Question: We're a small organisation operating in a highly competitive industry. We can't afford the same expensive contact centre systems as our larger competitors but we need to deliver comparable service quality

Answer: Until recently, advanced contact centre technologies have only been affordable to larger organisations. As those technologies have matured, however, the picture has changed. 

Today, smaller organisations can expect to get a whole range of advanced functionality for a very affordable price - and in an integrated form. Macfarlane's CallPlus IP platform, for example, delivers a complete Contact Centre solution with skills-based routing, call recording, real time and historical reporting, interactive voice response with speech recognition and text-to-speech, and more - and at a price that will appeal to under 30 seat operators.

It's not just a case of contact centre technology becoming more scaleable as it gets more mature. The SME contact centre revolution also owes much to technology convergence and the introduction of Internet Protocol (IP) based technologies. Voice and data convergence in an IP world has brought:

. Greater consumer choice (i.e. the ability to manage customer contacts by phone, SMS, Instant Messaging, web forms, email and fax - and soon MMS and video calls - in a totally integrated way) 

. More cost-effective home working (making it fast, simple and cheaper to set up contact centre agents at home)  

. In-house or 'hosted service' choice

This last point is often crucial for SMEs. Capital costs, as well as on-going software upgrade and maintenance costs, can be significant barriers to SMEs interested in setting up formal customer contact operations. With a hosted service option, that problem disappears. For with IP contact centre platforms embedded in service provider networks, service providers can, in theory, provide exactly the same range of contact centre services as if the technology was installed on customer premises. Services can be rented by the month rather than on an on-going basis, software upgrades and maintenance handled by the service provider, and there are usually no - or very few - capital costs involved. There's in fact no real need for the user organisation to employ any in-house contact centre technology experts at all - all technical matters can be handled by the service provider.

If you have existing contact centre in house equipment, that's usually not a problem either. For whether you choose an in-house IP-enabled system or a hosted service offering, leading IP contact centres will work together with your legacy in house systems and act as a bridge between traditional and VoIP infrastructure. They will also give you the ability to support business processes by integrating easily through standard interfaces with applications such as CRM and Service and Workforce Management.

Flexibility and scalability are key for small businesses. So whatever vendor you select, ensure that their IP contact centre offerings are adaptable and can scale from a few agents to many hundreds as your business expands. Also ensure that user interfaces are intuitive, accessible and adaptable to profiles of each user type - and that the vendor/service provider has a proven track record when it comes to delivering quality service and technical support.

Finally, SMEs should be aware of the availability of new cost-effective CRM software solutions for SMEs from the likes of Microsoft, Lagan and others. By tightly integrating state-of-the-art and proven contact centre and CRM technologies, there is no reason why SMEs need to be at any disadvantage when it comes to competing with their larger and richer competitors.

Paul Skinner, Sales Director, Macfarlane Telesystems

Tel: 0207 314 1304

Email: pskinner@macfar.co.uk