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The Smart Techie was renamed Siliconindia India Edition starting Feb 2012 to continue the nearly two decade track record of excellence of our US edition.

Next Gen Contact Centers

Rajarshi Bhose, Amit Wasudeo Gawande & Evelyn
Wednesday, September 1, 2010
Rajarshi Bhose, Amit Wasudeo Gawande & Evelyn
Service providers today understand the importance of customer service in defining their success. Of all the business units aligned towards customer service, contact centers have a direct involvement in customer satisfaction. However, traditional contact centers operate with the sole aim of efficiently completing the transactions and resolving the issues cost-effectively. This, as a result, introduces inefficiency in the contact center workflow, affecting the customer retention and in turn, the revenue. Next Generation Contact Centers (NGCC) improve the customer satisfaction level by leveraging the immersive and latest advanced technologies, thus overcoming the aforementioned inefficiencies.

Introduction

Since customer retention and revenue generation per customer is the primary focus of service providers around the world, customer satisfaction (C-SAT) plays a pivotal role in deciding their success. The service that contact centers provide gives a good indication of C-SAT levels and acts as a make-or-break criterion for a service provider’s business. Organizations set up contact centers for catering to the needs and requirements of their customers about the applications and services the organization provides.

The current workflow followed by the contact centers around the world embodies inefficiency in multiple ways. To begin with, customers are generally made to navigate through a labyrinth of Interactive Voice Response (IVR) prompts to determine the problem type and finally are routed to the human agent. In many cases, the IVR prompts are not adequately designed, and quite often a customer reaches a dead stop at the IVR prompt with no category or solution sounding correct to him. Again, multiple times a customer is put on hold waiting for a free agent to respond. Sometimes the agent is available, but the customer once again has to replay the entire problem. The ability to resolve a problem further depends on the skill level of the human agent and their abilities in searching the existing knowledgebase for the solution or in routing to the best agent who is skilled in the required area. All these lead to

* Longer call handling time,
* Lower C-SAT levels, and

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