The running of contact centers has undergone a sea change in the past couple of years and the prime reasons for this have been offshoring of contact center work and the necessity of running a contact center.
Offshoring has occurred primarily to cut down on operational costs and having a contact center has become a necessity in order to stay competitive in a business environment where service is often the only factor that distinguishes one business from another. Although contact centers are a vital cog in the CRM efforts of a company, very often they are viewed as cost centers that are major resource guzzlers – mainly because of high attrition rates with employees that increases the training and H.R work required to maintain adequate staffing and technical requirements to process large amounts of data, maintain security of data, networking, hardware costs, etc.
For a contact center to deliver real value to the business, it has to succeed at two ends. It should keep the customer happy and at the same time achieve its objectives at a low cost. Today, a fantastic low cost contact center management opportunity in the form of hosted contact centers is available for businesses.
Technical requirements necessary for the success of a hosted contact center include fast connectivity that factors in latency and additional capacity. Ensure that your new hosted contact center is provided with sufficient bandwidth so that calls from precious customers do not have to compete with email and other applications for priority. This can be achieved by segregating call center traffic from internal traffic and putting it on a separate WAN or increasing existing bandwidth capacity.
Ensure that the network infrastructure can take peak loads and still maintain smooth and fast data transfer. Latency is another problem with IP-based networks. Aim for a latency of around 50 milliseconds (ms) or less. Remember lower the latency better the communication. The quality of your call, especially if you plan to deploy a VoIP solution, is highly dependent on the latency.
Any hosted solution raises the issue of data security, with a contact center the issue is of particular significance since the data is not yours; it is information about your customers. If you are in the finance sector or banking then your contact center data needs to be hosted on a separate server at the host’s end and you should ask for a dedicated network connection. Check for the different levels of data differentiation, these should include database, server rack, network routers, and network switches.
Before your hosted contact center goes live you need to ensure that the hardware at your end is up to the task. This means up-to-date processors, RAM, and size of the hard drive. Your hosted applications will perform to the extent permitted by the agent’s PC.
Sherman Hsieh is founder and CEO of Gate58 Marketing. Prior to founding Gate58 Marketing, Sherman was a marketing executive with Siebel Systems. Sherman is also founder and CEO of VendorDemo.
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