Contact centers have always had a data problem: there is a lot of it and it is difficult to make it useful. Moreover, contact center data is still contained in many silos such as workforce management solutions, CRMs, ACDs, and IVRs to name a few. While contact centers continue to collect data, by itself data are useless. It has to be sliced, diced, mixed, and mashed into a useful format.
Knowledge is the consolidation of all past events into a handy package that provides data that are organized and focused on specific issues. The traditional source of knowledge is the agents and their multitude of sticky notes. Contact centers have been attempting to consolidate that institutional knowledge into a central location (or knowledgebase) for decades. Access to a knowledgebase or the “common brain” enables agents to have as much and possibly more information than do customers, as well as enables contact centers to provide consistent answers.
Upstream Works believes that analytics is a process not a product, and that good analytics needs to be based on good data. The needs of each organization are unique, so each installation needs to be adapted to those unique needs. Even individual contact center teams within the same organization may have different needs. With the uniqueness of the organization in mind, Upstream Works creates custom analytics process for each installation that includes a uses flexible analytics datamart and a set of role-tailored agent interfaces.
Upstream Works also believes that agents are the key to serving the customer and the company developed its application in order to simplify analytics, drive workflow and to streamline agents operations. The unique philosophy of the Upstream Works solutions is that data elements are aggregated and organized as they are received. That data are used by management to improve operations, and by agents to improve personalization and customer service.
The Business Interaction Manager datamart is the foundation of its application suite. The datamart is media neutral and capable of consolidating data from multiple and diverse sources, including information from ACDs, IVRs, email servers, chat application, social media, workforce optimization solutions, and customer survey data. The company also supplies functions for spidering through corporate intranets, wikis, and social communities for information.
Business Interaction Manager (BIM), Upstream Work’s flagship application, reflects the company’s “data quality” and “analytics as a process” philosophy and its aim to put more control in to the hands of the contact center agents. It uses SAP’s Business Objects and is also compatible with any other business intelligence solutions. The suite utilizes the company’s Business Interaction Manager datamart to enhance agents’ knowledge of customers, their issues, and possible resolutions. Business Interaction Manager also provides a series of performance management reports; enabling contact center managers to analyze customer actions, center and agent performance, and call and agent trends. In addition to the core datamart, Business Interaction Manager includes options for supervisory and executive dashboards, pre built analytic reports, and interaction profiling. Business Interaction Manager uses a standardized interaction record format that is applicable for enterprise analytics as well.
Utilizing the data gathering and analytics capability of its Business Interaction Manager, Upstream Works offers enterprises a suite of contact center applications.
UpStart, s is a role tailored interface that provides agents with a significant amount of information about the caller before the call is passed to the agent. The desktop operates seamlessly with Business Interaction Manager and users can integrate the application with third-party contact center agent desktops. It is capable of utilizing information and analytics from the Business Interaction Manager datamart to quickly offer the agent a complete contact history. Moreover, the desktop provides the agents with several performance reports, such as KPI trends and answer stats. The UpStart agent desktop also supports multimedia and blended interactions (agents answering calls and chats at the same time) with supported ACDs. Finally, UpStart is always displayed but it never covers the entire agent screen. The desktop is a tool bar that sits along any side of the agent’s screen that displays high-level data with drill-down functionality.
The company’s Call Management Automation Server (CMAS) is a comprehensive computer telephony integration infrastructure. It acts as a interaction hub, and can supplement the traditional routing rules of a third party ACD with analytics from the Business Interaction Manager datamart to accurately route calls to the most appropriate agents. For multichannel contact centers, Upstream Works offers UpStart Interaction Hub for Multichannel, an application that integrates with third-party non-voice servers and utilizes the Business Interaction Manager datamart and CMAS to route non-voice interactions (email, chat, social media, click-to-call, etc.). Like CMAS, UpStart Interaction Hub for Multichannel is applicable in the greater enterprise to route emails, faxes, text messages, and other non-voice interaction to appropriate back-office employees.
Upstream Works also offers technical support centers, network operations centers, utility monitoring centers, university maintenance dispatchers, brokerage trading floors, and other highly technical groups a product called Visual Queue. This application works with third party ACD’s and Upstream Works’ CMAS to exhibit detailed and prioritized lists in a contact center like queue display. Visual Queue provides more information than does a normal ACD queue display and calls change color based on priorities, which can be set by the users. The Visual Queue display is operational on traditional mouse-driven displays as well as many touch-screen monitors found in command centers.
At this time, Upstream Works has integrated its applications with contact center solutions from Nortel, Avaya, and Cisco as well as applications from Business Objects and Motorola. In addition, the application has been tested and integrated with Microsoft Lync. Business Interaction Manager can integrate with most quality assurance solutions. The company is compatible with applications for the iPhone and iPad that interface with the datamart for mobile dashboards. Upstream plans to evaluate integrations with Playbook as applications become available.
While performance management solutions are very beneficial to contact centers and enterprises as a whole, they can be labor-intensive to configure and implement. Moreover, the more data sources with which the analytics applications are integrated, the more complex the solution and the more time and effort it takes to install. Upstream Works’ applications are no exception. Prospective customer should be ready for an installation period of at least four weeks of professional services time. In addition, major changes to the reports will also require the vendor’s intervention. Finally, while Business Interaction Manager components can operate independently of the underlying PBX infrastructure, Upstream Works has only tested and integrated its native CTI connectors with Avaya/Nortel and Cisco solutions. It has not tested CMAS on ACDs from Genesys, Interactive Intelligence, Aspect, ShoreTel and others.
Upstream Works is a privately held company headquartered in Vaughan, Ontario, Canada. It was founded in 1995 as Canadian Lynx with a focus on building computer telephony integration solutions for the telco and outsourced markets. The company changed its name to Upstream Works in 2000. In 2005, HP acquired a 20% stake in the company. Upstream Works earns most of its revenue in Canada and US but several of its customers are international corporations. The company is an Avaya DevConnect partner (it was Nortel Open Developer and Link Developer partner prior to Avaya’s acquisition of Nortel), Business Objects partner, Microsoft Silver ISV and Cisco Development Partner. Upstream Works includes Bell Canada, Ronco Communications, Hiscall Communications, Sunturn and Parallax Technologies as reseller partners. Finally, Upstream Works’ customer based includes Young America, The Sutherland Group, Permanent General Companies, and Canadian Tire.
Few organizations in the enterprise have more and diverse data that do contact centers and getting the right information out of the myriad of data sources is difficult. However, contact centers need that data to better serve their customers. Upstream Works offers companies a set of solutions that not only allow users to dive deeply into the data, but also more effectively use the data to actively serve customers. Companies looking for a sophisticated analytical tool should investigate Upstream Works.
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