Feb 4th, 2011

The Internet has brought about a revolution in the world of customer service over the last decade. Today’s customers expect to be able to contact organisations at their own convenient time and more importantly, by their own choice of channel technology such as SmartPhone, email, web chat, Instant Messaging (IM) or social networks.  Furthermore, they expect better, faster and more effective service than ever before, regardless of the method of communication.

Contact Centres have become key in light of the above. They’re the most logical department to deal with these communications as they already possess knowledge about the company, its products and services as well have as access to customer files and business applications.

Says Paul Fick, MD at Spescom DataFusion, “Being able to adapt to new trends and customer requirements provides contact centres with a competitive edge, a pressing issue for organisations when considering the highly aggressive environment that companies have to succeed in.  However, the ability to interact with the explosion of channels that the Internet has spurred is no longer regarded as a competitive edge but rather a necessity.  In addition, the market is fuelled by the ‘need for speed’, further creating pressure for organisations and more specifically, their Contact Centres.”

However, in order to deliver an efficient and speedier customer service through these Internet channels, fulfilling customer demands, Contact Centres need to implement technologies that can handle automatic multi-channel classification and prioritisation, universal queuing, multi-channel and multi-service blending, unify reporting, response templates and knowledge base, web collaboration, web callback and so forth.

The Contact Centre is no longer regarded as just a call centre, but rather the main source of interaction with many different interfaces.

“Contact Centres don’t manage calls but rather manage customers,” remarks Araceli Aranda, Presence Technology’s CEO. “It is highly important that Contact Centres count on the right tools to manage interactions via the Internet.”

When a Contact Centre is prepared to satisfy these needs, it drastically improves its customer satisfaction, optimises resources, reduces costs and, in most cases, significantly improves productivity. To achieve this goal, organisations need to choose the right ‘All-in-One’ suite which is able to efficiently handle phone calls, emails, faxes, SMS, web chats, web call back and social media and, in addition, provide support to handle administrative tasks. Multi-channel interfacing is crucial to satisfy client’s behavioural trends and is even more relevant when considering the fact that ‘Generation Z’ – those born in the early 1990′s onwards, also known as the Net Generation – is forming a large percentage of a company’s customer base.

It is just as critical for Contact Centres to look toward implementing a flexible module that manages their inbound voice communications, allowing easy integration with corporate tools such as Customer Relationship Management (CRM) applications and databases, providing the agents with resources to review customer information through a pop-up window when a call is presented to them, delivering the most efficient and effective quickest call management possible. This reduces the time it takes to identify a client and retrieve a call history screen, allowing the agent to be more productive and faster.

Another important tool is an intelligent routing module which enables Contact Centres to route any multi-media customer interaction to the most appropriate agent. Every interaction that arrives independently of the channel has to be routed according to a set of business rules that is fully synchronised with the Automatic Call Distribution (ACD) engine.

On top of this framework, organisations need additional modules that can be integrated ‘out-of-the-box’, extending the solution’s capabilities to handle all actual and future channels, allowing for interaction with customers on a fully blended environment.  However, this also provides a consolidated reporting platform with unified administration and a supervision front-end which simplifies and speeds up the contact centre management.

Adds Fick, “Underpinning the success of this technology is having the right partner.  It is crucial to engage with a company that understands the contact centre’s requirements and possesses the expertise, ‘know how’ and experience to implement and integrate these solutions.”

Only then will organisations will be able to guarantee the highest productivity and customer satisfaction, an increase in first contact resolution and reduction in overall handling time.”