Contact Center Software

This section of our technical library presents information and documentation relating to Contact Center technology and Best Practices plus software and products. DSC is a leading provider of contact center technology and software solutions as well as predictive dialer phone systems for the modern call center. Customer contact center software includes CRM software and computer telephony integration solutions. These modern products help call center phone agents communicate effectively with your customers and prospects.

The following article presents product or service information relating to contact centers and customer service help desks.

BUSINESS CASE TIP #1

Link the business case to the business value.

If you’re thinking in terms of how to get a contact center “IT project” funded, you've likely made your first mistake. Although this may be your ultimate aim, the secret to getting the project approved is to think of it not as an IT project but rather in terms of its business value. From there, the business case will emerge. Indeed, without a solid, wellthought- out business case, executive management is unlikely to fund the project.

The most common pitfall is to immediately get caught up in the technical details of a project. But unless the project is couched in terms of reducing costs or increasing revenue, it’s not going anywhere with executive management. What’s more, the project must show that it has been sufficiently researched to be creditable. How do you go about this? How do you build a business case?

Here are the steps that we advocate for building an effective business case:

Description - Create a succinct description of the project, capturing the business context and establishing clear boundaries of what is and what is not in the project.

Justification - Describe the justification for the project in terms of business benefits, ultimately providing the justification in terms of increased profits or reduced costs.

Vision - Create a description of how the project fits into the overall vision of the business.

Affect on People and Processes - Because no IT project can succeed without being in tune with the people affected by it and in line with the underlying business processes, provide a plan for showing how your project meshes with both people and processes.

Alternatives - A reasonable description of viable alternatives will gain credibility with management. Absent a discussion of alternatives, management will be skeptical and may send you back to the drawing board.

Cost/Benefit Analysis - The more you can produce a classic cost-benefit analysis, complete with discounted cash flows and a well-defined payback period, the more you are meeting executive management on their own terms - return on investment (ROI).

Risk Assessment - Assessing the risks and defining a risk mitigation strategy is a necessary step in any IT project and executive management will know it.

Dependencies - Enumerate what other systems you are dependent on, including those that are within and outside your control.

Project schedule - No project will be blessed by management without some sort of rudimentary schedule showing dates for major milestones. This is also a good occasion to describe the trade-offs between cost, schedule, and features.

CRM Contact Center Software

Database Systems Corp. (DSC) has been providing CRM Customer Relationship Management solutions to businesses and organizations for 2 decades. TELEMATION is a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) application employed in a wide variety of organizations including contact centers, help desks, customer service centers, service bureaus, reservation centers and corporate call centers. The package has extensive CTI features and is fully integrated with our PACER phone system. TELEMATION operates on Linux, Unix or Windows servers. Software programmers can develop call center applications quickly using the robost features found in the Telemation toolkit.