How to Choose the Right
Contact Center Software
Contact centers have been around for more than a decade and continue to show slow but steady growth. However, for most of the contact center setups, it is due to intermediaries, human errors or other dependencies that such business usual y turns into a bad investment.
Broadly the three pil ars of such businesses are:
•Business Development and Customer management
•Quality of Agents and operations
•Connectivity and Technology
Historical y, these start-ups are mostly entrepreneur driven businesses and micro management of all the three pil ars is done by a one man team. Such entrepreneurs instead must focus on Business Development and customer management rather than operations and fire-fighting of technology issues. The latter should ideal y be handled by hiring good resources or finding good technology partners.
However cash-flow problems and stringent budgets in a smal setup push entrepreneurs to curtail expenses on basic infrastructure and agent quality and thus the entrepreneur is always left to managing the operations internal y rather than focusing on business development.
Contact centers are primarily ITeS, and IT obviously plays one of the most important role among the three pil ars. Therefore it should not be compromised to below hygiene levels
Technology options available:
Globally Renowned Solutions: A What makes them an unpopular choice among the contact centers is the cost implications with each seat costing around $2K+ dol ars including other add on costs like software OS/DB/Server licenses or hardware implications. Recurring service and maintenance costs are additional pain areas.
Free or White Labeled Solutions: These are almost free solutions that can be downloaded off the internet and sold or white labeled by few companies at costs as low as $500 for limitless licenses in a setup costing up to only $200 per seat. They are not meant for serious business and are at most a short term fix. Sales or engineering oriented teams download an open-source solution and either sell it as a service or in most cases il egal y white-label it in their name. The companies sel ing this freeware usual y deploy onsite engineers who do very frequent site visits only to simply reboot the server and restart the application rather than fixing the bugs.
So the bottom line is that the right solution should be one which offers:
1)Robustness and Reliability
2)Intel igence - Predictive Dialer, ACD systems, AMD, Lead Management, Cal Back Management, CTI, Supervision and Reporting, Voice Quality and VoIP Handling, Dynamic IVR.
3)Return on Investment