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InContact: What Does A Cloud-Based Contact Center Look Like?

InContact: What Does A Cloud-Based Contact Center Look Like?

September 08, 2011
By David Sims, TMCnet Contributing Editor

When you hear talk about a “cloud based contact center,” what do you actually visualize? A bunch of people sitting on clouds, wearing headphones? A server farm humming quietly?

Kind of a hard thing to visualize, really -- as Kevin Jensen, Director, Professional Services, Business Consulting at inContact says in a recent blog post on the issue, it “really has no pre-defined shape or parameters that it has to conform to.”


And this is a good thing. As he says, if a cloud-based contact center needs to add additional ports, “that activity can be accomplished very easily without adding any additional customer-purchased hardware,” as opposed to a traditional premised based system, where “there are limits on scalability that often times result in additional hardware needing to be added.”

With enterprise-class cloud contact center technology, as Jensen says, any customer in the world who’s online can get an online call center without the time or expense of putting in your own equipment -- “Instead of having to install separate boxes for an ACD, IVR, Dialer, CTI (News - Alert) interface, reporting engine,” with the inContact product, you get access to all of it in one cloud-based app.

Recently inContact released [http://www.tmcnet.com/channels/hosted-call-center/articles/88854-incontact-ebook-outlines-five-best-practices-ivr.htm] an eBook including a list of five IVR best practices, which they describe as "methods have been developed by call center experts with years of experience in the call center space."

The IVR Road Map: One Internet service provider had big plans for their IVR. Instead of tackling everything at once, they prioritized what things could help them the most and tackled them one at a time. They started by implementing a simple IVR process that informed customers when there was an outage in their zip code. With that little piece of functionality, callers could quickly determine whether they simply needed to wait for a regional issue to be resolved or had a service issue that needed to be proactively addressed.

Keep it Simple: One inbound sales contact center tried to put their entire product inventory in their IVR system. They went to a lot of trouble, and actually got it working. However, after all that work, they discovered that the number of products and required IVR choices were very frustrating to callers. Without an agent to help, callers abandoned the effort and sales were lost.


David Sims is a contributing editor for TMCnet. To read more of David’s articles, please visit his columnist page. He also blogs for TMCnet here.

Edited by Chris DiMarco



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