The Power of Versatility in Contact Centers

‘Versatility’ is a pretty powerful adjective in the world of contact center technology. Defined as either “capable of easily turning from one task or endeavor to another”, or “having or capable of many uses”, versatility is the name of the game when it comes to technology. With it, comes tremendous advantages. For example, a call recorder with truly unbridled customization capabilities (virtually unabated) could lead to net-new value in the areas of cost and resource savings, intelligence gathering, compliance, customer service and more. Sure every contact center solution promises as much, but without open customization, there are defined limits to the value you can realize. Full versatility pushes the boundaries and opens up newfound improvements.

Long gone are the days of “black box”, proprietary solutions. Today’s nirvana is producing solutions with ubiquitous versatility. Let’s take a closer look at the power of versatility. Let’s take call recording, for example, and break down the elements of both data acquisition and system interoperability as it relates to customer interactions to see how extreme versatility enhances the bottom line.

Data Acquisition – Versatility in terms of the types of data that can be culled, combined and mined centrally can lead to a new level of intelligence gathering and subsequently dramatic enhancements in service and sales performance. For example: Let’s say a multi-site customer support center utilizes a combination of landlines, VoIP, chat and Skype when communicating with customers. If the installed interaction recording software was only capable of capturing a fraction of these modalities, the company would only see a sliver of the full picture regarding customer service performance, agent workflow optimization, or sales conversion success. Therefore, imagine the value in recording landline, VoIP, mobile, Skype, and even Office 365 all on the same system.

Interoperability – Suppose you run a large, multi-site contact center all using Avaya VoIP. Now, suppose your organization just acquired another firm and it has contact centers running Cisco TDM. Without the flexibility to centrally capture, mine and replay interactions across both telephony environments (or even more than just two for that matter), you are left without a unified measure of your service performance, your compliance adherence, order verification, and so on. To say the least, this disconnect would lead to significant redundancies and manual workarounds in order to pull interactions from the varying PBX centers into a single view for monitoring and reporting purposes. And redundancies and workarounds equate to allocating time, staff and money you don’t have or want to part with.

Below is an image which represents the full spectrum of customizable elements you should look for in your next call recording solution: