Contact center capacity is going up as voice becomes “sexy” again driven by mobile adoption. This is both good and bad news for enterprises. It’s good news because the contact center is becoming an increasingly important channel for managing the customer experience. Being able to have a one-on-one interaction over the voice channel can have a much greater and lasting impact on a customer and the customer experience than most other channels, both online and offline. It’s a channel that the competition can’t duplicate or infringe upon meaning your customer experience remains uniquely your own. The bad news is that as contact center capacity is going up so too are sales and service costs. Higher call volumes means enterprises need more resources to keep things working smoothly—more agents, better technology, and more overhead. The challenge moving forward then is how can a contact center offset their operating costs without sacrificing the customer experience? One solution? Marketing partnerships.

Online marketing partnerships are incredibly common these days. For instance, when you book a flight online from American Airlines, chances are there will be several partner offers listed on your flight confirmation page, probably for a rental car company, local attractions or a hotel near the airport. These offers are driven by a trigger event; in this case the purchase of a ticket. These one-to-one partnerships give the advertiser/marketer the chance to connect with a relevant customer at a moment where they may be more inclined to buy and gives the seller the opportunity to become a “concierge” service for their customers, enhancing the customer experience. It also gives them the opportunity to create a new source of revenue.

But how can a partnership marketing model like that transfer to the voice channel and work in the contact center? How can a contact center become a profit center?

Let’s say, instead of going online, a traveler called American Airlines to book their flight. Once the flight purchase was completed the American Airlines agent would present an offer from one of their partners, like Avis or Hilton. If the flyer agreed to be transferred to the partner American Airlines would receive a fee for that live phone transfer. This kind of voice marketing partnership has existed for a long time, but the challenge to making it a strong and consistent source of revenue for the lead seller has been the fact that most of the partnerships tend to be one-on-one, which limits the number of partners they can work with, and ultimately the revenue they can earn. These partnerships often require a lot of upfront business development and long-term contracts as well, further complicating the process. Not to mention the infrastructure required to manage the call transfers.

That’s why SalesPortal created the “Google AdSense model” for contact centers. Contact centers can now work with a variety of partners and present their customers and callers with the most relevant offer. By removing the one-to-one restrictions of former voice channel partnerships both the contact center and the advertiser benefit. First off, the pre-approved partners can bid on a contact centers live call transfers, helping keep their customer acquisition costs down. Since they can run multiple lead buy campaign at once they don’t have to worry about their lead generation efforts running dry. On the flip side, the contact center chooses whose bid they accept, ensuring the best possible revenue stream.  Thanks to the SalesPortal partnership marketing network contact centers are able to monetize their phone traffic, helping offset the increasing operation costs and provide a new source of revenue for the enterprise.

Whether companies are willing to admit it or not, their customers are not willing to engage and interact with their brand in one channel and one channel only. Nor do customers’ expectations of your brand promise stay tied to a single channel. The customer has needs and wants that transcend a solitary customer engagement channel and, depending on those needs and wants, they may attempt to interact with your brand through the voice channel, online forums, FAQs and live-chats, social networking websites, mobile technologies and more. Everyday customers are attempting to engage your brand through these various channels, sometimes using multiple channels within a single transaction.

For brands, it’s more important to focus on what the individual customer hopes to get out of a particular channel than the channel itself. The customer experience needs to be upheld regardless of the channel used, which means companies need to understand why their customers would turn to a specific channel. For instance, why would someone chose mobile over the voice channel? What would drive someone to visit the website and then reach out via social media? The customer has different needs and expectations depending on which channel they use and in order to preserve the customer experience companies need to understand these subtle differences and react accordingly.

For instance, a DIY customer service customer might visit an online FAQ first, hoping they can find the answer to their question quickly and move on with their day. If your website has the information they need than the particular customer experience lived up to its promise. But what if your FAQ doesn’t answer their question? Will they try your site’s live-chat feature? Phone into your contact center? Post a message on Facebook? Your brand has to remedy the fact that your first channel failed and save the customer experience in the second channel.

Research has shown that multichannel customers (those who are willing to engage with your brand in multiple channels) spend 20-30% MORE money than single channel customers. The multichannel customer also tends to buy more frequently, is more likely to be open to cross selling and upselling, and typically will be loyal customers for a longer period of time than single-channel customers. An IBM survey found that customers using 2 channels spend 114% more than single channel shoppers!

However, it is important to note that there is a large different between a customer that chooses to be multichannel customer and one that is forced to become one. When a customer is forced to jump from channel to channel because the customer experience keeps failing (the FAQ didn’t have the answer they needed, no one got back to their Facebook post, and they were on hold for 20 minutes in your contact center) chances are they will not be spending more with your company. In fact, customers that have a negative experience with your brand are more likely to turn to a competitor for their next purchase.

97% of customers expect their experiences to be consistent and seamless regardless of technology the use, which means your brand has to prepared in every channel. Becoming a multichannel business isn’t an option, it’s a necessity.

SalesPortal today announced it has won the Red Herring’s 2012 Top 100 Global Award, a prestigious recognition honoring the year’s most audacious and far-reaching private technology companies and entrepreneurs from across the globe.

Red Herring’s editorial staff evaluated award contenders on quantitative and qualitative criteria such as financial performance, technological innovation, management strength, business strategy, customer acquisition, and market penetration. SalesPortal was selected from more than a thousand of the most cutting edge private technology companies in North America, Europe and Asia.

“Choosing the best out of the previous three years was by no means a small feat,” said Alex Vieux, publisher and CEO of Red Herring. “After rigorous contemplation and discussion, we narrowed down our list from 1,200 potential companies to 200 finalists. Trying to get it down to 100 companies was a task upon itself. The top 100 companies who were chosen should be extremely proud; the competition was difficult.

SalesPortal enables companies to collaborate across brands on marketing programs that extend value to consumers. The company’s partnership-marketing platform allows contact centers to present their customers with relevant offers from marketing partners at the end of sales and service calls, generating new revenue streams in the process. Interested customers are live-transferred to the partnering companies, providing these partners with a new low-cost, high-quality customer acquisition channel.

“As a winner of the Red Herring Global 100 award, we are in great company,” said Saurabh Khetrapal, co-founder and CEO of SalesPortal. “We’ve realized some of SalesPortal’s global potential with our partnership marketing networks in North America and India, and there’s much more to be discovered. Our technology is changing the way companies build value and mutually beneficial relationships with like-branded partners.”

Global 100 winners were announced during the Red Herring Global Forum in Los Angeles last week. In May, SalesPortal was named a Red Herring Top 100 North America start-up.