Adept Networks: What Is A Contact Center And Does Your Businesses Need One?

Online, June 13, 2013 (Newswire.com) - A contact center is a unified communications system that easily connects customers with the right agent at the right time. What does that mean? Really, what it means is that a company can leverage and manage a wide variety of customer relations across multiple channels including phone, business website, live chat, email, instant messaging and even video all with one "dashboard" application.

Why is this important to a business? This type of management improves the customer experience by providing answers to questions when they need them, which in-turn improves sale conversions. A contact center is proven to help a business become lean in operating processes resulting in lower costs and higher revenue.

What's the difference between a call center and a contact center?
Most people are familiar with traditional call centers which route inbound and outbound calls for multiple companies, typically handled at a separate location from the company. A contact center is connect both internal and external customers to the right agent at the right time. Essentially, it's a more robust form of call center that allows businesses to manage large volumes of different types of inquiries ranging from customer service calls, sales calls to website inquiries and integrate those inquires with a CRM or customer relationship management service.

There may not seem like much of a difference between a contact center and a call center, especially today, since most call centers are adopting contact center capabilities, but a contact center truly does provide a higher level of service.

Adept Networks partners with both ShoreTel and Allworx to provide the most robust and advanced premise based contact centers available. These contact center solutions have proven to help reduce operating costs by streamlining business processes. First, companies are able to eliminate costly third party conferencing services. Secondly, businesses are able to put critical information within reach of those who need it and that applies to both employees and customers. Lastly, businesses are able to eliminate missed phone calls and delayed responses, which is a serious problem for companies that handle large volumes of calls.

For examples of how a contact center can improve business operations, read Adept Networks' recent article explaining what a contact center is and how a contact center can help businesses.

Simply put, a contact center allows agents or employees to work from anywhere. Moreover, when an agent is contacted they also receive critical information about the caller or contact in order to help them field the call in the best way. A contact center is completely geared towards improving productivity.

Adept uses premise based contact solutions by ShoreTel and Allworx because they are easy to deploy, maintain and use. Those are the 3 key ingredients to a successful contact center.

The Allworx contact center features a very robust call management solution that allows businesses to distribute calls in linear priority, round robin, longest idle and ring all to maximize answered calls. Aside from flexible queuing options there are a host of supervisor management tools and call assistant features.

For more information on contact centers and integrating a contact center into a business, contact Greg Wilkoff at Adept Networks.