Five Essentials of the Integrated Call Center
Businesses that want to get closer to their customers are transforming their conventional call centers into multi-channel contact centers that support telephone, e-mail and the Web. Multiple technologies must be integrated with a single goal; to improve the way a company does business by enhancing the customer relationship through enriching the quality of the contact.
The ability to integrate communications and contact management systems can make the difference between attracting and retaining long-term customers, or just treading water.
- Open systems foundation
Solutions today must be based on an open systems (standards based) communications platform. This increases the ability to easily integrate voice and data management. Stepping away from complex, expensive, proprietary telephony systems and eliminating the need for proprietary network components and gateways will greatly simplify application integration, infrastructure management and reduce operational costs while laying the foundation for better customer experience/service/personal experience.
- Adopt Self-Service Applications
Modern IP contact center software gives you sophisticated automation and integration options that help cut the costs of staffing and running your contact center. For example, self-service applications allow customers to do business with you when and how they want. Customers can complete transactions, initiate requests, or check account balances at any time. These self service options can be easily deployed to improve service options without tying up live agents.
- Extend your network with VoIP
Businesses can unify communications between departments and multiple sites to gain tremendous efficiencies by connecting their phone systems to their data network, via Voice over IP. With VoIP, you can easily add and reduce staff based on seasonal sales cycles; and you can add remote agents as easily as you can add them in your headquarters, without the need for special hardware, proprietary solutions or office space.
With VoIP you can seamlessly transfer calls across locations and implement a company-wide extension plan that works regardless of employee location. This means employees from different branches could be part of a single service group.
Connecting multiple sites and/or remote agents into a single system allows your customer relations to follow the sun. This improved utilization of employees across locations helps the integrated call center employees communicate with each other and customers as if they were in the same location. This transparency to both employees and customers promotes easy navigation and an enhanced calling experience. For customers, it means never worrying about where a particular employee or service is located. They can be automatically routed or quickly transferred to any location allowing employees to assist other locations as needed during peak activity while employees with special skills can be shared across locations or departments.
- Enable seamless integration of your contact center with other customer information applications
The marriage of CRM and VoIP call-center technology should be making people think of marketing, sales, service desks, call centers and CRM as complementary facets of a single, customer relationship “bead” threaded across all other operational strings. For example, screen pops with customer information pulled from contact management systems provide call-center reps with insight for resolving callers’ needs – before the phone is answered.
Now, extend all of that increased efficiency still further by merging sales and marketing with service – through the call center. It’s a crossroads of simultaneous emotional and business transactions that directly impact customer loyalty.
- Quality Management and Call Recording
Only with proactive quality management can customer interaction be analyzed and trends in customer needs, or in the way employees are meeting customer demands, be identified. This enables managers to refine corporate plans and behavior intelligently.
By Greg Anderson, Senior Director of Product Marketing for FrontRange Solutions
A virtual call center is a call center that can function using the Internet as their infrastructure. A call center is a business that works by absorbing certain business functions of a corporation so that the client organization is free to concentrate on other business functions to stay competitive in its industry. Hence, all call centers need a call center solution that can help make the call center more productive and more profitable. One such virtual call center solution is the Oracle Contact Center Anywhere call center software which is now being offered by Promero (a Certified Partner of the software manufacturer Oracle.)
The first benefit of using this virtual call center solution is that the call center agents need not be concentrated within just one geographical location. Rather, the call center company can become a virtual call center running different smaller virtual call center facilities in different places. This means that though your main contact center may be located in the US, the virtual call center technology allows the company to also have a virtual call center in the Philippines, a virtual call center in Indonesia, and maybe a virtual call center in India (as deemed necessary by your company.) This makes the Oracle Contact Center Anywhere call center solution a boon to companies that need to have dispersed operations throughout the world.
Second, this call center software is said to provide excellent return-on-investment for the call center company using it because it can heighten agent productivity. A company that can achieve high return-on-investment is one that can live to fight another day with a war chest intact.
Third, the call center technology behind this Oracle call center software come with various tools that all aim to boost productivity for each agent.
Fourth, it is adaptable for use by a virtual call center of any size. So whether you have one virtual call center in Manila, Philippines which is manned by just 10 agents while another virtual call center of yours based in Calcutta, India has 100 agents, this virtual call center software can be scaled up or scaled down as needed for your enterprise.
Fifth, this virtual call center solution is reliable enough to serve as a back-up disaster recovery system for the contact center, guaranteeing that the system will always be functional throughout all aspects of the call center system.
Sixth, call center technology has progressed so much with this virtual call center solution that supervisors can monitor and guide agents even from remote locations. This means that if you are a contact center supervisor based in the US and you have an agent in the India who needs help during a call, the Oracle call center software will permit that in real time.
Seventh, the Call Recording function of this call center technology permits the call center virtual transactions to be recorded appropriately so that the call center staff can review the details of the transactions as needed.
Eight, the virtual call center software uses call center technology that is compatible with every phone type.
Ninth, this virtual cal center solution from Oracle is compatible with nearly every type of hardware configuration.
Lastly, customer relationship management improves because agents are able to meet more needs even for the same prospect or customer with a more effective call center solution.
So if you are planning to put up a call center of your own, no matter how small or large, you may want to consider using the Oracle Contact Center Anywhere product instead available from Promero.
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Improving Contact Center Service and Performance
