A new model for customer contact: New Research from Datamonitor

See the Future of Integrated Customer Contact

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

A vision for the new contact centre. What are the key components?

• Support for a distributed contact centre 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 contact center CRM applications, knowledge bases and other office systems. The next generation of contact center should be about managing business processes, not just routing customer contacts.
  

“Constantly striving to reduce AHT (average handling time) destroys customer relationships and has a negative effect on a company’s performance.” - Datamonitor

Changes are driven by business imperatives, but they are enabled by technology. An integrated, IP-enabled contact centre 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 centre was out of reach to all but the very largest global corporations.

Although the next generation contact centre 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 centre. From a technology perspective, it is important to select a technology platform that will support the cultural shift. Any viable next generation contact centre platform should provide the following functionality:

• Support for a distributed contact centre 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 CRM functions.
• Easy integration with CRM applications, knowledge bases and other back office systems. The next generation contact centre should be about managing business processes, not just routing customer contacts. This cannot be achieved without a tight integration between the contact centre platform and all of the other systems utilized during the execution of a business process.