Contact Centre - Introduction
PlanNet21 has established a stronvig track record in the contact centre industry in Ireland. We offer market leading technologies that enable our clients to transform their customer access strategies, empowering their customer service advisors with knowledge based tools that enable first contact resolution, drive superior customer experience, and build long lasting relationships with their customers.
We lead each and every engagement via a business process driven engagement model, completing customer needs assessments, leading client workshops with the business, and establishing a top down approach to technology investment strategies within our client base, linking business outcomes to technology investment strategies.
Integration of PSTN and Web-based communication channels is key to optimizing customer service and improving customer retention rates. However, many companies are finding this difficult to implement within the confines of proprietary voice switching equipment, which can be difficult to integrate with newer Web-based interaction channels. These time division multiplexing (TDM)-based platforms cannot seamlessly interface with new channels such as Web collaboration, text chat, e-mail, and video, all of which are requirements for a 21st century customer contact center. As a result, meeting customer service objectives in a call center based on legacy TDM platforms alone can be both cumbersome and expensive—but this is not the case with open telephony platforms that leverage standards-based IP data networks such as the IP Contact Centre provided by PlanNet21.
Location independence is a key benefit of an IP-based contact center infrastructure. No matter where agents are physically located, as long as they have access to the corporate WAN they can still function as if on-site, receiving and responding to customer inquiries as appropriate. With an IP-based customer interaction network, companies can better utilize employees located in branch offices, or allow them to work from their homes, functioning as remote knowledge workers. With this flexible model, companies can bring additional agents on-line as needed—making it easy and cost-effective to implement follow-the-sun customer support programs, with live operators around the world providing 24x7 assistance.
By supporting IP voice, companies can converge their voice and data networks onto a single infrastructure. A single network is not only less expensive to purchase and operate, but business rules can be configured and managed in a single place to ensure a consistent experience for the customer. In addition, with a converged network that supports IP voice, new applications from multiple vendors can be implemented and leveraged across the network and organizations can leverage new service offerings from IP-based carriers.
Of equal importance is the ability of IP-based contact centres to support multiple contact channels. Competitive forces have rendered simple telephone support inadequate; customers now expect to be able to choose from Web collaboration, text chat, e-mail, or video communications as well. Since almost all of these capabilities are developed using open standards, adding them to an openly architected, IP-based contact center is seamless and can be managed in an integrated fashion to support a unified customer experience across all interaction channels.
PlanNet21 provide IP contact centre solutions from Cisco Systems. These solutions deliver intelligent call routing, advanced IVR, network-to-desktop CTI, and multi-channel contact management. Single-site and multi-site contact centers as well as service provider hosting environments are supported. Cisco Contact Centre solutions utilize a company's existing IP network, allowing organizations to leverage their wide-area network (WAN) infrastructure, lower administrative expenses and extend the boundaries of their contact center enterprise to include branch offices, home agents, and knowledge workers. In the case of a pure IP-based environment, calls may be routed over the WAN, thus reducing PSTN transport costs.
