As the economy continues to struggle and as companies face increasing cost pressures – and as all sectors of the business come under the microscope – so the interest in leaner contact centres has grown.
Consequently there is a noticeable shift towards a new business model in the call centre industry, such as the virtual or decentralised contact centre – which is poised to become an increasingly attractive option for companies and customers.
This is according to Andrew van Niekerk, managing director of Teleforge Communications, a tier-3 voice solutions provider focused on providing carrier grade voice services to medium and large enterprises – as well as call centres.
Van Niekerk says the virtual contact centre fulfills the role of delivering more, but with less costs and recourses. “This is a relatively new philosophy, and it allows businesses to reduce their reliance on full-time, on-site call centres manned by full-time employees Instead companies can make greater use of mobile contact centre agents that can operate from any location, yet still deliver optimum service levels.”
This can only be achieved by having the right contact centre technologies and tools available and in place, including voice-over Internet protocol, automatic call distribution, virtualisation and call routing environments.
IP telephony, in particular, makes this a cost effective solution with a substantial return on investment for any size business.
But what is more obvious is those businesses increasingly want to grow their contact centres as their business grows – and not the other way around, which is how it traditionally happens. But this is a trend that is increasingly loosing traction.
Being able to make your call centre grow along with the business makes the decentralised contact centre model more alluring – because one of its key benefits is scalability.
Not only does it offer the required scalability, but it also offers work-from-home flexibility, less investment in offices, a greater pool of talent to fish from, the ability to route calls to the most skilled agent and effective resource utilisation – in other words 24×7 support.
This, says Van Niekerk, delivers a number of benefits including business continuity, increased employee satisfaction, decreased staff churn and absenteeism, and most importantly, better levels of customised and consistent customer service levels.
In the future it is also possible that we will move inexorably closer to the multimedia contact centre concept.
“In reality, this is not really a new concept. But it is arguably going to be one of the great unified communications challenges to get right – and, at the end of the day, to be able to properly harness multimedia contact centres.
