TMCnet LOGIN
Webinars
Hosted Contact Center Featured Article
Study Reveals Best Practices for Implementing Hosted Contact Center
Ovum’s (News - Alert) Daniel Hong recently published a useful study on best practices for a hosted contact center implementation. The entire study is well worth your time, so here’s a summary of the high points:
Start with a clean slate: Enterprises should start with a clean slate and think “outside the box” when it comes to extending the capabilities of the hosted contact center to their business practices. They should not replicate any business processes that were dictated by the technology constraints of legacy equipment.
Understand your resources: Before making the switch to a hosted solution, contact centers must conduct a full assessment of their technology assets and human resources, including agents, managers and technology staff. In doing so, enterprises will be able to decide which technologies to keep in-house, provide new performance and cost metrics to executives, and more.
Link front- and back-office functions: Linking the contact center with other parts of the organization provides strategic value. The contact center should be aligned with the back office, which provides order fulfillment, product information, accounting, supply chain, and logistics.
Understand security implications: Many enterprises fear losing control over data, security and equipment management. Hosting providers address these concerns through a variety of measures such as hybrid managed services and service-level agreements, among others.
Think about flexible staffing: Hosted technology enables contact centers to change their staffing model, as it’s easier to provide technology to distributed agents. This essentially virtualizes a contact center, with assets in different physical locations but functioning as a fully integrated, seamless operation.
Look into new products: Enterprises should be aware of new products and features that will improve business results and help innovate and create a competitive edge. The advantage of hosted contact centers is that enterprises can exploit new features and functions without the associated risks of upgrades and rollouts.
Plan well to make future possibilities a reality: Enterprises need to build a tactical and strategic roadmap to achieve short- and long-term goals for contact center operations. It is important that enterprises embed hosted solutions into this overall planning process to achieve the right degree of flexibility to support customer service needs.
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 Tammy Wolf
