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Enkata: Correcting Call Center Mistakes You Didn't Know You Were MakingEditorial Director, CUSTOMER INTER@CTION Solutions
San Mateo, California-based Enkata says that its name means "truth" or "spirit" in Ancient Greek. It's true that you learn something new every day.
I recently spoke with Ron Hildebrandt, co-founder and president and responsible for sales and marketing, to catch up with the company, which has announced its impending launch of Enkata 6.0 at the end of the first quarter of 2006. Owing to the company's purchase this year of e-mail management provider ePeople, Enkata 6.0 will offer Web services integration functionality resulting from that acquisition. Version 6.0 will also offer more vertical features for the financial services market.
Enkata, which was formed in 2000, survived the dot-com bust and even prospered through that time. The company sells to after-market customer industries such as telecommunications service providers, financial services companies and health care providers (what some consider to be "the big three" verticals for call center solutions providers). These industries, according to Hildebrandt, have a tremendous amount of operational investment: billing systems, claims, and financial transactions just to start. As competition in these industries broadens, existing providers are under a great deal of pressure to drive costs down, particularly in the call center, and reduce customer churn. The best way to accomplish this (for smart companies, anyway) is to streamline operations. Enkata currently works with some of the largest of the telcos and healthcare providers, and is currently looking to get a better foothold among financial services customers (hence the financial services offerings in Version 6.0). On the healthcare side, United Health Group, Cigna and Aetna are current customers. On the telecommunications side, Hildebrandt told me that the company has a "top three" U.S. company as a customer via Enkata's relationship with Accenture (with which they have a joint marketing relationship). Enkata also boasts Bell Canada and Rogers Communications as customers.
The Enkata product is a vertical industry-specific solution that contains dashboards, scorecards, prepackaged data models, reports and analytics — all the tools that many call centers are looking toward today to drive up efficiency while simultaneously driving down costs. The Enkata solution was created to allow operations people in the three vertical industries to identify which aspects of their business are creating failures, inefficiencies and unnecessary costs.
The company markets its product directly to the VP of operations of any prospective customer. Hildebrandt mentioned that many companies find the solution appealing in that it can be used not only to generate new business, but to make the process of serving current business so efficient, that ROI can be realized from existing operations. He provided an example.
One customer of Enkata saw 40 percent of its phone calls coming from customers that described their issues as "billing issues". The client organization used Enkata to tie those billing calls both to the billing system and also their collections system to better understand why the billing calls were occurring. The organization was pretty sure it knew what the problem was: their bills were confusing. But by streaming the systems together, they discovered that 40 percent of those incoming "billing" calls were actually from customers who were in collections. These customers were receiving a lot of collections contacts and experiencing service disruptions — they were calling to complain.
This discovery prompted the organization to change its collections policies by segmenting their user base into "high risk," "medium risk" and "low risk" so they could tone down their collections notices to match the risk level, which resulted in a vastly lowered level of incoming calls.
By streaming together multiple silos, organizations can make discoveries about their operations that might not be intuitive or even visible to casual examination. The acquisition of ePeople helped Enkata streamline its e-mail management and collaboration, which better enables end users to share information and problem-solve.
Enkata told me that three-quarters of their sales that are still "in the pipeline" will be delivered on-demand (the company offers both on-premise and on-demand solutions). Larger companies, which not very long ago were more likely to look for premise-based software, are beginning to ask for hosted solutions for many of the same reasons SMBs do: less upfront costs, more control over financial distribution of those costs, and less need to keep a large staff of IT administrators.
For more information, visit www.enkata.com.
Tracey Schelmetic is editorial director for CUSTOMER INTER@CTION Solutions. For more articles please visit Tracey Schelmetic’s columnist page.
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