Research Shows Technology Consolidation to be Key to Achieve Best-in-Class Contact Center Performance
Aberdeen Group Surveys 175 Contact Centers for Altitude Software Sponsored Research Benchmark
Lisbon, Portugal, May 5th, 2008 – In the “Contact Center Consolidation – March 2008” Research Benchmark, industry leading analyst The Aberdeen Group surveyed 175 companies to see whether contact center infrastructure technologies can be consolidated to provide consistent and accurate information while supporting distributed agents and applications.
The report outlines the results Best-in-Class organizations have seen across several key contact center metrics and compares these results to those of Industry Average and Laggard companies. Through the consolidation of the contact center infrastructure Best-in-Class Companies will see a reduction in contact center expenses and improvement in contact center uptime.
How can consolidation be achieved? According to the report, required actions include:
“Developing a culture that supports standardization, training, vendor management, and virtualization is critical to the success of the contact center. Specific recommendations to develop this culture and achieve Best-in-Class performance include:
– Standardize customer support across all channels;
– Develop a ROI for consolidation projects;
– Implement e-learning to train agents;
– Implement a virtual contact center platform”
Accordingly, in the same report, Aberdeen Group Senior Vice President Alan Hubbard estimates that “…possibly the most important and challenging piece of developing the right culture is the consolidation and/or virtualization of the contact center. By successfully consolidating the contact center resources companies “dissolve the walls” of the contact center to better manage contact center resources.” While adding that “… The platform and technologies used to run it are crucial to the success of the company. Contact Centers need to identify vendor partners that will work with them to deliver consistently high levels of customer support. Flexibility on both sides of the relationship is critical”.
Miguel Lopes, Vice President of Marketing and Product Management for Altitude Software comments: “As the Aberdeen research indicates, the biggest benefit a vendor solution can provide is to enable customers not to focus on the infrastructure but rather on business: It is to provide a cutting edge solution supported by first rate customer assistance, to solve the complexities of managing a contact center. Altitude Customers can benefit from our IP Contact Center solution new SIP capabilities to reduce communication and infrastructure costs while ensuring high-quality service. Customers also benefit from Altitude uCI’s solution industry leading ease of implementation and well documented capability to leverage customer’s existing investments”
The Altitude IP Contact Center is a complete modular software suite putting together the Altitude uCI (Unified Customer Interaction) multichannel software solution and the Altitude vBox, a contact center optimized soft switch. This combo enables contact centers to face change, profit from virtualization, increase productivity and grow proactive customer service practices through a number of deployment options, such as ‘on-demand’ contact centers, home or remote agent, centrally managed multiple sites or on-customer premises.
This leading edge solution provides businesses with a SIP-based multimedia contact center solution and a wealth of advanced features, including unified desktops, routing, reporting, dialing, voice portal, management and open integration via Web services and/or Altitude connectors. The Altitude uCI suite architecture is unique to the industry with a single language and editor to all media interactions simultaneously and in real-time on IP-PBXs (i.e. Altitude vBox) and/or traditional PBXs. The solution is backed by a ISO 9001:2000 certified Customer Assistance team with high-levels of surveyed customer satisfaction,
Aberdeen’s Research Benchmarks provide an in-depth and comprehensive look into process, procedure, methodologies, and technologies with best practice identification and actionable recommendations. A complimentary copy of this report is made available by Altitude Software. To obtain a complimentary copy of the report, visit www.altitude.com/cc_consolidation
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About Aberdeen Group, a Harte-Hanks Company
Aberdeen is a leading provider of fact-based research and market intelligence that delivers demonstrable results. Having benchmarked more than 30,000 companies in the past two years, Aberdeen is uniquely positioned to educate users to action: driving market awareness, creating demand, enabling sales, and delivering meaningful return-on-investment analysis. As the trusted advisor to the global technology markets, corporations turn to AberdeenTM for insights that drive decisions.
As a Harte-Hanks Company, Aberdeen plays a key role of putting content in context for the global direct and targeted marketing company. Aberdeen’s analytical and independent view of the “customer optimization” process of Harte-Hanks (Information – Opportunity – Insight – Engagement – Interaction) extends the client value and accentuates the strategic role Harte-Hanks brings to the market. For additional information, visit Aberdeen http://www.aberdeen.com or call (617) 723-7890, or to learn more about Harte-Hanks, call (800) 456-9748 or go to http://www.harte-hanks.com.
About Altitude Software
Altitude Software is a leading independent contact centre vendor with the Altitude Unified Customer Interaction™ (Altitude uCI) product line. Altitude uCI manages and improves customer relationships for each new interaction in a wide range of contact centres, from SMEs to large multisite organizations. Altitude uCI is a cost-effective application suite conceived to improve the overall productivity of the contact centre. Since Altitude uCI was engineered to integrate easily with enterprise front office and back-office systems, Altitude uCI delivers significant cost benefits, revenue benefits, and intangible benefits with a limited upfront investment. Altitude uCI not only allows users to achieve return on investment in a limited time frame, but also provides a successful solution to their customer interaction and organizational efficiency strategies. Altitude Software serves around 800 customers of all sizes (with more than 200.000 licenses) in about 60 countries worldwide, both directly and through a wide network of partners. Altitude Software has 18 Offices in four continents. Please visit us at www.altitude.com.
For more information:
Altitude Software
Carlos Taveira
Marketing Communications
Phone: +351 214 129 800;
Email: [email protected]
