Contact Centre

Instant access to information

Answer Contact Centre offers a new look and feel carefully designed to facilitate speed and ease of use.
It provides your service teams instant access to the information they require and the tools necessary to respond to any query or question.

In its simplest implementation, it can provide a fresh front end to the Customer and Vendor service and support teams in your organisation.

Once they have identified who they wish to deal with, a Contact, a Customer, a Vendor and so on, all information relating to the Contact/Company (Customer or Vendor) is available and appropriate methods of communicating with that company are provided.
The current Contact being dealt with is retained "in context" and all the appropriate Answer Back-Office functionality can be reviewed to provide the information necessary.

As you get more familiar with the functionality, the Contact Centre application provides you the ability to proactively deal with your Contacts.
Ensure that if you promise to contact them, then this promise is visible to your organisation, and ensure that the promise is kept.
Get to know your contacts better. Understand where they fit in their organisation and what decisions they can take.

Integrate with MS Outlook to send and record e-mails from the Contact Centre and schedule appointments.

What is a contact?

A Contact in the Answer Contact Centre is anyone who has, or might have, a relationship with your company.

A contact might represent an existing Customer or Vendor. Dealing with such contacts enables you to leverage the integration into the Answer Enterprise application, providing you with instant information relating to the current status of the Customer/Vendor in question.

Contacts do not have to represent Customers or Vendors—in fact they do not have to be associated with a company at all. You might want to record any dealings with your bank, landlord or even queries from end consumers.

The Contact might be from a Prospective Customer or Vendor and you can capture information relating to the opportunity which presents itself. Further integration into the Answer application allows such Prospects to be provided with Sales Quotations or you can send a Request For Quotation to a prospective Vendor.

Contacts might also be people within your own organisation who are not Contact Centre users.

You can configure what items of data must be collected against a contact. This can help your organisation gain an understanding of where the contact sits in their structure and perhaps what decisions they can take.

For instance, you may define that Home or Business Address is mandatory using the configuration options.

Contacts can have user defined relationships assigned and/or enforced. These relationships can vary by Contact Type. A relationship is a link to another Contact, Customer or Company.
When defining Activities/Action Types then these can be assigned to a Relationship or a User or a Group of Users. Contacts can be linked to a Customer based on a Relationship.
When using Recurring Standard Orders who pays for individual items is determined by Contact relationships.

Contacts can be defined as ‘Private’ or Company, which invokes the appropriate processing. Contact data maintenance also includes the necessary double option for promotional and email offers.

Once you start working with a Contact that contact and associated company remain available to you without further searching until you decide to remove it from your work list.

How do I identify a contact?

You can identify contacts in many different ways. Users are provided with different paths through the identification process depending on what sort of information the contact is providing. It might be their e-mail address, the first few characters of their name, or the company they represent.
Advanced searching with full wildcard, similar sound matching and combinations of different data fields are available. For example looking for Fred Smith would suggest using Fred Smythe if a ‘fuzzy’ search set of criteria had been used.

The contact may not exist, there are many paths which then enable you to create the contact and associate him/her with a company if appropriate and capture all required/necessary data.

Once you have selected the contact you can immediately see all the open activities against this contact. You might be waiting for a call from the contact on a certain subject, or realise that the contact was due to be called about a different matter. This helps improve your efficiency and the perception of a quality service in the contacts’ eyes.

Contacts you are working with are retained as you select them, hence contacts you deal with on a regular basis are always visible on screen without having to be searched and retrieved.

Once a Contact’s details are captured, if they wish to place a Sales Order then a single check will create them as a full Answer Customer or use ‘one off’ customer information to position the user in sales ready for entry of the sales lines required.

How do I identify a company?

Contacts might be associated with a company. They might be associated with an existing Customer or Vendor.

You can identify a company by Name, Address, Post Code, Telephone Number, or their existing Customer or Vendor code as used throughout the Sales and Purchasing modules.

Responsibility for maintaining the company identification for Customers and Vendors remains within the remit of the Sales and Purchasing teams. Any change of company characteristics such as Name, Address, Post Code, Telephone Number etc. are immediately reflected in the Contact Centre.

Any change of Company Telephone Number is immediately reflected through all Contacts associated with that company unless they have had a specific number attached.

You do not have do double key any such data changes and there will be no confusion between data held in the Sales/Purchasing modules with that in the Contact Centre.

Activities

Everything done in the Contact Centre revolves around activities.

If a Contact calls in and leaves a message, that is recorded as an activity. If a Contact calls in and wants to be called back then that is a scheduled activity which is assigned to an appropriate member of your team.

If you call a Contact then that is a Completed activity. If you call a contact and they weren’t available, that’s an activity. If you asked them to call you back, that’s an activity.

And so it goes on…

Most activities can be seen by all users of the Contact Centre regardless of the activity owner. Under certain configuration options you can assign activities to others or take ownership of activities currently assigned elsewhere.

You can print a calendar style schedule of your open activities.

Use the power of Outlook to request Appointments with your Contact. Invite others that might be required to attend and let Outlook determine if they are available on the requested date.

Use standard e-mail templates to create well-formed e-mails in Outlook ready to be sent to the Contact. Such e-mails can be reviewed by all users when reviewing your activities to find out exactly what has been said.

Mark activities as Sensitive to prevent unauthorized users from seeing them.

Download the PDF to find out more about how to capture data and how Contact Centre integrates with the rest of the Answer Enterprise application.

Key Features Leverage existing information held in your database Answer integration, no double keying of companies Manage your communications Keep your promises Be pro-active Integrated with Outlook 2000 and above Fully integrated with Supply Chain modules bringing sales and service together Efficient, consistent management of Contacts leads to improvements in service levels for Customers, Vendors, Companies and so on Improve Customer retention

Learn More ... Download Contact Centre PDF