Premier blogposts

Your company’s success partially relies on whether you deliver an excellent customer experience. But, how do you measure your delivery?

The answer to that question lies in the data and insights captured by call centre software with reporting and intelligence. 

Many call centre managers all over Australia will relate to one point of frustration: lacking software that delivers call centre data in easy-to-understand and configurable, real-time and historical reports. Call centre leaders need this type of software to track what is going on with their team, measure how they compare to past performance, make informed decisions on how to change call flows and plan for future demand.

Real-time management for call centre leaders

Leaders in a call centre need information at their fingertips to effectively manage call centre operations in real-time. Your call centre likely has a lot of activity occurring at once. You may need to review wait time, average handle time (AHT), sales tallies or other KPIs that your company deems a priority. For these reasons, you need call centre software with flexible reporting and intelligence capabilities.

When you have access to real-time data and reports, you can make quick and informed decisions that improve performance in your call centre. For example, if an issue arises within your call centre and impacts a KPI, the call centre software will alert you to the problem through visual and audible alerts as well as email and SMS alerts. From there, you can work with your agents to resolve the issue.

Furthermore, call centre software with customisable dashboards, such as Premier Contact Point’s software, allows you to display the reports you need in a format that suits you.

Deliver real-time insights to your agents

Call centre software with business intelligence and reporting capabilities also delivers real-time insights to your call centre agents. From these insights, agents can become more autonomous and make better decisions and improve customer service, no matter where they’re located. With KPIs on hand and easily accessible, agents can also stay alert to issues and contact their manager for assistance if needed.

Reporting and intelligence also can improve agent motivation because the reports monitor their performance in line with their KPIs. Only 26% of employees interviewed in a Gallup survey agreed that they received clear feedback on how to do their job better. Call centre software with reporting and intelligence tools highlights what agents have achieved or not missed, which provides a source of motivation.

The agent dashboard can notify them if they are falling short and alert their manager to get help in addressing the issue. Perhaps their average handling time is too long, or that there is a lot of idle time because they do not have enough calls coming in. Either way, agents can leverage their reporting dashboard to address any issues.

Manage sales campaigns from your call centre software

When your marketing department releases a new sales campaign, your agents will need to be ready for the increased call volume that follows. When experiencing high call volumes, it is crucial that you pay particular attention to wait times, average handling times, and callbacks. Especially when 48% of customers will tell more than ten people if they had a negative experience with your company.

Suppose a particular metric, such as the number of abandoned calls, falls into the red. You can investigate the issue and reallocate resources to ensure enough people are online to address the high number of calls. Alternatively, you can change your queue configuration in real-time and offer callers the ability to receive a callback when they reach the first position.

When you have call centre software with business reporting and intelligence, it allows you to manage sales campaigns in real-time. They can make changes to the campaign as it is happening and get the most out of it. With this type of software, leaders can get up-to-the-minute information on how their campaigns are performing. They can also make changes on the fly, based on what they see in the reports. Call centre software allows them to maximise their sales potential and improve customer service.

Leverage reporting and intelligence to make future-facing decisions

Leaders can also use the data from the reporting and intelligence to make better decisions about future sales campaigns.

Reporting features allow you to gather data about your campaign performance, while intelligence features provide insights that can help you improve your campaign results. With this information at your fingertips, you can make informed decisions about allocating your resources and achieving better outcomes for your business.

When the sales campaign ends, you can create a report that analyses queue and call types and suggests staffing requirements for the next campaign. If your call centre software can integrate with external data sources like your CRM platform, you can leverage that data to build even more informative reports.

The right call centre software provides your team with the business reporting and intelligence they need to make future-facing decisions. With the ability to track agent productivity, access call recordings, and get insights into customer behaviour, you can make informed choices about how to improve your call centre operations.

Call centre software delivers historical reporting and intelligence

Eighty per cent of companies have cited customer experience improvements as a top priority. So, business reporting and intelligence features are essential for keeping you competitive and helping you make future-facing decisions about sales campaigns to improve customer experience.

Leaders of call centres need all the help they can get to make informed decisions, and call centre software with reporting and intelligence provides that. This software delivers historical reporting and intelligence and allows call centre leaders to analyse data collected over time. You can leverage this information to make informed decisions about improving your call centre’s performance.

Premier Contact Point delivers business intelligence and reporting

Today’s call centres require flexible and real-time reporting delivered to managers and agents in a highly complex and ever-changing business environment. With the right data at your fingertips, you can make informed decisions about your call centre as issues occur and plan for future demand by reviewing historical data.

Our call centre management software helps you achieve your dream of delivering the ultimate customer experience through our Reporting and Intelligence capabilities.

I speak with many companies who install custom software or use multiple tools to meet the needs of their customer service and sales teams. While these tools might deliver many of the features needed, agents often need to access them in different ways, impacting their ability to provide an excellent customer experience (CX).

