Electrical Engineering Solutions

If contact centre managers, and those responsible for the centre’s technology, are to meet the ongoing demands of customers, a well defined product and technology road map is essential.

Contact centre technology initiatives are now viewed as being equally as important as other key components of the business.

Fundamental to this is that it is not technology itself which makes a difference to business operations, but how this technology is applied.  “Benchmarking technology in the contact centre is about understanding how to use technology to achieve business aims,” says Bradley Hemphill, Managing Director of Electrical Engineering Solutions (EES), which has specialist experience in communication networks and related information technology (IT).

“It is essential to line up the business and customer key performance indicators (KPI) with each of the technology functions within the contact centre to ensure the technology performs at its best,” Hemphill explains. 

When evaluating technology performance, the two important questions to consider are: “Did the customer get what he or she was promised and expecting?” and “Did we do the right thing for the company in which the contact centre operates?” 

In addition to good service availability and business continuity planning, efficient technology performance today includes a strong emphasis on decoupling the service from the technology that enables it.  This is commonly referred to as service orientated architecture (SOA), in which the internet protocol (IP) network becomes the core platform. 

“The IP network is core to the new architectures in the contact centre, and in fact is being embraced as the appropriate technology”, says Hemphill.  “Virtual contact centres are becoming increasingly important to many companies.  Executives need to manage many sites from a central location, and routing calls across a virtual contact centre to the correct agent can save costs and improve service delivery.”

He adds that the major reason for contact centres moving to IP is a flexible architecture and the technology cost drive.  “We can expect to see business derive specific benefits from their IP architectures and begin to differentiate their services from those of their competitors, while at the same time reducing costs.”

Information and data management will become key to handling the complexities of the contact centre in the future, and will be fundamental to resolving calls first time and meeting customer needs.  And technology should be flexible so that business can adapt to future developments.

“Technology cannot stand alone and the relevance of agent behaviour, which is driven by management policies and incentives, is a co-dependency.  For agents to achieve customer and business aims, they need support technology to give them access to the relevant information while being able to functionally carry out the transaction,” points out Hemphill.  He believes that most contact centres are now aligning their technology strategies with these needs.    

Contact centres that understand how future technologies can bring flexibility and help cut costs will see a real benefit for themselves and their customers.  With the right attitude and intentions they will differentiate themselves from their competition and ensure that the customer comes first.