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Working eTalk in the Contact Centre Market

The contact centre market in Asia is ready to adopt platforms that enable recording, analysis and agent performance improvement, in the effort to compete more effectively in global markets. etalk, an Autonomy company, provides an enterprise platform for call recording, quality monitoring and speech analysis. Combined with Autonomy’s IDOL voice analytics and conceptual intelligence, etalk offers technology to understand the communication a business has with its customers, to deliver customer intelligence. Roger Woolley, Senior VP of Marketing and CMO, spoke to SDA Asia about eTalk, the security issues involved with contact centre software, and market dynamics in the APAC region…

Roger Woolley brings more than 12 years of strategic marketing experience to his role as eTalk Corporation's senior vice president of marketing and CMO. In this capacity, Woolley has overall responsibility for directing the company's marketing strategy and product initiatives. In addition to product management, Woolley is responsible for marketing communications, public relations, and channel marketing activities. He is also responsible for establishing strategic business relationships with key technology partners. Prior to etalk, Woolley served as the vice president of worldwide marketing for Interphase Corporation, an international supplier of telecom and server technologies. He was responsible for global marketing strategy including branding, product launches, public relations initiatives and distribution channels. At Olicom, Woolley served as director of channel marketing worldwide, where he successfully designed and implemented new worldwide partner reseller programs, a reseller advisory council and distributor account marketing strategies. Previously, Woolley spent three years at Memorex Telex Corporation, as a product manager and director of marketing operations. As a director, Woolley managed product life cycles and built strategic business partnerships. He also served as marketing manager for Comtrol Corporation in St. Paul, Minnesota, where he developed strategic marketing programs for networking and data communications products. Woolley launched his career with MPSI Systems in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

SDA Asia: What is eTalk? What are the products/services available through eTalk? What are its benefits? How do your products affect the contact centre industry?

Roger Woolley (RW): etalk has launched a product, which is a driver for the up and coming intelligent contact centre. The company has products designed for call centres. eTalk is travelling to Asia to see if there are existing contact centres or developing ones in order to join hands for business purposes. We travelled to Manila for outsourcing options for the US in terms of call centres. China still has ways to go in terms of stepping up with the rest of the world. But they do have a large number of call centres.

eTalk also conducted a study that was done by Katrina Wallace to communicate where the market stands, what specific technologies are available to help improve the contact centre.

SDA: Do eTalk products align IT and business together? Can you talk about security issues if any?

RW: As you know in all parts of the world there are regulations regarding personal information. For example insurance and the credit card industry have strict regulations regarding privacy of the customer. So measures have been put in to protect the individual. From a network security point of view all of that is locked down and traditional enterprise security.

What you can do is you can use encryption techniques to encrypt the voice conversation so they can be encrypted their personal information and can be protected and so and will not be available for people who do not have access.

SDA: How is eTalk products different from products launched by peer organisations?

RW: The background to eTalk products is that we provide the call recording and contact centre performance software. For sometime companies could record the conversation between the customer and the agent and was basically a recording market. Then it evolved to using these calls to evaluate how the agents are doing—coach them, , train them. So companies could use it for agent evaluation and performance provide coaching and learning opportunities and so forth.

The next trend is to apply software that can analyse the speech of conversations. Till now customers had to manually listen to these conversations and then know whether it was a good or bad call. Now the systems listen to the calls, as there are larger volumes of calls and start to categorise the calls depending on what was spoken. For example, "I would like to speak to your Manager", " I would like to cancel my services”, and also “hold it” when the customer is put on hold. Now companies don’t have to manually listen to calls they can let the technology do it for them.

SDA: The contact centre industry in the Philippines has the region’s highest growth rate and is expected to increase by 33% in seat numbers in 2007 reports the 2006 Asian Contact Centre Industry Benchmarking Report conducted by callcentres.net, Asia Pacific’s call and contact centre research and publishing company. Thailand also is projected to grow by 33% in 2007; Singapore and Malaysia are both projected to grow at 32% per annum, China at 22% and India at 16%. Is this one of the reasons to target Singapore with eTalk products? Why did you decide to launch eTalk in Singapore? Do you believe Singapore is a hotbed for growth in this area?

