Gartner defines contact center infrastructure (CCI) as the products (equipment, software and services) needed to operate call centers for telephony support and contact centers for multichannel support. An additional major deployment option for CCI is as a core component of customer engagement centers (CECs), in which functionality is tightly integrated with CRM and social media channels to give a “single view of the customer” across all touchpoints. This type of infrastructure is used by customer and employee service and support centers, inbound and outbound telemarketing services, help desk services, government-operated support centers, and other types of structured communications operations.
Contact center interactions can be people-assisted or automated self-service, using web chat or interactive voice response (IVR) and speech recognition technologies, for example. They can also be a combination of people-assisted service and self-service. Channels for interaction use both live agents and messaging technology, and include voice, web, email, instant messaging, web chat, social media, video and mobile devices. Although there can be significant technology overlap between the CCI market and the CRM CEC market, the CCI market has three unique characteristics:
Download the full pdf below