Description of the process
The infrastructure process deals with the technology selected for the contact centre to route a customer contact from its source to its destination. The technology involves network components, hardware devices and software applications. Technology created the call centre industry using 800 number access and automatic call distribution (ACD) functionality. Technology appeared to be the driving force when in fact reduced costs and increased customer satisfaction were the stimulus.
This stimulus continues today for deploying new technology into the contact centre infrastructure:
- Increase agent productivity
- Improve process efficiency
- Give customers convenience & choice
This process starts with a customer contact from any source (call, fax, e-mail, voicemail, web inquiries, etc.) and ends with a process flow through all the enabling technology to get it to the right resource (agent, self-serve or automated response).
Characteristics of a best practice
Given the complexity of contact centre technology and the proliferation of vendors, the most important task within this process is to choose the right partner with which to work.
- Contact centre professionals have a high level understanding of technology and the functionality it provides to meet their needs.
- Contact centres are experts at defining their requirements. They leave it to technical experts to develop the solutions using the appropriate technology.
- Technical experts in contact centre technology are typically within the IT and telecom management departments who handle enterprise-wide networks and systems.
- Contact centre takes responsibility for planning and implementation of new technology into the contact centre.
- Business cases to support the capital investment for technology are based on one or many of the following:
- Handling growth without increasing operating budgets.
- Improving customer satisfaction, employee satisfaction or revenue without increasing operating budgets.
- Reduce operating budget – the least favourite because it is not an investment strategy for building the contact centre as a strategic asset.
Relationships to other processes
Input to infrastructure process:
- The Contact Centre Role process defines the organization’s customer communication channels that will be supported by an agent (inbound/outbound calls, inquiries from self-serve applications, fax, e-mail).
- The Business Model process defines the capabilities that the contact centre requires to serve external customers.
- Basic voice service providing toll-free access and call routing to first available agent using network and ACD technology
- Inquiries to agents from self-serve customers using IVR, web voice over IP, web call back or web chat technology
- Alternate communication choices using voicemail, fax and e-mail technology
- Service according to segment, transaction type or any other business rule using CTI and intelligent routing technology.
- Automation of outbound calling using dialer technology.
- Integration of all incoming media (voice, fax, e-mail, voice over IP, Web callbacks) using communication server technology.
- The Organizational Design process defines integration requirements for different pools of agents.
- The infrastructure technology collects and reports data required by the Performance Feedback process.
Output from infrastructure process:
- An understanding of the customer’s experience with the contact centre technology is a component of the Skills & Knowledge Transfer process.
- Force Management process becomes more difficult as routing decisions become more complex.
What’s in it for me?
Be an expert customer yourself
Contact Centre professionals can be easily overwhelmed with technical information provided by vendors and be paralyzed by a lack of understanding. This is the time to come to grips with your role. Contact centre professionals are key users of contact centre technology, not designers. In this role, the most important activity is to clearly articulate what you want to improve in an existing process or what new capability you want to acquire. Technical experts will define the solution.