I’m often asked what a contact centre is. Put simply, it’s a point of communication into or out of an organisation. It can be a single phone in an office, a good receptionist, or even a company with a policy to answer all calls within 3 rings (I’ve worked in all three). If they work, then great—‘if it’s not broken, don’t fix it.’

Often though, it really is important to bring some structure into this critical business function. If you look at the basic structure of a contact centre, you’ll see a few different elements:

• Infrastructure: How are the contacts (calls, texts, emails, etc.) routed and filtered so that they reach the correct destination?

• Agents: How are the contacts dealt with to obtain the correct outcome?

• Back Office: How are outcomes communicated to the back office to ensure appropriate actions are taken to ‘close the loop’ from contact to action?

Of course, this is a very simplistic view, and digging deeper into any of these three elements would reveal all sorts of complexities. There is, however, one common entity that binds these three elements. Without Quality Data, the contact centre will, at best, operate inefficiently, and at worst, it will grind to a halt.

Most contact centres will generate a mass of data to finite detail that describes every aspect of what is happening. This, of course, can be extremely useful, but it needs to be organised and accessible in a format that is simple to interpret. It’s important that a record of that contact is either documented against a CRM record or triggers an action, such as raising a support ticket.

The Dimensions Technologies Contact Centre provides plenty of options to help streamline these processes:

• Reporting: We make it simple to analyse the data, whether it’s historic or real-time, to provide tailored reports to suit individual needs, with the added ability to ‘drill down’ to the finite detail by simply clicking onto a specific field.

• Integration: We provide several ‘off-the-shelf’ integrations to third-party applications, and our UK-based team is always available should there be a more specific requirement to provide something more bespoke.

• Webhooks: These provide the ability to update third-party applications based on real-time call data, ensuring that specific telephony events trigger precise actions to enhance workflow automation and minimise manual intervention.

To summarise, Quality Data is key. If not refreshed, if it is difficult to access, or cannot be analysed, then the contact centre will suffer. It is imperative that Agents have the correct data at the right time, and performance cannot be enhanced without understanding what currently works and what needs to be improved.

Andrew West, Dimensions Technologies