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Customer interfacing is an art and those who perfect it will reap the fruits. The contact centers play a key role in enabling a multitude of customer interactive services that makes for managing the lifecycle of the product at the consumers end. Contact center outsourcing is a significant slice of the ITeS space and one needs to deploy a combination of best practices to put in place best of breed solutions for customer interaction. One of the best practices in creating a robust customer interaction backbone lies in some of the technologies that creates and enables seamless communication.

Key Deliverables
While BPO companies as part of their service portfolio provide various customer interaction services, well take a look at one of the significant performance metrics that determines the call resolving efficiencies of call centers. In any call center, the average call handling time (ACHT) has to be short and the first call resolution (FCR) should be high. From a technology perspective, there are several products that take care of various processes of the call center, but arriving at peak FCRs has always been an issue. So a good FCR product has to have a lot of interactive features like real-time data mining tools and messaging consoles that will enable a call center agent to resolve customer queries with least wait times and avoid repeat calls.

In any customer interaction service, what the key deliverable clients must look for from their outsourcing partners is the kind of customer management and relationship technologies they have in place. More specifically, the clients derive a lot of intangible RoI out of the way issues are solved because when the first contact call is made by the customers it has a direct bearing on the client companys brand equity. In order to determine the effectiveness of the FCR solutions, the ideal way is to look at the functionality of the solution and how it integrates analytics with real-time problem solving features. For instance, some of the solutions have a messenger console integrated with its FCR solution. So when a call lands, the agent can handle the call in real-time while simultaneously chat with the team leaders and find a solution to that particular query.

The contact centers across the world operate in extremely challenging environments and deal with geographically widespread clients and products cutting across wide segments- from FMCG to technology. Given such challenges, the technologies used in managing the customer interaction has become a big market. Its not just IVR that once used to be the major form of technology when managing the customers was in question. Today, the technology behind the contact center has reached the next stage where solutions in the realm of FCR are playing a crucial role in addressing the customer challenges effectively.

However, despite the availability of solutions, the biggest challenge is in creating an automated customer delivery platform ecosystem. Its not apps silos, it is a combination of tools and best practices that usher in a customer interaction regime that makes for a highly responsive and knowledge driven ecosystem.

Shrikanth G
shrikanthg@cybermedia.co.in

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