Concerned that your contact center is getting, well, fat?
Are you planning a network upgrade and expansion over the next few years, and becoming concerned about the growth of your business contact center?
Without a doubt, the coming years will witness the continued drive to upgrade contact centers with the latest technologies; businesses will continue to expand their platforms in order to support additional customer channels; and the development of integration features will become increasingly advanced.
One factor in these developments is the dramatic expansion of mobile-based services in both volume and scope. This has given rise to significant growth in the contact center industry, in turn resulting in a severe capacity demand. With skyrocketing industry demand, IT contact center managers are confronted with an operational conundrum — how to best meet industry demand without expanding beyond their means?
In your contact center, you should always reach for the following benchmarks of three criteria: minimum TCO per solution (i.e., minimum number of HW resources such as servers and DB); maximum operational simplicity; and the largest capacity utilization best practices allow. Of course, this all depends on the size of your contact center and the business you are targeting.
Small- and medium-size contact centers should be able to enjoy the full benefit of employing one physical machine to accommodate at least a few thousand agents. In this case, the operational flexibility of just one machine is substantial, notwithstanding the need for additional backup and a cloud solution.
Tier 1 mobile operators and sizeable financial industry enterprises have what are categorized as large contact centers. These organizations are concerned with scale, even at the expense of the TCO. Common dilemmas faced by large contact centers are whether the organization's recording infrastructure is sufficient to support tens of thousands of agents, a challenging rate of calls per second, hundreds of thousands of calls each day, and so on.
The primary concern for such organizations is that current systems lack a sufficient capacity to operate smoothly with the enormous number of interactions the business needs to handle. These risks delays, software hazards, dropped calls, etc. Secondly, growing businesses with ambitious goals cannot be sure their existing contact center will be able to accommodate future business demands.
In addition to traditional call recording, advanced features and platforms that are being rapidly integrated into contact centers, contributing to the overall system load, include:
- Quality Management - for comprehensive implementation of a quality assurance program for agents, supervisors, evaluators and managers. This includes scoring, graphic visualization, alerts for urgent issues and best practices guidance for contact center agents.
- Analytics-based Quality Optimization (AQO) - to provide advanced call categorization and root cause analysis. This includes analytics-based KPIs (e.g., customer satisfaction, customer churn).
- Interaction Analytics (IA) - to analyze customer interactions across all channels on a large scale; quickly identifying hot topics and root causes, and producing actionable insight to improve processes, increase sales, optimize marketing campaigns and reduce operational costs.
These emerging technologies enable enterprises to analyze calls in real time and gain critical business insights.
Here at NICE, we set out to address these growth and development concerns with our innovative NICE Engage solution. When designing the platform for NICE Engage, we paid particular attention to the architecture's flexibility and versatility.
This allows customers to choose one of two options. The 'pay as you grow' concept allows for modest investments, but provides the center with the capability of meeting new demands should the scale expand beyond expectations. The second option allows customers to plan in advance for a large, "fat" contact center to address rising capacity requirements, and the correlated need for additional agents, supervisors, synchronized operations, and more. In both of these options, NICE Engage infrastructure takes into account existing advanced quality management and analytics services used for optimal business utilization.
NICE Engage solution assures that you'll be able to cope with a call center of any size, ensuring compliance, quality and optimum recording targets.
Interested in learning more about NICE Engage solution? Please do not hesitate to contact me at Eran.shecter@nice.com.