CALL CENTER SOLUTIONS : Good Times Ahead

Call center is an important part of business strategy for any enterprise
today, since it is the lowest medium in terms of cost efficiency for enterprises
to interface with their customers. It is critical for any enterprise to have
uniformity and consistency in communications with its customers through all
channels. The market size for contact center solutions is around $110 mn.

The contact centers of today are maturing, and adaptation of voice is a must
have. Most call centers work toward enhancing the relationship with the customer
during the call; executives are no longer focused on closing the call in a
specified duration. Quality of service is key to ensuring operational
excellence. The focus is typically to better utilize the resources for resolving
complex queries rather than using them for mundane interactions.

In today's competitive scenario, it is critical to offer 24x7 access and
contact centers have adopted an 'always available' stance for incoming calls,
and to be able to get the right people to answer those calls as quickly as
possible. This calls for a solution which is scalable and flexible. The
enterprises are fast realizing that automation is becoming a key to reducing the
operational cost and dependencies on resources.

In a tough economic environment, it has become important to maximize the
resources available, while at the same time finding the balance of delivering a
significant customer experience. Companies are recognizing the growing
importance of improving operational efficiency and agent effectiveness with
fewer resources; hence investments in performance optimization solutions are
increasing.

As a result of the worldwide economic crisis, enterprises are becoming more
and more price sensitive and competitive. Organizations are slowly moving toward
adopting the SaaS model which offers quicker RoI while reducing capex. The
unified communications platform is further likely to drive the market.

Apart from that, organizations in the SMB space are looking toward contact
center products which offer an all-in-one solution that is easy to install,
maintain and integrate, and should contain pre-packaged business intelligence
reports, scripts and IP PBX.

Tech Trends

Today, call centers are increasingly using technology infrastructure as a
differentiator highlighting better quality of service and hence, better
delivery. There is a definite focus toward IP-enabled contact centers.
IP-enabled contact centers with PBX, voice logger, universal queuing and routing
and advanced CRM capabilities providing minimal capital expenditure are likely
to be the most popular. An IP-based platform offers various business benefits
like lower cost of transport with IP as a medium of transport and enterprise
wide contact centers vis-a-vis disparate contact centers. This movement toward
an IP-based platform is likely to further help in virtualization of contact
center resources.

One of the most visible trend in the call center solutions industry is the
switch from IVR to speech recognition customer service solutions. These
solutions enable enterprises to offer their customers a more enriched user
experience, whereby consumers are able to conduct self service transactions in
the language of their choice. The conversational quality of these interactions
is believed to be more appealing than the tone dial commands of IVR.

Apart from that, hosted contact center solutions are rapidly gaining
acceptance with contact centers of all sizes as an alternative to premise-based
technology from traditional call center vendors. An increasing number of contact
centers are making the switch from legacy software and equipment that they
maintain in-house to solutions provided over the Internet as SaaS.

Another technology which is fast catching up in the call center solution
space is unified communications enabled contact center solutions. A unified
contact center architecture brings together IP telephony, customer interaction
technologies and UC capabilities such as rich presence, instant messaging,
shared directories and calendars to enable organizations to improve how
customers, contact center agents, and enterprise knowledge workers interact and
perform.

Since customer experience has become of critical importance in the current
era of economic slowdown, Customer Experience Management software are increasing
in popularity. CEM for contact centers helps in integrating the customer's
voices through various channels in an enterprise.

The new technologies in this segment basically revolve around to simplify and
streamline the desktop to optimize agents and the contact center operations. It
mostly boils down to a unified agent desktop approach wherein it presents the
right information when and wherever you need it. Also, the new technologies are
built around a modular service-oriented architecture (SOA) which provides
organizations with great flexibility to extend the functionalities and reduce
integration challenges.

There is also clearly a move towards VoIP and open standards such as SIP.
Open standards are particularly valuable to companies because they deliver
increased compatibility among components, enabling true interoperability. As
open standards continue to mature, there is going to be development of a number
of new and innovative products and services using new standards, such as
VoiceXML, SCXML, CCXML, which have been built on early protocol standards such
as HTTP and SIP.

Some vendors have introduced the Video Contact Center, which is effectively
the next evolution of the contact center.

Vendor Demands

Back-end data integration is one of the recent demands from call center CIOs.
Customers spend considerable time researching products, managing accounts and
order information and resolving issues compared to a traditional
brick-and-mortar storefront. This requires contact centers to have a 360-degree
view of the customer, and thus integration of data from across the enterprise
has become a must for a contact center.

Channels such as the Web and phone self-service make ordering, status
checking and account updates available without utilizing an agent. CIOs at
contact centers need to seamlessly and efficiently manage all customer
interaction channels-phone, email, chat and Web.

Going forward, contact centers are going to increase in importance where
customer acquisition is concerned. Vendors are further going to drive the market
with the introduction of new and evolving technologies. The solution provider
should focus on the business needs of the enterprises to come out with
innovative products to meet business objectives.

Gagandeep Kaur

gagandeepk@cybermedia.co.in