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May ❘ June 2004 IT Pro 331520-9202/04/$20.00 © 2004 IEEE P u b l i s h e d b y t h e I E E E C o m p u t e r S o c i e t y

MultichannelCustomer ContactManagement

Paul Herceg and David Madison

C ontact center infrastructures use variouscommunications and application tech-nologies, including customer contact management (CCM) and customer re-

lationship management (CRM) technologies. In acontact center enterprise, the CCM domain prior-itizes and routes customer contacts. Continueddevelopment of consumer communicationsdevices,carrier services,and supporting enterprisesystems has put pressure on customer serviceorganizations and product vendors to convergeCCM on all types of contact media. Leading con-tact center infrastructure vendors have acquiredcompanies and integrated stand-alone communi-cations capabilities to support development of fullproduct suites that manage all synchronous andasynchronous customer communications.

Further, in 2001,consulting groups predicted thecreation of a universal queue for unified handling

of customer contacts. Forexample, the Gartner Grouppredicted that by 2003, salesof universal queue serverswith comparable functionswould supplant conventionalautomatic call distributors(ACD) and computer teleph-ony integration (CTI) servers(B.Elliot,Universal Queuing:Successor to the ACD andCTI Markets,Gartner Group,30 January 2001).Contrary to

such projections, in 2002 AMR Research statedthat 72 percent of companies didn’t use a universalqueue (A. Bednarz, “Revamped Call CentersReduce Operating Costs,” Network World, 9 Sept. 2002, http://www.nwfusion.com/news/2002/0909specialfocus.html) and that 90 percent of allcontact center communication would be viaphone and e-mail for at least the next two years(T. Kaneshige, “Greasing the Contact CenterMachine,” ECT News Network, 18 Nov. 2002). AVanguard Communications study revealed thatmany organizations claiming to operate multi-media contact centers weren’t using a universalqueue (L. Bocklund, “The Multimedia ContactCenter: Everybody’s Doing It… Or Are They?”ICCM Weekly, editorial, 21 Nov. 2002; http://www.vanguard.net/DocLib_Docs/Multimedia_Contact_Center_11-21-02.pdf). These studiesraise the following questions:

• Was the market overly ambitious in forecast-ing the use of the universal queue-enabled con-tact centers?

• Will organizations function effectively withoutintegrating multiple contact media?

• How viable is a contact manager (CM) fororganizations needing convergence?

Several challenges face multimedia, or multi-channel,customer contact management design anddeployment efforts, including industry agreementon the role of the CM, the key convergence tech-

An effective contact centerdesign can reduce the overall service time and the number of end pointswith which a customer communicates.

GlossaryContact Manager

StructureMITRE’s Contact

Center of the FutureLaboratory

Inside

34 IT Pro May ❘ June 2004

C O N T A C T C E N T E R S

nology.(See the “Glossary”sidebar for definitions of thisand other terms.) By clarifying CM concepts and termi-nology, we hope to create a common basis for collab-oration among researchers, contact center productmanufacturers, and customer service organizations indeveloping multichannel customer contact managementdesigns.

WHAT IS A CONTACT MANAGER?Historically, call center management has focused on

phone calls to and from the public switched telephonenetwork (PSTN).The ACD was the workhorse for rout-ing and queuing calls and for working with interactivevoice response (IVR), CTI servers, and predictive dialercomponents. To interconnect siloed, geographically dis-tributed contact centers in large virtual contact centers,infrastructure designers used centralized call routers tointerface with carrier networks and proactively negotiateeach call’s destination. By monitoring ACDs and issuinginstructions to them, a call router initially leveraged anACD’s local routing and queuing functions. Other teleph-ony systems, such as IVRs, CTI servers, and predictivedialing components,were integrated in the same manner.

In today’s multimedia world,customer contact can takeplace by phone,e-mail, fax,voicemail, text-chat,and more.These various types of communication need a central-ized component—a contact manager—to govern inboundand outbound contacts in the same way that call routersgovern phone calls. The disparity of communicationschannels makes the CM task complex.

