10 Questions to Ask Your On-Demand Contact Center Provider. An Oracle White Paper September 2006

Transcription

1 10 Questions to Ask Your On-Demand Contact Center Provider An Oracle White Paper September 2006

2 10 Questions to Ask Your On-Demand Contact Center Provider EXECUTIVE OVERVIEW Building and maintaining a contact center can prove cost-prohibitive and resourceintensive. Yet when you re committed to providing your customers with a personalized multichannel communications experience across sales, marketing, and service interactions, it s a must. Siebel CRM Call Center On Demand enables companies to a launch fully functional multi-channel center without the upfront investment in complex hardware and software traditionally required to build a contact center. INTRODUCTION Traditionally, companies have had to invest in telephony equipment which typically includes an automatic call distributor (ACD), interactive voice response (IVR) platform and computer telephony integration (CTI) to intelligently route calls to the correct agent and to prioritize customer inquiries. Siebel CRM Call Center On Demand delivers hosted voice, voic , , and Web communications as a fast, flexible, and affordable monthly service. The Siebel CRM Call Center On Demand solution is embedded directly into Siebel CRM On Demand, the hosted CRM solution, or available as a stand-alone hosted solution offering voice, voic , and reporting. Siebel CRM Call Center On Demand also provides flexible deployment options for organization with existing on-premise CRM deployments by integrating with Oracle ebusiness Suite, Peoplesoft Enterprise and Siebel CRM applications for rapid computer telephony integration (CTI). DOES YOUR SERVICE PROVIDER MEET THE ORACLE STANDARD? Here are 10 questions to ask. 1. Does your hosted CRM system provide out-of-the-box contact center functionality? For many companies, 70 percent or more of their customer interactions occur over the telephone. Only Siebel CRM On Demand offers Call Center On Demand a built-in hosted contact center with CRM functionality. 10 Questions to Ask Your On-Demand Contact Center Provider Page 2

3 Other vendors claim to offer hosted contact center functionality, but in reality all they provide is an interface (API) for customers to build their own integrations to third-party contact centers that must be purchased separately. 2. Does your hosted CRM system provide multiple communications channels such as inbound voice, voice mail, , fax, and Web communications? Siebel CRM Call Center On Demand comes standard with multi-channel support capabilities (voice, voic , , fax, and Web) to address the range of communications channels that today s customers require. Regardless of channel, all inbound communications are routed to the appropriate agent s Web-based screen using pre-defined skills-based routing and workflow rules. 3. Is your hosted CRM provider the worldwide leader in contact center and service applications? With more than 12 years of experience in delivering CRM globally, Siebel CRM On Demand is the industry-leading CRM solution experienced in delivering missioncritical business such as customer service and support. Garter, a leading analyst firm, consistently ranks Siebel products as the sole Leader in its annual Customer Service and Support Magic Quadrants and as the only Strong Positive rating in Gartner Group s CRM Customer Service Contact Center MarketScope report. 4. Can your hosted CRM provider route calls to remote agents? Remote agent capabilities can dramatically reduce overhead and provide recruiting and retention benefits while enabling the call center to gain access to more qualified agents at lower cost. Siebel CRM Call Center On Demand enables call blending for office, remote and work-at-home agents using the same CRM system across the organization. Due to the premise-based nature of traditional contact center software, other CRM systems require employees to be physically located in the same location as the telephony equipment. If you need to open a new office, you must duplicate your existing on-premise telephony infrastructure. 5. How are application upgrades handled by your CRM provider? Because Oracle provides all the CRM and contact center functionality together, application upgrades and support are handled through one company Oracle. Upgrades are passed through behind the scenes with minimal disruption. Other hosted vendors lacking Oracle s R&D resources use third-party vendors for analytics, data warehousing, contact center capabilities, and more. This bolt-on approach involves significant risks for customers. An upgrade by one party can cause a ripple effect requiring multiple calls on your part and ongoing integration headaches, rapidly increasing your total cost of ownership. 10 Questions to Ask Your On-Demand Contact Center Provider Page 3

4 6. Does your hosted CRM provider support both packet-switched and Voice over IP calls? Contact center administrators want a platform that supports today s most common call technologies while providing capabilities to support emerging standards. Siebel CRM Call Center On Demand supports traditional packet-switched telephone networks (PSTN) and the newer Voice over Internet protocol (VoIP) and Session-Initiated Protocol (SIP) making the choice of technology yours and not your vendors. 7. Does your hosted CRM provider include out-of-the-box contact center and CRM reporting and analytics? Oracle s built-in analytics across contact center and CRM capabilities run on Oracle s business intelligence and analytics technology, eliminating the need to buy, integrate or maintain reporting and analytics software packages from multiple vendors. By capturing real-time activities and interactions from multiple channels in a single database, organizations are able to gain deep customer insight with comprehensive real-time, historical and ad-hoc analytics. Other hosted vendors make you responsible for integrating a third-party CRM analytics solution that you must also integrate with a third-party contact center provider. The result is a web of integrations that drain your resources and increase your total cost of ownership. 8. Can you receive phone calls through any phone using your hosted contact center provider? Siebel CRM Call Center On Demand allows users to route telephone calls and voic s to any phone, including mobile phones and handheld devices such as a Blackberry. Furthermore, organizations can choose to deliver voice traffic securely over the public Internet or via a dedicated private line. 9. Who hosts your communications traffic? While other hosted communications providers may use second-tier hosting partners to house your valuable customer data, we ve partnered with tier-one voice carriers to deliver the most secure, reliable and scalable platform in the CRM industry. 10. Does your hosted CRM provider offer contact center functionality built-in to industry-specific solutions? Some other vendors claim that a few cosmetic changes to field or tab names constitute a vertical solution. Worse yet, other vendors expect you to do the work of tailoring a solution to the needs of your industry. Siebel CRM On Demand s Industry Editions reflect our unmatched expertise with industry-specific CRM, and include pre-built optimizations at all three levels of the solution: the user interface, data model, and process and logic level, including built-in contact center capabilities. 10 Questions to Ask Your On-Demand Contact Center Provider Page 4

5 Siebel CRM On Demand s Industry Editions reflect lessons learned from CRM deployments to hundreds of thousands of end users in specific industries. These editions enable you to rapidly deploy a hosted CRM solution that best meets your needs, foregoing the costs and risks of customizing a generic solution from other vendors. CONCLUSION Building and maintaining a contact center can be cost-prohibitive and resourceintensive. Though, companies have had to invest in rich telephony equipment to intelligently route calls to the correct agent and to prioritize customer inquiries, Siebel CRM Call Center On Demand provides world-class support via voice, voice mail, , and the Web without the upfront investment in complex hardware and software. 10 Questions to Ask Your On-Demand Contact Center Provider Page 5

6 10 Questions to Ask Your On-Demand Contact Center Provider May 2006 Deleted: Hosted Oracle Corporation World Headquarters 500 Oracle Parkway Redwood Shores, CA U.S.A. Worldwide Inquiries: Phone: Fax: oracle.com Copyright 2006, Oracle. All rights reserved. This document is provided for information purposes only and the contents hereof are subject to change without notice. This document is not warranted to be error-free, nor subject to any other warranties or conditions, whether expressed orally or implied in law, including implied warranties and conditions of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose. We specifically disclaim any liability with respect to this document and no contractual obligations are formed either directly or indirectly by this document. This document may not be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, for any purpose, without our prior written permission. Oracle, JD Edwards, PeopleSoft, and Siebel are registered trademarks of Oracle Corporation and/or its affiliates. Other names may be trademarks of their respective owners.