Microsoft Teams integration for contact centres provides a central place for agents to communicate with customers and collaborate with others inside your organisation. It integrates with Contact Centre as a Service (CCaaS) solutions to deliver voice calling, instant messaging, presence and one-click transfers, all in a single user interface. 

Depending on your staff’s preferred way of working, they can choose from two options to best leverage the integration of these two powerful applications. Either embedding the CCaaS solution within the Teams user interface or embedding Teams functionality within the CCaaS user interface.

How Contact Centre as a Service benefits customer service teams 

CCaaS is a software deployment model that delivers contact centre technology services via the cloud. It allows you to outsource your contact centre technology to a service provider that manages the service within their infrastructure. 

CCaaS provides a range of benefits, including: continuous enhancements and feature updates, no need for internal ICT skills to manage the technology resulting in reduced support costs, high levels of scalability, reliability and availability, a better customer experience and agent experience as well as better transparency and significant cost savings.

Microsoft Teams and CCaaS integration enables agent collaboration

Microsoft Teams is a communications and collaboration platform that integrates and expands the capabilities of your contact centre software by providing an efficient way for employees to communicate with customers and each other.  A best-in-class solution enables either the Teams functionality to be embedded within the CCaaS interface or the CCaaS interface to be embedded within Teams.

For agents whose primary function is to process large volumes of inbound and outbound customer interactions, across a range of contact channels like voice, email, chat and SMS they may prefer embedding the Teams functionality within the CCaaS user interface. This ensures they can easily connect with colleagues across the organisation for call transfers or for assistance in answering customer enquiries whilst still accessing the CCaaS user interface for the majority of their work.

However, for staff who need to spend the majority of their work day within Teams (mainly communicating within the organisation) and only occasionally take customer service or sales calls, then embedding CCaaS within the Teams user interface may provide a better experience for your staff.  

Whatever their function, by having one interface, agents can communicate and access the information they need. By collaborating on projects, agents can achieve better results for customers. Agents can quickly identify the availability of their colleagues to determine if they are ready to receive a call or join a three-way conference call. If so, the agents can connect with their colleague with a single click.

Connect agents with subject matter experts in your business

Microsoft Teams and CCaaS integration goes beyond improving CX and connects agents with subject matter experts. Contact centre agents can easily collaborate with subject matter experts to immediately get the answers they need for a customer, which creates a more streamlined customer service experience. Experts can also easily offer their help, which will improve customer satisfaction.

Microsoft Teams integration bridges the gap between contact centre agents and subject matter experts by allowing them to connect in real-time and from anywhere in your organisation. Agents can reduce call handling times by contacting the right person via click-to-call or direct message.

If agents are unsure who to contact, they can identify experts by department. Once they have found the right person, agents can initiate a one-on-one call, a conference with the customer or transfer the call to the subject matter expert. Regardless of how the agent handles the call, the goal remains to resolve the customer’s issue the first time, every time.

Improve first call resolution with Microsoft Teams and CCaaS integration

First call resolution is a key measure to ensuring your agents deliver outstanding CX. Microsoft Teams and CCaaS integration helps to improve first call resolution by enabling agents to quickly identify and solve problems or access previous customer information without ever leaving the agent desktop.

When contact centre agents have access to the caller’s profile and history, they can quickly address their needs on the first call.

First call resolution times decrease when agents connect callers to the right people. By identifying subject matter experts, your agents can quickly identify the source of a customer’s issue and provide the right solution. With Microsoft Teams, organisations can also provide a better customer experience by routing customers to agents with specific areas of expertise.

Microsoft Teams is also a great way to keep customer interactions organised.  All conversations with customers are archived and searchable, so agents can quickly find the information they need, which helps ensure that agents always have the most up-to-date information at their fingertips.

Premier Contact Point integrates with Microsoft Teams

Premier Contact Point leverages the power of Microsoft Teams to help customer service and sales staff take customer experience to the next level. Request a demo for more information on how we can help you get more out of Microsoft Teams.

Think back to your last experience making an online purchase. I trust that in these times, it was not very long ago. I imagine that you experienced a few of these:

• You heard about the brand or retailer somewhere
• You received an order confirmation email immediately
• You had a question about your order and revisited the website or spoke with a customer service agent

Now here’s a question: which of these experiences defines the customer experience? It’s a trick question: the answer is all of the above.

What CX challenges does the typical Australian company face?

The expectations of Australian customers are changing fast, and your customer service arm must be a fast-moving engine to keep up. As our world becomes more connected, your customers expect more touchpoints and real-time interactions with your company. In this landscape, competition for customer retention is fierce.

Fast resolution time is no longer a competitive advantage. Customers expect empathy from your customer service agents, and they want to interact with companies that enact their values, not just shout about them.

