How contact centre technology brings people together

Your contact centre is more than a factory for providing advice and solving problems. No longer are contact centres voice-driven departments whose goal is to get people off the phone as quickly as possible lest the call queues increase. It is a place that brings people together. It connects customers with your brand and provides agents with the tools they need to foster relationships and support customers through whatever guidance they seek.

As such, your contact centre technology should be a hub of communication platforms that enable agents, customers and other business departments to collaborate and solve problems together.

From a call centre to an experience hub

As the world becomes more digital, so do our interactions. We shop, book travel and even order food online. So it is no surprise that many of us expect customer service to include online channels. And that is where the contact centre comes in.

In recent years, leaders have shifted how they think about contact centres. No longer are they seen as a call centre for patching customer issues, but instead as an opportunity to create connected, digital customer experiences. 

Part of this comes from a significant mindset shift. Contact centres must become experience hubs where customers can get the help they need and the human interaction they want when they have queries. Such a mindset shift means considering the contact centre not as a costly business department but as a revenue generator. It also means shifting from a focus on customer transactions to a focus on customer relationships.

Technological advances and the prevalence of omnichannel contact centres have driven such changes and provided the platform for personalised customer experiences.

What challenges does contact centre technology solve?

Contact centres deal with common, longstanding issues that often make it difficult for people to bring your contact centre to an experience hub. Here are some challenges that robust contact centre technology solves to bring people together:

  • High call volumes make it difficult for agents to give customers the individualised attention they need when contacting the company with a query or complaint. Customers also become frustrated when they experience long wait times.
  • Customer dissatisfaction: When your contact centre lacks personalisation and meaningful human interaction, it becomes difficult to retain customers. Customers want to feel valued and appreciated, which can be difficult to achieve with automated platforms that lack personalisation or remove the human element from your contact centre.
  • Agent attrition rates can be high in contact centres, causing challenges such as training new employees, low staff morale and poor customer service due to agents with less experience. Agents need technology connecting them with knowledge bases, training resources and their colleagues, so new starters feel supported.

How contact centre technology fosters agent collaboration

Agent collaboration is essential to providing excellent customer service. By working together, agents can share information and ideas, solve problems efficiently, and provide a better overall customer experience.

Naturally, some agents might prefer to handle specific issues or have more knowledge of one area in the business. Newer agents may also need guidance or help from other agents and need technology solutions that enable them to connect with their colleagues quickly and efficiently.

Contact centre technology supports agent collaboration and helps contact centres run more smoothly. For example, many contact centre solutions integrate with unified communications platforms such as Microsoft Teams, which offer features like group chat and instant messaging that make it easy for agents to collaborate.

By investing in contact centre technology, you can create a more collaborative environment, which leads to better customer service, higher staff retention and improved business outcomes.

Collaboration across the organisation

One of the most important aspects of contact centre technology is its ability to unite the organisation. In the past, contact centres remained siloed from the rest of the business, but modern technology has made it possible to integrate them into the wider business.

Contact centre technology should provide a single point of contact between your agents and others working in departments across the business. If an agent does not have the answer to a customer query, they can contact someone in another department to help them answer the question or even forward the caller to that person. If the agent does not know who to contact, they can connect with the department and find the right person to connect with the caller.

Contact centre technology is, therefore, a valuable tool for organisations looking to support collaboration across the business. Contact centre technology facilitates communication and improves the customer experience by providing a central point of contact between departments.

Omnichannel technology connects your brand and customers

People are constantly on the move and always connected in today’s world. It has led to a new set of challenges for businesses, which now need to provide customer support across various channels. The aim of contact centre technology should be to seamlessly bring the human element into the contact centre technology rather than remove it. 

Omnichannel contact centre solutions bring voice, chat, email, SMS and social media into one platform, making it easy for agents to provide a seamless customer experience. These channels enable customers to connect with you in the method of their choice. One person might prefer to raise an issue via instant messaging, and another might prefer to chat with an agent over the phone.

In addition, omnichannel contact centre solutions allow businesses to track all customer interactions in one place, giving them valuable insights into customer behaviour. By using data from previous interactions, you can provide a more tailored service that meets each customer’s specific needs and maximise your ability to achieve first contact resolution.

Overall, omnichannel contact centre solutions are valuable for businesses that want to provide an outstanding customer experience. They bring people together, make it easy to track interactions and provide valuable insights into customer behaviour.

How Premier Contact Point brings people together

Our cloud contact centre solution delivers contact centre training that support your customers and agents. We provide affordable, innovative features, such as visual IVR, CRM integration, self-service options and omnichannel queueing.

You can get in touch with us to book a demo of our cloud contact centre solution.

