Instant Contact Centre Software and how do you choose one?

By Manish Yadav Manager – Client Service Cincom

For those who have experienced or seen setting up of Call Centers will agree that even with fast paced decision-making and a conducive environment it takes a minimum of 3 months to start your call center operations.

Having a contact center has become a necessity for organization of every size. In most of the cases traditional contact center applications are not suited to small and medium enterprises because of the high investments and complicated implementations. With rapidly changing business requirements organizations want a contact center and CRM with a short implementation cycle, low or no capital investment, pay as they use and use when they want it.

Organizations also want to avoid investing in Resources, Hardware, Maintenance, Security, Disaster Recovery etc. associated with their Contact Center & CRM solutions. State-of-the-art technology in Contact Center Solutions many a times becomes an enterprise luxury.

Vendors have taken note of this and are modifying award-winning CRM software’s used by enterprises to suit the needs of distributed call centers and those employing less than 50 agents.

What is an Instant Contact Center? A General Definition of Instant Contact Center would be provision of contact center technology from the network level by the service provider. One needs a telephone line, Internet connectivity (Broad band – 256 Kbps) and a desktop to operate a Contact Center User/Agent.

If you intend to run a small or scalable call centre, run a check on if your CRM software allows for the following:

1. Is it Ready-to-use? – Can I get the software up and running in 30 minutes? Software that will need a big deal of customization and long implementation cycle will increase gestation periods and will not be ideal for a real-time business.
2. Can it be used from any city or anywhere in the world? The CRM software should be usable in any city of India. For e.g.: a consumer electronics company offering a local promotion in each metro through call centre agents located in the same city as its customers. Can the same CRM software be used to help unified reporting despite have small groups of call centre agents in these markets?
3. Does it have low or no capital investment? – If it needs huge capital investment, it is not suitable for a small and medium size business.
4. Can it be scaled up to handle sudden upsurges in call volumes or seasonal requirements?- Sometimes, the call centre volumes (inbound/outbound) increase significantly – a crisis (floods in Mumbai) or during a Festival Shopping season. Does the CRM software allow taking care of this spike? Also, sometimes, the call volumes are tremendously low, can the users be scaled down or redeployed and thereby reduce the cost of software usage?
5. Does it allow a pay per use model? Explore if you can pay per month, per hour, per user etc.
6. Does it give you the option of trying it out adequately before the purchase? Before going in for any software get your hands as dirty as possible with it. Test if it suits your requirement. Don’t get stuck with something that doesn’t work for you.
7. It does not add pressure to the existing IT infrastructure and resources: Picking up software should not mean increasing man-hours on maintenance and support of the software. The software should be flexible enough to use current resources and not need increase in IT infrastructure.
8. Can it be upgraded to be able to use the latest and pre-integrated suite of applications? – Understand if the software gives you the flexibility to upgrade and add more modules and utilities to your existing applications.
9. Is it scalable in terms of number of users? Does it allow more users as business increases?
10. There are no hidden costs of integration with disparate applications. The software should not be difficult to integrate with existing applications being run.