Remote operations
Marc Prempain
7 May 2024
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Considered a relatively new solution, contact center is an omnichannel customer support platform. Its single-channel strategy developed to perfectly tailor the needs and wants of the organization’s customers provides a fresh, holistic approach to creating support services that meet the rising customer demands, taking customers’ service experience to the next level. Contact center agents strive to make customer experiences seamless, satisfying, and of the utmost quality across channels that work best for their special customers.
As the name itself suggests, an inbound contact center takes care of receiving all incoming contact inquiries from both individual and business customers. Contrary to call center agents who cover incoming phone calls solely, contact center staff navigate across all sorts of communication platforms, be it calls, email, text messages, online live chat, or video assistance requests.
This type of communication allows for a more intimate, emotional connection between the contact center agent and the customer, than the interaction established through a support center tackling multiple channels. The agent has all the resources to put their time and effort into providing excellent support, whereas the customer can be alert, engaged in the issue resolution process.
Depending on the size of the organization, contact center staff often has to deal with many different inquiries, ranging from dozens to hundreds every day. To make inbound contact operations smooth and of utmost quality on both the customer’s and the agent’s sides, various innovative technologies can be used. The most desired and beneficial features of successful contact centers are:
With competition looming in the market, keeping existing customers engaged and maintaining their satisfaction is as important as attracting new potential clients. Since as many as 61% of customers say they have stopped engaging with a company due to a poor customer service experience in the past, companies must work towards continuously excelling in their customer support services and regularly improving them to be ahead of the times. Here is a list of behaviors businesses can adapt to ensure their contact centers provide professional and excellent customer experiences.
Identify your customers’ preferred modes of communication. Do they respond well to automated emails? Do they prefer phone calls and real-time agent-customer interaction? Have you seen high customer engagement from text messages and live chats? Maybe they are more engaged with your social media and the support you can offer there? Pinpointing the most successful communication channels is key to saving time and effort that we all value highly.
After establishing the main channels that help you reach your customer base quickly and effectively, make sure your contact center managers have a strong strategy in place. Agents need to regularly and actively engage with new and existing customers to enhance the contact center experience from start to finish. Leverage your CRM tools that allow you to monitor, record, and analyze the customer data, and create reports combining the habits, preferences, and needs and wants of your clients to understand their experience with you. This way, it will be easier for your contact center staff to sustainably develop a strong personal relationship tailored to each individual customer.
To understand your position on the market, as well as how your customers resonate with the services you provide, it is essential to engage with and learn from their feedback. What better way to find out what you are doing well and where you should seek improvement than from those who transact with you directly? Contact center agents should thus actively promote feedback surveys in order to gain valuable comprehensive insight on your customers’ sentiments towards your business – after all, 90% of customers themselves state that organizations should provide such ability for them to provide feedback.
As many companies are switching their whole business infrastructure to cloud computing, the cloud is consequently also considered the future of contact center software, with 61% of organizations saying they plan to move their contact centers to the cloud. What’s more, it has already been noted that cloud-based contact centers have proven to be more efficient than those ran traditionally and managed on-site – they are 27% cheaper and suffer from 35% less downtime.
Contact centers are becoming increasingly digitally driven, hence traditional customer data measures such as call handling times and linear channel usage are not enough anymore. Contact centers need to be more strategic with how they track analytics and leverage the information to connect to business KPIs, enrich the customer experience, and build strong agent-customer relationships. What should be measured for the ultimate visibility of contact center analytics?
Contact center analytics can be tracked in a few ways. Many organizations still use traditional customer feedback measures like surveys to get their views of how the business is run and where improvements lie. However, as the market is evolving and customer expectations are reaching a new high, more innovative data tracking tools have emerged.
Speech and text analytics is seen as a successful way to determine customer satisfaction, especially in instances of call distribution, video support, and text-heavy strategies like email campaigns. Various companies are now opting for self-service facilities for specific tasks, be it updating personal and bank details, or tracking shipment and delivery through live support systems. Beyond providing oversight into any technical issues from the customer’s side, this also determines how customers feel about doing these tasks themselves.
Certain modern contact centers have also started using artificial intelligence for speech analytics. This helps employees quickly identify the soft skills lacking in their employee base and change their training programs accordingly. AI also allows companies to adopt predictive analytics, providing an in-depth review of various metrics to determine which problems may reoccur – and how to avoid it happening.
The contact center analytics mentioned playing a significant role in customer service development as they indicate trends, impacts, causes, and results of your company’s products or services. Contact centers generate tons of customer-related information every day, thus should be seen as a crucial strategic resource for organizations that strive to gain meaningful insights into enhancing customer experience.
According to recent Microsoft findings, 66% of customers use an average of 3 communication channels to be able to connect with customer service support – the need for omnichannel contact center services has thus been rapidly growing. To develop a thorough understanding of which contact center practices to implement, it is crucial to rely on intelligent data analytics. Apart from identifying industry trends, highlighting existing issues, and automating operations, reviewing your business analytics will help you enrich the customer journey, ensure customer satisfaction, and establish a high-standard brand identity.
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