Service Pattern Next-Generation Cloud-Based Contact Center Product ...

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Bright Pattern’s Service Pattern is a powerful, flexible and cost-‐effective next-‐ generation cloud-‐based contact center platform for effective customer service management. It is an integrated, multi-‐ channel platform that empowers frontline agents and supervisors and h elps companies manage the complete cycle of customer experience.

Service Pattern

Next-Generation Cloud-Based Contact Center Product Evaluation

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Methodology This review is based upon information provided by the vendor and gathered through independent research. The vendor provided detailed product specifications and marketing materials, as well as an in-‐depth product demonstration. Further research was conducted surrounding business needs, market competition and software functionality.

Contents Methodology ......................................................................................................................................... 1 Product overview ................................................................................................................................... 3 Business needs ...................................................................................................................................... 4 Customers .............................................................................................................................................. 5 Competition ........................................................................................................................................... 6 Differentiators ....................................................................................................................................... 7 Pricing .................................................................................................................................................... 8 Product features .................................................................................................................................... 9 Agent user interface .......................................................................................................................... 9 Supervisor user interface ................................................................................................................. 10 Voice call – inbound ......................................................................................................................... 12 Voice call – outbound ...................................................................................................................... 14 Web client ........................................................................................................................................ 15 System administrator user interface ............................................................................................... 17 Core administration user interface .................................................................................................. 20 Specifications ....................................................................................................................................... 21 Recommendations ............................................................................................................................... 22

Product overview Companies are increasingly using multiple channels to engage with their customers, including social media, call centers, live chat, email and websites, but many are still finding it a challenge to integrate these channels to provide an efficient contact center solution. Bright Pattern’s ServicePattern is a cloud-‐based contact center platform that seeks to solve this problem by natively supporting multiple customer engagement channels. Bright Pattern was founded by a team of contact center and customer service management experts in 2010, when then developed the product. ServicePattern strives to resolve the shortcomings of the previous generation of contact center technology by providing an integrated cloud-‐based contact center platform that combines multiple communication channels in one interface and offers features that increase the productivity and profitability of contact centers, including: • •

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Native multi-‐channel. ServicePattern supports inbound and outbound voice; web connections, such as web chat and email; and social media straight out of the box. Unified Customer Experience. The ServicePattern architecture treats all communication channels equally, so reporting, surveying, management and analysis are standardized across all the channels. This gives users a clear picture of their customer experience performance. On the fly configuration. ServicePattern’s easy-‐to-‐use interface empowers users, allowing them to effectively monitor and manage agents, teams and campaigns; manage data in real time; and build and modify reports and call flows, amongst other options. Fully scalable. ServicePattern is fully scalable from any number to any number, so you can easily deploy a contact center that supports as few as five agents or as many as 5,000. Integrated support for CRM. ServicePattern includes native support for Salesforce’s customer relationship management (CRM) software. It also has simple CRM functionality built in for smaller companies and the option to integrate other systems with a small amount of custom coding, through APIs

The platform has four main user interfaces, each with different features: • • • •

Agent Supervisor Campaign operator Contact center administrator

In addition, a fifth for partners who wish to build and sell their own tenants: •

System administrator

ServicePattern offers a flexible pricing structure, so customers can pay depending on business needs. Customers can either opt for an annual contract, which can be supplemented with short-‐term ‘burst contracts’ for peak periods, or more flexible month-‐to-‐month payments. Bright Pattern also offers discount schemes for those clients switching from other contact center platform vendors.

Business needs An Aberdeen Group report from May 2013 titled, ‘Building the New Database of Intentions with Real-‐Time Marketing Analytics’, claimed that ‘If you don’t provide a remarkable, personalized experience, the chances are that your competition will. Increasingly this requires the ability to aggregate interactions and behavior across myriad channels and touch points in real-‐time.’ In other words, companies cannot afford a second-‐rate contact center. Businesses that are slow to adapt can look forward to reduced revenues and lower customer satisfaction. Setting up a contact center traditionally required trying to cobble together an integrated solution from several vendors, creating a brittle, frustrating and costly infrastructure. Multi-‐channel contact center platforms, like ServicePattern from Bright Pattern, however, provide everything in one place, offering multiple inherent communication channels; standardized reporting and data; and various functional applications such as customer relationship management (CRM) and quality management. Not only does this integration help to streamline the jobs of contact center operators but it also means that ServicePattern can help companies do more with their data. The ServicePattern platform treats all customer engagement channels equally with regards to configuration, reporting and features so it can produce standardized data that enables big data analysis to better monetize customer experience data. The bottom line is that it helps give a higher return on investment on contact centers. The right cloud-‐based contact center platform, therefore, can be a real competitive advantage.

