TMCnews Featured Article

Remember when the only way to contact an organization was either in person or by snail mail? I don’t really – for the majority of my life I’ve been able to contact a company for any reason through the telephone or Internet. Today, customers have numerous options when it comes to getting in touch with a business. Apps, mobile devices, landlines, live chat, e-mail and websites are just some of the many ways technology has granted customers on-demand access to companies and their contact centers.

The rise in mobile device usage is one of the primary factors driving the evolution of the modern contact center, especially of VoIP and cloud services.

"Without question, this phenomenal growth in mobile technology, coupled with the growth in BYOD policies, mobile device growth and increasing numbers of remote and teleworkers, is driving more companies to deploy VoIP call centers," said Denise Culver, a research analyst and author of a Return Path study.

Customers are using mobile devices and apps to get in contact with organizations, and it’s important for them to be able to get the information they need from these channels. Well-designed sites and apps can cut down on the number of calls that end up at a call center.

"Businesses are creating apps all the time," Kathleen Peterson, founder of PowerHouse Consulting, told CRM Buyer. "It's an alternative method of executing some task or activity, but it may or may not reduce calls to the call center. The need for services is elastic, and the more options you provide, the more options the customer will use."

Mobile devices not only affect the customer’s experience, but they help with call center managers and agents.

"Every minute that a supervisor is sitting at a desk staring at a computer screen is a minute that they can't help their agents," said Taylor. "It helps them be more accessible to their staff."

Hosted technology is allowing contact centers to adapt to the consumers’ demands and innovations in the industry. LiveVox (News - Alert), a provider of cloud contact center solutions, offers an integrated hosted predictive dialer, ACD, IVR, call recording and business analytics suite. Recently, the company announced major improvements to its compliance suite, a platform for companies to manage compliance even as client demand or regulations change, allowing users to streamline compliance across all their contact centers while simultaneously customizing specific campaigns.

The latest feature, Phone Lock, completes the compliance seal by eliminating the three most common sources of call recording gaps: manual dials, inbound calls and transfers. Contact centers traditionally face data collection and account coordination gaps between sites, PBX's (News - Alert) and dialers. The latest offering from LiveVox addresses those gaps.

LiveVox also offers a private VoIP cloud, which includes multisite deployment, MPLS cost efficiency, security and redundancy, capacity provisioning, centralized management and control and cloud-based switching.

To learn more about its applications offerings, click here.

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