A Practical Guide to Call Center Technology
A handy, comprehensive guide for those setting up technology-based phone systems to manage customer matters.
TABLE OF CONTENTS A Practical Guide to Call Center Technology
Chapter 19: The Trends
The major trends within the customer contact center industry center around explosive technology growth, which has led to a growing library of open architectures with industry standard interfaces, more sophisticated tools residing in smaller centers and more component applications involved in each transaction. There remains a need to work with legacy applications as the traditional call center evolves into a modern customer contact center to answer the customer s demand for more integrated data (ACD, IVR, web-based, etc.). Nevertheless, rapid migration to a state-of-the-art customer contact center is critical to many businesses that want to reach or maintain profitability.
EVOLUTION OF THE CUSTOMER SERVICE INDUSTRY
The technology of serving customers from a centralized point has been the typical role of the traditional call center. This is evolving in many directions.
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The facilities that once just served to respond to the customer telephone call has now become the focal point for serving any contact channel a customer may wish to use. The customer call center has now been redefined as the customer contact center.
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This contact is not simply a transaction, but a milestone in a customer relationship AND a customer s experience. It is not a finite event but part of a delicate ongoing process.
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This customer or prospect arrives with a history and leaves with an experience. This fact cannot be ignored. The one exception may be when the customer contact is viewed in a very limited sense as a one-time transaction and not as a key way point...
Copyright Andrew Waite 2001 under license agreement with Books24x7
