The way executives view the contact centre, the role the contact centre plays within an organisation, and the delivery of customer service all contribute to the success or failure of a contact centre.
So says Deon Scheepers, strategic consultant at Interactive Intelligence.
According to Scheepers, most contact centres are still viewed as '"cost" centres by organisations with very little value-add; however, the importance of the actual customer experience within South African organisations cannot be underestimated.
"Contact centre managers often do not fully understand the costs involved to service customers, and struggle to sell their value propositions to the greater organisation," says Scheepers.
He says South African contact centres are considering using new ways to improve their customer service and efficiencies, and reduce costs. These include cloud computing, customer self-service options, workforce optimisation technologies, mobile and social media, process automation, and voice of the customer strategies.
On this note, Interactive Intelligence, in partnership with ITWeb, is conducting an online contact centre survey.
Some of the main objectives of the survey are to gain insight into the ownership of customer experience strategies within South African organisations; to understand the importance of the role contact centres play in the delivery of customer experience; and to better understand the products, technologies and interaction channels that are being used by contact centres.
When asked if he believes South African organisations are investing enough resources into their contact centres, Scheepers says: "No. Most South African organisations are still not seeing the contact centre as a cornerstone for their customer experience strategies and they are still running on old, disparate TDM technology and have not migrated to VOIP or SIP technology, which helps reduce costs and improve efficiencies."
Scheepers also points out that, as a result of this lack of investment, most contact centres are a mess of disconnected technology resulting in contact centre interaction and management chaos.
Scheepers says that with the power and voice today's customers have, contact centres can no longer afford to manage their business and customer service without access to accurate, real-time information, and will struggle to provide excellent customer service until they rectify this situation.
"Most South African contact centres are still trying to do workforce management and performance management using static Excel spreadsheets and manual processes. Contact centres must start investigating and investing in the latest technology to help reduce costs and improve efficiency, says Scheepers.
Contact centre success factors
According to Scheepers, there are four main contributing factors to the success of a contact centre: a single, all-in-one platform; a standards-based solution; all-software architecture; and breadth of applications.
"All of these factors will help reduce costs, simplify management, increase interoperability, increase productivity and improve customer service enterprise-wide.
"Customer service levels are poor because contact centres do not have a single view of their customer interactions. This is primarily due to multiple technology platforms, lack of integration between technologies, customer data located in multiple back-end databases, and social media and mobile strategies that are not integrated into the contact centre."
Click here to complete the survey and stand a chance to win an Apple iPad Mini 16GB (WiFi).
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