Call Center Technologies

Today, companies are recognizing that being able to deliver a high-quality customer experience through call center technology is of major strategic value to the organization. Technology has played a vital role in customer service outsourcing. Rapid advancements in information and communication technology have led to a boom in call centers across the world. Call centers use a variety of technologies to support contact with a customer.

Call centers have been aided by a range of telecommunications and computer technologies, including automatic call distribution (ACD), interactive voice response (IVR), and computer telephony integration (CTI), which allows the actions of the computer to be synchronized with what is happening on the phone. The latest internet technologies allow "virtual" call centers to be established across a company's telecommunications network without physically putting all the people in one office.

Technology is transforming the traditional call center, allowing staff to be in contact with customers in a number of different ways.

Technology Usage Level in Call Centers

Technology ----------------- Percent of respondents
1. Email -------------------------------------- 62
2.Voice response systems ----------------- 61
3. Quality monitoring systems ------------ 53
4. Computer telephone integration ------ 51
5. Call logging systems -------------------- 49
6. Contact Management tools ------------- 46
7. Workforce management tools --------- 43
8. Wallboards / reader boards ----------- 42
9. Advanced network services ------------ 38
10. Knowledge-base tools ----------------- 35
11. Predictive dialers --------------------- 18
12. Web-enabled call center -------------- 8
13. Multimedia queues ------------------- 13
14. VoIP ------------------------------------ 9
15. Speech recognition ------------------- 7

Finding the right technology is not an easy task, but the first steps must be to determine the organization's needs, and to link customers with the information and services they require quickly.

Various technology options are available to an outsourced customer service center and the selection of technology that will be used by the center needs to be done intelligently. That should provide the following six essential requirements:

1. Availability: The applications and services should be available during the specified time of operations. The system should also be available to the customers without making them wait for a long duration.

2. Manageability: The system should be easily reconfigurable and should enable the center to quickly customize the applications for any new services and scripts requested by the client.

3. Quality of Service: The voice and data services should be reliable and should have a pre-specified quality level.

4. Redundancy: There should be adequate protection against system failures and data loss. Adequate back-up plans in case of any system failures should be made so that the operations are not hampered.

5. Scalability: Modular increments in the system capacity should be feasible.

6. Security: Technologies used by the center should ensure prevention of loss and theft of client data.

Posted by:
Call Centers India Inc.
http://www.callcentersindia.com/