From the Customer Services Director's perspective, the same requirements are equally true of electronic transactions and yet many organisations fail to deliver a service equivalent to their telephony channel. Historically, electronic communications have not been treated like telephony either from the process or technology perspective. So, electronic communications often do not have equivalent (or better) service levels or response times. Probably, this is why so many on line consumers are so frustrated!

So the customer is creating many new challenges for the contact centre:

• The speed and accuracy of response relative to expectations: the immediacy issue
• The need for a personalised response
• The need for quality and consistent responses
• The establishment of valid response expectations
• The requirement to handle multiple inbound and outbound communication styles.

Against this back drop of new customer demands, the contact centre has its own challenges to meet:

• Trying to meet the internal targets and servicing the customer well
• Servicing multiple brands with differing SLA's from a single contact centre
• Achieving more for less
• Addressing new regulatory requirements
• Meeting compliance needs
• Deciding and implementing new services based on geographic splits
• Managing staff dissatisfaction and churn
• Addressing the skills shortages in the market
• Managing the increasing cost base
• Attending to the growing service backlogs
• Improving sales and profitability.

Faced with these dual pressures, just how can the modern contact centre respond?

What are the Options?

The organisation has a number of choices when deciding on their contact strategy and the way they service their clients:

• Do Nothing
• Increase the Internal Resource
• Transform the business