resources within an expert group, and immediately set up a collaborative session to serve the customer better. The ensuing collaboration could be off-line or be extended to include the customer. The expert anywhere approach to enhanced customer engagement can be extended to any customer-facing representative, whether a wealth manager, lender or broker.

The fifth phase is the SIP-enabled consumer. This could be as simple as walking up to a SIP-enabled kiosk or banking machine and initiating a secure collaborative multimedia session with a contact center agent. In the longer term, the increased penetration of SIP-based communication services offered by service providers, and of SIP-enabled PCs and mobile devices, broadens this opportunity to the masses. While the technical challenges in identity federations and securing all communications are being addressed across the industry, the business challenges and opportunities associated with this phase are more significant as they require a rethink of elements of the firm's go-to-market strategy.

It's All About Customer Engagement

Contact center agents only have a brief opportunity to exceed service expectations and delight their customers. The expert anywhere approach to customer service, powered by a SIP-based integrated suite of multimedia applications, can link expertise resident across the financial institution, into the contact center enabling single call resolution and delivering a new level of customer service. This is truly business transformation and allows the financial institution to provide faster, more efficient service for stronger customer engagement. Financial institutions which are first to address the considerable security and business challenges associated with the consumer-related scenario described here will achieve a considerable customer service advantage, through anticipatory, real-time, media adaptive customer engagement.

Tony Rybczynski (email: tonyryb@nortel.com) is Director of Strategic Enterprise Technologies at Nortel. (www.nortel.com).