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Calling all SMEs
Mention the words contact centre
and the image that springs to mind is
of a large room with banks of desks
occupied by people whose sole function
is to answer calls from the public. Such
places do exist, but they are far from
typical.
Any organisation that takes or makes
calls has a contact centre of some sort – it
could be a telesales department, accounts
department or helpdesk – and they are
usually critical to the success of a business,
being involved in generating income,
collecting payments or providing customer
support.
Large enterprises have invested huge
sums in contact centre software to
improve the routing of incoming calls and
the productivity of call centre agents and
to give supervisors the information they
need to manage incoming and outgoing
calls more effectively.
The financial investment required and
the level of integration involved have
put such systems beyond the reach of
most small and medium-sized businesses
(SMEs) depriving them of an important
management tool. Instead, SMEs have
been forced to rely on less sophisticated
reporting tools or contact centre solutions
provided as part of an office phone system.
Yet, as WilfredWood, senior product
manager at Samsung Electronics, points
out, many SMEs would benefit greatly
from improved management of formal and
informal contact centres.
“Even if you just have two people in
a sales department or two people in a
finance department, you want them to be
productive and to ensure that callers are
dealt with properly. You don’t want people
going to lunch if that is when all your calls
come in. Unless you put something in to
manage this, it’s very difficult to run your
business efficiently,” he said.
Samsung Contact Centre meets this
need. Developed from the ground up in
conjunction with call centre specialist
Braxtel, it provides all the functionality
of an enterprise contact centre for a
fraction of the cost and with none of the
complexity.
It is available as a fully integrated
module for the Samsung OfficeServ and
Ubigate IP phone systems, but can also be
used with any other phone system using
Ubigate as a gateway.
Next generation
Suitable for contact centres with
5-100 seats (but scalable beyond that
should greater capacity be required),
Samsung Contact Centre has a number
of advantages over alternative solutions,
be they resource hungry enterprise
solutions or SME-focused options with
limited functionality. These include lower
costs – typically 20% lower than other
SME contact centre solutions; simpler
Samsung’s new contact centre software brings enterprise-class
call centre features to small and medium-sized businesses
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installation and deployment; and improved
functionality.
According toWilfredWood, many of
these advantages are the result of Samsung
Contact Centre’s use of a browser-based
architecture.
“We describe Samsung Contact
Centre as a next generation contact
centre, because it is built around a web-
based architecture that reduces the cost
of software licenses and the costs of
maintaining, installing and administering
the system,” he said.
“A lot of contact centres will only work
in aWindows environment so all agents
have to have a PC withWindows. But ours
is built around a web-based architecture
so you could be using a PC, Mac, Citrix
thin client, smartphone, iPhone or tablet.
It can deliver information to any device,
anywhere as long as there is a browser. And
a web-based architecture helps keep costs
down because you are not buying software
licences for individual PCs.”
Wood adds that pricing is much
simpler than on other systems – “With
Samsung Contact Centre, you buy the
product according to the number of agents
you need and that gives you everything,
including an unlimited number of IVR ports
on the server,” – and so too is the product
installation. The software is loaded on a
dedicated server that connects to network
via a single cable.
Large
enterprises
have invested
huge sums
in contact
centre
software...