A NICE way to smartly manage your “contact” centre?

by Alex Zaharov-Reutt

Tuesday, 03 June 2008

Page 1 of 4 ! Hey, don’t call it a “call centre”, like Cylons they’ve evolved, into “contact centres”. But instead of being evil like Cylons, with the right software infrastructure a contact centre can actually be quite “NICE”, not only for customers, but for your business too. A couple of weeks ago I attended a presentation on the NICE SmartCenter, call/contact centre software which is trying to change the way that contact centres operate. I found it to be rather interesting as it showed just how much the basic call centre has evolved, or can evolve if you use much more advanced software to manage the entire contact centre operation. In attendance were a range of NICE’s existing and presumably potential customers, there to see what a 21st century contact centre was like and how, instead of being a problem to be tolerated, the contact centre could be a real strength to the business, which is actually what they should be. After all, how many of us come away from a call/contact centre experience feeling better about the company we’ve just dealt with? So, instead of simply being reactive entities, a modern contact centre should allow organisations to “manage their contact centres in an insightful proactive manner and take action at the right time”, so sayeth NICE’s description in its press release. The NICE SmartCenter software is an evolution of the NICE Perform solution and “leverages the synergies of the combined capabilities of Performe, IEX TotalView and Performix”, and is designed to help organisations to “extract insight from interactions”, which if you think about it, is a pretty smart thing to be doing. Indeed, to me it seems to be a contact centre based extension of the whole idea behind “customer relationship management”, although much more from the coal-face point of view of the contact centre, as opposed to the retail store front or the on-site contractor. Given that old fashioned call centres and more modern contact centres are something we all have to deal with, it’s interesting to look at some of the stats NICE has provided on contact centres in Australia. According to NICE: - Australia has the highest demand for advanced call centre technology in the APAC region. - Unlike other countries within the region, the current trend for Australian companies is to pull their call centre operations back into the organisation - This high end technology brings the voice of the Australian customer into other business departments ensuring that the contact centre operates as a strategic function rather than just a cost centre. So, what were some interesting things I learned at NICE’s presentation/conference on contact centres? Please read on to page 2. << First page <   1 2 3 4 Next page > Last page - Post your comment >>

 

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