RW: We have offices all over the world. We have offices in Singapore, China, Japan and all across Asia. We have about 50 customers in the Asia region today. Many of them are large US multi-national companies that have contact centres in the region. For example BHL is one of our customers that has a few centres here in the region.Dell is also another of our customers in Asia. We’ve had customers using our products but now we are being more aggressive with our marketing and branding to capitalise on this growing market.

Singapore is still small right now. We do see it growing and being a leader in adopting technology. And I believe other countries look to Singapore to see what they are doing. And if you want to grow you need a presence in Singapore.

SDA: Where do you think the new offering will be best implemented—in the APAC market, American or the European Market? Tell us about its potential, especially in APAC market. How has the Market Dynamics evolved in this arena?

RW: The market is growing differently in different parts of the world. Overall the markets are growing in the US, UK Asia, practically everywhere. Companies two years ago were talking about these types of technologies but in 2007 we are seeing companies actually buying the technology. It’s a very good outlook. It has very good benefits to customers to have large volumes of calls because one of the problems is these customers have large volumes of calls but do not have the staff to listen to the calls and react, creating an action against it. Now the technology will do it for them.

SDA: What are the major hurdles faced in implementing these strategies in the APAC market? How do you overcome it? Tell us what are common strategies used while implementing eTalk products in Singapore?

RW: Singapore has fewer contact centres as compared to other places, such as India. They have very good educated working staff. Traditionally they are higher paid workers as compared to other parts of Asia. A majority of their contact centres are in house and in- country contact centres. They don’t compete on a global scale for outsourcing because their labour costs are not competitive compared to other countries. But that’s okay, because the good news is there are very well funded organisations; they have investments as well as planned investments to use some of the most new available technologies in the market place.

SDA: What are the pragmatic steps you can take right now to use eTalk products? How long does a typical process take from inquiry to completion?

RW: What we normally do is that we take a customer that is interested and we do an evaluation of their software . We then install a software in their system and we start processing these calls through the speech analytical engine and show them the capabilities that it can provide. There are also more benefits from the implementation standpoint. Once the customer likes the software then we agree on the contract and we have an implementation team that comes in to implement the software.

SDA: Can eTalk products drive revenue in enterprises? If yes how will it achieve this?

RW: Till now I have been talking about the support side. What’s happening is we are seeing in outbound and selling opportunities services. If a company launches a new product or service, they can quickly get feedback from that product based on the trends and why people are calling the call centres so we see companies using it for campaign management. We see companies using it for campaign management, so they put out a product or promotion they can go to the contact centre and say, “I want feedback from the customer”. They can set up a per-defined category and say, “give me all the calls related to product x, y, z", and within a day they are getting media feedback. So they don’t have to wait for customer surveys, they get that information immediately and can change their campaign. This way the companies are able to see if their product was confusing, or the message was confusing, depending on the statistics.

SDA: How has eTalk product designs changed in the last few years?

RW: The product has evolved a lot. The eTalk product has been in the contact centre market for more than 23 years. Two years ago we were acquired by Autonomy that provides infrastructure for enterprise. So the features I am describing are actually part of the acquisition so the product has evolved over time. And the latest implementation is taking the application to a whole new level. The application analyses speech and concepts and makes it searchable just like a Google search and you can also train the system saying, “I like this call, find many more calls like this”. From that perspective, you are now mining the intelligence that is available to the user from the contact centre.

SDA: Looking into the future, what technological advances do you visualize in the eTalk domain over the next 10 years? How do you see eTalk evolving, in an increasingly dynamic and customer and bottom-line oriented global economy?

RW: We believe that our company is a technology-based company. We invest USD 60 million in research and development every year for incorporating our capabilities. We have design and research centres all over the world. We see that the voice processing capabilities is the answer to a number of things. Not only in terms of calls. We also have another product called a cyst wherein when a customer is on call with an agent we can just listen along with the conversation and based on the content provide suggestions to the agents for possible answers. So we are using a voice processing technology to enable the contact centre to run efficiently. And taking the manual and mundane processes and let the technology do the work.