IP Contact Centers: customer retention has become the key benefit

Traditional contact center infrastructure vendors face few greenfield opportunities in the large enterprise market in mature geographies. This, according to independent market analyst Datamonitor, has caused them to change their sales and marketing strategies, focusing much less on the benefits of the transition from time division multiplexing (TDM) to internet protocol (IP) and much more on topics such as unified communications (UC) for the contact center and ways to connect the enterprise with the branch and the contact center. The report says that IP contact center vendors have begun to offer unified product lines, aiming for common administration and reporting, common user interfaces and functionality far beyond basic routing.

An IP contact center is any contact center that does not use traditional circuit switching; that is, all calls are voice-over-IP or are converted from TDM to IP. An IP contact center leverages the intrinsic benefits of IP communications, including the fact that either or both voice and data communications can be efficiently routed to any customer service agent with access to an IP connection. Through the use of SIP, IP contact centers can detect and route customer communications based on SIP-controlled presence management in place of the traditional automatic call director (ACD).

The sluggish economy has led to a change in strategy in the contact center: the focus has shifted from customer acquisition to customer retention. Clients' budgets are tightening and consumer confidence is in decline along with consumer spending. This is making it difficult for enterprises to gain new business, and they are concentrating on current customers, improving customer service and seeking out contract renewals and upgrade opportunities. Customer service quality and customer intimacy are becoming increasingly important to achieve good customer loyalty rates.

Core IP contact center features and functions are important and customers still consider functionality when making their purchasing decisions. But, the difference between choosing vendor A and vendor B rarely comes down to which technology provider can implement specific-agent recall routing rules or which one has a scripting engine for canned email responses.
More information on the contact center market can be found at www.supportindustry.com