|
Death and taxes used to be the pair of inevitable horrors held up as examples of the worst life had to offer. These days, one could add voicemail hell to make a diabolical trio that everyone can all agree to hate. The odd thing, though, is that in spite of the universal disdain for bad call-center experiences, more and more companies are finding that business logic forces them to install those nasty call centers anyway. The trick is to take the “bad” out of the call-center experience — and adding VoIP to the equation does just that. While most call-center features are common to both analog and digital telephone systems, the growing move to VoIP for business telephony makes this hybrid a nobrainer.
First impressions are lasting impressions, as everyone knows, which makes it all the more important for businesses to change their attitude toward call centers, which are often the first point of contact for customers. In the past, businesses have considered call centers a necessary and unwieldy evil. But thanks to the powerful capabilities of the latest call-center hardware and software, call centers (so-called “CRM hubs”) are handling email inquiries, Web chats, incoming and outgoing faxes, and a broad range of text messaging from handheld devices like cell phones and PDAs — as well as fielding phone calls in a way that keeps customers smiling and the bottom-line healthy.
These days, a VoIP call center can be a valuable source of revenue, as well as a mission-critical resource for selling products, responding to questions, resolving technical support issues, and handling inquiries in a timely and efficient manner. Key features like call scripting, predictive dialing, multimedia recording, multisite routing and real-time monitoring keep your IT department as happy as your customers.
There are two basic approaches to setting up a call center. The onpremise solution involves buying hardware and software, hiring agents, and setting up your own on-site or off-site call center. The hosted (or outsourced) solution involves contracting with a call-center company that already has a staff of agents and a software system, which allows it to step in and handle calls for your business.
In this Buyer’s Guide, you’ll find out how to start asking the right questions about VoIP call centers and what to look for in a system vendor. You’ll learn how to buy, what you can expect to pay and how to go about maximizing your investment.
Call-Center Overview
In most situations, a VoIP call center looks very much like an analog call center — except less expensive.
IP telephony is a combination of voice, data, video and wireless applications into an integrated enterprise infrastructure that offers the reliability, interoperability and security of a voice network; the benefit of IP; and the efficiencies, mobility and manageability of a single network. VoIP is the voice part of the IP telephony complex — the technology that is used to transmit voice over an IP network, which can be either a corporate network or the Internet.
Call- or contact-center solutions (really a subset of the CRM, or Customer Relations Management, paradigm) deliver customer service solutions over any communication channel — analog or digital — including inbound calls, outbound calls, email, fax, Web, chat or cobrowsing.
VoIP call centers offer all the benefits of the call-center model plus the savings and flexibility built into a VoIP system: lower telecommunications costs, fewer maintenance headaches, and easier integration between voice and data applications.
A well-designed VoIP call center should be effortlessly scalable, allowing you to operate with any number of agents (depending on customer demand) at any given time. It should be immediately and intuitively operable by your call-center staff — managers, supervisors and agents. Essentially, the call center should offer a centralized, graphical management environment that simplifies deployment and boosts customer value. In addition, you should look for advanced features like an embedded solution for call qualification; management of real-time business conditions; and collaboration capabilities that easily link agents, experts and customers. It should be possible to define distribution schemes, services and agent groups with the click of a mouse, as well as manage your queues, tune your services and access a comprehensive set of reports with equal ease.
|
