Customer Experience Management - Building Trust to Create Success

This week Cicero announced the upcoming release of our new family of Customer Experience Management (CEM) products - Cicero XM™. Cicero XM is designed to address all components of the Customer Experience while improving Efficiency, Effectiveness, and Insight throughout the Enterprise. Wikipedia says that “[t]he goal of customer experience management (CEM) is to move customers from satisfied to loyal and then from loyal to advocate. … Customer experience solutions provide strategies, process models, and information technology to design, manage and optimize the end-to-end customer experience process.”

That is a fair description of what Cicero XM is all about. It is built to allow its users to create a superior customer experience by allowing the Business Process Analyst to work from the customer’s point of view to design the optimal interaction experience. In Rules to Break and Laws to Follow, Don Peppers and Martha Rogers, Ph.D. ask, “[w]hat’s it really like to be your customer? What is the day-in, day-out 'customer experience' your company is delivering? How does it feel to wait on hold on the phone? To … wait for a service call that was promised two hours ago, come back to an online shopping cart that’s no longer there an hour later? Or what’s it like to be remembered? To receive helpful suggestions? To get everything exactly as it was promised? To be confident that the answers you get are the best ones for you?”

As Peppers and Rogers further point out, a successful customer experience is based on trust. If your customer doesn’t trust the information received during an interaction, she will not be a customer for very long. If the agent doesn’t trust the systems he is using, he will not be an agent for very long. Trust is the bandwidth of change and one of the key components of trust is what Dennis Reina and Michelle Reina refer to as “Transactional Trust” in the Reina Trust and Betrayal Model™. Transactional trust contains three core components: Contractual Trust or “Trust of Character”, Communication Trust (“Trust of Disclosure”) and Competence Trust (“Trust of Ability”). Each of these trusts are created incrementally and are reciprocal between the parties to the transaction. There is not space here to go into detail about all the aspects of trust, but trust me, it is one the most critical components of success. It is also one of the easiest to destroy. To quote Peppers and Rogers one more time: “Customers may forgive honest mistakes but will never forgive dishonesty.”

In many cases, the perception of a company is driven by the performance of its contact center; a 2002 Purdue University study showed that 92% of U.S. consumers base their image of a company on experience with company’s contact center. That same study showed that 86% of those calling to express dissatisfaction with a product or service will stop using the company if their call experience was negative.

Cicero XM was designed and built specifically to help companies address these issues. For example, one major source of problems in contact centers is agent frustration. What causes this? One significant reason is what the Reinas would refer to as an unintentional betrayal of trust caused by a failure to give the agents the correct tools to allow them to do their jobs easily and effectively. When an agent has to use multiple applications to retrieve a customer’s record, or has to cut and paste data between applications or ask a caller to wait for a slow system, that agent cannot possibly be 100% focused on attaining a trust relationship with the caller. Cicero XM’s scripting, data integration through the United Data Model™, call flow management and agent workspace all combine to convert this:

into this:

A clean, organized workspace that presents the agent with exactly the information needed, when it is needed. A workspace that is completely context sensitive based on call type that can be determined from DNIS/ANI or other information provided by an IVR, the caller or other data source.

The unique Cicero XM Studio allows screen layouts, scripts and even call flows to be created and modified by the contact center’s own Business Process Analysts. With Cicero XM Enterprise, changes can be automatically deployed to Cicero XM Desktop so that all agents have the latest information at all times.

Cicero XM Studio can help further enhance the trust relationship between agent and management because now when an agent makes a suggestion as to how a screen could be better laid out, or how a call flow could be made more efficient, it is no longer necessary to get IT involved. If the change makes sense, it can be implemented and deployed in hours or days rather than weeks or months. The agents will see their ideas come to life and will therefore feel trusted and empowered. This attitude will come through to the customers as well as they sense the agents’ enthusiasm and loyalty.

Providing your customers with accurate information in a timely and concise manner will go a long way towards building their trust. Over the next several weeks and months, you will see more about how Cicero XM is revolutionizing customer experience management and will help you transform your customers’ experience with your company.

The Purdue study referenced earlier also points out that only 16% of customers reported contact experience that exceeded their expectations. That is pretty poor. However, 95% of those people (who had those great experiences) will stay with that company. Cicero XM will help your company exceed expectations and transform your customers into “raving fans.”

Jim Hunt
Director of Product Development
Cicero Inc.

Cicero Inc. Announces New Product Offerings and Adds Two New Customers: Interactive Response Technologies, Inc. and Innoverse Services Network, Inc.

