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Today's Hosted Contact Center Solutions: Meeting Every Need
The concept of a hosted contact center solution is a boon to any customer-facing organization for a number of reasons we already know: the need for little capital upfront, the ability to offload software and server management and IT headaches to someone else, regular (and included with the price) updates, and the ability to extend the solutions' abilities to remote workers.
But another positive element of hosted contact center solutions is the breathtaking, nearly unlimited number of features contact center organizations can find at that finger tips: features that once upon a time, were either out of reach because of cost or too complicated to implement, since they had to come from a variety of different vendors in a variety of different solutions.
Today, all-in-one hosted contact center solutions – like that from Five9 (News - Alert) (www.five9.com) – offer everything a call center could want, and more, helping them meet their needs and extend their services to new, revenue-generating areas.
On The Inbound Side
Today's hosted contact center solutions can offer the features you'd expect: such as ACD, IVR, PBX and computer-telephony integration (CTI (News - Alert)), but also some features that might surprise you. Five9's solution offers inbound organizations provisioning for toll-free, international toll-free and DID numbers. It also offers call conferencing, speech recognition (remember what you had to go through to get THAT 10 years ago?), text-to-speech capabilities, voice mail, call recording and quality monitoring, historical and real-time reporting, contact history databases, cloud APIs, home agent capabilities and VoIP (voice over IP).
On the Outbound Side
So your call center handles inbound contacts. Most do. But what about outbound? Regardless of whether your outbound needs are small and occasional, or large and part of of your business plan, today's hosted contact center solutions can meet those needs.
Five9 offers dialing functions of all kinds: auto, predictive, power, progressive and preview. And because outbound campaigns are only as good as their scripts, it also offers Web-based agent scripting, campaign and list management, data import and finally – to avoid costly fines – do not call compliance that work across both outbound and inbound operations.
What About Blending?
Because many contact centers today blend their inbound with their outbound, a modern hosted contact center solution can help companies gain features that will help them blend their operations in a way that best meets their needs. No more “siloed” inbound and outbound operations that not only don't complement one another, but can actively work against each other, leaving your customers angry and confused.
At The Back End
Can a hosted contact center solution even provide the critical functionality every contact center needs even before it takes – or makes – its first call? Even functions like workforce management, scheduling and adherence?
Yes, because when you think about it, it doesn't make much sense to isolate the workforce management in a standalone solution, since its success relies so heavily on real-time data from contact center operations.
Now doesn't that sound like a reduction in headaches for you and your call center?
To read more about Five9 Hosted Contact Center capabilities, visit http://www.five9.com/call-center-software/features.htm.
Susan J. Campbell is a contributing editor for TMCnet and has also written for eastbiz.com. To read more of Susan’s articles, please visit her columnist page.
Edited by Chris DiMarco