Several factors can increase the time and cost of serv-icing a contact, such as misrouting and rerouting con-tacts, the number of endpoint resources used insuccession or used simultaneously, and any repeatedquestions or data entry resulting when a contact passesfrom end point to end point. Moreover, the customerexperience (affected by performance, transaction work-flow, transaction results, and so on) can vary dramati-cally from one channel to another.

WHY USE A CM?A CM can provide consistent management, scalabil-

ity, and extensibility to a large contact center operationspanning geographic locations or servicing multiplechannels. Figure 1 shows how a contact managerimproves multichannel communication:Figure 1a showsa communications center without a CM, and Figure 1bshows a center with a CM.

Multichannel contact management without a contactmanager

• develops separate rules for each channel,• involves complicated correlation of multiple logs,• forces some customers to go through multiple con-

tacts to accomplish a task,

Terms used in this article have various meanings in theindustry; we define our use of them here.

➤ Channel:A medium of communication between twoor more parties (human or machine) via a combina-tion of networks, protocols, and devices or applica-tions, such as phone, e-mail, or Web browsing (not tobe confused with a logical or physical telecommuni-cations channel).

➤ Consolidated queue: A virtual collection of midpointresource queues that the CM monitors and manages.The term also refers to a CSR-perceived virtual queuethat delivers contacts on various communication media.

➤ Contact: A delimited period of synchronous com-munication with a customer (usually half-duplex),such as a phone call, or simplex communication to orfrom a customer, such as an e-mail.

➤ Contact manager (CM): A component or system ofcomponents in a contact center that manages theinbound and outbound contacts on all channels.

➤ Customer: A consumer, supplier, partner, oremployee that communicates with a contact center.

➤ Customer contact management (CCM): An imple-mentation of a business strategy to administer cus-tomer communication on all channels.The term alsorefers to the information technology systems used toimplement customer communication according to aCCM strategy.

➤ Customer relationship management (CRM): Animplementation of a business strategy to capture,track, and leverage customer communicationsrecords and account information to maximize sales oroptimize service; or, the IT systems used to capture,track, and leverage customer information recordsaccording to a CRM strategy.

➤ Customer service representative (CSR): A humanwho provides service to customers.

➤ Endpoint resource: A CSR or machine (such as aserver) that communicates with a customer on agiven channel.

➤ Midpoint resource: One or more components orservers in a contact center that facilitate communi-cation between customers and endpoint resources.

➤ Multimedia contact center: A contact center thatenables communication on multiple channels. Alsocalled a multichannel contact center.

➤ Routing: The act of directing a contact to a destina-tion, whether to a queuing mechanism or to an end-point resource.

Glossary

May ❘ June 2004 IT Pro 35

• saturates some channels while others might be idle,• relinquishes channel selection to the customer,• might result in idle single-channel CSR groups, and• locks contacts to a single channel.

In contrast, multichannel contact management with acontact manager enables rule development once for allchannels, accurately reports activity on all channels, givesexpedited service to customers, facilitates equal load shar-ing across channels, proactively directs contacts to the bestdestinations, keeps the CSR workforce busy at nonpeaktimes, and uses multiple channels as needed.

A CM leverages information sources, enables real-timevisualization, and provides end-to-end reporting. It canaccess information sources to learn about customers, busi-ness rules, and the load on midpoint and endpoint re-sources.Examples of midpoint resources are e-mail servers,Web servers, and ACDs. Endpoint resources include IVR,Web application servers,and Wireless Application Protocol(WAP) servers. With such information, the CM can opti-mally prioritize and route contacts (collectively, these func-tions are sometimes called intelligent routing), significantlyreducing the overall service time and number of end pointswith which a customer communicates.

Prioritization includes channel consideration, customerclass, and service type requested. Routing includes con-sideration of customer service representative (CSR) skills,self-service applications and transactions, resource avail-ability, customer profiles, and accumulated understandingof a contact as it navigates the enterprise service space.

