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Hosted Call Center Lets Home Decor Retailer Focus on Core Competency

By Linda Dobel, TMCnet Contributor

It’s an age-old conundrum in business. To be the best, the most unique and the most innovative, you need to laser focus and seriously concentrate on your core competency But where does that leave your customers? Every business that intends to succeed carves out a niche for catering to its customers, and those that are most successful treat this area of business with the same seriousness as they do their core competency.

The problem that has plagued more than too many businesses over the years is the ordeal created by premise-based equipment. What many are now learning is cloud-based technology lets them get back to concentrating on core competencies while still providing a dynamic customer experience.

That is the case for a retailer of clothing and home decor products that markets and sells most of its products through catalogs and e-commerce. While the retailer said its contact center is highly valued because it provides the only human contact its customers have with the company, it also found that it was devoting much too much energy and time tending to aging premise-based technologies and redundant servers across multiple locations, upgrading firmware, etc.   

Recognizing that it needed to make a change but continue to “put a premium on providing its customers with a leading experience with every call,” this week the retailer announced it has chosen a hosted call center solution from inContact, a leading provider of cloud-based contact center software and contact center agent optimization tools, to power its service and support center. It was reported in the announcement that the company feels the move to a hosted call center model will “free management to focus their time and efforts on the company's business strategy.”

Paul Jarman, inContact CEO, said the inContact cloud-based solution allows companies including the retailer to “benefit from built-in redundancy, ongoing upgrades and the ability to deploy the software easily to any location,” all of which allow them to achieve the goal of being “free to focus on their core business.”

The inContact solution will enable the retailer to scale “to support seasonal shifts in staffing” and it will help with the support of agents who work at home for the company. Disaster recovery is another area the inContact solution will support, and the retailer will have the added benefit of using inContact’s professional services to help it apply best practices in regard to call flow and scripts.

The retailer has plans to implement another solution from inContact called inContact Plugin Agent, which is designed to integrate with a company’s CRM system and provide intelligent call routing that results in agents receiving caller information along with the call delivered on a single, unified screen at their desktop.

Recently, TMCnet reported that inContact landed two new business process outsourcer customers in the Philippines. Commenting on the development, inContact CEO Paul Jarman said, “The inContact cloud portfolio continues to be the solution of choice for outsourcers that leverage their technology and people to win additional business and grow their bottom line.”