Call Centers

Integrating inbound and outbound calling functions with an internal network or the corporate Web site

A call center is a critically important forum for customer contact. For many customers, in fact, the call center is the business--the only face they'll ever see. Their satisfaction--and their willingness to keep doing business with the company--depends to a large extent on the speed, accuracy, and value of encounters with that call center.

Call centers also have a critical role to play in reaching out to customers with personalized service and marketing. With extensive information at their fingertips about a customer's buying habits and needs, call-center agents can implement a one-to-one marketing model and build long-term customer relationships. During calls, agents interactively market to customers based on account histories. And call centers can roll out new initiatives and promotions quickly to key customers or targeted subsets of the customer base.

With all this potential, the future of the call center is integration--tying the interactive service and sales role of customer agents to the wealth of information residing in a business' databases. This integration can increase revenue, improve return on investment (ROI) for marketing expenditures, reduce paperwork, enhance new product and service development through timely customer input, improve decision making, and increase customer satisfaction.

In the Internet era, the call center is being redefined to accommodate customer contact via the World Wide Web, and companies need to be ready with call center applications that translate their customer service experience effectively over a browser. Integration means finding a way to manage customer contact no matter how it begins, whether over the phone or via a Web site. Through data and voice integration, customers can visit the Web site and, with a mouse click, connect to a live agent to ask questions or clarify an order.

Implementing Call Center Applications
Giving all call center agents desktop access to the Internet is a good place to start in implementing a next-generation call center. Then, agents can respond to customer inquiries about order status in real time by checking the shipper's tracking and routing details on its Web site. And they can reply to requests instantly with e-mail that includes product images, new software drivers, and other electronic information. The Internet-enabled call center enables agents to be more productive and more valuable to customers.

Because call center agents rely on quick-access information stored on the company intranet (or internal network), it's also a good idea to seek a network solution that's smart enough to give call center traffic precedence over the network. This setup ensures that agents don't experience awkward and aggravating delays while assisting customers, because someone somewhere in the company is running a month-end report or sending large files to coworkers via e-mail.

A high-speed, highly available network with widespread Internet access sets the groundwork. In the future, call-center applications will take advantage of "converged" data, voice, fax, and even video services over a single network. On the technical side, this strategy lowers maintenance costs and burdens by reducing duplicate communication networks. From a business perspective, a "multimedia" call center becomes a richer, more valuable resource for connecting with customers.