Cisco Cisco Unified Contact Center Enterprise 10.5(1) White Paper

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Wave 2: The Customer Relationship

This wave has its roots in the 1990s as contact centers evolved from being primarily a place to also encompassing

a system comprising web, IVR, and customer relationship management (CRM) elements. Customer care

expanded beyond workflows being executed by people in a building to include the processes, applications, and

data associated with the larger system. This expansion provided the ability to dynamically adjust the level of

self- and assisted-service based on the value of the customer - and the interaction - to the business. Some have

termed this care

“segmented” customer care. For example, a lower-priority caller might be diverted to an IVR while

a gold card customer would go into a minimal-wait queue to speak to a specialist agent. Wave 2 met the need to

match the right customer to the right channel for care.

Of particular value are intelligent queuing and self-service at the edge of the network that realize wave 1

efficiencies while providing the dynamic, contextual services of wave 2. From self-service the call may escalate to

assisted service, where the agent has full knowledge of what has already transpired during the call.

Wave 2 is about knowing the customers and what they need so that their interactions with the contact center can

be optimized.

Optimized experiences require knowledge of customers’ history, status, and context - including any

information gathered during the actual call (for example, from an IVR or more recently from a self-service web

session). Reporting systems must account for this information and all system elements to provide decision makers

with the metrics needed to evaluate and improve the care model.

In wave 2, service inquiry, billing, and sales are conducted with the help of automated systems. IVR systems

provide voice self-service, whereas web systems provide online care. Computer telephony integration (CTI) and

intelligent routing provide valuable customer segmentation and context. New metrics included customer retention

and acquisition, service personalization, up-sell and cross-sell, and wallet share.

Technology providers such as Cisco that started in wave 2 tend to have strong multichannel portfolios

(or partnerships), CTI integration technologies, and next-generation IVR platforms.

As described earlier, the three waves are ongoing and cumulative, so even as wave 2 matured through the 1990s

and into this century, wave 1 was still accelerating innovation in the contact center. Wave 2 advancements

continue today with the continuing evolution of web, voice, and video portals and speech analytics applications that

can provide real-time guidance to agents and supervisors during the call.

Wave 3: The Complete Experience

The third wave began in the mid to late 2000s and was unique in that many aspects of it were led by customers,

not enterprises. Modern consumers are moving beyond the traditional channels of business interaction as they

embrace new media and access methods such as video, mobile, and the social web. Consumers now expect to

interact with people across the full spectrum of a business, whether it is with an employee at a retail branch, a

marketing manager, a product expert, or an agent at a contact center. And they demand a consistent, contextual

experience while doing so: For example, is an agent in an outsourced contact center aware of a promotion at a

local retail branch office?