A call center is a critically important forum for customer contact. For many customers, in fact, the call center is the business---the only face they'll ever see. Their satisfaction--- and their willingness to keep doing business with the company---depends to a large extent on the speed, accuracy, and value of encounters with that call center.

Call centers also have a critical role to play in reaching out to customers with personalized service and marketing. With extensive information at their fingertips about a customer's buying habits and needs, call-center agents can implement a one-to-one marketing model and build long-term customer relationships. During calls, agents interactively market to customers based on account histories. And call centers can roll out new initiatives and promotions quickly to key customers or targeted subsets of the customer base. With all this potential, the future of the call center is integration---tying the interactive service and sales role of customer agents to the wealth of information residing in a business' databases. This integration can increase revenue, improve return on investment (ROI) for marketing expenditures, reduce paperwork, enhance new product and service development through timely customer input, improve decision making, and increase customer satisfaction. In the Internet era, the call center is being redefined to accommodate customer contact via the World Wide Web, and companies need to be ready with call center applications that translate their customer service experience effectively over a browser. Integration means finding a way to manage customer contact no matter how it begins, whether over the phone or via a Web site.

Call NMC for a demonstration of CIsco Call Center for the Cisco AVVID Voice over IP telephone system.