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eLoyalty History
In May 1999, eLoyalty Company made the bold and promising move to incorporate the ECM business unit as a wholly owned subsidiary of TSC. This was the first of many successive steps eLoyalty took to eventually become a freestanding player in the CRM market. On February 16, 2000, eLoyalty was successful in attaining its goal of publicly trading as an independent company. "Spinning out an existing company and creating a new one on the fly is not a goal in itself, it's just a milestone," said Kelly Conway, eLoyalty's CEO. "What you're trying to do is build a great company." A look at how eLoyalty achieved important milestones begins with the first generation of call centers. These call centers came out of necessity, the higher volumes of business being transacted over the telephone prompted their beginning. In this generation of call centers, agents had a versatile skill set and were able to accommodate calls of varying degrees and subjects. To compensate for the immediate technical needs, desktop applications were repurposed from other parts of the business to fit the call center needs. The Automatic Call Distributor (ACD) functioned as the call center operations hub by providing the necessary routing and load balancing capability, although this was a very limited capability. eLoyalty triumphed by being the first company to use intelligent routing rules to route calls and "pop" a desktop application (Computer Telephony Integration or "CTI") for the purposes of customer service. This was not only a milestone achieved for eLoyalty, but for the progress of CRM. As call centers became the norm, the second generation evolved from the need to be efficient. In this genre of call centers, metrics were beginning to come into play, and to alleviate the rise of call handle time, agents were being trained to specialize in a variety of areas. To accommodate such advancement, CTI technology, automated call direction, and skill-based routing were born. As a result of such powerful technologies, economies of scale were found and great leaps forward were realized for call centers. By this time, eLoyalty had expanded its practice twofold: eLoyalty expanded to include a presence in Europe, and secondly, grew its practice to include areas such as assessment and operational offerings, strategy, IVR, call routing, and CTI. By pacifying the bare necessities and then the drive for efficiency, the third generation of call centers was developed with the goal of effectiveness in mind. By now, eLoyalty had become the pioneer of CRM processes, methodology, and technology. Advances in intelligent scripting, enterprise workflow, and knowledge-base support were leveraged to improve an agent's ability to resolve the increasingly (and often multiple) complex problems posed by a single interaction, or call. Rather than train agents in a more general or specialized curriculum, technology played a key role. First, and foremost, with the additional channels of contact coming into play (Web, e-mail, face-to-face, fax, traditional mail, and phone calls), the call center label evolved to become the contact center, thus reflecting the full range of contact options available to customers. To manage the increasingly more complex and multiple incoming channels of requests, work resources were distributed (physically and logistically) to manage the intellectual weight. As a result, work was channeled to the Web as a form of self-service, and other simple tasks were outsourced. "The company is the world's first and only global business/management consulting and systems integration organization focused exclusively on building customer loyalty." www.executiveselect.com, July 13, 2000 eLoyalty now rides the crest of a new wave of CRM. The next generation of contact centers will be driven by the ability to measure the exact items that affect customer behavior. The ability to create mutually beneficial customer experiences from high-impact interactions will make the next generation of contact centers a distinct strategic asset for leading businesses. The customer experience will be managed using a combination of self-service, outsourced services, and a continuous validation of the customer experience, loyalty, and whether such measures are falling in line with the strategic direction. The next generation of contact centers will encompass the best-in-class practices as seen throughout the contact center evolution. Moreover, the five active aspects of a call center (technology infrastructure, resource capability, resource allocation, physical structure, and analytical measurement) will experience significant changes in the near term as the next generation of contact centers emerge and succeed. eLoyalty has implemented full-scope solutions, which include strategy and financial analytics (Value from and Value to the Customer Analysis), contact center assessments, marketing analytics, and technical architecture analysis. At a ripple ahead, eLoyalty will be the one to watch as new benchmarks of achievement are realized in the CRM arena. |
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