Executive Summary
If the old adage, ‘You only get one chance to make a first impression' is to be believed, then it's no wonder companies are rethinking their approaches to call-center management. Typically the first 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 fielding 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 efficient manner. Helping them to do so is a spate of contact-center technology solutions with features including call scripting, predictive dialing, multimedia recording, multisite routing and real-time monitoring.
In this Buyer's Guide, you will find 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.
Call Center Overview
In today's highly competitive marketplace, maintaining a loyal customer base can mean the difference 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 flow – a perk that's especially beneficial 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 flexibility that comes with ondemand 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 fluctuating 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 flexible."
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 of control, there are providers in this space, notably Avaya, Genesys Telecommunications, Oracle, Verizon Business, that have put signifi cant investment into their security structures." In fact, many small to mediumsize businesses would be hard-pressed to put the same high-cost security precautions in place.
The hosted-delivery model may be taking the world by storm, but companies in search of an on-premise solution can take comfort in the fact that many vendors, including Avaya, Nortel Networks and Alcatel- Lucent, off er both options. In fact, some industry analysts argue that an on-demand delivery model simply isn't cost-effective in the longterm for large enterprises requiring hundreds – or thousands – of subscriptions.
And then there's the thorny issue of disgruntled IT staff . After all, introducing a solution that doesn't require any in-house deployment, support or upgrades can spell career-suicide as far as some salaried IT professionals are concerned. In the end, a business wishing to control its contact center technology "from soup to nuts within the four walls of the company" would be wise to go with an on-premise solution, recommended DeSalles.
