A contact center’s objective is to combine all customer communications to provide a consistent and complete customer experience. Irrespective of the channel that the customer chooses to pursue: whether it is via a website or a discussion forum, a chat message, a short message service (SMS) or even a telephone call, the agent needs to be empowered to experience the customer request.
The contact center today is not there with this yet and will therefore have to develop multichannel capabilities that will need to be delivered as a standard feature and not as a complex customization. Online communities support need to proliferate. Blogs, discussion boards, social networking (with special emphasis on feedback management), wikis and collaboration tools to enable customer self service. And knowledge solutions, real-time analytics and decision support to enable the agent better serve the customer. Customer data integration is an important requirement here that will enable a 360 degree view of the customer and her/his experiences.
Lets take a look at what technology, a contact center needs. A contact center has essentially the following components to it and some of them can be rather tightly coupled with the others.
1. The Customer Interaction Management (CIM) suite of business applications that will manage the customer interaction process. Some amount of Business Process Management (BPM) will have to be inbuilt into the CRM for workflow management.
2. Contact Center infrastructure, not restricted to Interactive Voice Response (IVR) systems, Computer Telephony Integration (CTI), SMS and Payment gateways alone.
3. Optimization tools for the Contact Center such as call recording solutions, back-office software, training and quality assurance tools.
4. Analytics tools to gather business intelligence and customer insight.
CRM applications are increasingly becoming more complex. Automated proactive alerts, BPM and integration support for multiple interfaces are now becoming standard features. While most CRMs today are primarily being used for handling service requests and as knowledge-base solutions, social networking support and predictive analytics are fast catching up.
Though it is a well known fact that any hosted CRM needs to have some sort of SaaS support for it to be successful, pure-play SaaS-based CRMs still have a long way to go before they can start dominating the CRM market. Today, Salesforce CRM is available only as SaaS. Microsoft Dynamics has now gone online and offers a cloud version as well. However, SaaS based CRMs have historically worked great for low-volume and simple contact centers and therefore there is a dying need for SaaS CRMs to have more complex and customizable features.
A paradigm shift is therefore waiting to happen with SaaS based CRM solutions. Gone are the days when the contact center was only about blended solutions, simple CRMs that primarily handled service requests, and IVRs. The market is out there and the future is waiting. After all, the objective of a good Contact Center is always to enhance the customer experience, isn’t it?
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