Keywords: Many Channels, One customer, Customer Relationship Management, Workforce Management, Productive, Mobile Employees, Virtual Contact Center

Contact centers are important for the success of most businesses, providing the "face of the corporation" to customers, suppliers, employees, and other partners. They require a specialized communications infrastructure, with specialized applications.

First set of enhancements of a basic call center (ACD and PBX, special phones and phone headsets for agents, call recording and monitoring system) were brought about through computer telephony integration (interactive voice response, screen pops, intelligent call routing, automated outbound dialing....).

The Internet and Voice over IP take the call centers to entirely new level of transformation. Businesses that can execute on Internet-based call center integration can cut costs in their value chain, capture new customers and maintain loyalty via high-volume sales through the lowest cost channel.

Perhaps the biggest benefit to the businesses is the ability to create distributed or multisite contact centers, operating as one virtual center with calls and data seamlessly routed between locations. They can use remote agents regardless of their physical location. The call center reps can work from home, accessing the company network via a VPN that tunnels through the Internet to link to the company's call center server. Globally speaking, not only will contact centers be expected to integrate across time zones in the future, but there will also be an increased importance of multi-language capability and a better understanding of cultural differentiators, including customs and lifestyles.

Since customers communicate with the business in many ways -- by phone, e-mail,fax, web, personal sales representative, the new cross-media contact centers can seamlessly handle any combination of these contact points. For example, a "click-to-talk" application lets an agent and Web user talk while jointly browsing Web pages.

The monitoring, management, training, performance tracking play increasing important role in the success of the new call centers. For outbound call centers, software to ensure compliance with regarding "Do Not Call" federal and state laws should receive special consideration.

Smaller contact centers require much of the same technology as their larger counterparts, but due to the capital constraints, they should consider taking the ASP route i.e. outsourcing their call center operation to an application service provider (ASP).