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The Contact Center Must Evolve

By Mae Kowalke, TMCnet Contributor

Customer service is evolving as social networks and smartphones have made buyers more demanding, quicker to leave a brand, more vocal, and at the same time looking for added customization.

As the public face for most companies, the contact center is in the thick of this change in customer needs and attitudes.

The contact center in 2013 must be more nimble; it must be able to adjust in real-time by changing call flows to meet demand and routing high-value customers to agents best able to service their needs. It must evolve technologically, supporting the latest communication channels. It must hear customer feedback and be able to take that knowledge and tweak support practices.

Contact centers also must embrace the personalization that customers now expect. This means integrating the contact center with the full battery of information the company has on the customer by tying into its CRM and enterprise databases.

Its approach requires more than a surface appreciation of chat, text messaging and social network customer interaction, too; contact centers that cobble together communication solutions will soon not be able to keep up with the customer experience that businesses deliver when they have an integrated contact center solution that blends together all the various communication channels and empowers agents to work across these channels just like they do at home.

Meeting these needs increasingly means a move to cloud-based contact center solutions.

“If your contact center is still anchored to a premise-based system, serving your customers comes at a cost,” noted inContact, a leading contact center solutions provider, in a recent video. “By moving to the cloud, you’ll save your company from endless technology investments, and provide profound business agility.”

Knowing that customers are now empowered by virtually unlimited choices, inContact has developed a cloud-based contact center solution that uses the latest technology to address the current issues contact centers face.

The solution includes an intelligent multi-channel ACD with its offering, enabling routing to the right agent at the right time. It lets managers adjust all flow with clicks of a mouse instead of needing IT, and it integrates with a company’s CRM and enterprise databases. For high-value customers, it offers screen pops and special call routing for personalized service.

Agents also can seamlessly move between inbound and outbound calling using inContact’s true blended dialer, and echo surveys give the contact center quick feedback on agent and company performance. The solution also features advanced interactive voice response, workforce optimization and a smooth transition from an on-premise to hosted solution.

“With InContact you choose to win,” noted the company’s video. “But you also choose to lose: lose the big capital expenditures for on-premise equipment, lose over-provisioning, proliferating server farms, and escalating total cost of ownership. Instead, pay as you go to scale capacity to demand.”