The contact center solutions market in India is witnessing the emergence of many new trends. On one hand contact center companies are becoming a lot more quality conscious and so have begun investing in their ability to record and monitor quality. Also, investments in performance optimization and workforce management are likely to grow. While the former would require contact centers to invest in the real time monitoring, unified reporting and real time alerting and messaging tools so that performance can be measured and benchmarked against the best, the later would mean investments in work force scheduling and adherence tools. IP is also gaining prominence. In fact, IP would soon be at the core of all offshore contact center services.

Technology Options

n Circuit Switch versus IP-based Network: The traditional circuit switch-based solutions are well proven in the market place and provide good features and very good quality voice. However, IP-based converged voice and data platforms are better equipped to meet customer demands of consistency across all communication channels. This is because it can facilitate voice and data interaction over a single network and single platform. IP also offers cost savings in terms of more flexible adds, moves and changes. For those setting up multi-location contact centers or even location-less (home-based) centers, IP offers tremendous potential. For instance, in a traditional environment, while a multi-location contact center would need an ACD at every site, one ACD could suffice for all sites if the network is IP-based

n IP-based Solutions: These are intelligent and offer specialized, multimedia-based customer interface and redressal solutions. The IP-based solution also enhances the productivity of the contact agents. Location independence is a key benefit of an IP based contact center infrastructure. No matter where the agents are physically located, as long as they have access to the corporate WAN they can still function as if onsite, receiving and responding to contact center inquiries as appropriate.

This also assumes significance on driving down costs by being able to operate in a distributed manner, making the infrastructure resilient to eventualities of failure/disaster. With an underlying IP-based contact center infrastructure, one deploys and maintains a single network. All these factors significantly reduce the total cost of network ownership.

n Best-of-breed Components versus Complete Solution: Anybody setting up a contact center can either settle for a solution with the best-of-the-breed components from several vendors or go to just one vendor and ask him to deliver a complete solution. The million-dollar question, however, is—what is the better approach? The best-of-the-breed solution assembled from ten different vendors appears to be a better approach for some for the obvious reason that it allows them a lot of flexibility in terms of range of choice. However, it appears from the call center preferences worldwide that more and more of them are now looking for vendors who can offer them everything under one roof. This is largely because they want to avoid a multi-vendor environment where failures often lead to blaming games, that is, instead of rectifying the fault one vendor starts pointing finger at another. However, are these really two different choices? Not really, after all even the biggest of end-to-end call center solution providers do not offer everything from their own stable.

n The CRM Perspective: Another way is to look at the call center solutions from a holistic customer relationship management (CRM) perspective. A holistic CRM ecosystem should include such elements as interaction management, commitment management and business intelligence. Keeping these elements in mind, one can start putting in place a contact center solution. For instance, keeping in mind the fact that customers today appreciate communication consistency across all communications channels be it Web, e-mail or voice, interaction management should have components like IVR and ACD (for voice), Web-conferencing and e-mail response tools. Similarly, the business intelligence part of the contact center solution should have tools that satisfy an enterprise’s growing need to know its customers more and better. Tools that help a business keep the promises made to its customers can take care of commitment management.