The Value of the Contact Center

The contact center is a company’s biggest asset in reaching out to current and potential customers, and it’s also a valuable tool in allowing loyal customers an avenue to reach the company, and even connect with specific individuals.

There’s a lot to accomplish in a given day within the contact center, activities that often demand the assistance of proven technology solutions.

For the contact center manager, how do they select the right solution to fit their needs?

Companies large and small rely on the contact center to reach out not only to customers, but to other departments within the company – or to satellite offices. Before the age of the Internet, most companies bought their own contact center infrastructure and set up a contact center on the premises.

Today, companies are either integrating their current system with a hosted service, or starting fresh with a hosted contact center exclusively.

Contact centers help employees manage their customers through a variety of media and applications, from phones to e-mail to live chats. Some of today’s contact centers are integrating SMS messaging to specific call lists to get real-time and immediate word out about special events or limited-time offerings on various services and products.

Companies that have constructed their contact center programs carefully will get value out of it, not only with better customer satisfaction and larger pools of potential customers, but also by enhancing the satisfaction of the employees who are more successful in their jobs because of an efficient contact center.

The contact center is a place where representatives have the opportunity to cross sell, assist customers with their issues or guide them to the correct product. It’s also a place where extremely valuable data is captured and stored. Administrators can run a variety of contact center software on the data to analyze and report on the various business processes that can be made to run more efficiently, thanks to the visibility the data provides.

There’s no doubt that the contact center is the central point of any business or enterprise. It’s where marketing ideas meet customer approval (or dissatisfaction). Multichannel marketing relies on the modern contact center and its various software and applications to carry out the essential information about goods and services that today’s consumers rely on.

Interactive Intelligence (News - Alert) Group, Inc. (ININ) is sponsoring an upcoming industry Web event focused on the importance of contact centers. The 75-minute webcast will begin at 11:30 a.m. (EST) on Tuesday, October 30, 2012.

The discussion brings industry analysts together to talk about best practices in establishing or upgrading a contact center. ININ’s chief marketing officer Joe Staples (News - Alert) will host the webcast.

For more information on how to register, check out this statement.