The enterprise is the contact centre

One of the biggest changes in communications technology in recent years has been the dramatic increase in enterprise telephony. The exponential growth in the number of companies looking to embrace VOIP, for example, has encouraged service providers to extend call centre-centric technologies across the enterprise.

As a result, companies have a number of large customers - in some cases including up to 100 000 users - a very small percentage of whom are call centre agents.

Today, the distinction between the company and the call centre has become blurred, to the point where the enterprise is the contact centre.

The goal of such technologies is to enable the enterprise to model itself in a way that more closely and directly responds to the customer's needs - so, for example, handling accounts calls in a more customer-centric way. The key to this is by replacing the old departmental 'siloed' approach with desktop-based communications technologies that seamlessly link together the whole business, enabling employees to interact with each other and providing maximum visibility of the customer interaction to each individual, whatever their role.

Organisations look to take enterprise-wide advantage of functionality previously restricted to the contact centre.

Dave Paulding is Interactive Intelligence's regional sales manager for UK and Africa.

Until relatively recently, the call centre or help desk was typically managed as a separate part of the business, with its own IT infrastructure and telephony applications. As a result, however good or poor the contact centre was in managing the customer interface, resolution of problems involving another part of the company could not be dealt with in a seamless way, resulting in delays and a less than ideal customer experience.

Over the past 12 months and more, however, the marketplace has increasingly begun to recognise the benefits to be derived from an integrated solution that could serve both the customer-facing contact centre and internal back-office telephony communications, in terms of greater operational efficiencies and improved customer experience.

With the resultant emergence of a range of converged solutions, the distinction between the contact centre and the broader business has become increasingly blurred, as organisations look to take enterprise-wide advantage of functionality previously restricted to the contact centre.

For example, if a contact centre receives a customer billing enquiry it is likely that this will have to be passed to someone in the back-office accounts department. If they are both using a similar system, it becomes much easier for the contact centre agent to establish the availability of the relevant back office colleague and forward relevant notes and records on the customer interaction captured by the system.

And, equally importantly, this is both easy and cost-effective to implement. Assuming an IP-based network is already in place, there are no upfront infrastructure costs - such as additional telephones or complex cabling - as all that is required is to extend the licensing agreement to cover the extra seats required for the relevant applications.

This is particularly attractive for those organisations looking to rationalise or simplify their telephony investment, as it removes the management cost and administration associated with a multiplicity of suppliers and maintenance contracts.

Unusually, until recently, smaller businesses were more likely to adopt a single shared system, with the main office telephony system including a small number of extensions, providing help desk or customer service support. By contrast, for a variety of reasons, major corporates have typically maintained separate telephony environments.

Change is under way, however, as larger enterprises become more aware of the benefits of unified communications and major software vendors respond with solutions bringing together voice and desktop applications and targeted at both the contact centre and back office.

As a result, looking ahead, the concept of 'the enterprise is the contact centre' is likely to become the de facto standard for companies seeking to achieve both operational gains and better customer service. The age of the win-win is with us.

* Dave Paulding is Interactive Intelligence's regional sales manager for UK and Africa.