Call Center Management Featured Article
Fly Jamaica Turns Up Call Center
Business can be unpredictable. And the airline industry is more unpredictable than most. Sophisticated aircraft sometimes require checks and fixes. And severe weather can mess with flight schedules.
Such issues and delays can lead to a flood of calls and other inquiries into airlines’ customer service centers. So it’s nice to have the ability to quickly bring up call center resources to address the load.
That’s exactly what Fly Jamaica recently did in light of flight cancellations and delays due to maintenance on its planes and the domino effect of the U.S. snow storms. The company reportedly established a 24-hour call center to serve passengers stranded in Guyana and other locations. It decided to take this step following a meeting of the Civil Aviation Authority.
Cloud communications enables businesses to quickly and easily set up call centers because the software lives in the network as opposed to on the business’s premises. That means organizations can spin up call center seats – or call centers themselves – on demand.
These call centers, as Genesys (News - Alert) explains, “Leverage the flexibility and speed of the cloud. With rapid update deployment, you’re always on the cutting edge. And flexible terms enable you to scale your tools up or down easily as your business needs evolve due to market changes and seasonal peaks.”
Gartner’s 2017 Cloud Contact as a Service Magic Quadrant ranks Five9, Nice inContact, and Genesys as the leaders. Serenova and 8x8 (News - Alert) are the challengers in this category. Aspect, West, TeleTech, and Evolve IP are the niche players in this category. And Gartner considers BroadSoft and Talkdesk CCaaS visionaries.
“Contact center as a service (CCaaS) solutions offer the same functions and capabilities required to operate call and contact centers as premises-based contact center infrastructure,” notes Gartner (News - Alert). “The functions that organizations consider when reviewing their contact center requirements include automatic call distribution (ACD); computer-telephony integration; interactive voice response (IVR); and universal queuing of internet channels, such as email, chat, short message service (SMS), social media and video. Also, abilities to support virtual operations, remote agents and subject matter experts residing outside traditional contact center operations. Moreover, proactive contact, including outbound dialing, email notifications, customer relationship tracking, management and operational support applications, including reporting, analytics, self-service portals and workforce optimization (WFO).”
Edited by Mandi Nowitz