Creating Efficient Contact Centers

Sponsored By: eGain, LiveOps, Verint, Autonomy, OAISYS, Contact Solutions, Lithium Technologies and Astute Solutions

Gartner research, referenced in this white paper as part of Astute Solutions' essay, clearly shows customers are continually shifting their channel of choice from the phone to one of the other service delivery channels. There doesn't seem to be a single alternative channel that is replacing the traditional call center, which still accounts for roughly half of all interactions. Instead, all channels are picking up new users.

This shift has prompted this year's group of industry experts to suggest that organizations provide a consistent customer experience across those channels. The challenge lies in unifying all of these channels into a central repository available to all, including your contact center agents. Autonomy calls the central point of customer service operations a "relationship management center" and eGain dubs it a "customer interaction hub."

With more and more information coming in from nontraditional sources (read Lithium's piece, "Delivering ROI in the Contact Center with Social Knowledge"), managing and making sense of the data flow has never been more important or challenging. Fortunately, the big concepts that are offered this year (i.e., meaning-based computing, creating actionable intelligence, gaining deeper customer insights) are all within reach of most companies.