For many Australian businesses, this keeping up to maintain a competitive edge can be a significant challenge in this space. If you have a slow response to addressing customer expectations, they can become dissatisfied with your service and their experience and move on to another company.

The pandemic accelerated the adoption of digital technology within all of our lives. Customers have increased the frequency with which they leverage messaging apps and social media to interact with your company. Today’s customers may become frustrated if there is only one method of communication with your company. Even if you are not a digital native, you surely enjoy having options when contacting a company. You may become frustrated if they lack a web enquiry form or even an FAQ page, and you have to call to address your simple question.

Moreover, CX challenges for contact centres also exist within the development and implementation of CX initiatives. You need a holistic view of your CX challenges if your initiatives are to succeed.

Source: Gartner.

Where CX initiatives go wrong

Some companies go wrong with their CX initiatives by conflating customer service with customer experience. In reality, customer service is one slice of the customer experience pie. CX covers the gamut of interactions with your customers, from first hearing about you online to the first time they call your customer service team.

Many companies go for surveys to gauge CX in their business. While surveys are one good method of highlighting where you might improve CX, they are not the only and certainly not the best way to pinpoint areas of improvement. Again, it often goes back to customers’ expectations of service in real-time; surveys capture customer data from the past and do not allow you to improve the customer experience as people interact with your company.

There is also a need for companies to address their internal challenges before trying to fix external problems. For example, if customer service representatives are under-trained or overworked, it can affect CX. So, they need to be resolved internally first before focusing on external aspects of CX initiatives.

“A study by Forrester measured the CX maturity of the survey respondents. Only 31% of them qualified as experience-driven businesses.”

Improve your play with a CX maturity model

CX maturity is a model for measuring the capabilities needed to deliver excellent CX and whether your contact centre meets these; it essentially measures how customer-centric you are. A CX maturity model is a sliding scale, and your organisation will place somewhere on this scale based on the measurements you are succeeding in.

It tracks metrics such as the sophistication of your technology, the skills of your agents and how well you implement customer feedback. Furthermore, it can be a great way to benchmark yourself against your competitors and decide where you need to improve your play.

With 73% of customers citing good CX as a factor in their purchasing decisions, it is crucial that you increase your CX maturity. Marking where you sit on the scale can provide you with the information to target potential areas for improving customer satisfaction and implement them across your organisation.

We have developed our own CX Maturity Assessment to help you get started in this process.

Strategies to overcome CX challenges

Once you have your CX maturity rating, you can leverage some of the strategies below to increase it.

1. Understand your customer base

Your customers will have differences in culture, generational attitudes, economic factors and geographic location, all of which you should consider if your team is to deliver CX with empathy. Your customers will have some of these metrics in common so you can create segmented lists for different types of customers.

2. Capture real-time customer feedback

Many CX challenges, such as unhappy customers and high turnover, can arise from a lack of real-time feedback.

Effective contact centres offer great service and respond to customers’ requests quickly and efficiently – but the contact centre is only as good as the agents responding. So, contact centres need to accurately capture real-time feedback to ensure they give the customer their best.

Capturing real-time customer feedback also helps you enhance training programs, so new hires have a better chance of learning and improving from day one.

3. Regularly gather employee feedback too

Employees are your most valuable asset when it comes to contact centre operations. It is seldom enough to gather their opinions via a yearly review, so you should consider regularly gathering their feedback to gather their ideas on where CX could improve. Your agents are, after all, the ones interacting with customers every day.

4. Create a clear customer experience vision

A successful CX initiative builds on a clear, future-facing vision that guides your business and your team in the right direction. Remember, your customers love companies that stick to their values and deliver on them.

You might ask:

• Is your vision clear?
• Does everyone in your contact centre understand how they contribute towards delivering that customer experience vision?
• What would happen if all of your contact centres understood their role in delivering the overall customer experience strategy.

Remember: Your vision should be something your agents can realistically stick to, and it should be specific.

5. Measure the ROI of your improved customer experience

One of the most important reasons for measuring ROI is to gauge the impact of your CX initiatives. By measuring ROI, you can designate whether particular CX strategies are working and where you might need to place more focus.

There are different ways you can measure your contact centre. For example, you might measure contact centre effectiveness by assessing how well agents communicate with customers and how satisfied customers are at the call’s end. You can also measure contact centre efficiency by assessing how long it took to answer a call during peak periods.

Overcome CX challenges with Premier Contact Point

We can help you measure your CX maturity, find strategies for improving it, and implement the solutions you need to deliver an outstanding customer experience. Our solutions encompass real-time customer reporting, seamless connections between touchpoints, quality assurance, self-service options and omnichannel queueing.

You can complete our CX Maturity Assessment to receive a report with actionable insights for improving CX.

Consumers are increasingly frustrated with the time spent waiting in call centres queues. Read our 7 tips for reducing waiting times.

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.

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