CMs use information sources to enable real-time visu-alization of contact center activity,allowing customer serv-ice organizations to respond to spikes or system failuresby adjusting business rules or resource configurations.CMsenable end-to-end reporting of contact centers’ nativebusiness intelligence. Centrally tracking contacts createsan end-to-end picture of all customer activity regardlessof channel, which is more accurate and efficient than theconventional approach of attempting to artificially corre-late a telecommunications circuit report with multiplechannel logs. It also overcomes the multiple logging thatoccurs when a contact navigates from end point to endpoint or when multiple channels are used simultaneouslyto satisfy a single contact.

By elevating monitoring and management control abovemidpoint and endpoint resources, CMs also let the contactcenter scale to new contact types. A centralized CM sys-tem reuses routing business logic rather than re-creating iton new midpoint and endpoint resources, thus minimizingdevelopment and maintenance efforts and associated costs.

In addition, an open CM platform lets infrastructuredesigners add innovative solutions that enhance central-ized routing for all contact types, such as customer profilelookups and integration with natural language contact-routing systems.

A CM can extend contact center resources beyond con-ventional tasks. For example, a single CSR could succes-sively receive contacts on various channels. Although theindustry calls this extension of capabilities the universalqueue (Elliot), because the CSR appears to be receivingdifferent types of contacts via the same queuing mecha-nism, we call it a consolidated queue (see the “Glossary”sidebar). Furthermore, a CM could unify other corporateworkflow processes, such as leveraging contact center staffat nonpeak periods to assist with internal business pro-cessing.

IMPLEMENTING A CMImplementing a CM involves converging and integrating

resources and services.The “Contact Manager Structure”sidebar describes the major CM components enabling thisintegration.

An open CM architecture would include an open appli-cation programming interface (API) so infrastructuredesigners could add innovative capabilities or extensions,

Customers

ChannelsMidpointresources

Endpointresources

• Prioritization• Routing

Contactmanager

Customers

ChannelsMidpointresources

Endpointresources

ControlData

(a)

(b)

Figure 1. Multichannel contact center infrastructure without (a)

and with (b) a contact manager (CM).



An ideal contact manager (CM) incorporates allenterprise midpoint resources, endpoint resources, andcustomer relationship management (CRM) back-endservices. A CM’s major components—decision engine,middleware, and database—make it an all-governing,enterprise-wide controller. Figure A shows the CMstructure.

The decision engine uses business rules to perform rout-ing calculations based on contact and enterprise intelli-gence information. Information about a contact can beinternal (the subject line in an e-mail, for example) orfrom an external source (such as automatic number iden-tification information obtained through a telecommuni-cations carrier). Endpoint resources can obtain externalinformation via CRM information retrieval (includingoffline information extraction) or online language pro-cessing of the contact’s audio or text.A CM can thereforeintegrate systems from various disciplines.

Enterprise intelligence information is obtained bymiddleware systems and includes the number of cus-tomer service representatives available in a given skillgroup, a list of CSRs ready to receive contacts, and theutilization on self-serve systems. Prescripted businessrules then denote the procedures used to compute the

best routing decision based on available information.Middleware provides a real-time interface with mid-

point and endpoint resources. Designers implementmiddleware using software agents that periodically pollmidpoint and endpoint resources locally (to avoid flood-ing the wide area network) and propagate intelligenceup to the CM. The same middleware enables control ofthe resources. Hence, when a contact arrives at a mid-point resource, the middleware propagates a message tothe CM, at which point start-to-finish management ofthe contact begins.

The database stores information about active contactsand enterprise intelligence information. The CM accu-rately tracks and logs contact activity in a historical data-base for later analysis. With its bird’s-eye view, the CMcan log a single contact record even when several chan-nels are used simultaneously or in succession (for exam-ple, a phone call and Web collaboration or a switch fromtext-chat to phone call). The CM uses a combination ofstatic information (such as CSR skills) and dynamicinformation (the availability of CSRs and the availableports on an endpoint resource, for example) stored inthe database to construct up-to-date snapshots of theentire contact center operation.

