Enterprise

In today's economy, businesses are competing with product and service offerings from all over the world. The fiercely competitive environment requires a greater effort towards customer retention in order for businesses to sustain revenue and profit growth.

Customer service has become a key differentiator among those companies that experience high volumes of regular customer interactions, such as those in financial services, communications, utilities and travel & tourism. Consistent delivery of excellent customer service is necessary in order to promote retention and up-sell and cross-sell opportunities.

The traditional contact centre architecture of ACD, PBX, IVR, CTI server and custom agent terminal is being replaced by an IP-based architecture. IT infrastructures are being redesigned using service-oriented architecture (SOA) and web services are finding their way into contact centres so that all enterprise systems can be fully and seamlessly integrated.

The role of network services

Network solutions offer businesses the opportunity to deal with operating costs rather than capital expenditure, which is particularly attractive to small and medium-sized enterprises, but network solutions can also provide benefits not achievable with customer premises equipment; such as handling call spikes and fluctuations, and for business continuity and disaster recovery.

There is a growing recognition that customer-premises and network capabilities can be blended in a 'hybrid' model, enabling businesses to benefit from the functionality and financial advantages of a network solution without compromising existing investment.

The HTK Horizon™ Portfolio is an integrated suite of customer interaction Software as a Service for the enterprise; to reduce the cost of customer service whilst building brand and creating loyalty; to improve the effectiveness of sales and marketing campaigns; to help manage the growing problems of consumer debt and other issues around billing and payment; and a wide range of solutions for other common business functions.