The Evolution of the Contact Centre

The contact centre is your first line of customer service and customers will form their initial opinions of your business from the experience they receive. It is essential that customers are routed to the correct agents who can fulfil their request as fast as possible. First time resolution is every contact centre’s manager’s prime objective, the more calls that are handled accurately the move revenue the business makes.

Increasingly contact centres are leveraging IP solutions to enhance their customer services, improve sales performance and streamline branch office operations.
Traditional contact centres are centralised, tied to a fixed location and do not easily integrate into back office systems, with IP Telephony, organisations can seamlessly and cost-effectively extend corporate phone features and IP-based applications to employees regardless of location, encouraging better communication and collaboration. This allows the formation of a geographically dispersed virtual contact centre that draw skills from anywhere in the enterprise.

Alpitour is a leading Italian travel agent with six sites across Italy and no physical central contact centre, the Alpitour Group needed to create a distributed contact centre for all of the travel agencies to provide a reservation service that could be networked together so everyone could access the system. If one agent is busy then the call is routed through to another agent so the customer can make their booking. The objective is to improve customer service through better call management and response times.

“Thanks to quality and reliability of Mitel solutions, we are able to migrate all ACD groups belonging to reservation area from TDM to IP and create distributed agent groups. This has been possible thanks to the smooth migration from TDM to IP solutions offered by Mitel, allowing a convergence of communications tools and saving our existing investments,” said Mr Lingua, IT Operation of Alpitour.

Both the underlying IP voice network and the contact centre application are seen by users and callers as one seamless system. However call centre agents can be located anywhere. Of particular interest at present is the concept of teleworking where users are provided the same communication capabilities in a small office home office (SOHO) as they would if they were based in the corporate head quarters.

Increased flexibility and customer service
Teleworker solutions allow for the easy addition of agents to the call centre as the need arises to cater for peak periods alleviating the need for agents to travel or increasing the real estate of the call centre. Contact centre agents can be deployed remotely, enabling expansion of contact centre operations across multiple geographies and time zones, and increased scheduling flexibility.

Ashford Council in the UK extended the opening hours of the contact centre by offering agents the opportunity to work at home using the Mitel Teleworker solution. This improved customer service by offering more hours of service and also saved costs on keeping the building open through the evening and weekends.

“We were attracted to IP Telephony because we were upgrading our communications network and needed a solution that would provide us flexibility in deployment. We needed a system that would enable us to affordably extend the opening hours of the call centre. We chose the Mitel IP Communications Platform because it provides this flexibility, enabling call centre agents to work from home well as enabling remote agents to work in other areas of the council. Moreover, we were especially taken with the Contact Centre Management Solution, because of the ease of management and reporting it provides.”
Rob Neil, Head of ICT Services, Ashford Borough Council

Alpitour also plan to offer agents the flexibility to work from home using the Mitel Teleworking Solution. The employees still retain the same functionality that they have in the office and this again provides the Alpitour Group with the option of extending their hours of business, which in turn will increase customer satisfaction, and retaining and recruiting talented workers.

“ Agents will soon be able to work from one of the sites or remotely with teleworker solution with the same features and benefits they have in the office. Flexibility and mobility are key requests in our industry, both from customers and employees, and thanks to Mitel solutions we are now able to satisfy,” said Mr Lingua.

An innovative approach
The perception of a contact centre is that it is a large bustling department in a head office. However this is not the case with IP and small companies now have the flexibility to operate a contact centre with just a few people whilst portraying the image that they are a large global company.

CommonTime is a small software company based in Derby, UK, with satellite offices in North America, France and Spain. CommonTime wanted to give international customers and prospects the ability to contact any employee, regardless of location, through one single phone number, to operate with the same efficiency as large global corporations and deliver outstanding customer service. Instead of deploying a contact centre solution CommonTime invested in a teleworker solution, that enables its employees to work effectively from any location, creating a teleworker ethos.

CommonTime offers 24x7 contact by phone is a concept which the firm calls ‘Follow the Sun’, so called because when one country is asleep, another is awake, and locals may need to call for assistance or to make a purchase. This innovative and forward thinking use of IP technology means at any time of the day a customer or prospect can call CommonTime and a member of staff will answer, as the call is routed to the most appropriate country over the IP network. Mitel enables CommonTime to deliver the superior services that big companies offer to customers while at the same time retain small overheads.

Flexible reporting

IP contact centre solutions generate invaluable reports for managers to help them plan for quiet and busy periods, monitor and track queue and response times and evaluate individual agent’s performance.

The Health Professional Council in the UK previously operated in the dark handling their 20,000 calls per month that it receives from UK healthcare professionals. Using the Mitel Contact Centre solution the contact centres management has been radically improved, and the HPC can now utilise extensive reporting and tracking capabilities. This enables managers to have ready access to important data and ultimately helps them to better understand both internal and external customers.

Contact Centres of the future
The multi-media contact centre using email, fax and phone is stepping up to the next level using real time communications on the agents desktop combined with real data, which can be integrated into Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) applications, a true next generation application.

The Microsoft Live Communications Server and the Mitel Live Business Gateway offers real time communication with an intuitive interface on the desktop and facilitates closer team working incorporating different ways of communicating, such as email, secure instant messaging, voice and video conferencing, and the ability to share documents. Imagine this scenario in a contact centre environment seamlessly bringing remote and office based agents together to answer a callers query in a first time resolution.

More and more, contact centres are becoming the primary means for customers to reach into an organisation, whether by phone, email or the web. By enhancing customer service levels through first contact resolution and implementing productivity enhancing management tools, contact centres can transition from cost centres to profit centres, and facilitate revenue growth and business success.