Intelligent Customer Care

By Araceli Aranda, Managing Director of Presence Technology

The ever-growing number of consumers using Contact Center services has shown up the advantages for many companies derived from establishing a direct channel of communication with their current and potential customers. However, reality is quite different in many cases. When a customer calls a Call/Contact Center, the path to problem resolution may be both long and complicated.

The service/cost relationship within Customer Care Centers forces an increasing number of companies to offer a selective attention to their customers. To achieve this, the implementation of business rules for the Call/Contact Center management poses the challenge to perfectly match either the individual or group customer needs with the most effective way to provide a response within the shortest possible time. Also, reducing the time of attention as well as providing a problem resolution in a 'first-contact basis' are the keys for a productivity improvement.

Organizing our Contact Centers
The Contact Center integrates multiple agents and marketing strategies, while managing thousands of contacts on a daily basis through different channels such as voice, mail, chat/web, call-back, SMS, etc. Although the IT staff is responsible for the infrastructure, it is the management who decide on the workload distribution in order to reach the target productivity. Inefficiency in call routing may result in saturated, low-productivity centers, which in turn results in a loss of customer satisfaction.

Furthermore, the growth of new channels without performing a suitable integration may pose a large problem for organizations and result in a 'Tower of Babel' effect, or it can be managed by means of tools that offer a multi-channel consistency and allow for the integration of contact interactions in an intelligent way. The goal is to achieve that customer care is provided through a system allowing for the best-suited agent to handle a client at any time.

Transforming user´s habits
The power of Intelligent Routing resides in the possibility of routing all the interactions in a Contact Center based on business criteria, and not based on the channel through which the customer accesses to the service. This routing allows defining, for example, what incoming calls have a greater probability to be qualified as a sale or how to gain customer loyalty by providing customized offers. To do so, companies in charge of the management of contact centers need to quickly access to their business databases. Furthermore, to make the most out of both technology and resources, they should be able to modify parameters and forecasts 'on the fly', depending on the use or seasonality of the center.

If all communication channels with customers are integrated, companies can offer whichever communication media with the customer wish to strengthen, at a reasonable cost. If the answer is positive using new communication channels, customers will start using them. To make this possible, it is fundamental to rely on systems featuring a multi-channel universal queue with the capacity to unify and to distribute all kind of interactions with customers, as well as the pending tasks between all the agents.