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We have all seen the mounting evidence that when managed properly, contact centers offer substantial benefits to customers and companies alike. By providing both Web and voice self-service channels combined with the option of transferring to a live agent, companies can shift a greater percentage of customers to more cost-effective self-service applications while reducing lost sales opportunities, increasing customer retention rates and improving agent productivity by automatically providing up-to-date information about a customer's history and needs. On the other side of the transaction, customers benefit from shorter wait times, access to more efficient support channels and more personalized service.
To achieve these benefits, however, companies must be prepared to implement several major upgrade steps to combine and enhance the voice and Web "silos" that exist in most contact centers. These include:
* Computer-telephony integration (CTI) and skills-based routing to automatically "pop" all relevant customer data on the customer service representative's (CSRs) desktop and route a caller to the most appropriate agent based on various customer attributes and CSR skill sets.
* Shared databases between Web and voice applications so that regardless of where a transaction is initiated, both customers and agents can be viewing the same data.
* Browser-based agent desktops coupled with blended queuing and routing to enable live agent interaction via the Web with voice chat, collaborative browsing or instant messaging, and cross-channel applications such as Web callback.
* Monitoring the ongoing performance of applications and infrastructure (just as most contact centers currently monitor caller and agent performance).
Each of these steps establishes significant new quality of experience (QoE) benchmarks that didn't exist with separate silos. Failure to test against these benchmarks can result in failure to identify critical performance and functionality issues that can undermine and, in some cases, completely nullify the ROI for adopting an integrated, multimedia approach to contact center operations.
Even before they make the move to Web-voice integration, contact centers using CTI are finding plenty of coordination and performance problems to keep them worried about maintaining acceptable levels of customer service.
For example, a recent performance test on a contact center for a major online brokerage house revealed that the CTI was taking a full 12...