Sales force automation (SFA) is thriving, running on-premise and in the cloud, in part because one SFA application can support complex sales activities. Log on, enter or retrieve the required information, and you're ready to sell.
The call center environment, in contrast to SFA, is much more complex, even when running service in the cloud. That's because, instead of your salespeople callingâ€"or calling onâ€"the customer, they call you. So in addition to integrating CRM, back-end systems, your private branch exchange (PBX) for incoming calls, and agents' landlines or VoIP-based calling (especially for work-at-home agents), you also need:
- Computer telephony integration (CTI) to do a "screen pop" showing a call center agent the name and details of the person who's calling.
- Interactive voice response (IVR) to identify callers, reduce costs and resolve issues with minimalâ€"or noâ€"live agent interaction.
Providing great customer service, besides having top-notch customer service agents, requires integrating and making all of the above components work well together. But too often, it instead adds up to one big headache.
The Perfect Call Center Storm
Several years back, for example, one of Innoveer's high-technology clients integrated its Siebel CRM software with third-party IVR and CTI software. But about six times per day, often at night when call volumes peaked, the call center software would crash for 10 minutes, booting customers out of call queues. For a company selling items worth hundreds of dollars and taking 1,000+ calls per day, the result was lost revenue and no small risk of customer defection.
The culprit? Small memory leaks, which in the high-production environment eventually added up to a system crash. These memory leaks resulted from the underlying third-party call center software and components having been designed for slightly different versions of Siebelâ€"one for 7.7.0.1, another for 7.7.0.2, and so on. Meaning, no simple fix existed.
Murphy's Law Alive and Well
Unfortunately, no one offers a great soup-to-nuts call center. Telephony systems are complicated, proprietary, not yet open, and difficult to test at high volumes. Furthermore, your vendor for every required componentâ€"CRM, PBX, IVR, CTI and so onâ€"will often differ, and their software not be quite compatible.
Holding Out For A Hero
Arguably, call centers are ripe for a savior, and help could be on the way:
- Oracle CRM On Demand: With version 9, added a virtual CTI connector, which lets organizations more easily bring voice, voicemail, email and Web channels into the on-demand service picture. Meanwhile, IVR enablement via SOA offers new types of self-service and on-demand possibilities.
- Service Cloud: For this salesforce.com service offering running on Force.com, the company, together with Cisco, announced a Customer Interaction Cloud, aimed at SMBs, which is an out-of-the-box, SaaS-based call center.
- Asterisk: Run this open source call center software on an inexpensive Linux server, and for a few hundred dollars (including a digital-to-analog converter), you can have a working call center.
Upsides to cloud-based and open source call centers, besides their relatively low cost, are that they've been designed from scratch, which means they could potentially work much better than the call center technology kludge that's become common today.
Downsides, however, include a dearthâ€"so farâ€"of plug-ins to make them work with your internal network, IVR software and all of the other modern call center requirements. To integrate SaaS-based service with your on-premise systems, you'll also need to start opening firewall ports. From a security and privacy standpoint, that can expose you to data hijacking and potential break-ins, including browser cache attacks.
The Collective Power of Frustration
Will open source technology and SaaS call centers solve today's call center technology issues? With so much collective frustration over call centers, they're the safe bet for how we'll make the next big step forward toward creating easy to integrate, useful and headache-free call centers.
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Mastering customer service, regardless of whether it's running on-premise, in the cloud, or as open source software, requires treating the call center as a strategic asset. Furthermore, until you get your customer service business practices and self-service sites in order, from a service standpoint also forget social networks.and don't worry about Twitter.
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