Contact centers—widely used in both businesses and public sectors—allow organizations to interact with customers and address their requests efficiently. As the U.S. member body to the International Organization for Standardization (ISO), the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) seeks comments by November 8 on a proposed ISO Technical Committee (TC) on contact centers.
Serving as the nucleus of responsive and efficient customer service, contact centers handle various customer communications, including but not limited to phone calls, emails, text or SMS messages, social media messages, online chat, and mailings.
The Standardization Administration of China (SAC), the ISO member for China, submitted a draft proposal for committee work on contact centers, with the following scope statement:
“Standardization in the field of terminology, requirement, guidance, practices, evaluation for contact centers management and services provision”
Relevant work within the scopes of the following committees is excluded:
• ISO/IEC JTC 1, Information technology
• ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 40, IT service management and IT governance
• ISO/TC 176, Quality management and quality assurance
• ISO/TC 176/SC 3, Quality management and quality assurance —Supporting technologies
• ISO/TC 290, Online reputation
• ISO/TC 312, Excellence in service
• ISO/PC 317, Consumer protection: privacy by design for consumer goods and services
As noted in the proposal, the proposed TC will support contact centers to provide a standard framework to assure consistency in processes, terminology, service quality, and operational efficiency; build up connections with organizations to maintain high standards and deliver consistent and reliable support; and streamline workflows and leads to faster issue resolution and cost savings among other benefits.
Read the proposal and submit comments to Steven Cornish, ANSI senior director of international policy and strategy, at [email protected] by close of business on Friday, November 8. All input that ANSI receives will be used to develop a recommended ANSI position and comments that will be sent to the ANSI ISO Council for approval before submittal to ISO by the December 13 voting deadline.