Contact Manager Structure

CM

Back-endsystems

Decision engine

Database

• CRM• Enterprise resource planning…

Middleware (software agents, APIs, adapters)

Endpoint resources• Web application server• Web servers• IVR• Instant messaging chatter bot• WAP servers• e-mail response management system (ERMS)• CSR…

Core midpoint resources• ACDs• e-mail servers• Web servers• VoIP PBX• Web collaboration server• IM server• Predictive dialer…

CSR midpoint resources• CM client• Web collaboration client• CTI client• Softphone• Phone• e-mail client…

Synchronous contact• Phone• Web collaboration • Text-chat…

Asynchronous contact• e-mail• Fax• Voice mail…

Figure A. Contact manager structure.


such as CSR productivity tools. Depending on the imple-mentation, CSR desktop applications are either native toa midpoint or endpoint resource,or packaged with the CM.

CSRs need information about the contacts pushed totheir station, regardless of the contact channel. For exam-ple,CTI server middleware typically displays external infor-mation about a phone contact. CSRs also need to executeactions to service given contacts.During a Web collaboration ses-sion, for example, a CSR musttransfer a contact,push a Web page,drop a caller, or complete a cus-tomer’s log. An effective multime-dia contact center CSR desktopapplication would consolidate screen-pop information andcontrol functions for all channels in one client. Regardlessof the CSR desktop application solution,a CM could imple-ment a consolidated queue by controlling the routing onmidpoint and endpoint resources.

Because CMs are tightly integrated with the enterprise,aCM implementation for a large,critical contact center wouldrequire significant redundancy.In case of failure,hot stand-by spares would take over for primary servers, or clusteredservers would assume peer workloads. Communicationslinks and systems should also be redundant.

CHALLENGESContact centers have made little progress toward CM

implementations that truly replace comparable ACD andCTI server functions (Bocklund), leading some to questionthese implementations’ viability for multimedia contactcenters. Others have claimed that the need for CM consol-idated queues is based on the deliberation of “vendors,con-sultants, writers, and speakers in the industry,” rather thana study of operations (Bocklund). Providing additionalchannels is an appealing concept, and thereby fuels thedevelopment of unifying initiatives and encourages com-petitive contact centers to acquire converged, multichan-nel solutions. However, several challenges remain beforecontact centers can realize CM technology’s full potential.

Gain consensus The industry must reach agreement on the CM’s role in

multimedia contact centers and develop related standards.The open literature confuses the term “universal queue,”describing it as both a new type of channel, and an imple-mentation of a consolidated queue using a CM and a set ofsingle channel systems.(R.Breslauer,“Beware the Vacuum:E-mail Management in the Age of Multichannel CustomerService,” Customer Interaction Solutions, Feb. 2003;http://www.tmcnet.com/cis/0203/0203ecrm.htm).Consistentterminology to describe a CM’s functions is essential toevaluating whether a given vendor implementation satisfiesspecific requirements.

The industry must develop open standards for CM com-

ponents. Because no single company offers all CM com-ponents, vendors use a network of partnerships and origi-nal equipment manufacturer (OEM) relationships to offercomplete contact center product suites.This amalgamationresults in complex integration of a CM with a disparity ofexisting enterprise ACDs and servers. In addition, a givenCM’s middleware offering should include adapters for a

large set of midpoint and endpointresources, CRM applications anddatabases, and CSR desktop appli-cations.A contact center can’t buildon its investment in midpoint andendpoint resources without suchadapters, but finding a vendor with

all the components these systems need is difficult. Recentefforts to add software developer kits to CM systems willsimplify adapter and extension development; however,maximizing CMs’ potential capability will require cross-vendor interoperability.

Open standards should let the middleware layer func-tion as a backplane through which a CM system,CRM sys-tem, and midpoint and endpoint resources communicate.In addition, open standards should enable CM-to-CMcommunication and ensure that external informationabout a contact passes from system to system during thecontact’s life.

Prepare the target infrastructure for CM technology

Contact centers contemplating implementation of a CMmust first model the customer base to identify ways toimprove the contact center infrastructure.

