TRANSFORMING THE CALL CENTER USING MULTIPLE CONTACT MANAGEMENT SYSTEMS By Steve Leaden, President, Leaden Associates, Inc. The dawn of a new age is here, an age of the Internet, an age of customer service, an age where people communicate via any media (voice, e-mail/WEB, fax, video).  Welcome to the 21st century, an age that embraces all media all around us, with an absolute obsession for customer service, to serve the customer first, and for doing “whatever it takes” to win the customer’s business. What is a significant area that will impact this obsession for customer service?  Multiple Contact Management Systems (MCMS) for call centers.  Terms like e-commerce, e-business, have created an exciting picture of selling anything, anywhere, 24 x 7.  Some dot.com models have not yet realized that, without a real live person on the other end of the transaction for handling issues other than “standard” orders, the dot.com will not succeed; a call center is needed to facilitate orders and customer service issues.  It is here where the MCMS-based call center comes into play.  MCMS provides a means to embrace voice calls, e-mail/WEB forms, fax, and video into one cohesive component, treating an e-mail or any other media as if it were a voice call, and tracking it for later review. Why MCMS Is Needed Today Imagine this: You are a call center manager or director and given corporate direction that your company is moving to an e-business model, and you must begin to transform a traditional call center model to an e-business model.  You’ve already deployed skills-based routing and CTI into the call center and have helped proven to management the value of call center tools to improve call flow, to improve the bottom line for your organization. Now it’s time for the next transformation – to evolve your call canter toward an e-business model, an e-business solution.   I believe the above scenario is inevitable for ALL companies in today’s fast-changing Internet-driven marketplace. Take a look below at projections for e-business between now and 2003.   Source: Forrester Research Next Page a