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Responding to a changing marketplace and intense competition, service providers that previously offered voice or data services to end customers, or enterprises that operated their own contact center infrastructure are now seeking to take advantage of proven technology to both offer value-added services, and make their contact center services more efficient. The goals of the service provider are to reduce customer turnover, attract new customers, and open the doors to new markets. While the enterprise looks to offer contact centers and branch offices complete, cost-effective, location-independent, multi-channel contact center services via a common platform.
To address this new business imperative, Cisco Systems has defined a set of managed voice solutions that service providers can profitably deploy and offer to enterprises and small and midsize businesses, and large enterprises can employ to provide multi-site contact center capabilities. These solutions include the Cisco IP Contact Center (IPCC) Hosted Edition, Cisco Managed IP PBX Solution, and Cisco Multiservice Virtual Private Network (VPN) Solution. All Cisco Managed Voice Services share the following characteristics:
One of the Cisco Managed Voice Services, the Cisco IPCC Hosted Edition, allows a service provider or an enterprise to offer full IP-based contact center services from its network. The only required customer premises equipment (CPE) are Cisco IP Phones, agent PCs, and a Cisco AVVID network enabled for quality of service (QoS).
The market for Cisco IPCC Hosted Edition includes companies with existing or new contact center requirements that want to reduce capital expenditures including large enterprise customers that are entertaining the idea of a centralized solution for multiple offices. Reducing capital expenditure appeals to companies of all sizes because contact center systems typically cost millions of dollars, depending on size. The solution appeals to small and midsize companies, as well as large enterprises.
These companies are attracted to hosted services to reduce capital and network management costs, to gain access to leading contact center technologies that previously were prohibitively expensive, and to free workers to focus on the company's core competencies. With IPCC Hosted Edition, enterprise customers are able to take advantage of a more flexible, effective, and efficient contact center solution. This gives them the ability to locate agents anywhere within their enterprise or to make use of home agents, to deliver customer contacts to the right resource at the right time—whether that resource is a live agent or an automated response system—and to maximize available resources across the enterprise.
A logical extension of service providers' current service portfolios, the Cisco IPCC Hosted Edition makes business sense. It addresses urgent needs of the most communication-intensive portion of the enterprise—the groups managing customer interactions—thereby providing a high-value service.
The Cisco IPCC Hosted Edition is an evolutionary departure from TDM-based services for three primary reasons:
The Cisco IPCC Hosted Edition is a strategic platform that enables customers to move into the next phase of customer contact—beyond today's Contact Center to a Customer Interaction Network. The Customer Interaction Network is a distributed, IP-based customer service infrastructure that comprises a continuously evolving suite of innovative, multi-channel services and customer relationship management applications. These services and applications provide enhanced responsiveness and streamlined customer exchanges to help your organization deliver superior customer service. A Customer Interaction Network extends customer service capabilities across the entire organization, giving your business a more integrated and collaborative approach to customer satisfaction.
Numerous business and technology factors make Cisco IPCC Hosted Edition attractive to large enterprise customers, business customers, and an exceptionally profitable opportunity for service providers.
Growing expenditures for contact center technology—Maintaining good relationships with customers is essential to any business. Gartner Group reports that businesses spend $45 billion dollars annually on contact center solutions, including automatic call distribution (ACD), interactive voice response (IVR), predictive dialers, and customer relationship management (CRM) applications.
Service providers that offer premium contact center solutions provide high value to their business customers by helping them increase customer satisfaction and loyalty. The benefit to the large enterprise customer is the ability to maintain and administer the contact center centrally, while supporting multiple branches or divisions with a unified solution.
Growth in small and midsize markets—Contact centers with 100 or fewer agents constitute more than 50 percent of all contact center seats in the United States, and up to 70 or 75 percent worldwide, according to DataMonitor. This population is a prime target market for Cisco IPCC Hosted Edition. In fact, Ovum forecasts that the number of contact center seats using at least one service from a service provider will grow from 700,000 in 2000 to 2.7 million in 2005, or from 11 percent of all contact center seats to 26 percent. The projected total global market for outsourced contact center services is growing 25 percent annually, from $675 million in 2000 to $2.8 billion in 2006, according to Ovum.
Higher customer expectations—To succeed in today's marketplace, companies must deliver on customers' expectations for immediate, superior customer service—often differentiating themselves based on their customer service capabilities. When customers contact a business, they expect rapid resolution: their question answered, replacement products shipped, their reservations made. Yet companies have responded to profit pressure in ways that make it difficult to meet these expectations.
With this shift, it becomes crucial for companies to accurately assess each customer's value, so they can deliver the appropriate service level. For example, a company might want to always provide its high-value "gold" customers with access to contact center agents, while limiting access for "silver" or "bronze" customers to certain situations. However, it is often difficult to accurately assess a customer's value because the company lacks a consolidated view of the customer's multifaceted interactions with the company. A contact center agent might be completely unaware of the customer's recent Web site experience, for example, or even that the Web site is down. To provide the excellent service that attracts and retains customers, companies need contact center solutions that allow each customer to be treated appropriately, no matter which channel the customer uses for a given interaction.
Cost and complexity of contact center technology—Contact center technology can be complex, costly, and, with few exceptions, not the core competency of most businesses. Companies are receptive to outsourcing contact center management to cut costs and free resources to focus on their core business. Companies subscribing to Cisco IPCC Hosted Edition can expect to reduce their contact center costs significantly, depending on their size, present network configuration, and other factors. And by choosing a hosted contact center solution, customers leave the management of technology to the service provider.
For the large enterprise customer IPCC Hosted Edition provides an enterprise view of the entire contact center network enabling management to make cost-effective staffing decisions. IPCC Hosted Edition also enables each of the branch office locations to treat calls at the edge of the IP network—saving on toll free costs associated with 800 numbers dialed over a TDM network.
Service providers and large enterprise customers alike choose the Cisco IPCC Hosted Edition because of its industry-leading technology and because Cisco and its channel partners offer unmatched resources for technology, implementation, and marketing.
Cisco IPCC Hosted Edition is an ideal product for the service provider that wants to expand its business to the small to mid-size company that desires a robust IP-based, multi-channel contact center solution. Or for the large enterprise that wants to centralize its contact center operations for more control over its resources while providing branch offices and corporate divisions with a comprehensive, flexible solution. This enables businesses to focus the improving contact center efficiency and customer service capabilities, while improving customer service and enhancing customer satisfaction—continuing the evolution towards a true Customer Interaction Network.
Posted: Mon Feb 23 00:52:43 PST 2004
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