The Contact Centre Mission and Voice Technologies
How do the core technologies of ASR, Secure Internet Protocol (SIP), NLU and Verification support the trategic
and tactical mission of the customer contact centre? If we understand the mission, we can formulate the strategic deliverables from the contact centre organization. Strategic deliverables are defined as those that are the longterm, ongoing objectives of the organization and can be viewed as “building solutions.” It is helpful to be able to show how voice addresses the “pain points” associated with these missions. The three strategic deliverables identified from our research and interviews can be defined as:

• Driving customer satisfaction: This has always been the justification for contact centres, going back to the earliest days of toll-free inbound call centre development. Historically, the shift has been from an initial “reactive” focus on market damage and loss of share from dissatisfied customers to a more recent “proactive” focus on increasing customer lifetime value and revenue per call.

• Management of human assets: The largest expense for contact centre organizations has always been and
will continue to be live agent costs. In addition, the ability of the organization to introduce and apply technological innovations has been limited by the relative scarcity and expense of expertise associated with
the often-esoteric hardware and software platforms used in contact centres.

• Supporting enterprise CRM strategy: While the above two imperatives are longstanding, the adoption of a corporate-wide CRM strategy is a relatively new phenomenon. While contact centres are the lynchpin of such a strategy, data warehousing, business processes and marketing are also involved, making it a crossdisciplinary, company-wide imperative.