Driving improvements with contact centre data and reporting

contact centre data

Data is the new gold! And so much data flows in and out of contact centres every day. Call volumes, average handle time (AHT), customer sentiment, first call resolution rate, etc. Each of these data points tells one part of your contact centre story.

When you have the means to piece it together and see it in an easy-to-understand format, you can use your contact centre data to drive improvements in productivity and agent performance. Yet, there are still so many contact centres without the right data capabilities who have not truly realised the value of their data.

How can you get get more from your contact centre data?

There is no one-size-fits-all solution for getting the most from contact centre data. But, you can take a couple of approaches to glean more value from it.

1. Develop a strategy

Before you deploy a solution for reporting and analytics, you need to establish a strategy that outlines how precisely you will leverage it. Ask yourself and others in the leadership team: What do you want to achieve with data and reporting? What do you need to provide more than just reports but true actionable insight into your contact centre performance?

You might start with an issue you have noticed. Perhaps you wish to improve your Net Promoter Score (NPS) and therefore need to monitor customer satisfaction. Your strategy would need to focus on the data you want to monitor and prepare for the changes required to boost your NPS.

Contact centre data supports your strategy in the following ways:

  1. Reporting highlights issues and identifies areas of improvement.
  2. You can leverage data to track the progress of your new initiative and measure success.
  3. Data provides insights into the customer experience for you and your agents to leverage.

2. Facilitate a data-driven culture

Your data strategy is not merely a project for the leadership team. You should educate others in the company to support your strategy and encourage them to identify problems they are looking to solve or areas of performance they are looking to improve by leveraging data.

Your frontline staff, in particular, can benefit from insights gathered through data analytics. When your agents understand how to leverage data while working with customers, they can identify areas where they can provide a better experience. They can also use data to spot trends and potential problems before they happen.

How contact centre analytics transforms granular data

Contact centre analytics can be far more than an exercise in citing numbers, graphs and KPIs. Contact centre solutions with reporting capabilities transform these figures into digestible insights that paint a complete picture of your contact centre in a way that enables you to take further action.

Speech and text analytics provide insights into customer behaviours and agent performance by collecting data from chat, SMS transcripts, phone calls and emails. These data points take audio from a call and analyse it to suggest the customer’s tone and gauge their response to the service given by an agent. You can then leverage this data to extract insights on customer satisfaction and deliver training to agents on the best approaches for managing specific queries.

Self-service analytics have become an increasingly important metric as self-service options have become prevalent in many contact centres. Whether via your FAQs page, through an IVR solution or a customer portal online, there is much data to be collected from the customer’s experience. Contact centre reporting and insights on self-service options enable you to identify which ones work best and which might need improvement. So, you can ensure that even your chatbots deliver the best CX possible.

Desktop analytics collects, analyses, and reports on the software leveraged by your agents to handle customer inquiries. It collects data on customer interactions, call times, agent performance, and more. When you monitor desktop analytics, you gain valuable insights into your contact centre from an operational standpoint. If you are unsure how your contact centre or call centre software is performing, this is a great metric to watch.

Predictive analytics uses past data to predict future outcomes, and prescriptive analytics leverages past data to identify the best course of action to take in a given situation. You can leverage both metrics for resolving current challenges in your contact centre based on past issues and their solutions. For example, predictive and prescriptive analytics assist with forecasting peaks and troughs in customer demand, so you can ensure you have the right number of agents available.

Three traditional metrics to monitor in your contact centre

1. Average handle time (AHT)

We work with many contact centre leaders whose aim is to reduce AHT. Contact centre data might reveal that the reason behind long call queues is high AHT. You might provide additional training or establish smarter self-service workflows or digital automation for particular inquiries.

Then, you can leverage your data to monitor the impacts of these solutions on AHT and place more emphasis on developing the one that works best.

2. Improve first call resolution (FCR) rate

Contact centre analytics report on FCR by tracking and analysing the number of times a customer reaches out about a specific query. The data will recognise trends that cause the customer to reach out multiple times.

For example, if the analysis reveals that a particular customer query is consistently leading to FCR issues, the contact centre can implement measures to address this query. Again, you might provide additional training for handling that type of issue or change how agents log and process queries.

3. Forecast for peaks and troughs in demand

Contact centre analytics can forecast peaks and troughs in demand, allowing you to better plan for periods of high and low call volumes. A classic example is more staff needed over December as shopping increases and businesses close over the holidays.

You can leverage such information to adjust staffing levels, shift resources around and make other operational changes to ensure that the contact centre can meet customer needs during periods of high demand.

How Premier Contact Point supports analytics

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.

We provide contact centre training, affordable & innovative features, such as visual IVR, CRM integration, self-service options and omnichannel queueing.

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