Cicero XM Enables Business Transformation to Improve Customer Interactions Across the Enterprise

Cary, NC—February 2, 2010—Cicero Inc. (BB:CICN), a leading provider of desktop automation and integration solutions, announced today it is launching three new products, collectively called Cicero XM™, to help contact centers and enterprises improve their Customer Experience Management (CEM). Cicero also announced two new customers that will be implementing Cicero XM to improve business user efficiency, effectiveness, and operational insight in their contact centers: Interactive Response Technologies, Inc. (IRT), a contact center outsourcer, and Innoverse Services Network, Inc., a technology solutions company specializing in helping clients execute ‘outside-the-box’ projects.

“IRT’s focus is on providing the best customer experience possible for all our call center clients and we believe that you do this by delivering superb service with each customer interaction,” said Martin Lehtio, EVP of Operations. “We are excited about using the Cicero XM technology to build an intelligent desktop where our agents can better focus on customer interactions and strengthening customer relationships rather than the individual technology tools they are using for certain lines of business.”

As a CEM solution, the new Cicero XM technology helps companies transform their customer interactions by simplifying workflow, automating tasks, providing context-sensitive scripting and automatically sharing data between applications, while leveraging existing IT investments. Cicero XM, short for Cicero Experience Management, includes three new products:

• Cicero XM Desktop™ - A dedicated agent desktop solution that includes user guidance in the form of context sensitive scripting and managed call flows, a United Data Model™ that provides a single, holistic view of the data regardless of source, the ability to easily create composite applications and toolbars, a TAPI-compliant soft-phone console, and a flexible workspace to drive business user efficiency and effectiveness.
• Cicero XM Enterprise™ - An enterprise solution for managing interactions, including cross-application workflow, call scripting, analytics, telephony integration, United Data Model™ persistence, and a powerful database to provide operational insight. Cicero XM Enterprise adds the full power of enterprise CEM to the XM Desktop.
• Cicero XM Studio™ - A visual toolkit used to integrate applications and configure Cicero XM products. Cicero XM Studio enables business analysts and other non-IT personnel to make changes to end-user scripts, call flows, and composite screens without risk to underlying applications or business logic.

“We look forward to using Cicero XM to collect data about application usage on desktops and then using this data along with Cicero XM to integrate applications, automate workflow and provide a new unified desktop - a smart desktop in BPO environments,” said Edward J. Goldgehn, VP and Lead Solutions Architect, Innoverse Services Network, Inc. “Our clients come to us looking for solutions to improve user productivity, simplify training, cut costs, and deliver superior end-to-end service. The solutions we can now deliver with Cicero XM will help us do just that.”

“Unlike other CEM and unified desktop solutions, Cicero XM helps companies non-invasively integrate existing applications and enterprise data so business users can leverage an intelligent desktop to improve productivity, cut costs and deliver a better customer experience,” said Tony Castagno, Cicero CTO. “Combining Cicero’s surface integration expertise with workflow and United Data Model technology, we have created the most powerful Customer Experience Management solution in the marketplace today.”

About Interactive Response Technologies, Inc.

Founded in 1993 as a software company for the Call Center Industry, IRT has been operating contact centers since 1995 for a variety of Fortune 500 clients. Today, IRT operates 5 state-of-the-art contact centers in Florida, Texas and Oklahoma with international partnerships that span the globe. We have earned our reputation of unparalleled service and results by focusing our efforts on people. We believe in creating the right culture and building systems and processes that are focused on the “right behaviors”. Our dedicated teams are fully committed to delivering the desired outcomes for our clients. IRT partners with a variety of Fortune 500 clients in the Financial Services, Telecommunications, Healthcare, Insurance, Retail, Transportation, Utility and Education industries. Value-added solutions and services provided to its client-partners include customer service, tech support, customer loyalty and retention, acquisition and business-to-business programs.

About Innoverse Services Network, Inc.

Innoverse Services Network, Inc (IS.Net) was founded in 1999 as part of a multi-faceted organization of companies focused on delivering unique technology-based solutions to businesses of varying sizes and industries. IS.Net's principals each have many years of business process management experience through all phases of entrepreneurial business development and operation. Learn more about Innoverse at www.is.net.

About Cicero Inc.

Cicero, Inc. provides solutions that enable business transformation of enterprise interactions for Global Fortune 500 and other companies and government organizations. Cicero’s XM technology delivers this capability via a unique and innovative combination of integration, automation, presentation and analytics capabilities, built to transform customer interaction into the most powerful marketing and branding asset a company can own. Learn more about Cicero at www.ciceroinc.com.

Cicero, Cicero Integrator, and Cicero XM are trademarks or registered trademarks of Cicero Inc. and/or its affiliates. Other company names and/or products are for identification purposes and are the property of, and may be trademarks of, their respective owners.

