Use Multimedia and IP for Your Contact Center?

By Betsy Wood, Marketing Manager

Convenience is a key driver for your customers whose ever increasing expectations include fast, friendly and knowledgeable service 24 hours per day, 365 days per year. How you meet these expectations is critical to keeping your customers coming back again and again and failure to respond can result in significant loss of business.
As you assess ways to expand your call center to meet these expectations, you are likely to be looking in two key areas - multimedia and IP - both of which bring customer service benefits to your business. As you go through this process, you might want to keep these tips in mind.

1.  Build upon your current expertise. Identify your business objectives and the benefits to be gained from creating a multimedia contact center and/or using IP. Leverage your years of experience providing customer support to create a new contact center that is a natural extension of what you do successfully.
   
   Create a cross functional team of shareholders (telecom manager, contact center manager, IT manager, contact center agents, sales manager, service manager, etc.) with an identified leader. Plan your contact flow (telephone calls, e-mails, Web chats and so on) based upon your business requirements and your new contact center capabilities. Validate that your existing call center applications like workforce management, quality monitoring and CRM will integrate with your multimedia and IP solution and understand how they may need to be modified.
   
   Migrate in logical and manageable steps. Ensure that all business and technical critical success factors are managed to deliver your solution quickly. Implement, test and revise your plans as necessary. Your customers' needs and expectations are dynamic and ever changing, and so should your contact center strategy be - think of it as an ongoing way of doing business.
   
2.  Provide your customers with seamless service anytime, anywhere and anyway. Offer your customers options for contacting you - the phone, fax, e-mail, the Web, personal digital assistant, mobile phone and so on and unify self-service with agent-assisted service. Integrate front and back office applications so agents have the right tools at their fingertips at the time of the interaction. Leverage IP to easily extend your contact center by dynamically distributing calls among agents in many locations and in different time zones.
   
3.  Make your business decisions first; then enable them with technology. Connect your customers with the best person to handle the contact the first time. Give whoever receives the contact the right tools, the right information and the right level of authority.
   
   In a multimedia contact center environment, you will have access to an expanded resource pool. Agents who have been utilized in the past can now be leveraged appropriately during peak volumes based on their individual, unique strengths and skills. Also, improve agent quality and satisfaction while reducing costs by using IP telephony to give agents additional flexibility to work at home to retain employees.
   
   Assure you have a dynamic and reliable infrastructure that can make this happen today and going forward. Use IP to give your business more scalability and flexibility so you can adjust quickly and cost effectively to fluctuating requirements.
   
   Make your self-service applications friendly, easy to use, convenient and unique to each customer using touch tone, advanced speech recognition, and/or the Web. Take advantage of being able to track and interpret customer actions to uncover more effective ways to do business.
   
   Balance the needs and expectations of your customers with your own to maximize effectiveness. Automation for efficiency's sake may mean things are done faster but not necessarily better. Focus your employees where it will have the most impact on customer retention and profit.