Contact Centers : A New Dimension in Customer Relationship Management

The contact center is a novel and emerging concept in the domain of customer service management, and is largely regarded as part of a company’s holistic customer relationship management strategy. The contact center acts as an organizational central point from which the entire pool of customer contacts is handled and is emerging as a vital component of the Multichannel Marketing Strategy of contemporary companies.

A contact center essentially comprises of one or several call centers, e-mail channels, live chat and social networking channels for collecting customer responses. Further, the contact center is normally powered by special software which enables routing of information to the correct person, tracking of contacts as well as data collection.

The reasons for the Emergence of Contact Centers

The increasing acceptance and adoption of modern communication channels, new devices- smart phones, tablets etc along with the growing proliferation of social media among today’s consumers has completely modified the conventional concepts of customer relationship management. Modern companies require innovative end-to-end solutions for empowering their customer relationship management experience and being “the best among the rest”; in order to drive long-staying brand loyalty & customer retention.

An ideal contact center solution needs to provide organizations with the below deliverables

• ·         Ability to engage with customers in the most intelligent and useful manner
• ·  The solution must be equipped with multi-channel customer experience management capabilities
• ·         Achieve superior results with every transaction
• ·         Overall enhanced business value

Contact Centers are a powerful tool for Customer Relationship/ Experience Management and hold the potential to offer companies a sustained competitive advantage over opponents by providing a unique customer service experience and environment. Customer Service is merely not about having customers in the first place! It is much more than that, and in fact it would not be wrong to consider effective customer service as the foundation stone of long-term profitability, client retention and retention.

An effectual contact center solution provides firms the opportunities for improving lead generation and hence profitability. A well-defined contact center strategy also allows companies to personalize customer service activities and offer products/services based on the behavior patterns and attributes witnessed; thereby leading to overall enhanced customer satisfaction. Contact centers help companies manage client interactions via several distinct media including emails, calls, fax, letters, live chat and messenger, social media platforms-Facebook, Linkedin, Twitter, Blogs etc.