Safe Harbor: Except for any historical information contained herein, this news release may contain forward-looking statements on such matters as strategic direction, anticipated return on investment, business prospects, the development and capabilities of the Cicero product group, new products and similar matters. Actual results may differ materially from the anticipated results or other expectations expressed in this release of a variety of factors, including risks that customers may not adopt the Cicero technology, which Cicero Inc. may not successfully execute its new strategic initiative and other risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from such statements. For a description of other factors that could cause such a difference, please see Cicero Inc.’s filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Contact:
Keith Anderson
Director of Client Services
kanderson@ciceroinc.com
919-380-5092

Cicero Inc. Acquires Assets of SOAdesk, LLC; Closes Initial Round of Series B Preferred Offering

Acquisition Unites Best of Breed Desktop Integration and Leading Customer Interaction Management Software; Combined Products Offer Complete Customer Interaction Management Platform to Reduce Enterprise Costs and Help Companies Deliver an Improved Customer Experience

Cary, NC—January 19, 2010—Cicero Inc. (BB:CICN), a leading provider of desktop automation and integration solutions, announced today that it has completed the acquisition of SOAdesk, LLC’s innovative Customer Interaction Management (CIM) technology – United Desktop® -- through an Asset Purchase Agreement dated as of January 15, 2010 among Cicero, SOAdesk, and Vertical Thought, Inc., an affiliate of SOAdesk. Simultaneously, Cicero has also closed an offering of an initial round of its Series B Convertible Preferred Stock.

As a result of the acquisition, Cicero will provide a new set of product offerings called Cicero XM™ that combine Cicero’s leading desktop integration software with SOAdesk’s United Desktop® technology. Under the terms of the acquisition, Cicero has agreed to pay a minimum of $2.525 million over the next three years through a combination of stock and cash for the assets of SOAdesk. In addition, SOAdesk could earn additional consideration based upon certain earn-out formulas within the contract. The initial Series B round of Convertible Preferred Stock, in excess of $1.35 million, will provide funding for the acquisition and working capital to launch the new products.

“This acquisition combines our expertise in surface integration with SOAdesk’s United Desktop technology, enabling us to provide our customers and partners with the tools and solutions they need to deliver exceptional customer interactions while leveraging an enterprise’s existing technology assets and data. Partners and analysts all agree – to win and keep customers, you must be able to work faster, smarter and provide better service to your customers,” said John Broderick, Chief Executive Officer for Cicero. “Today, we can say that we believe we provide the first and only CIM solution that excels in all three areas – while allowing clients to adapt to changes in their business model practically overnight. This combination enables real business transformation for our clients and we’re excited to be able to deliver it all under one roof.”

The acquisition makes Cicero, a pioneer in desktop integration and automation, a much broader provider of solutions in the contact services marketplace, estimated by many analysts to be in excess of $1.5 billion per year. By acquiring SOAdesk’s United Desktop® technology, Cicero is now the only company to offer organizations a complete customer interaction management platform that leverages an enterprise’s existing technology assets and data, and repurposes it to provide employees the information they need, when they need it and how they need it, to be able to serve customers faster, more accurately and in a brand-positive way.

“Cicero’s sweet spot has been its ability to integrate disparate applications quickly and seamlessly, providing a very rapid return on investment for its customers,” added Broderick. “Our core technology will be enhanced by SOADesk’s United Desktop, which together will allow customers to choose and grow from surface integration solutions up the solutions stack, to complete customer interaction management solutions.”

Complementing the existing Cicero team, Tony Castagno, CEO of SOAdesk, will lead the technology team as Chief Technology Officer (CTO). Jim Hunt, CTO of SOAdesk, will head product development, and Mike Garner, President and founder of SOAdesk, will lead worldwide sales.

Cicero’s current desktop product, Cicero Integrator, will continue to provide award-winning application automation features, and Cicero XM will allow customers to use the power of desktop integration to share data, automate processes, and unify desktop applications, as well as improve customer interactions using the many new features from the United Desktop technology.

Cicero XM will expand Cicero’s existing desktop integration or surface integration solution with new features such as enhanced workflow, a powerful new workspace, and a new configuration toolkit. This combined offering provides an enterprise model for truly managing customer interactions using the best of breed applications and systems that customers already have. Cicero XM will:

• Enable business transformation through dramatic improvements in business user efficiency, effectiveness and operational insight.
• Help companies improve the overall customer experience they deliver by combining enterprise data from the desktop with telephony and other sources, creating long-term customer loyalty and value to the enterprise.
• Reduce costs and increase profitability of each customer interaction using new features such as dynamic scripting, reporting, integrated messaging, and many others.

