The Strategic Role of the Contact Center in High Technology

Although participating in a commodity business, high-tech companies cannot focus on running their contact centers primarily as cost centers to provide acceptable levels of technical support. In today’s competitive market, contact centers are an even greater strategic asset for survival and will have to go the extra mile to deliver value.

Contact centers are a way to improve the quality of customer service to help differentiate themselves. Fundamental customer service goals that should be delivered by today’s contact center include cross-selling and up-selling more products and services by understanding customer needs, and running more cost efficient operations by increasing agent productivity. Further, contact centers are now considered a key instrument in changing the public’s perception of a company, creating a great customer experience and executing on the business goals of the company as a whole.

How can your contact center accomplish these service objectives? Depending on contact center maturity and business requirements, here I suggest one contact center strategy to make these goals a reality

Facilitate Integrated and Consistent Cross-Channel Interactions


The first step in offering an exceptional customer experience is to offer multi-channel contact center interactions comprised of phone, fax, e-mail, SMS, and perhaps even Web chat, so that prospects and customers can conduct business with you exactly when and how they like.

With one view of the customer across all interaction channels, high-tech companies are able to deliver better service, improve cross-sell and up-sell rates and lower operating costs. Providing customers with a seamless experience across all channels ensures that their interactions are as consistent and efficient as possible, which will help build a solid relationship with the customer. Sharing custom data across channels helps create a more complete customer profile which can be used to identify cross-selling opportunities. And, streamlining data exchange and supporting collaboration across all channels promotes operational efficiency.

For relationship selling, service representatives require a unified view of interactions across all channels to effectively promote and sell services. In the early promotional stage, this means ensuring that high-tech companies don’t repeat turned-down offers to customers at different touch points, such as the call center and the Web. As the customer responds to the promotion, customer service representatives can pick up where the customer left off at each stage in the sales process, regardless of which channel the customer was using.