The contact centre of today is made up of various communication and management solutions. But, despite this inherent complexity, it's essential that the contact centre does not stand isolated as a silo within the business.
This is according to Jeff Bowyer, sales and marketing manager at Jasco Enterprise, a communications solutions provider to enterprises.
To Bowyer, selecting the right contact centre technology allows organisations to tightly integrate their contact centres with core business processes such as customer relationship management and enterprise resource planning systems.
By joining up the environments, the contact centre functions as an effective conduit between a business and its customers - to ultimately deliver the best experience to customers, says Bowyer.
However, it's only possible if contact centres are in touch with what's happening at the business process level.
Across any channel - from inbound to outbound lines, Web chats, interactive voice response, e-mail, SMS, instant messaging, social media and so on - there needs to be a seamless, two-way flow of critical information between the customer and the business, explains Bowyer.
With the right infrastructure, configured in the right way, the organisation maximises the benefits of each of these channels, he adds.
Also, it allows the contact centre to adapt to changing customer or business demands, adding new channels where necessary, and scaling out the team 'on the fly' for major outbound campaigns.
He points out that, too often; organisations fail to tightly integrate the contact centre environment with existing core processes.
Valuable customer data from the frontline is never fed into the decision-making processes - whether it be individual product designs, business strategy, or anything in between, he adds.
Bowyer believes businesses require a deep understanding and more experience in the fields of contact centres, business systems and business processes to design the kinds of elegant and effective integration that deliver true, sustainable business value.
He adds that the only way to truly achieve contact centre return on investment (ROI) is by having close ties to the organisation's inner workings.
There are many ways in which truly-aligned contact centres deliver tangible ROI to businesses - from increases in agent productivity, to improved sales conversions, reduced downtime and risk reduction.
Tight contact centre integration reduces the need for manual processes and ad hoc reports from contact centre managers, says Bowyer. It aligns the business vision with the customer service operations, delivers useful insights to business owners across the organisation, and tightly links the customer with the business.
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