There are many ways to transform your call center and gain efficiencies. Many companies are adding more channels of contact to create an enhanced experience with high customer satisfaction. Market research indicates that the new standard for contact centers is a combination of phone, email, self service, and web. If your contact center is running separate call-handling groups (customer service and collections, for example), then by merging these two groups you can take advantage of the economies of bigger contact centers. You can continue to have call handling groups logically separated, but with the ability for available agents in one area to handle overflow in the other area. Implementing an IP contact center can help make your operation more scalable, which means you can enlarge without costly build-outs or investments in your plant. Instead, you can utilize and manage remote agents – through your IP infrastructure – as if they were physically in your office. You can also benefit from improved agent occupancy by blending work into your contact-handling queue. A classic example of blending is mixing outbound telemarketing into an inbound sales or service queue. In this case, you make use of agent idle time – time agents spend waiting for incoming calls – to do your outbound work. As a result, your agents are busier (more occupied) overall. Should inbound volumes increase or spike, your agents can stop making outbound calls while they handle inbound calls. Other types of work such as email and chat can be blended in as well. Provide your agents with tools to maximize their efficiency. By providing screen pops of relevant information, an easy-to-use agent desktop, perhaps softphone, and the ability to access experts for the tough questions, you can increase the number of one-call resolutions and customer satisfaction. And, you decrease the overall volume of calls to your contact center. | 
