Contact Center 101 (Part 2): How Contact Center Solutions Enhance Customer Experiences
Jeff Stormer
As we continue our intro-level blog series on Contact Center solutions, we’d like to address one of the most frequently asked questions businesses ask when considering implementing CC & IVR technology: how can Contact Center solutions improve customer engagement?
The simple answer is, many businesses don’t realize the impact that customer service can have on their business, and how superior customer experiences can increase their bottom line.
Case in point: we’ve all been on calls where we wait on hold for what feels like forever. Interaction with a call center is frequently an impersonal and frustrating experience. This fact should make any business owner’s blood run cold — it’s a recipe for lost revenue and bad reviews. Rather than providing an exemplary experience that will foster loyalty and leave customers satisfied, this scenario often leaves them exasperated.
The Changing Face of Contact Center Technology
Sophisticated technology is changing the way Contact Centers perform, transforming them into a vehicle to drive positive interactions. These solutions can help agents do their jobs better by giving them more agile, streamlined, and customizable tools. These resources transform disagreeable customer experiences into the kind of compelling engagement that is vital for the success of any business. And as these solutions have evolved, their price points have come down to the point where even small, cost-conscious organizations can accommodate productive, personalized customer engagement experiences that will create long-term relationships.
Modern, effective customer engagement solutions can:
- Provide customizable interfaces to suit different user workstyles
- Integrate with customer records for easy access to call histories
- Offer a streamlined GUI to manage multiple channels like voice, chat, and SMS
- Provide analytics to assess agent performance
- Utilize call recording tools to aid in agent training
- Reduce churn by increasing agent satisfaction'
The Power of Personalization
Personalized engagement is positively critical in a marketplace where commerce has become more Internet-based, and customers are starved for individual interaction. A positive, personalized customer service experience can be just the thing that makes someone tell their friends about the company. Or write a review on Yelp. Or talk-up the business on social media. And naturally, the opposite holds true as well: A customer who has had a bad experience will often take to some kind of public stage to vent.
In today’s over-saturated marketplace, consumers are empowered with a myriad of purchasing options, right at their fingertips. As technology providers, we want to create systems that will show customers that the business respects their time, values their patronage, and cares enough to ensure the kind of superior interaction that will inspire a return engagement.
How Contact Center Solutions Create Efficiencies
An effective contact center solution can accomplish so much more than just improving communications. They can create efficiencies that make agents more productive and businesses more effective, such as through intelligent routing systems that direct calls to the appropriate departments, presence management that lets employees know who’s available when, or reporting features that help develop a more skilled and proficient team. And the ability to provide services to companies through a SaaS ( Software as a Service) model means these capabilities can be delivered in a scalable, cost-effective manner. “CCaaS,” or Contact Center as a Service, lets managed service providers deploy solutions faster and scale them much more easily as their customers grow.
This is the kind of Contact Center solution that businesses need to build a loyal customer base. For the savvy business, it’s a way to differentiate your offering and create powerful and satisfying engagements. This leads to customers becoming not only loyal patrons, but most impressively, brand advocates.