I wish that most people could answer that question with a resounding YES! But I’m afraid that complaints about technology and the people who support it are rather common. Technology is supposed to serve our customers better, lower our costs, and position our companies to sell our wares effectively. But too often, we’re caught up in the complexity of too many components, applications, and vendors, and not enough end-to-to-end contact center experts who can put it all together seamlessly.
If you want a better relationship with technology and the people who support it, here are three important steps you can take in that direction:
- Conduct an audit of your existing contact center technology. Assess its performance against the business goals that you established when you purchased it. Compare your implementation against call center best practices. Conduct a gap analysis to identify key deficiencies that you’d like to remedy.
- Develop a plan to re-deploy your applications. It’s likely that you’re underutilizing your technology. Get the business people, call center professionals, and technology specialists in a room to understand what your applications can do for you and identify the processes and resources that you need to turn that potential into reality.
- Find the time, talent, and money to plan, implement, and support your technology in excellence. In the mad dash to the installation finish line, those steps often get short-changed. Unfortunately, that practice also short-changes the value that can be realized and/or sews the seeds for trouble downstream. If you weren’t able to do it right the first time, there’s no time like the present to start again.
Let 2011 be the year that you fall in love with technology again.