Under the direction of Tony Castagno as Cicero’s CTO, the company will continue to innovate and leverage emerging technologies to maintain its leadership position in the Customer Interaction Management space.

“My experience with desktop integration has shown that the ultimate goal is to provide organizations with the tools they need to deliver the best customer interaction possible,” said Castagno. “Cicero XM builds upon surface integration by leveraging existing technology investments and adding new features such as dynamic scripting, cross application workflow, telephony integration, and universal enterprise data access, to improve both the agent and customer experience while reducing costs.”

About Cicero Inc.

Cicero, Inc. provides solutions that enable business transformation of enterprise interactions for Global Fortune 500 and other companies and government organizations. Cicero’s XM technology delivers this capability via a unique and innovative combination of integration, automation, presentation and analytics capabilities, built to transform customer interaction into the most powerful marketing and branding asset a company can own. Learn more about Cicero at www.ciceroinc.com.

Cicero, Cicero Integrator, Cicero XM, and United Desktop are trademarks or registered trademarks of Cicero Inc. and/or its affiliates. Other company names and/or products are for identification purposes and are the property of, and may be trademarks of, their respective owners.

Safe Harbor: Except for any historical information contained herein, this news release may contain forward-looking statements on such matters as strategic direction, anticipated return on investment, business prospects, the development and capabilities of the Cicero product group, new products and similar matters. Actual results may differ materially from the anticipated results or other expectations expressed in this release of a variety of factors, including risks that customers may not adopt the Cicero technology, which Cicero Inc. may not successfully execute its new strategic initiative and other risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from such statements. For a description of other factors that could cause such a difference, please see Cicero Inc.’s filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Contact:
Keith Anderson
Director of Client Services
kanderson@ciceroinc.com
919-380-5092

Reflections on the Call Center Optimization Forums 2009

By Mike Garner

I was fortunate enough to attend several Call Center Optimization Forums this year; the first in St. Louis and the last in Anaheim. Representatives from practically every line of business - profit, non profit and government got together to share stories from the front lines. From fashion to medical supplements. From airlines to automobiles. Although the industry and company purpose varied, the challenges and ideas discussed by the attendees, tended to center around 5 key areas this year. Mentioned in no particular order, here are my abridged comments on the conversations that took place:

Voice of the Customer

The big deal - customers decide who wins and by how much in practically every market today, so having a good handle on how they perceive your company, your products and your service has become mission critical, especially in a down economy when growth is expensive without a brand promoting customer base.

Current State - most attendees said they had some form of customer survey process in place yet many lacked actionable insight

Trend - invite every customer to speak their mind. Ask them often and make it very simple for them to give feedback. The hardest part: deciding the few questions that really matter to ask your customers.

Work force management

The big deal - most contact centers still report “days met” for service levels when economical staffing and excellent customer service delivery happen 15 minutes at a time.

Current state - contact center professionals are working hard to find models for hiring part time and split shift employees that can perform at a high level when the amount of time they spend in the craft is often that of a full time employee.

Trend - work at home model explosion as the quality of the workforce coupled with the ability to more accurately staff intervals is leading more and more practitioners to “find a way” through some of the HR and security concerns once holding back the non brick and mortar play.

Hiring

The big deal - turnover strands and destroys the huge time and monetary investment in building the muscle memory needed to deliver a consistently differentiated level of service. Every person lost costs an organization several months of lost productivity.

Current State - the best way to avoid turnover is to identify, attract and hire a better FIT for your center. Many attendees mentioned they had a formalized hiring process aimed at finding employees that will fit their particular culture, work type and schedule. And many of those same people didn’t know if it was working.

Trend - Shocking news but news you can use: it turns out the best way to hire is to take high performance contributors in the center, test them and then look to hire close to the model. Then test the speed to performance and retention of those hired using the instrument and feed back their results into the model so it can “learn” and continue to help you hone your hiring target, message and approach. One novel idea I heard - put job ads on pizza boxes in the area you’re trolling for talent. Clever way of getting your job opening noticed on campus.

Interaction Insight

The big deal - the experience is the differentiator in most highly competitive businesses and yet it is rare to find good, objective and subjective feedback on how well tuned the interaction machine really is.

Current State - most attendees claimed a voice monitoring/recording solution in place. Some have screen capture to go along with voice. A growing yet smaller number suggested they are using screen analytics to tag certain field entries (like customer id or account number) to the interaction recording so they can respond to the customer if warranted post call.

