7 reasons you need to re-evaluate your contact centre software

Our hyper-connected world has ushered in new customer expectations. When we email, instant message, and share on social media in our personal lives, we expect this level of connectivity from the organisations we interact with.

Many Australian contact centres have upgraded their operations to meet these demands for multichannel convenience. The pandemic has also fast-tracked digitalisation in contact centres as working from home became the norm last year. Changes to how contact centres operate show no signs of slowing down. For your customer service function to keep up, I recommend considering the points below to re-evaluate your contact centre software.

1. You cannot access your contact centre software from anywhere

COVID has helped many organisations understand where the deficiencies were, and may continue to be, in their business continuity plan. For many, one of the worst areas of performance was enabling their workforce to work from any location instantaneously.

On-premise contact centre solutions are typically unable to provide access to the software from external locations. Even those using an on-premise/cloud hybrid system have found it difficult. However, you can utilise true cloud contact centre solutions from anywhere your agents have access to a web browser and an internet connection and remain a part of a centralised, virtual contact centre team.

Contact centre software further enhances this by integrating your contact centre software with unified communications platforms like Microsoft Teams. These platforms enable agents to collaborate with colleagues and quickly identify their presence status so they can determine their availability to receive a call transfer or join a 3-way conference, all with a single click.

2. Your contact centre software does not integrate with your CRM

If your contact centre software does not integrate with your customer relationship management (CRM) platform, your agents are likely entering contact data manually or talking to customers without access to all their information when they receive the call. Either way, you are probably not getting the most from valuable customer data.

Integrating your contact centre software and CRM gives agents instant access to information such as the customer’s name, last interaction with your organisation, the reason for their enquiry, the last agent they spoke with and the call’s outcome, which helps agents achieve first call resolution and reduce average handling times. Furthermore, contact centre software can leverage this data to route the customer to the last agent they spoke with, making call routing 100% effortless for your customers.

Integrating your contact centre software with your CRM places customer information at your agents’ fingertips, which helps them deliver an excellent customer experience and achieve more productive workflows.

3. You have too many applications for managing customer interactions

Your contact centre software should reduce the number of applications your agents utilise by providing a single platform for managing customer contact workflows. Agents can leverage one application to access all contact channels and customer interactions instead of working across disparate applications, which wastes your agents’ time and costs your organisation more money.

Frequently, I also see contact centres still relying on email to manage workflows. Traditional email applications — such as Outlook — increase your application stack and often cannot process emails via a regimented workflow which ensures consistency in the delivery of customer service. Essentially: there is no way to guarantee your customer service agents address each email within your preferred timeframes. Contact centre software can replace traditional email applications and become your primary tool for customer email processing. This is essential, as traditional email applications leverage one inbox, accessed by multiple staff, without any structure for assigning emails to agents.

Contact centre software with multichannel capabilities can provide agents with a consistent and intuitive user interface (UI) to handle all aspects of customer interaction. Multichannel contact centre software can enable agents to handle all touchpoints that a customer interacts with.

4. Your contact centre software does not have the reporting capabilities you need

Reporting is among the top three reasons organisations come to Premier Contact Point to discuss how they can improve their contact centre’s performance. Contact centre reports provide actionable insights into what is happening in your contact centre. Real-time dashboards cast a spotlight on service issues and provide a vital tool for supervisors to respond to situations that require their immediate attention. Historical reports are crucial to help organisations make informed business decisions. These insights can help you optimise costs, make changes to your processes, or know where to provide agent support.

The reporting capabilities of your contact centre software must provide you with access to a suite of pre-configured real-time and historical reports and the ability to customise your reports quickly without the aid of the software vendor. Without these tools, your organisation is simply operating blind and unable to make continual improvements to customer service.

5. Your contact centre software lacks quality assurance tools

Call recording, post-call surveys, agent scorecards, and speech analytics offer contact centres a powerful way to analyse customer interactions, improve contact centre performance, highlight agents’ training needs, and create an engaging customer experience.

Investing in contact centre software that offers these capabilities will provide your business with real-time insights into contact centre performance and customer sentiment. Call recording and agent scorecards provide agents with vital feedback on improving customer service delivery, while speech analytics can reduce the time it takes for supervisors to review recordings.

6. You rely on your vendor for small software configurations

Contact centre solutions often require direct support from the vendor or your internal IT team to change configuration settings. However, waiting for this support for business-as-usual or emergency changes is a waste of time and can negatively impact customer service.

You can remove the impact of such inefficiencies by leveraging contact centre software that is intuitive and allows you to make configuration changes when you need them, instantly.

7. You need contact centre software with workforce management capabilities

Understaffed contact centres can experience significant increases in queue wait times, as well as an increase in customer dissatisfaction. Workforce management (WFM) software in a contact centre helps to ensure you roster the right number of agents with the skills you need when you need them.

Contact centre software with WFM capabilities can also improve agent satisfaction. A WFM solution conveniently allows agents to view their rosters and request shift swaps rather than directly interacting with a manager. Software like this improves agent satisfaction, making them 8.5 times more likely to stay with the company instead of leaving within the first year.

WFM provides workforce planners with real-time adherence reports, which helps them ensure that agents take breaks and attend training sessions on time, alongside a host of other benefits, which enable the smooth operation of the contact centre.

Improve the delivery of your organisation’s customer service with Premier Contact Point

In a highly complex and ever-changing business environment, today’s contact centres require; seamless connections between customer touchpoints, the ability to route customers to the right agent effortlessly, access to real-time and historic BI reporting, effective quality assurance functionality, and robust WFM capabilities.

Our cloud contact centre software solution can help you achieve your dream of delivering the ultimate customer experience.