Customer Care Technologies building a better tomorrow

As the profession of customer service expands worldwide, a trend I’m seeing is that more customer care teams are open to deploying a wide variety of tools they can't do without — such as routing, interactive voice response (IVR), workforce management, call monitoring and customer relationship management systems — in a hosted fashion. Besides fostering a working environment that accommodates at-home agents, hosting also broadens labor forces for call centers to encompass regions throughout the world.

As long as consumers feel entitled to service that is available by phone or on-line at a moment’s notice, companies will need agents to assist customers. Now that essential customer care technologies are accessible through a delivery mechanism such as hosting, companies can expand their workforces of people who communicate with customers to include local populations for whom commuting isn’t a viable option, as well as global populations in regions where customer care is truly a gainful way to earn a living.

It’s tempting to attribute the emergence of hosting simply to the ubiquity of high-speed Internet service. But I would say that hosting, like the growth of customer service as a profession, is a cultural phenomenon. Just as companies are broadening their methods of interacting with customers (see chart below), they are also broadening their methods of delivering technology that helps them serve customers better. As customer care teams become less dependent on where they’re located to serve customers effectively, they will increase their reliance on hosted systems.

This begs two questions: How do organizations know when they’re serving customers effectively, and how can they improve their value to customers? To answer these questions, we need the assistance of a second key category of customer care technology, performance management, which is vital not only to sustaining call centers, but also to sustaining the businesses they’re part of.

Read More