Is Your Customer King or on Hold?

In every industry, customer contact is where business is won and lost. Nothing could be more strategic than customer contact, but executing on that strategy can be a challenge even for the most customer-centric organizations. That’s because until now, organizations have had to adapt their business process and needs around their contact center technology. Yet contact centers don’t need to be hamstrung by complex and inflexible technology. With next-generation contact center solutions, call centers can be based on technology that moulds around the customer’s business processes using the power of a distributed unified communications (UC) system.

Tap into Efficiency and Expertise
Next-generation contact center technology platforms have the characteristics necessary to support your best strategies while allowing you to implement them in the most cost-effective way. These characteristics fall into two broad categories:

• Distributed contact center systems let you place agents or supervisors anywhere, including in home offices, while supporting full integration with and monitoring by the management software;
• A unified desktop applications provides a single point of access for agents and supervisors, which significantly lowers customer interaction times and empowers agents with advanced information.

The strategic benefits of a distributed contact center are many. Most companies recognize the business continuity and disaster recovery aspect of geographic dispersion, but the customer contact benefits may be more significant on a daily operating basis. Instead of hiring expensive industry experts or lower-paid staff, many companies exploit distributed contact centers to achieve the best of both worlds. They have tapped into a workforce of industry experts who require less overhead expenditure because they can work at home and enjoy flexible work hours. Organizations are saving money and attracting better employees by letting them work from their own houses.

The ability to hire agents anywhere with broadband Internet access means organizations can find the caliber of staff required for contact center needs — without having to locate the center to a geographic region of expertise. Freedom from geographical recruiting boundaries makes it possible to find employees that a traditional contact center could not attract, which can have a positive impact on customer service and the bottom line.

At the same time, the distributed model offers flexibility and cost optimization. Operational efficiency and scalability can be managed more granularly. And the impact of a local weather or other disaster is limited when your staff is spread across the country, whether working out of office locations or homes.

Integrated Contact Center and UC
A virtual and distributed contact center is imperative for organizations looking to extend the contact center to all parts of the enterprise in a bid to improve customer service, economies of scale and efficiency. Customer needs can be addressed at any time by the most appropriate agent, whether the agent is in the contact center or in a different department. UC brings together the real-time and asynchronous communications onto a single platform, enabling voice, e-mail, presence, chat and video technology.

A unified desktop applications that allows agents to communicate with customers in their media choice (voice, email, chat) while giving agents easy access to internal experts using instant messaging or video becomes critical to organizations deploying distributed contact centers. Unified desktop dissipates common concerns of agents switching through multiple applications to answer a customer’s inquiry.

Until recently, distributed contact centers were challenging to build and manage because the complexity of the system grows along with the size of the operation. However, a new generation of contact center solutions is rapidly changing that landscape. Contact center solutions that are an integral part of a reliable, scalable and efficient distributed UC architecture offer advanced functionality and help ensure exceptional business continuity.

“The completeness of the integration is critical to the usability and robustness of the contact center solutions,” said Venky Raman, product manager at ShoreTel. “When the contact center solution runs on the same infrastructure as the UC system, training can be handled more efficiently, and the solution leverages the same inherent reliability as the distributed call control architecture.”

ShoreTel ShoreWare® Contact Center offers three levels of contact center solutions: ShoreWare Workgroups for small groups, ShoreWare Contact Center for mid-size groups and ShoreWare Enterprise Contact Center for larger groups. Each is fully integrated with the ShoreTel Pure IP Unified Communications (UC) solution.

“This integration with the ShoreTel system is key because it means there is no single point of failure for either the UC system or the contact center,” Raman said. “With some other systems, organizations may have a fully redundant contact center, but if the phone system goes down, business continuity can be seriously affected. ShoreWare Contact Center creates a distributed virtual call center that is completely survivable.” All ShoreWare Contact Center solutions allow you to assemble geographically dispersed agents into a single seamless virtual contact center.

ShoreWare Contact Center integrates previously stand-alone contact center functions, such as automated call distribution (ACD), interactive voice response (IVR), outbound campaigns and multimedia routing, into a unified and centrally managed platform. The depth of integration makes specialized Computer Telephony Integration (CTI) software unnecessary for most applications, Raman said. In addition, ShoreWare Contact Center data can be integrated with other enterprise applications, creating the potential for enhanced business analysis.

With custom call routing and an integrated IVR scripting tool, supervisors can easily configure business logic that leads to superior customer service by routing each call through initial greeting and status announcements while in queue and ultimately to the best agent for each customer’s question — no matter where in the world that agent happens to be working. Agent skills, caller identity, wait time, priority or service level can be factored into the automated routing decisions.

Raman added that the fully distributed but centrally managed system gives companies the best of both worlds: the supervisor consoles also can be located anywhere, just like the agents. But the supervisor can see and manage the entire virtual contact center and all its agents from that single location. Should service at that location be disrupted, another location can quickly be identified to take over.

“ShoreTel’s UC capabilities also help improve the communications experience for customers,” Raman said. “Those who prefer e-mail exchange or Web chat have those interaction options, and agents can also leverage the enterprise UC features of the system to reach internal company experts via voice, video or instant message, to provide more information or support to customers when they need it.” This degree of functionality is easy to access through ShoreTel Call Manager, a powerful but intuitive unified desktop application that gives agents telephony, ACD, presence, IM and video functionality.

Download the data sheet for ShoreTel ShoreWare Contact Center product family.