Leading the Call Center Revolution

As enterprises implement customer relationship management (CRM) strategies to focus on customer service, retention and acquisition, customer contact centers (call centers) have increased in strategic importance. Forward-looking executives have leveraged these contact centers with enabling technologies to provide additional services to customers. Customer account inquiries and other transactions that previously involved a live agent can now be efficiently accomplished by Web or telephone. As we move through the Internet era, we encounter a lot of advances in infrastructure that enable new features at lower costs. One of the most exciting technology advances in call centers today is convergence - the merging of data, voice, and video communications over a common network infrastructure. The ability to integrate voice and data traffic across the corporate enterprise and the public Internet enriches call center interactions in ways never possible before. Companies that take early positions in the call center revolution will reap the benefits of increased customer satisfaction, increased revenue opportunities, improved market competitiveness, and improved communication with customers. Moreover, companies can leverage the growing power of the Internet and various multimedia channels into their traditional call center. Web-enabling the call center will provide businesses with a new level of customer service capabilities, as well as greater operator efficiency, and increased cost savings. Integrating other multimedia messaging services with the traditional call centers enable companies to manage flows of queues and service levels for all media types and also track media demand and network utilization for all media types. The functionality is deep, the technology is complex, and the results are strong.

Call Center Software Automation Packages

Call Center Software Automation Packages from companies like Siebel, Vantive and Clarify helps companies take advantage of the growing trend towards "convergence" and helps them migrate their "traditional call centers" to "web-enabled", "virtual", and "multimedia customer interaction centers". The migration process is complex and it involves a myriad of complex technical issues such as network infrastructure, bandwidth issues, skill-based routing, systems interoperability, and media traffic flow, to mention a few. There are a lot of pieces to this puzzle. "Call Center Software Automation Packages" literally mold all the pieces of the puzzle into one comprehensive software suite, thereby facilitating the migration from traditional call centers to customer interaction centers.

Choosing the right vendor

When it comes to Web-enabled call centers and enterprise-level multimedia contact information centers, the call center software automation package that is chosen must meet certain criteria. Certain technological standards and metrics that prevail are:
-Response time to each transaction has to be sub-second
-High transaction volume has to be handled easily.
-Scalability is critical.
-There needs to be a common architecture across all inter-related applications, preferably a single framework.
-A common data model should prevail - one dominant model that allows a single view of the customer to each and all agents. This data model should be concurrent across call centers, not just a sole call center.
-Rapid access to diagnostic information
-Advanced problem tracking
-Automated Intelligent Call Routing
- Logging and Monitoring
-Workforce Management, call volume forecasts, and agent scheduling
-Ease of installation

Managing Risks in an increasingly automated contact center.

An increasing number of customer interactions with the contact center are now automated by self-service applications, including Web sessions and Interactive Voice Response (IVR) transactions. Companies may be exposed to operational and financial risks because of the complexity of innovative contact center technologies, the growing number of potential failure points, and the reduced number of agent interactions that previously provided assurance over the customers experience. The growing complexity of contact center systems, networks and self-service applications increases the probability of failures resulting in customer service problems and reduced contact center performance. There is also the possibility of contact center operational failures and undiscovered customer service problems. A failure with one multimedia access channel could trigger a chain reaction of failures with other multimedia access channels Because of the growing reliance on contact centers, senior executives should be aware of the risks and the resulting impact of contact center failures and inefficiencies even over short periods of times. An effective risk mitigation program requires that the operational integrity of contact centers be closely monitored through a rigorous program of automated testing.

REQUIRED:
A comprehensive quality assurance program that proactively mitigates financial and operational risks in the process of transition towards the Customer Interaction Center. Critical to this is a comprehensive quality assurance program that leverages automated testing tools to provide strong controls over change management, and monitoring of contact center software systems and applications.