Technologies
What is increasingly important to a wide range of firms is information technology, for it is the enabling platform for call centers, the Internet, and other innovations. Research on IT investment has found that it is a substantial contributor to productivity and productivity growth.
Over the last ten years, various call center technologies have become available to the market, including voice-over-Internet protocol (VoIP), customer relationship integration tools, and Internet and Web communication tools and products. In the scientific study of call centers in the financial services industry it is stated that the requirement for call centers to ensure that their technology is effective or appropriate for the call center's strategy. It is also indicated that while excesses in the adoption of technology were common in the recent technology-bubble firms, organizations are now returning to basics. Meaning that call centers are more interested in products that provide mission-critical services. Call center technology investments should be driven by customer loyalty and service objectives.
A traditional call center is transformed be technology, allowing staff to be in contact with customers in a number of different ways, including, but not limited to, e-mail, chat, Web browsing, and voice mail. It is not an easy task to find the right technology, but the first steps must be to determine the organization's needs, and to link customers with the information and services they require quickly. CRM, knowledge databases, or customer tracking, CEM or customer follow-up and retention, and handling of multiple contact media must be integrated into a system that is easily accessible to front-line staff, or to customers directly. Customer and call center staff can be matched by automated system, based on the customer's profile and the staff member's knowledge focus. Today the banking industry is experimenting with such “intelligent routing” to direct calls from the bank's best customers to particular representatives.
It is known that the first generation of call centers focused on answering telephone calls from customers (students). Since the Internet has become more widely used, call centers have made use of this technology as well. IT allows feedback to customers or students to occur through either of these two channels, and the more flexible Internet media provide a variety of tools, including Web chat, asynchronous conferencing, video conferencing, and Web call backs.
Call centers have also begun to make use of Web sites to provide their customers with more information. Customers are often provided with “Frequently Asked Questions” (FAQ) pages, where customers can look up answers to their own questions. Answers for clients can be looked up by intelligent question and answer systems, and provide them automatically. Athabasca University has even developed such a tool, called Ask AU.
If you consider any of the Web-based tools for use with a call center, it is important to consider their positive and negative aspects, and how they will affect call center operations. Knowing that the Internet gives customers or students the power to seek out answers on their own, organizations have a challenge to develop integrated systems that allow delivery of services that are better and that operate faster than those that customers can find for themselves. Moreover, people tend to like services that are “multi-channel”; they may use the Web site, but will also want direct contact with representatives. But the channels should be viewed as complementary, not competitive.
Such powerful information store as the Internet is capable of providing vast amounts of information for call center staff as well as for current and potential customers or students. Despise this, developing user interfaces that make this information quickly available in a format that satisfies the diverse needs of users is an ongoing challenge. The main impact of the new Internet-based technologies is that the service bar is being raised. When routine issues are handled on the Web through automatic agents, the call center must handle more sophisticated calls.
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