One Huge Mega System – Is that Really the Answer?
Author: Gary BarnettI’m sure you’re familiar with a contact center’s core interaction technologies – the automatic call distributor (ACD), the self-service application, the predictive dialer, as well as email and chat capabilities. These technologies are the primary vehicles through which many customer-company interactions take place before reaching an agent.
These core interaction technologies are themselves supported by a number of additional technologies, such as workforce management, quality management, performance management and analytics, which are designed to help the business improve its processes and find the balance it needs for efficiency and effectiveness.
I’m sure you’re wondering why I’m providing this tutorial on the infrastructure of the contact center. Here’s why. One of the biggest challenges facing a contact center is figuring out how to keep all of the information maintained and shared between these various components in continual lockstep while the contact center continues to operate in a 24×7x365 dynamic environment. For example, when a new representative is hired, the agent identification typically needs to be populated in each contact center application – a very onerous task. And today, because so many companies have multiple contact centers in distributed/remote locations, the task of managing these systems has become incredibly complex, enormously time consuming and fraught with error.
One solution to address this problem is to create one huge mega contact center system that is used to essentially manage everything. This approach obviously creates its own set of issues. This system would probably not be able to scale to meet future agent levels. And, it would generate considerable challenges if it failed while trying to support the company’s customer-facing business processes – a failure that would obviously put the business at risk. In addition, if the existing software solutions come from different vendors, it is likely that many of these existing, fully-depreciated, and still fully-operational software licenses would need to repurchased in a mega scenario. That is a big capital expenditure. Ouch!
What businesses really need is a centralized application layer that brings the administration of all contact centers and their components into a single location, addressing the need to eliminate complexity and reduce overhead, but at the same time keeping the individual contact center applications in place. This approach enables individual contact centers to continue to operate in the event of an outage, and eliminates the need for a business to repurchase the same software licenses again.
But you tell me… Does mega system spell mega trouble?
Author: Gary Barnett
Catergories: ACDs, Analytics Tools, Dialers, Disaster Recovery, Unified Solutions, Voice Self Service, WFM
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9:40 am on November 9th, 2007
I’m a fan of distributed mega systems. Like the Aspect Callcenter of old. Big yellowish box that sat in my server room and did everything one could imagine a callcenter to need. Each site had it’s own glorious Aspect ACD then Enterprise Contact Server came out and what we thought where great ACD’s compounded to AWESOME ACDs. Now you could take 2 high powered fully functioning ACDs in different sites and seemlessly share info around. Things couldn’t get better…then eWFM tied the agents into the ACDs…well you get the point
9:34 pm on May 5th, 2008
I have a suggestion for a unified system that gives the benefits of the “all-in-one-” old-iron” contact center”, Populate your Unified communication system agent-groups from LDAP (AD or IBM). You could make agent-group assignment a function of LDAP OU membership. Leverage the core of the enterprise systems to facilitate ease of administration of users. You could also ensure compliance with the automatic disabling of ID’s when they disappear from active directory and enforce policy based user administration. By synchronizing the Aspect products with AD, you can offload the responsibility for adding and classifying users from the telco teams to the corporate AD teams, thus optimizing the process for hiring new employees and getting them to the contact center.