Trend - more frequent and intelligent use of interaction tags such as products ordered, credits applied, account status and account ID so you can filter and focus your monitoring and review efforts to those types of calls or situations where there is real money on the line.

Intelligent Desktop

The big deal - The avalanche of scattered information to be combed through at the desktop is costing companies employees, customers and money.

Current State - some attendees are trying to go uniform first and optimal second. Typically that means trying to migrate to a new CRM system or application suite to retrain all their people on how to use the new application and then they will tweak it to fit their needs over time. Still others are trying to get a few applications pushing and pulling data from one another to try to cut down on duplicate work using desktop or surface integration tools.

Trend - there is growing agreement that much of the customer experience and productivity gap left in customer contact is driven by complexity at the desktop and finding a way for the technology to take more of the burden off the individual employee can have a significant positive ripple effect on the organization. A customer interaction management system can reduce long training paths, cut down on employee frustration and turnover, shorten handle times and ensure the customer knows about solutions relevant to his or her needs. So more and more, attendees are looking for ways to automate manual work processes, guide agents to the next best action or offer, present relevant information about the customer, product or process all on one screen and then tie what’s happened on the desktop to IVR or switch data so they can isolate cost, revenue and quality metrics by call type. Getting a customer routed to the person that can best serve them was yesterday’s dilemma. Making sure that person can deliver a brand-positive and profitable interaction during the moment of truth is where today’s winners and losers of markets will be determined. And that’s precisely why contact professionals are looking to customer interaction management (CIM) solutions for a competitive edge.

Cicero Certified as a Windows 7 Front Runner

We’re delighted to share that Cicero has completed testing and certification to qualify for the “Compatible with Windows 7” title. This certification is based on extensive analysis, input from domain experts and feedback from Microsoft’s OEM , ISV and IHV partners on the challenges they and their customers face. Windows 7 testing targets specific, commonly identified application issues to ensure that Cicero is compatible and reliable on Windows 7. Cicero is also one of the first companies to support our customers in the Windows 7 environment, making us a Windows 7 Front Runner. We’re excited to add yet another operating system to the vast list of applications that we already do support and look forward to leveraging Window 7 support on behalf of our customers.

Cicero Wins American Teleservices Association Technovation Award!

Cicero has been honored by the American Teleservices Association (ATA) with a Technovation award for the Cicero Platform. During the three-day National ATA Convention and Expo, Cicero was judged by a panel of representatives from the software and contact center operations industries to have provided an innovative solution for a problem facing the majority of contact centers; namely the need to bring together data from a variety of applications in a rapid, cost-effective manner.

The Cicero Platform is a leading framework for organizing, integrating and enabling an organization's various enterprise software applications to operate seamlessly on users' desktops. Cicero goes beyond the more typical server-based solutions by non-invasively exploiting the interaction between the applications and the platform on which they run. A set of tools and a structure ("Framework") makes it simple to integrate applications that aren't typically designed to work together onto one desktop, eliminating incompatibility issues while creating operational efficiencies.

We're delighted to have received this award and we're looking forward to continued "technovation" in the future!

Cicero to Present Frost & Sullivan eBraodcast

Today at 2:00 PM ET / 11:00 AM PT, Cicero will participate in a Frost and Sullivan ebroadcast titled "Is Reduction in AHT the Holy Grail? How Improving Processes Can Yield Bigger Results!"

Reducing call time has become the Holy Grail of cost savings in call centers. Although some managers have been successful in shaving a few seconds on calls, many others are falling far short of reducing AHT, improving customer satisfaction, or, in general, improving operating costs.

A better approach is to focus on process improvement where it makes sense - at the customer service reps desktop. By focusing on process improvement at the desktop, call centers can improve customer service reps effectiveness, efficiency and satisfaction - faster than other approaches.

Join Frost & Sullivan, Customer Relationship Metrics and Cicero for a fun, interactive eBroadcast to learn how process improvement should be the goal of call centers and how it can yield results faster than focusing on AHT alone. You will learn:

-Why it is important to focus on reducing the complexity of the work environment for customer service representatives -Why the customer service rep as the focal point is the key to process improvement -How to understand the CSR work environment, their challenges and areas of process improvement -How companies focus on process improvement as the primary goal and the impacts on CSR effectiveness, efficiency and costs -How desktop integration allows you to use your existing technology investments and can be implemented in a matter of weeks and pay for itself in a few months -How well you remember facts through fun trivia from “Monty Python and the Holy Grail”

To register, visit www.ebroadcast.frost.com/holygrail and join us as we discuss call center process improvement where it makes sense – at the CSR desktop. Share and exchange your experience and viewpoints with our panel of experts during our live, interactive Q&A following the presentation.