Faraz Khan, the company's Director of Business Development, believes that: "the technology obsession of contact centres is distracting them from core business issues. There needs to be a sea change in the way that contact centre managers address their priorities for change - often spending less money to obtain more value for their organisations."
Protocall says that having been quick to invest in contact centre technology over the last decade - often with cumbersome and unwieldy solutions to show for it - organisations are now realising that technology is not the solution - simply an enabler.
"A good example is VoIP. A key business issue for contact centres has been to leverage resources across sites, countries & continents. VoIP came along and enabled it, but it didn't in itself drive the business need," continued Faraz Khan. "Organisations need to look inwards at their particular business and market challenges, as well as their people and processes to identify how to best use and benefit from the technology in question."
ProtoCall One has identified a set of Business Issues it believes will play a critical role in technology investment sign-offs.
The key business challenges for contact centres in 2007:
- Number one is to leverage the vast amount of customer information and interaction history to serve and sell to the customer better, enabled in particular by new developments in speech analytics, customer segmentation and the unified desktop .
- Increase customer satisfaction and loyalty, for example through intelligent call routing and real multi-channel integration - big gaps still exist particularly in integrating email into the contact centre .
- In order to serve customers more effectively, organisations need to support agent development, motivation and empowerment by adopting advances in Workforce
Optimisation .
- Make better use of existing resources, knowledge and capabilities within the organisation, for example through the virtualisation of contact centre staff.