Customers The contact center industry largely splits into two camps: Companies that offer a contact center as the business itself, such as a business process outsourcer that handles campaigns on behalf of other companies and companies that run contact centers in-‐ house to support their own operations, which might involve inside sales, outbound marketing and technical support. ServicePattern’s business-‐class contact center platform is built with the needs and aims of both groups in mind, seeking to reduce contact center expenses, improve contact center productivity and enhance the end-‐user customer experience. Additionally, the cloud-‐based platform allows scalability unmatched elsewhere in the market, so ServicePattern is suitable for both small to medium-‐sized businesses (SMBs) of approximately 50 to low hundreds of seats and large enterprises with hundreds to thousands of seats. ServicePattern’s platform has been tested with 5,000 concurrent agents on a single system, and some live clients are currently running as many as 1,900 agents, so it is a truly flexible platform.

Competition ServicePattern sees competition from companies who deal with both cloud-‐based systems and those that seek to build on legacy systems, including Five9, inContact, LiveOps, Interactive Intelligence, Genesys, Avaya, Cisco, Echopass, and Transera. ServicePattern, however, differentiates itself from the previous generation of cloud-‐based call and contact centers, which tend to compromise on scalability, reliability or features. Earlier cloud contact center platforms typically, or often, relied on CRM integrations for multi-‐ channel support, but now they are shifting toward comprehensive solutions that inherently support multiple communication channels. Natively supporting all channels from the box, ServicePattern provides a unified, 360-‐degree view of all customer interactions from a single vantage point. As a cloud-‐hosted platform, ServicePattern does not require costly on-‐premise hardware and allows for a pay-‐as-‐you-‐go payment structure, which means greater flexibility, lower expenses and reduced capital expenditures in comparison to legacy on-‐premise call center gear, like PBXs. ServicePattern seeks to deliver the capacity and features of traditional contact centers alongside the benefits of the cloud.

Differentiators The natively architected multi-‐channel ServicePattern platform has been developed to empower frontline agents and supervisors and, ultimately, increase the profitability and efficiency of contact centers. Several features in particular demonstrate this: •

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Great customer support. A personalized demo can be requested from Bright Pattern’s website, and a pilot is run with every prospective customer. ServicePattern is easy to set up, but Bright Pattern support staff will typically spend a few days customizing the system with the client. Most scalable platform. Truly scalable. The ServicePattern platform works with five agents or 5,000, which makes it easy for a company to scale up its contact center (or scale it down) as the business evolves. There’s no risk of overprovisioning or being trapped in a system that can’t keep pace as you grow. Native multichannel support. ServicePattern supports inbound and outbound voice, web connections and social media straight from the box. Unified customer experience. The customer can seamlessly shift between different contact points, and the agent can engage with them in multiple ways from one platform. Reports. Owing to the native multi-‐channel support, reporting is made much more efficient. Using the open source iReports software, users can download, modify and upload reports of their own design without contacting Bright Pattern. Control and customization. Easy to set up but very customizable. Can create and modify call flows, teams, report templates, dispositions, and many other features. Integration. ServicePattern has built-‐in Salesforce integration, and also allows integration with most web-‐based CRM software. Further, ServicePattern supports database access from scenarios, screen pops launching pre-‐configured URLs, and mechanism to call remote web services. Choice of public or private cloud. ServicePattern’s most common method of deployment is on the public cloud, which means customers that do not need to buy any expensive hardware. However, ServicePattern also allows supports private cloud hosting for those who wish to host the platform in their environment. Built with channel partners in mind. Bright Pattern has architected ServicePattern to facilitate self-‐hosted channel partner deployments to enable third-‐party SaaS service providers to, for example, address specific industry or geographical markets. For contact center operators, this may mean that ServicePattern is available through a relationship with an existing vendor.

