CEO and founder Ric Kosiba has been visiting Australia this week promoting the product to Interactive’s existing Australian clients. Bay Bridge Decision Support uses a complex mathematical technique known as discrete event simulation to model many aspects of call centre load. Kosiba developed it in the 1990s after stints in the US Air Force and as a senior load management analyst at Northwest Airlines.
Kosiba said the technique needs considerable computing power, and until recently was simply too slow for complex real world analytics. “It’s used a lot in gaming. But now the computer power is there, and we ca use it to do very powerful things,” he told iTWire.
“We can use it to predict whether a contact centre will need more staff – or fewer,” said Kosiba. “We can model the effects of acquisition – when call centres merge. We can tell if and when staff reductions will cause a deterioration in service. We can show who are the most effective operators, so they can be moved to higher value areas.”
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Kosiba says that Bay Bridge’s product is unique in the industry. “All the contact centre packages have some sort of staff planning, but none do the kind of predictive analytics we do. Most people to workforce management on spreadsheets – we have turned it into a science.”
NASDAQ listed Interactive is a major player in the contact centre automation market. It has annual revenues of US$209 million. Its major competitors are Cisco, Avaya and Genesys. It has 60 staff in Australia, and customers including Toyota Financial Services, Teachers credit Union, Macquarie Telecom, Sensis, and a number of councils and universities.
Kosiba did not make any sales on his trip to Australia – the intention was to introduced the product to Interactive clients. “We’ve had a great reaction,” he said. “They simply haven’t seen anything like this. Australian contact centre analysts seem very capable, and reporting here is probably more advanced than in the US.
“We never previously marketed into Australia – or anywhere else outside of the US and Canada. We simply didn’t have the resources. Now Interactive’s sales team can sell it worldwide.”
