Trends in the Contact Center (part 3)

Welcome back to the Touchpoint Blog. In this installment, we’re going to continue discussing Trends in the Contact Center. In the first installment we discussed the drivers. The second installment covered the first three trends. To continue with the next three trends, we’re going to discuss:

All in One Solutions
Business Knowledge
Multi-Media (including Presence)


All in One Solutions
This can be defined as a single vendor with a suite of Contact Center functions within a single platform with a common management interface. In the past, many customers preferred to deploy “best of breed” solutions, meaning the highest rated individual components were connected together to create a single contact center solution. A customer may have had one brand of PBX, a second brand of Contact Center software, a third vendor for IVR, etc. This was typically done to get the best features from each of the vendor solutions. In the not too distant past, you had to sacrifice features and functionality to get a single vendor solution. Today, we are seeing All in One vendors with increased functionality across the breadth of their product line, and this has made this option more attractive.

A major driver for customers buying into these products is a reduction in the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) by:
-Reducing the management costs via the single management and administration interface tool.
-Providing an easy point of entry into advanced applications that would be difficult to cost justify if buying the solutions independently


Business Knowledge
Some have called this “one to one marketing”, or the ability to tailor a customer’s experience to a customer’s desire. The most common way of doing this in a contact center is to utilize a CRM package that allows a firm to make intelligent decisions about a customer interaction based on their past experiences. A simple example of this is routing callers to the same representative so that there is continuity in service. While we haven’t yet seen a large deployment in technology on the routing side, we have seen firms desire to merge the Contact Center statistics with the Business statistics so that they have a better understanding of the customer experience. This trend is moving tracking of interactions from traditional statistics (average speed of answer, average handle time, etc.) to measuring the actual customer experience that establishes a relationship between an individual call and the business outcome of that call.

Multi-Media (including Presence)
In the past, this terminology referred to the addition of email contacts, changing a “Call” Center to a “Contact” Center. Many firms accomplished this by leveraging the voice routing software, and creating separate queues for voice calls and emails. As firms search for ways to streamline and create operational efficiencies, that the trend will move more towards creating single, or “virtual”, queues that allow multi-media (voice, email, and web chat) into the Contact Center.

A new form of Multi-Media incorporates the use of Presence. The more common term for this technology is Instant Messaging (or IM), but it’s also known as SIP (Session Initiation Protocol). With all of the acronyms used in the last sentence, I can see how this can be a confusing topic!

Even if your Contact Center is not using an official Instant Messaging product (such as Microsoft Office Communicator) I can almost guarantee you that your agents are using some version of an Instant Messaging Client (such as AIM or Yahoo Instant Messenger). The main issue with these rogue IM Clients is a lack of corporate security. In addition, using this capability outside the Contact Center reporting does not capture the full customer experience, which is clearly a goal of management.

One of the main values of SIP, or "presence”, is in locating “expert” resources that are available, and contacting them via their preferred mode or channel of communications. That means that some resources may be available to email or chat, but are not available to accept a phone call. The goal is to increase First Call Resolution.

The efficiency and productivity enhancements for implementing presence can be dramatic. It should be noted, however, that in order for this technology to be effective, it must be properly managed. Establishing the proper priorities and chains of command for expert resources will be critical. In addition, the ability to measure the total customer experience, including the use of experts in the interaction, will also be a determinant as to the success of SIP in the Contact Center.

This wraps up my guest blog (for now). Thanks for following along with me!

Diane will return next week to start talking about the proper deployment of technology. Overcoming the pitfalls in installing technology is doable, but requires dedication to a defined methodology.