Due to the Internet revolution, customers now expect to be able to contact organisations at their convenience and - more importantly - by their choice of technology.
This is according to Paul Fick, MD at Spescom DataFusion, who notes that in the face of the multi-channel explosion - with new platforms like smartphones, e-mail, Web chat, instant messaging or social networks - contact centres have become the focal point to meet customer needs.
Furthermore, he explains that customers expect better, faster and more effective service than ever before, regardless of the method of communication.
He also believes that contact centres are the most logical departments to deal with these communications, as they already possess knowledge about the company, its products and services, as well as having access to customer files and business applications.
"Being able to adapt to new trends and customer requirements provides contact centres with a competitive edge, a pressing issue for organisations when considering the highly aggressive environment that companies have to succeed in.
“However, the ability to interact with the explosion of channels that the Internet has spurred is no longer regarded as a competitive edge, but rather a necessity.
“In addition, the market is fuelled by the 'need for speed', further creating pressure for organisations and more specifically, their contact centres," says Fick.
He also notes that in order to deliver more efficient and faster customer service through these Internet channels, contact centres need to implement technologies that can handle automatic multi-channel classification and prioritisation.
Fick urges contact centres to employ universal queuing, multi-channel and multi-service blending, unify reporting, response templates and knowledge base, Web collaboration, and Web call back.
“The contact centre is no longer regarded as just a call centre, but rather the main source of interaction with many different interfaces”.
Araceli Aranda, CEO at Presence Technology, says: "Contact centres don't manage calls but rather manage customers. It is highly important that contact centres count on the right tools to manage interactions via the Internet."
To achieve this goal, she says, organisations need to choose the right 'all-in-one' suite, able to efficiently handle all forms of communication and provide support to handle administrative tasks as well.
“Multi-channel interfacing is crucial to satisfy client's behavioural trends and is even more relevant when considering the fact that 'Generation-Z' - those born in the early 1990s onwards, also known as the net generation - is forming a large percentage of a company's customer base,” says Aranda.
She also notes that it is just as critical for contact centres to look towards implementing a flexible module that manages their inbound voice communications, allowing easy integration with corporate tools such as customer relationship management applications and databases.
This reduces the time it takes to identify a client and retrieve a call history screen, allowing the agent to be more productive and faster, she notes.
Aranda says another important tool is an intelligent routing module which enables contact centres to route any multimedia customer interaction to the most appropriate agent.
“Every interaction that arrives independently of the channel has to be routed according to a set of business rules that is fully synchronised with the automatic call distribution engine.
“On top of this framework, organisations need additional modules that can be integrated 'out-of-the-box', extending the solution's capabilities to handle all actual and future channels, allowing for interaction with customers on a fully blended environment,” she says.
Fick believes that this also provides a consolidated reporting platform with unified administration and a supervision front-end which simplifies and speeds up the contact centre management.
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