To ensure consistent customer service, a contact centershould integrate back-end components before imple-menting a CM.The most basic multimedia contact centersuse segregated CSR groups to handle e-mail and phonecalls. However, a customer could contact on a first chan-nel (e-mail, for example), and then within an hour (orsimultaneously) contact on a second channel (such as aphone).To ensure consistent responses, the CSRs in bothgroups must work from common knowledge bases,and thesystems they use must have equal access to data, with thesame latency.

Process and culture can significantly affect channel unifi-cation.Not all customer service organizations are structuredor have a business process to support multiple channelsthrough a CM implementation. Before establishing a con-tact center,an organization should ensure that all midpointand endpoint resources and back-end customer service sys-tems (such as a CRM database) operate under the purviewof a customer service executive or manager.An organizationthat doesn’t use this management structure will need someorganizational or process reengineering.

CM is further complicated when midpoint and endpointresources cross charter or organizational boundaries, such

The industry must develop open standards

for CM components.



as e-mail servers used for both customer service and cor-porate communications. This boundary crossing puts theintegration effort under the purview of the centralizedenterprise IT department, although the customer serviceorganization drives the business requirements.

An organization must also be prepared to apply engi-neering discipline to CM deployment.From a systems engi-neering perspective, anorganization should intro-duce a CM in phases.Assuming completion of theprerequisite back-end inte-gration and organizationalreengineering, CM deploy-ment should begin with apilot implementation. Thepilot would focus on a subset of contacts on a given chan-nel (for example,a subset of phone calls) and would expandlater to all contacts—inbound and outbound—within thechannel. A follow-on phase would add a second channel,and so on.Each phase would ensue according to the successand lessons learned in prior phases.The organization shoulddevelop a consolidated queuing strategy at the onset andimplement it as a last step.

Deal with open CM design issuesCM implementations can only be effective if organiza-

tions address open CM system design issues.Integrating a CM into a multimedia contact center

requires significant investment in the deployment andmaintenance of CM components and the ongoing devel-opment and maintenance of business rules. In some cases,analysis might show that managing channels in a segre-gated manner would be less expensive while providingadequate customer experience, which would argue againstimplementing a CM.

MITRE’S Contact Center of the Future (CCOF) Labora-tory experience has revealed potential version interoper-ability problems—for example, adding a server mightnecessitate upgrading the CM, which might in turn requireupgrading midpoint and endpoint resources. Theseresource upgrades might or might not be available. CMmiddleware must be designed to minimize such interop-erability problems so contact centers can successfullyincorporate new capabilities.

Although a contact center suite vendor might providebasic out-of-the-box adapters (between the CM and a spe-cific set of midpoint and endpoint resources, a CRM sys-tem, and CSR desktop applications), configuring them canrequire considerable effort. When a vendor doesn’t havea needed adapter, enterprises must custom-develop it—and periodically maintain the custom adapter code toensure interoperability with commercial product upgrades.Although not reflected in all implementations, businessrules and resource descriptions (for example, skill infor-

mation) should reside in one place,not at both the CM andmediating resources. The development of CM standardswill likely improve version compatibility and minimizeredundant data.

Innovatively integrating the CM with various technolo-gies enhances CCM. However, such innovation depends on collaboration across vendor specialties. Furthermore,

commercial implementationsappear nearsighted, focusingon the push of information toand from CSRs. CM designsmust graduate beyond basicrouting functions native toconventional call routers. Asnew automation technologiesemerge, such as dialog man-

agers, commercially viable instant messaging chatterbots(programs that attempt to simulate typed conversation),and multilingual machine translation, more thought is nec-essary into how these and other technologies will impactthe CM role.

Much like dialog managers capture and reuse discourse,a CM should accumulate contact activity in real time, andshould be able to leverage this data as the contact movesbetween resources.This capability will require each auto-mated endpoint resource to log activity to a central data-base or peer system. CM design becomes more complexwhen multiple networks (that is, multiple organizations)are involved.The contact center vendor community mustwork together to evolve the multichannel CM role, theassociated design, and the standards to foster innovativeintegration.

