Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
frAMeWork for contAct
centers inforMAtion sYsteMs
project MAnAgeMent
Centre is updated with the results of the interaction
thus ensuring information consistency.
The hosted contact centre is composed of a
central system responsible for the overall man-
agement of an interaction, since its entry into
the system and its routing to the operator with
the appropriate profile until its finish and record
of the information. This information regards the
business component and the interaction compo-
nent. This central system can respond to multiple
contact centres of various organizations. Thus,
organizations need only to install the agents'
workstations on their side. All the processing
is performed from the central system (Demaria,
2005). The control of the interactions is achieved
by using session initiation protocol (SIP) and real
time transport protocol (RTP). The hosted model
works on an software as a service (SaaS) basis,
where the computer-based service is provided
to customers over a network. The organization
pays a fee (usually a monthly fee) for the use of
each workstation and the communications. This
model allows the organizations to overcome the
problem of the initial investment, which is one of
the greatest barriers to the adoption of a centre. In
this way, the risk of investing in a contact centre
is minimized. This model also allows the adjust-
ment of the number of agents, according to the
amount of work.
More recently, contact centre technology is
based on Voice over IP (VoIP) gateways. With
VoIP and an SaaS model, the agent only needs a
computer, a network connection, and a microphone
to work. VoIP enables the realization of voice calls,
with or without video, depending on the option. In
this way the initial investment and the total cost
of ownership (TCO) is reduced.
With this background information it is possible
the understanding of the supporting framework
for contact center information systems projects
presented in the next section.
In this section we present the framework for CCIS
project management resulting from our previous
work. Our goal was to identify the key factors in
CCIS project management and the characterization
of those factors. We recurred to semi-structured
interviews and to a set of highly specialized in-
dividuals in the area.
The framework considers twelve key factors:
flow, channels, technology, service type, integra-
tion, geography, dimensioning, way to obtain the
service, user and agent focus, legislation, business
sector and relevant actors.
A brief overview of the framework will be
presented with the characterization of each factor.
The twelve key factors are the following:
•
Flow. The concept of flow can be applied
to the interaction, to the service provided,
to the agent and to the complete flow. In
this last case all the relationship between
user and the organization is considered.
The complete flow can have inbound and
outbound parts and include one or more
services. From the point of view of an
IS, the inbound is considered more com-
plex, demanding a higher level of sys-
tems integration and more skilled agents.
However outbound services like debt col-
lection are an exception. The dichotomy
outbound/inbound should be used to facili-
tate the organization of the services and not
as a rigid division in the services. The use
of these concepts must be done carefully in
order to preserve the valuable asset of the
relation among users and organizations;
•
Channels. Interaction channels can be
classified logically as self-serviced or as-
sisted. Assisted channels demand agents
to process the interaction, self-serviced
ones no. Interactions have two main com-
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