Thought Leaders In Cloud Computing: Carol Kline, CIO Of TeleTech (Part 7)

By Sramana Mitra and guest author Shaloo Shalini

SM: Now, another thought that came to mind as you were talking about recording all your different calls is, What kind of analytics do you do on those calls? Are you converting them from speech to text and then running analytics on them? How do you analyze them?

CK: There is couple of levels [of analysis]. There is a base called monitoring, our associates following processes [to ensure] they are handling the call appropriately. This is a base level of evaluation. Part of that evaluation is automated, and we have a speech analytics capability for specific analysis of call drivers, patterns, behaviors, or whatever it might be.

SM: And what technology do you use for that?

CK: We use Nexidia for that.

SM: And this is happening in the cloud? All the calls are being rolled up for or are in the private cloud in one central database where you are running this?

CK: Not all of our calls are speech analyzed, but when they are, yes, that is what happens.

SM: I see. I guess for my last question, I wouldn’t call it a trend; it is more of a phenomenon. The large applications that people are building companies around or vendors are coming to you with solutions or coming to companies with solutions, these applications are specific to a certain industry, company, or business. Do you have such long-tail applications for which you are building technology in-house, cloud technology in particular?

CK: For call recording technology there are two or three anchor enterprise-class products in the marketplace, but we chose to build in-house and serve it as cloud based. This [decision] was primarily based on our scale, what we support around the globe.

So, there are traditional licensing models for that, and most enterprise-class companies are purchasing a handful of players’ products. We built our own. We have an offering for the marketplace right now with Cisco and Salesforce as an example. It is called the Customer Interaction Cloud. It is basically a contact center in a box that Salesforce was thinking about for their service cloud offering. They had a base of customers that were saying, ‘This entire infrastructure automatic call distribution (ACD) telephony infrastructure is so hard; can you make it easy?’ So Salesforce went to Cisco and said that their clients had a need for such a thing, and they would like to make it easy. Cisco came to us and said, ‘You are one of the leading providers of contact center ACD telephony infrastructure, can we partner?’ Cisco provides technology, but they don’t provide a managed service.

So, in our relationship with Cisco, Cisco came to me and asked if TeleTech would be willing to be a hosted provider of infrastructure. This offering is CTI integrated through a middleware box into Salesforce’s service cloud, which will be made available to a mid-market client base. It is clearly geared toward the typical smaller business. Middle market businesses typically may not be able to afford the support of that infrastructure, but in a hosted model with our kind of scale, we were able to provide that for them. Part of the platform that we used was the Oracle BEA middleware layer, and two of my employees were named Cloud Architects of the Year for Oracle for working on that implementation.

I think it has two sides. We have to deal with scale, so we take advantage of the cloud. The other side is because of our scale, we were able to capitalize on the cloud, and we were able to create a business model around it where maybe there was a gap.

SM: Very interesting. This has been an extremely interesting discussion. Thank you, Carol, for your time.

CK: Thank you.

This segment is part 7 in the series : Thought Leaders In Cloud Computing: Carol Kline, CIO Of TeleTech
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