Importance of contact centers growing

MANILA, Philippines - To many companies, a call center is merely a customer service necessity. But a contact center can be a treasure nest of incoming information. If a company uses a call center like a knowledge center, it will have a tremendous resource of information that can help the company develop its products and its brand.

“We know that massive amounts of knowledge go in and out of contact centers every day,” said Holger Reisinger, Jabra vice president of Marketing, Products and Alliances. “If we are smart in capturing these customer insights, this will position contact center managers as key players in companies’ strategic planning.”

According to both Laura Bassett, director of Marketing and Customer Experience at Avaya, a global leader in business communications, and Sarah Stealey Reed, content director at International Customer Management Institute (ICMI), the contact center will become much more like a knowledge center in the future.

The contact center is where company has the direct contact with customers and can collect important knowledge about the way products are being used.

From the customer interaction, companies can learn if customers are using their products as they were intended; be inspired to do new products and designs; learn if manuals and guides are user-friendly and build thought-leadership marketing campaigns on real market insights.

When seeing a call center more as a knowledge center “your contact center can drive revenue and increase shareholder value by being an important tool when it comes to product development, creating the best possible customer experience and implementing the strategic objectives of your company,” said Bassett.

According to Reed the contact center will gain tremendously from being used more as a knowledge center than just as a mere customer service function: “There is no doubt that it raises the profile of the contact center, if that is where we are getting the important information and having the great discussions as to how we  can develop our products and services even more,” she said and continued: “Furthermore, it will give the contact center managers better access to resources and an important seat at the corporate table if the management sees them in that light. To put it frankly, the CEO and CIO cannot afford to ignore contact centers anymore.”