Mosaix, the customer relationship management system (CRM) developer, is doing its best to pretend that all is business as usual as it waits the finalization of its $145m acquisition by Lucent Technologies Inc, and yesterday slipped another call-center monitoring package into its growing CRM suite.
Chronicle, which it describes as an agent effectiveness application should help call center managers keep better tabs on what there staff are up to, it says. It automates the capture and recording of agent/customer dialogues for both in-bound and out-bound transactions, and allows the agent’s manager to annotate recordings for return and play-back to the agent. In line with Mosaix’s current party-line that better quality agent/customer interaction produces more loyal, and more profitable customers, Chronicle is supposed to let managers do a better job of evaluating and grading agents skills.
This capability will become particularly important in the next generation of CRM systems set for delivery later this year, said Pat Whelan, Mosaix’s EMEA VP and UK managing director. These will include an enhancement to the Process Architecture module currently supplied to customers of the company’s ViewStar CRM suite. The enhanced module called Process Studio marks a departure from focusing on the refinement of the mechanical and systems driven processes involved in CRM planning, to a new concentration on managing the human resources element, said Whelan. Using agent skills grading data generated by products such as Chronicle, Process Studio will allow CRM system manager to point different customers to different agents, matching the likely requirements of the customer, with the agents’ particular areas of knowledge and expertise.
Whelan argues that the new approach will help move more of the 80% of CRM system-facing customers that the Harvard Business School recently calculated were unprofitable, into the top echelon of apostles. ‘Apostles’ are companies so happy with the service that they spend more and even recruit new customers by word of mouth.
The proof of Whelan’s claims may have to wait until after his $120m revenue, Redmond, Washington company has been slotted into Lucent’s growing portfolio of service application products, which already includes the telco billing systems of Kenan Systems Corp, which it acquired in January for $1.4bn. Lucent’s Mosaix deal, assuming it receives shareholder and Stock Exchange Commission approvals, should be concluded by June.