Pricing ServicePattern’s cloud-‐based platform allows for a cost-‐effective and flexible pricing model. Customers pay on a per-‐seat, per-‐month basis with each seat license costing between $100 to $200 per seat, per month. Customers can choose between an annual contract or, for those requiring more flexibility, month-‐to-‐month contracts. Annual Contracts ServicePattern’s seat licenses are priced monthly, per agent, but customers who commit to an annual contract are rewarded with favorable pricing in comparison to month-‐to-‐month agreements. On top of this annual contract, customers can also opt for short-‐term ‘burst contracts’ to handle peak periods or unforeseen high-‐capacity demands. Pay Monthly Companies who require greater flexibility, owing to seasonal campaigns, frequent short-‐term campaigns or disaster recovery can opt for month-‐to-‐month contracts, making it easier to adapt to ever-‐changing business needs. Contact Center Competitive Trade-‐up Bright Pattern also offers two trade-‐up pricing programs to match and improve on a competitor’s base per-‐agent seat price for a comparable product offering: • •

A flat 15% discount off a competitor’s per-‐month, per-‐seat, price for 12 months. A 200% rebate of a competitor’s per-‐month, per-‐seat, price over 12 months.

Additional costs Telecom charges are extra and priced per usage. DNIS numbers are charged at an additional nominal rate. Customers can add web chat for an additional monthly charge, or leave it off and just pay for either inbound, or outbound, or both.

Product features This section introduces some of ServicePattern’s key features. There are three main interfaces for the system: agent, supervisor and system administrator, and a fourth, higher-‐level administrator, for partners of Bright Pattern.

Agent user interface Feature and Benefits

Screenshot

The dashboard provides a user-‐ centric overview of current cases. The right side of the interface can integrate with Salesforce or other third-‐party applications, but here, a prototype of Bright Pattern’s own CRM functionality is being used.

The left side of the interface allows agents to view their one hundred most recent transactions, number directory and favorite numbers. It also has a dial pad and numeric field.

The platform also offers a built-‐in internal instant messaging service that agents can use to contact each other. The supervisor has the ability to broadcast messages to the whole team. The instant messaging service is controlled with permissions and roles so supervisors can disable it for any particular team.

Supervisor user interface The supervisor user interface is very similar to the agent user interface but has a few powerful differences, empowering frontline supervisors and giving them the tools to manage their teams, campaigns, and deal with real-‐time data. Feature and Benefits

Screenshot

The supervisor can view and select their teams

Supervisors can also add or hide metrics and reorder fields.

In addition, set thresholds for alerts.

The supervisor also has the power to control agents by forcing them into Ready or Logout. This gives supervisors the power to manage fault states to avoid skewing the statistics.

The campaign operator has dialer access to campaigns. Companies can customize the interface easily to display the information they need. Campaign operators can stop and start the campaign, and can start the dialer to provide additional work if there is a lull in outbound operations. Supervisors also have insight into campaigns, so they can see all of the dispositions, and can enable or disable teams and lists. All of these features help empower supervisors to meet the needs of their teams.

Voice call – inbound Feature and Benefits ServicePattern supports a range of agent voice connection options, including a softphone, extern phone, or nailed-‐up connection. If the agent uses a softphone, it runs as an applet in the

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system tray. So, should the web browser crash, the voice path is preserved and the agent can fluidly pick up from where they left off.

The inbound interactive voice response (IVR) picks up the caller ID and creates a screen pop. The IVR has text to speech built in, and it can all be translated and localizable.

Users can set up a whole series of dispositions, including a call back function to call customers back if they hang up while waiting. This pushes them into an outbound queue for a call back. The agent can flag a call, which causes it to pop up on the supervisor’s screen. The supervisor then has the option to monitor the call, coach the agent or barge-‐in on the call. Supervisors can also start recording the call and pull the screen.

Grading is built-‐in, with 10 customizable questions to grade the contact. Agent interactions can be graded on-‐ the-‐fly, or post engagement. Quality management is also built-‐in so the user can monitor all or none of the calls, and this can be varied for each team. The user can also choose to end the call with a short, three-‐question IVR survey. ServicePattern provides historical reporting to help analyze grading.

Voice call – outbound Feature and benefits

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When calling outbound, the user can see the contact history.

The user also has the ability to set the disposition. Dispositions are fully customizable.

Web client Feature and benefits

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Customers can attach the web chat function to their website through any icon of their choosing.

And can also customize the web chat request forms.

Like voice calls, the web chat creates a screen pop. Supervisors also have the ability, as with voice calls, to monitor the chat, coach the agent, or barge in on the chat.

Customers get the same questionnaire after a web chat as they do after a voice call.

System administrator user interface Feature and benefits

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As the system administrator, no statement of work (SOW) is required to make changes. Everything can be modified online.

The system administrator can build and modify teams, roles, users, lists, dialing rules, dispositions and campaigns.

They can also create do not call lists. These can be set across entire regions, which is useful if that area was suffering, for instance, from a natural disaster.