For economic reasons,CM design must also support out-sourcing. Unfortunately, outsourcing exacerbates thealready-difficult problem of providing multichannel con-tact management because

• transitioning a contact from one enterprise to another isa complex process, and

• relinquishing contact management functions to a thirdparty with multiple clients can compromise security.

It’s likely that the two enterprises (outsourcer andinsourcer) could use entirely different CM implementa-tions,midpoint resources,and endpoint resources.Becausesuch systems must exchange external information as eachcontact navigates the adjacent enterprises, informationexchange standards are essential for cost-effective devel-opment and maintenance.

In addition, a given CM design must clearly prove itsreturn on investment.Before deploying a design,an organ-ization should address the following questions:

• Does the CM strategy offer the organization a clear benefit?

CM implementations can only be effective if organizationsaddress open CM system

design issues.


• How practical are a CM’s seemingly endless features?

For example, a study could test the hypothesis that con-solidated queues are better for contact centers with busi-

ness process-based skill groups than for those that segre-gate skill groups on business skill and channel, or that con-solidated queues increase response consistency. Studies ofmultichannel queuing models could help determine opti-

MITRE is a not-for-profit organization chartered towork in the public interest. As a national resource,MITRE addresses sponsors’ critical needs in systemsengineering, information technology, operational con-cepts, and enterprise modernization.To support researchin the areas discussed here, MITRE sponsored the cre-ation of a Contact Center of the Future (CCOF)Laboratory.

As Figure B shows, the CCOF Laboratory consists ofcommercial hardware (phone sets, PBX, servers, and soon) and commercial software components (contact and

queue manager, a Web server, and a speech-recognitionserver, for example) integrated with MITRE-developedcapabilities (such as multilingual machine translation,CSR knowledge and question answering tools, text-based intent classification, and speech-recognition gram-mars). Through a consolidated queue and usingautomated intent classification, the laboratory can routedisparate channels (voice, multilingual Web chat, and e-mail) to an appropriate CSR or automated application.The laboratory has conducted many multichannel,agency-specific demonstrations.

MITRE’S Contact Center of the Future Laboratory

Ethernetswitch

CSR PCDNS

BRIVoIP

gateway

ConventionalPBX Loop

start

Analogcustomer

phone

Analogcustomer

phone

Customerbrowser

Analogcustomer

phone

Loop start

PSTN

Customer PCand phone

RouterIP phone

CSR PC

IP phone

CSR PC

IP phone

CSR PC

IP phone

KVMswitch

Monitor,keyboard,

mouse

CSR phoneand desktopapplications

Ethernetswitch

Webserver

VoIPsoftswitch

Queuemanager

Contactmanager

Speechrecognition

IVR

Text chat server/intent

classifier

Translation server(translation engine,

SIMP server,TrIM client)

Collaborationserver

Multilingual machinetranslation

KVMswitch

Monitor,keyboard,

mouse

Text-based intentclassifier

KVMswitch

Monitor,keyboard,

mouse

Voice-based intentclassifier

and automatedapplications

Contact managerand consolidated

queue

Figure B. Contact Center of the Future overview.


mal models. Furthermore, research could help identifysolutions for managing contacts as they traverse the enter-prise service space. In addition, industry consortiumsshould combine emerging technology and real contact cen-ter needs to determine the evolving functions and designsof multichannel CM-based solutions.

D espite the CCM industry’s enthusiasm about themerging of channels and the ability to implementconsolidated queues, multichannel CM implemen-

tation isn’t widely accepted. Significant obstacles still hin-der the development of a CM that can control multiplechannels. Once these obstacles have been overcome, CMsystems will likely surge as a critical enterprise resource.�

Paul Herceg is a lead information systems engineer at theMITRE Corporation’s Center for Innovative Computingand Informatics. Contact him at [email protected].

David Madison is a director of information and telecom-munications studies and collegiate associate professor at theUniversity of Maryland University College, and a principalinformation systems engineer at the MITRE Corporation’sCenter for Integrated Intelligence Systems. Contact him [email protected].

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