Integration: a new challenge for the profitable contact centre

Flexible, resilient contact centres that deliver cost savings, greater organisational effectiveness and improved communications are easily accessible for businesses today.

So says Mark Edwards, director of product and services at Intuate Group, a privately owned broad-based IT company and local reseller of contact centre solution provider, Noble Systems, who believes that contact centre integration is the key to achieving these competitive advantages.

“Whether it be via acquisition or outright product purchase, many companies are left with expensive, siloed contact centres technologies that are unable to communicate with other multi-vendor systems within the business,” he explains.

“This type of situation will never deliver a high quality customer experience as it means that contact centre operatives are severely limited in what they can do. They may have to access a number of different systems during a call in order to retrieve any information they might need or may not be able to gain access to it at all.
 
“And if your agents aren’t armed with the business intelligence information they need, they might as well be ‘cold calling’.”

Edwards maintains that with improved customer satisfaction and the related revenue generation being the main aims of today’s contact centre, this type of interaction is not permissible.

“By integrating the contact centre with other systems and applications used within the organisation, businesses can improve and personalise the user experience, enhance call quality, reduce call times and data entry errors and decrease the training time required. Not only this, but it also helps protect technology investments by providing access to existing environments.

“Back office integration is key, as it means that agents are provided with an easy-to-use single panel view, which greatly improves efficiencies,” he explains. “This is achievable through a standards-based, unified contact centre platform that includes all of the key technologies needed by today’s contact centre, from predictive dialling and inbound contact management to workflow management and real-time reporting.

“So, look for a technology suite that can be implemented quickly and easily and will integrate systems and applications into a single, unified platform, and get the most out of your contact centre!”