The system administrator can build, save and reuse call flows with an intuitive step-‐ by-‐step interface and palette of options.

The palette has Salesforce integration built-‐in, and the system administrator can even use Salesforce Object Query Language (SOQL) statements to search. ServicePattern also has built-‐in reports so the system administrator can search any flagged calls. They can listen and download the recording, and then grade the contact. The reports come as downloadable templates so users can modify and upload their own. These can then be exported as PDF, XLS, or CSV.

System administration interface The system administration interface provides command and control of resources such as server allocation, SIP trunks, phone numbers and other system resources. Typically only Bright Pattern, or their channel partners who build their own public or private cloud ServicePattern deployment, would use this interface. Normally Bright Pattern’s customers, or customers of their channel partners, would have no need to use it. Feature and benefits

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With this system, you can build a tenant.

Specifications Web browser requirements -‐

Compatible with all modern browsers.

Operating system requirements -‐

Windows and Linux. Updates first come out on Windows.

Deployment options -‐ -‐

Both public and private cloud is supported, but public cloud is the most common deployment model. Multi-‐tenant set up is also supported.

APIs and integration -‐ -‐ -‐

ServicePattern has built-‐in Salesforce integration. Support for additional third-‐party lead management, CRM and related applications. Also provides a number of other means of integration: Database access, Fetch URL web service invocation, screen pop of preconfigured URLs, Salesforce integration on desktop and via API on server side.

Mobile capabilities -‐ -‐

Currently, the supervisor user interface can be used on an Android tablet via a web browser. There is a tablet app in development.

Free trial -‐

No free trial, but a free personalized demonstration is offered and pilots are run with prospective customers.

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SSL encryption: 128-‐bit connection for web-‐based client UI Tenant data is backed up daily and weekly, and moved off site routinely. Call recordings are encrypted. Continuity: Bright Pattern has high availability in software, and uses redundant servers, network hardware, ISP connections. Security: firewall, log analysis, SSL connections, MD5-‐Digest password storage, recording encryption. Bright Pattern does not keep private client data. Bright Pattern’s system configuration that is done by tenant is not accessible to any other party, including Bright Pattern’s personnel, without permission from the tenant. Certified for direct connection to NTT and KDDI (Japan) SIP telephone networks. Equipment is racked in datacenters with SAS 70 certification. They are ‘carrier-‐neutral’ facilities with access to multiple providers for TDM and packet connectivity, and with diverse entrances into the building. The datacenters have power delivered via dual entrances from redundant substations, and onsite UPS with diesel generators and redundant refueling contracts. The datacenters also have waterproof conduit for below-‐floor cabling, and leak detection.

Recommendations ServicePattern’s customizable, cloud-‐based contact center is a business-‐class product. Bright Pattern’s team has over one hundred years of combined experience in this sector and they have worked to build a platform that is functional, cost-‐effective and intuitive. Several features in particular make ServicePattern stand out in their market: •

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Most scalable platform. ServicePattern’s cloud-‐based platform is fully scalable from any number to any number, so you can deploy a contact center that handles as few as five agents or one that supports 5,000 or more concurrent agents. This means that ServicePattern can handle the largest contact centers in the world while also making it easy for companies to grow according to their needs. Quick set up. Infinitely customizable. Walk into a mobile phone store and in under an hour you’ve picked your phone, signed the contract and you’re making calls. However, once you get home you can start personalizing it as much as you want for as long as you want. The same principle applies to ServicePattern. Users can activate the ServicePattern platform and have their tenant built in under an hour, but from there they can take it in any direction they want to. Bright Pattern typically spends a few days customizing it with a new user, but the customization is ultimately business dependent.

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Native multichannel support. ServicePattern brings together inbound and outbound voice; web connections, such as web chat and email; and social media straight out of the box. This built-‐in integration allows ServicePattern to produce standardized data that can be merged with other business intelligence data to generate insights into the most profitable customers and provide new revenue opportunities. The bottom line is that it helps make contact centers more profitable.

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Unified Customer Experience. A blend of voice and non-‐voice communication channels; routing, queuing, and distribution logic; and functional applications such as customer relationship management, case management, surveys, and quality management means that contact center operators can get a complete view of customer and case history and status across all channels from one platform, enabling them to effectively manage and improve the customer experience.

Overall, ServicePattern fixes the shortcomings of the first generation of cloud-‐based contact centers and provides industry-‐leading functionality, reliability, and scalability.