Call Center Management Featured Article
Make the Contact Center the Foundation of a Company, Not an Afterthought
For many companies, the contact center has traditionally been a “necessary evil.” It was a function tacked on to the company – or outsourced entirely – only because companies grudgingly understood that they had to offer a modicum of customer support for their products and services. It was a cost-center, or a profit sink-hole, and few companies rushed to ensure it was properly equipped and staffed.
That model is (or should be) long dead. The contact center of the twenty-first century should be a modern foundation for a company, not an after-thought. In a recent blog post, Monet Software CEO Chuck Ciarlo describes a survey conducted by customer support analytics company ForeSee in which customers’ experiences were studied to see how they affected the company’s future success.
“They found they satisfied customers are far more likely to remain customers, and to make a similar purchase again from the same company,” wrote Ciarlo. “Even more significant, however, is the willingness of a happy customer to recommend the company to a friend, family member of colleague. Thus, one customer who has a positive experience with your agents may create many new customers.”
In light of statistics like these, companies can no longer consider the contact center an isolated cost center that is operated as an after-thought. Call centers today should be the clearing houses not only for calls but also every other type of media transaction: emails, mobile apps, chat, SMS and social media. In the near future, Web-based multimedia interactions enabled by the WebRTC standard may enter the mix, bringing even live video chat to bear. The importance of the contact center will only escalate.
It sounds daunting, particularly for a company that has always considered its contact center to be a barely-necessary burden to operations. Many companies will fret that they don’t have the right technologies in place, they don’t have enough agents (or properly trained ones), and there isn’t enough inter-connectivity with other critical departments like sales and marketing, or back-office functions. While this is true for a lot of companies, according to Ciarlo, remedying the problem is easier than many organizations today think.
“The prospects of delivering those happier customers become much easier with the right technology tools in place,” he wrote. “And now that these sophisticated solutions are available via the cloud, even smaller and midsized contact centers can provide optimal service without a huge upfront investment.’”
Thanks to cloud-based contact center technologies, companies hoping to bring their operations into the 21st century can do so quickly and without huge upfront capital investments. They can connect remote and distributed offices and even use the services of home-based agents easily, bringing their customer support forward half a century – and their contact centers back into the light -- in a matter of weeks or even days.