Contact center technology is designed for better customer service — and this benefits both the customer reaching out and the team receiving the call.
Of course, you want your contact center solution to be easy to install and economical to operate. It’s got to have plenty of options that can be fine-tuned to your specific business niche.
But nothing matters more than giving your contact center team the best tools to deliver a seamless customer experience. To illustrate the must-have features, let’s consider a hypothetical contact center manager and a typical customer.
Dominique manages the contact center for a company that sells wearable electronics. Wendell, craves the latest gadgets — especially smartwatches to track workouts.
Wendell bought a new smartwatch from Dominique’s company last week. But, there is a problem with the watch, so they seek help on their website.
Fortunately, Dominique’s company just installed the latest contact center as a service (CCaaS) technology, which centralizes a broad suite of features in a single dashboard accessible on any internet-connected device.
CCaaS provides six ways to make Dominique a better manager and Wendell a satisfied customer.
1. Analytics and dashboards
On the Customer Support page, Wendell clicks a button to launch a webchat. From this point on, the CCaaS software starts tracking vital data, including:
- Average talk time
- Wait time for a response
- Ultimate resolution of the call
- Agent contacted
- Reason for visit
- Communication channels used (text, voice, video, etc.)
- Caller detail (phone number, email, etc.)
Dominique can view this data in a real-time dashboard that provides essential insight on the effectiveness of agents and the time they take to resolve customers’ problems.
Analytics tools also demonstrate the business value of contact center operations. They reveal what’s working best and point out problems that need resolution.
2. Chat queue management
Wendell’s webchat app places them in a queue with other customers waiting for support. Dominique has sophisticated tools for creating chat queues and assigning agents to work in them. She can see which chats take the longest, which ones have been abandoned, how many people are waiting, and the reasons why they are in line — all in real-time. Several agents specialize in smartwatches. She can program the CCaaS platform to make sure Wendell talks to one of these experts.
3. Agent availability tools
Wendell is one of dozens of people calling in right now. Dominique needs to know the status of every agent to make sure Wendell (and others) get answers as soon as possible.
The agents click a button in the application when they break for lunch. When they come back to work, they click again to show they are available. This makes sure everybody knows where everybody else is — which keeps the team concentrated on clearing call queues and reducing wait times.
4. Integrated chat, voice, and video
Wendell is having trouble describing their problem to the customer service agent over chat. So, the agent says, “let’s take this to a phone call and talk it out.” The agent gives Wendell a phone number to call, which leads to a voice conversation where the two reach a consensus on the nature of Wendell’s issue.
But they don’t have a specific solution. So, the agent does some poking around and finds a video that shows how to address Wendell’s issue. He sends Wendell a link to a video meeting where the agent uses screen-sharing to walk Wendell through all the steps to resolve the question.
The CCaaS software makes all this possible, ensuring that the agent and the customer have the right medium and channel to work things out. The leading CCaaS tools also allow customers to chat from social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram.
5. Wrap-up
After the call, the customer service agent can use the wrap-up feature to capture notes from the customer engagement. This time is automatically set by the admin, and the agent will “end wrap-up" when notes are completed, and they are ready for their next call. Wrap-up notes help streamline and personalize the customer experience if they call back in the future.
6. Queue callback
Wendell calls back a week later with another issue at a busy time for the contact center. The CCaaS technology identifies these long wait times automatically and sends Wendell a recorded message asking them if they would prefer to get a callback in 60 minutes.
Wendell is spared time on hold and the expert agent brings the call to a happy conclusion.
The right tools for contact center transformation
The top CCaaS solutions also enable supervisors to monitor calls for training, using “listen” mode to hear conversations, “whisper” mode to deliver advice to the agent that’s inaudible to the customer, and “barge” mode to jump into a conversation and deescalate conflicts.
The ideal CCaaS technology for your business can be customized to suit your customers’ unique requirements. To find out more on the value of a robust cloud-based contact center solution, talk to the experts at GoTo.