An Informal Contact Center Offers Massive Benefits at an Affordable Price Point
January 15, 2015
By Laura Stotler
TMCnet Contributing Editor
Contact centers can offer huge benefits to an organization, but unfortunately, they typically come with a huge price tag (News - Alert) and infrastructure investment. The good news is that technology advances now enable the setup of an “informal” contact center environment that can provide many of the same benefits for a fraction of the cost.
ISI Telemanagement Solutions (News - Alert), a company that specializes in call accounting and reporting software, has drafted a blueprint for setting up an informal contact center. The objective of putting together this type of solution is to offer a centralized location for handling all incoming calls to an organization at a low price point. This can range from a small structured group like an internal help desk, to a disparate group of workers from the sales, service and technical sides of your organization who work together to handle incoming service requests.
The primary consideration is, of course, cost. Companies must figure out how much they are willing to invest in this type of solution and that budget should take into account the types of capabilities immediately needed. For instance, some organizations may need call recording or some type of compliance solution with speech analysis to keep agents in check. Other companies may require a call reporting or accounting solution. Adopting a flexible and scalable call control platform enables these types of features to be rolled out on an as needed basis, or as budgets allow for them.
Along those same lines, flexibility is a pretty crucial component of any type of solution. Some companies’ call control needs fluctuate on a seasonal basis and being able to adjust for variable call volumes on the fly is critically important for these organizations. Similarly, scalability is also crucial as companies grow and their call volumes shrink or increase based on all types of factors. Being able to easily and affordably scale out your solution as well as add and take away features is a major component for keeping costs down.
ISI recommends a flexible platform like Cisco (News - Alert) or Microsoft as the building block for an informal contact center. Beginning with a basic platform enables a wide variety of add-ons to be easily integrated as needed. Features like workforce management, collaboration and recording and call accounting and reporting may all be easily implemented on the fly, at an affordable price point. These types of platforms also enable advanced features like voice traffic analysis and network planning, telecom expense management (TEM) and audit and UC features like video, instant messaging and speech analytics.
No matter what an organization’s immediate needs are, an informal contact center can be a powerful solution for keeping customers happy while also providing a company with immediate and actionable information about operations and communications.