Information Technology Reference
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ponents, the relational component and the
transactional component. It is necessary to
analyze both components when deciding if
an interaction can be automatic (e.g. using
a self-service channel). Pure transactional
interactions tend to be supported by au-
tomatic channels. Relational transactions
demand human interaction. Channel selec-
tion must take into account some factors,
among others: organization strategy and
image; how usually organization interacts
with it's user; target public profile: age,
sex, culture, technological skills; product
and service characteristics like service
level;
of business continuity (for example, if there
is a fire, operations continue) and enables
load transfer when burst situations occur;
•
Service type. Service type depends of the
strategy and on the business area. It is pos-
sible to distinguish the following main
inbound services types: customer service
(refers to information about billing and
provisioning), claims, generic information
about services or products and technical
support. Outbound main services types are
debt collection, welcome calls (for first-
time service users), churn reduction, sales
and inquiries. Specialists believe that it is
possible to identify best practices for each
type of service;
•
Technology. Contact Centers have tech-
nological solutions related with relational
marketing (among others, business intel-
ligence, customer relationship manage-
ment and workflow) and operations. It is
possible to distinguish two components in
the operations: planning and on-line sys-
tems. Planning is related with volume es-
timation (forecasting), estimation of how
many agents are needed based on volume
estimation (staffing) and the creation of the
appropriated work schedule (scheduling).
Operations on-line systems like Computer
Telephony Integration (CTI), Automatic
Call Distributor (ACD) or quality moni-
toring and reporting tools are related with
interactions' distribution, monitoring and
reporting as well as business continuity
systems. Today, with high reliability and
reduced cost of dedicated lines, operations
tend to be centralized in a datacenter with
remote agents geographically distributed.
This solution facilitates systems adminis-
tration, increases system reliability, and it
is not an obstacle for geographical distri-
bution. Actually, organizations where con-
tact centers are critical to the business are
splitting their operations into just two sites.
This increases security from the viewpoint
•
Business sector. Knowledge, best practices
and experiences of CCIS projects done in
a certain business sector, tend to be applied
to other organizations operating in the
same business sector and in similar mar-
kets. Business sectors with a large number
of residential users and without an high
level of market fragmentation have, natu-
rally, contact centers. Nevertheless, many
organizations have the account manager
or power user function. Account managers
(or power users) are persons that manage
a set of customers. They do debt collec-
tion, up-selling, cross-selling, and process
requests. They aren't pure contact center
agents, but they use similar procedures,
tools and technologies. So, whenever there
are a significant number of interactions,
contact center technology and expertise
can be applied. Market maturity level and
competition influence also the investment
in a contact center;
•
Integration. The purpose of integration is
to make information available to agents
and other actors. There are three main
strategies: use existing back-end applica-
tions if their complexity and response ca-
pacity allow; develop a new front-end in-
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