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Contactual (News - Alert) has done you a favor.

You want to get the right contact center for your business. Not a “good enough” one, but the right one. To do that you need to ask the right questions when evaluating your options. To do that, you need to know what the right questions are.

That’s where Contactual has done you a favor. Here are five questions you need to ask yourself before you start signing checks for a call center:

What is the primary purpose of this call center? Order desk? IT helpdesk? Telesales? It matters, because it matters which application would best fit your business process units? Does your application require complex queues and/or interactive voice response (IVR) scripts? Or, if you are in regulated industries like healthcare or finance, call recording is required legally.

What issues prompted the need to evaluate your call center now? In other words, are you at this point because your internal PBX (News - Alert) system is frequently failing, causing dropped calls, lost sales opportunities, and irritated customers? Or are you just tired of maintaining an outdated, outmoded call center system? Do you just want to expand to multiple locations or use new technology, maybe to add remote agents without adding a lot of overhead?

What are the feature gaps between your call center needs and your existing call center, and how can you close those gaps? Do you need automated call distribution to help route customers' calls to the best-qualified agent to handle them, thus increasing first-call resolutions? If you had IVR, could you reduce average speed to answer? You need to know which features, if added now, will slash costs and improve productivity across your call center operations.

What does the future hold for your call center? Okay, maybe you don’t need e-mail and chat integration now, but will you in the near future? When you invest in call center technology, Contactual advises, you should take a three-to-five year view of your business landscape.

Which third-party applications will your call center solution need to integrate with? If you already have stuff like CRM, SalesForce.com or something like that, you’ll need call center technology that plays nicely with it.