Transforming your Call Center into a Multimedia Contact Center

"The convergence of two trends, the move to e-commerce and the consolidation of all customer interactions into a contact center, with its self-sales and self-service functionality and advanced call center technology, will quickly become the dominant market segment in the CRM space,"

Customers want the freedom to choose among multiple contact points, depending on what is most convenient to them. As more people become comfortable doing business through alternative interaction channels, unified messaging and web technologies are becoming a necessity for enabling companies to support these channels through their call centers. Companies willing to invest in these technologies stand to reap huge rewards. Many call centers are reducing the cost of sales and customer service while increasing revenues through improved cross-selling and up-selling capabilities from their Web site. More importantly, companies improve the overall quality of customer interactions by providing online customer service via the Web and accurate, timely responses to voice mail, fax, and email. As a result, organizations are achieving increased customer loyalty and satisfaction and ultimately greater profitability. As we move beyond management of phone calls to management of all customer interactions, the demand to transform your call center into a Multimedia Contact Center becomes the critical key to success.

Unified Messaging

A call center agent can open a single, universal "inbox" from their desktop that supports delivery and retrieval of all types of messages. With all messages in one place, forwarding, saving, prioritizing, and managing customer messages becomes much simpler. Emails and faxes will no longer accumulate until someone has time to address them, or worse, not addresses at all. Instead, your agents can handle these requests according to each message's real priority and urgency, just as they would incoming phone calls.

Although the concept seems simple, the benefits of unified messaging can be remarkable. Agents can spend more time focusing on the content and quality of their replies to customers and less time on the mechanics of how they retrieve and manage their messages. Agents will have convenient access to all message types since voice mails and faxes become messages along with their email. Call centers will realize a tremendous productivity boost from unified messaging since their agents will no longer need to make round-trips to the fax machine or spend time dialing into voice mail systems to retrieve messages.

From a customer service perspective, Unified Messaging helps agents to easily maintain and manage a customer's interaction history of email, voice mail, and fax. With easy access to customer interaction history, agents can forward messages with combined media quickly to other parts of the organization. Visual scanning of email, voice-mail, and fax messages also allows agents to better prioritize their messages and respond rapidly to critical messages.

There are several key elements that should be part of a true unified messaging system. Voice mail, faxes, and email should all be treated the same as an "interaction message." In the instance that your mail system should go down, unified messaging should provide fault tolerance by creating local copies of voice mail and faxes and handle the queuing of these incoming messages.

Integrated Multimedia
Future enhancements in the support of the Multimedia Contact Center will bring about new technology that can fully integrate all types of customer contacts. All interactions will be queued and routed by a single process. Call centers will be able to build rules and logic into this process to determine how and where an interaction should be handled. For example, in some instances Web chats may take precedence over phone calls, so these types of interactions would be given a higher priority in the inbound queue. Or, some customers may receive priority treatment regardless of which contact method they use. A specific type of email may require specialized skills, so this interaction would be routed to an agent with the appropriate skill set. As the dynamics of the call center change, the traditional phone, web, and messaging systems will need to merge into one to create a super "contact distribution" system for support of an integrated media environment.