Call Center Buyer's Guide: Learn Which Solution is Right For Your Business

Call-center technology can deliver huge benefi ts to your bottom line by boosting revenues and enhancing customer experience.
Call Center Buyer's Guide
Copyright © 2007, Tippit, Inc., All Rights Reserved. www.insidecrm.com Call Center Buyer's Guide
Contents
E xecutive Summary 3
Call-Center Overview 4
Market Overview 6
Call-Center Benefi ts 7
Basic Features 8
Advanced Features 10
Cost 11
Checklist 12
Conclusion 13
www.insidecrm.com 2 Call Center Buyer's Guide
Executive Summary
If the old adage, 'You only get one chance to make a fi rst impression' is to be believed, then it's no wonder companies are rethinking their approaches to call-center management. Typically the fi rst point of contact for customers, the call center has long been viewed as a 'loss center' - a costly yet necessary evil.
Fortunately, that view is fading as businesses slowly come to the realization that a call center can be a valuable source of revenue and a mission-critical organization. So what's changed? Simply put, call centers are no longer about fi elding phone calls. Rather, today's newly renamed 'contact centers' let customers submit email inquiries, request Web chats, send faxes and text message from handheld devices including cell phones and PDAs. In turn, businesses are now better equipped to sell products, respond to questions, resolve technical support issues and handle inquires in a timely and effi cient manner. Helping them to do so is a spate of contact-center technology solutions with features including call scripting, predictive dialing, multimedia recording, multi-site routing and real-time monitoring.
In this Buyer's Guide, you will fi nd details on what to look for, how to buy, what you can expect to pay and how to derive the most value from your contact center technology investment.
www.insidecrm.com 3 Call Center Buyer's Guide
Call Center Overview
In today's highly competitive marketplace, maintaining a loyal customer base can mean the diff erence between success and failure. That's a mighty tall order considering that American businesses experience between 20 and 50 percent customer turnover annually. What's worse is that it can cost up to six times as much to replace a customer as to keep one. Certainly, contact center technology can help retain customers. The trick, however, is fi nding a solution that's right for your budget, resources and business objectives.
"Hosted is by far the hottest topic" among today's contact center solution seekers, according to Michael DeSalles, a Frost & Sullivan strategic analyst. In fact, Frost & Sullivan forecasts overall hosted revenues to grow at a compound annual growth rate of 34.1 percent from 2006 through 2013. It's no wonder. Hosted or on-demand solutions off er countless benefi ts above and beyond their on-premise counterparts. For starters, a hosted solution's pay-as-you-go model eliminates the need for huge upfront costs and instantly increases cash fl ow - a perk that's especially benefi cial to growing small businesses.
"The fact that you're moving from a capital expenditure model to an operational expenditure model frees up a tremendous amount of capital," said DeSalles.
And then there's the unprecedented fl exibility that comes with on-demand delivery. Using a subscription model, companies can add and subtract functionality with minimal risk and at a reasonable cost. Growing businesses can rapidly scale up or down in operational size to meet fl uctuating business demands. And hosted solutions allow companies to better manage agents and their activities, regardless of where they are physically situated.
Said DeSalles, "With hosted contact-center solutions, you can move away from technology that is based within a company's four walls to one that is much more fl exible."
Nor does handing over your contact center management to a third party necessarily open you up to data security risks, a common concern among buyers. According to DeSalles, "while there is a perceived loss
www.... [download for more]