With the rapid adoption of VoIP technology in the enterprise, today's contact centers are able to be more customer-centric than ever before. VoIP opens the door to integrating technologies that satisfy customers' desire for choice when contacting a company and, in turn, allows the company to be more efficient when responding to customer contacts. VoIP enables customer response management for contacting and routing to seamlessly integrate with customer relationship management (CRM) for efficient handling of each contact.

To be competitive and customer-centric, a typical contact center offers its customers choices for how the customer would like to engage with the company - immediate assistance, deferred assistance, or engaging with the company via self-service. Yet companies struggled to manage multiple customer response service models for responding to multiple customer inquiries. The immediate assistance service model is typically delivered by live agents in a call center, but it can also be delivered via Web chat, and even through immediately escalated e-mail. Deferred assistance is typically provided again by live agents responding to e-mail and voice messages, although automated response applications remove the live agent from the process. And self-service is typically delivered over the Web in the form of knowledge base information or over the phone via an IVR.

The degree to which these three service models are integrated determines how intelligently and cost-effectively a company can respond ro a customer need. These service models usually are designed around proprietary hardware and software solutions in a silo fashion, with little to zero integration. In addition to the inefficiency of the silo architectural design, the cost of integrating these service models with proprietary hardware is often prohibitive and is, therefore, seldom considered. Today's customer response management software applications leverage VoIP technology to integrate all three customer service models into a single, consolidated software application on the corporate data network.

In addition to the integration of the customer service models, VoIP also enables these models to be tightly integrated with CRM to automate the routing and prioritization of customers based on historical insight in the CRM database. In fact, because today's VoIPbased customer response management applications are software-only architectures, the integration with CRM applications is at a fraction of the cost and deployment time of traditional CTI (computer-telephony integration) deployments for database access, routing and screen-pop.

There are several compelling reasons for companies to consider the latest customer response software applications:

Prioritize and route customer responses, based on customer need, customer value to the business, and resource availability. The integrated customer response solution allows every customer contact to be evaluated based on the history and relationship of the customer with the company. In this way, companies can respond immediately to highest valued or highest priority customers, regardless of how they chose to contact the company (phone, e-mail or Web). Any business value in any database can be used to determine the priority of a customer.

Provide a more flexible model that allows you to intelligently choose when to escalate the response based on customer need and value to the business. Without the integration of customer response service models with CRM information, it is often the type of service model the customer chooses that dictates the level of service the customer receives. If a customer took the time to phone a company, then that live personto-person call would be deemed more important than an e-mail, when in fact, the e-mail may be from a higher valued customer. However, the value of the customer to the company is not realized upon contact unless the customer's CRM information is integrated with the service models. With the integration, a "high value" customer e-mail, which typically is handled as a deferred contact, can be escalated and handled immediately by a live agent.

Service customers consistent with your goals to reduce operational costs while exceeding customer expectations. As companies attempt to drive customers to self-service, the challenge is to drive the right customers to self-service and to identify those who require deferred or immediate assistance. Driving all customers to self-service, without regard for the customers' needs or their value to the company, forces the company to risk losing the loyalty of some customers.

Reduce the cost of managing multiple customer service models. Companies rely on reports generated by customer service models (phone, e-mail and Web) for making current and future business decisions and improvements. However, today's separate silo operations and systems for phone, e-mail and Web applications require separate system administration, which equates to separate reports. Consolidating, comparing and analyzing the reports each becomes a time-consuming, unmanageable and costly part of the operation. The latest customer response software applications both require a single administration tool and provide consolidated reporting across all service models so business decisions and improvements can be made quickly and costeffectively.