The secret to business success is really no secret at all: It's all about providing high quality customer service, whatever your particular industry. In fact, a survey conducted by Alcatel-Lucent back in 2007 found that three-quarters of 4,200 respondents said they would continue to business with a company with which they had a great contact center experience. In addition, half indicated they had previously ceased working with a company based on a poor experience with a contact center. Other industry research reports support these findings, which only underscores the notion that the first step to a successful business is its customer support facilities.
As part of its Dynamic Enterprise vision, which embraces the need for businesses to create more tightly integrated and user- and customer-centric communications environments, Alcatel-Lucent understands that today's customer support services are not delivered merely through the traditional call center, but through multi-channel contact center services, including live agents, as well as email, IM-based chat, and, importantly IVR, which can be leveraged to quickly address many common, recurring customer needs and, can cost 10 percent of a live agent interaction.
To support a multi-channel contact center environment, Alcatel-Lucent offers its OmniTouch Contact Center edition, which provides an integrated IVR server that can be used to automate many of the incoming calls to any contact center, including all of the standard IVR functions, like play, database look-up, selection menus, and call transfer.
It also offers visual IVR capabilities to enable smoother call routing (to specialized agents, for instance), and integrates with Alcatel-Lucent's CCIVR platform and the Genesys Voice Platform to enable text-to-speech and speech recognition capabilities. With the Alcatel-Lucent OmniTouch 4625 Contact Center IVR, businesses are able to enhance their welcome messages, automate data collection and access to profiles, allowing them to more easily identify the best ways to communicate with each customer - in today's multi-channel environment, reaching customers through their preferred means of communication is as important as reaching the customer at all.
A versatile, scalable IVR solution can help businesses not only become more dynamic and able to more effectively respond to customers, but it helps protect other investments in customer service, from technology to staff to training and more.
The simple fact is that an effective IVR platform can present a much more professional, yet welcoming entry into a customer service environment, creating a positive first impression - and it's common knowledge that the first impression is often the most important and longest lasting. By providing an effective mechanism for customers to communicate with support services, including appropriate call routing and self-service capabilities, businesses can not only ensure they are able to limit wait times (including allowing customers the option to wait, leave messages, request call backs, or use alternative channels for communication) and increase success rates by integrating with back-end customer data (there is little more aggravating that having to repeat account information two, three, or even four times during an interaction).
Whether a business needs a standalone system or and IVR platform to integrate with existing CRM technologies, and regardless of the type of interaction - sales/ordering, caller ID and qualification, ticketing/reservations, help desk/customer care, information services, telemarketing - the Alcatel-Lucent OmniTouch 4626 CCIVR can be used to meet any needs, from basic to the most complex, and is scalable to grow with a business.
