Datamonitor White Paper

See the Future of Integrated Customer Contact. 

This report outlines a new model for integrated customer contact that will enable companies to transform their call centers to meet the demands of the 21st century consumer.  It discusses the changing role of the call center: from being a cost center to something of strategic importance whose performance directly impacts the success of the business.

A vision for the new call center. What are the key technology components?

• Support for a distributed call center environment across multiple sites, different types of employees and self-service systems.
• Support for managing the complete customer lifecycle across multiple inbound and outbound contact channels.
• Easy integration of the call center with CRM applications, knowledge bases and other office systems. The next generation of call center should be about managing business processes, not just routing customer contacts.
  

“Research shows that the most successful companies are the ones with the most satisfied customers. Consequently, the role of the contact center is changing: from being a cost center to one of strategic importance whose performance directly impacts the success of the business.”  - Datamonitor

Changes are driven by business imperatives, but they are enabled by technology. An integrated, IP-enabled call center technology platform significantly reduces the cost of deploying a next generation contact center by eliminating much of the need to integrate multiple systems. Until recently, these costs were so prohibitive that a next generation contact center was out of reach to all but the very largest global corporations.

Although the next generation contact center is now available to the many rather than the few, there are still deployment challenges. Perhaps the greatest of these is ensuring the cultural shift that will enable the customer satisfaction ethos to permeate the whole enterprise rather than the contact center. From a technology perspective, it is important to select a technology platform that will support the cultural shift. Any viable next generation contact center platform should provide the following functionality:

• Support for a distributed call center environment across multiple sites, types of employees and self-service systems.
• Support for the complete customer lifecycle across multiple inbound and outbound channels. This should include a unified database of customer interactions and support for sales, marketing and customer service functions.
• Easy integration with CRM applications, knowledge bases and other back office systems. The next generation call center should be about managing business processes, not just routing customer contacts. This cannot be achieved without a tight integration between the call center platform and all of the other systems utilized during the execution of a business process.