Your contact center is an opportunity to set you well ahead of your competitors – even your larger ones. With the right contact center, you can have smooth, streamlined customer-centric conversations, track your employee productivity and leverage automation to do more with fewer reps.
It sounds like a dream, and yet so many contact centers are a constant headache for their IT directors. It’s simply a matter of ensuring that you have the right Contact Center for the job – and ensuring that it’s set up properly by your vendor.
What to Look for in a Contact Center
Some service managers and IT directors, in a desperate attempt to resolve your problems, might be shopping the most expensive solutions thinking they’ll solve all contact center issues (they won’t).
There are two keys when shopping a contact center: make sure you have the right contact center for your organization and have it set up by a company with specific expertise in contact center design and implementation.
Features That Make Contact Center Life Easier
1. Reporting features. Features that can help management track productivity levels and hours worked and compile reports on calls handled, time spent on the phone and other key metrics are a lifesaver for busy customer service managers.
2. Multiple methods of contact. Chat, email and voice should all be available to your customers.
3. Self-service options, like account information or other quick-access information to reduce the volume of calls handled by a rep.
4. Call recording capabilities. You can get more sophisticated with this like including speech analytics for emotions, words or phrases, so the system can help you more efficiently help with situations like irate customers.
5. Screen recordings. Sometimes it’s telling to see what the agents are doing on the screen. When one client of ours juxtaposed the screen recording of a rude customer service rep with their phone call, they discovered their agent was playing a computer game while talking to the customer.
6. Workforce management. Manual scheduling should be a thing of the past. Many contact centers can masterfully synchronize the 30, 40 or 50 odd call rep schedules and account for paid time off, breaks, lunches and other factors. These tools can also calculate different scenarios and help forecast how many agents are needed based on anticipated demand.
7. Post-call survey. How will you know how happy your customers are if you’re not asking them?
Consider Hardware to Software-Based Contact Centers
More contact centers are shifting to the cloud for the benefits that the cloud brings. Cloud-based contact centers leverage a bring-your-own-device model of contact, letting their agents work from home instead of a central location. If you have the right capabilities, this is easy to deploy, and with the labor market today, it’s ideal for you and the employee.
Software-based systems can reduce the capital costs of getting a new contact center and often have more access to features and productivity tools. It makes sense that the software is where the real advancements are, and the more you can offload offsite in the cloud, the less your IT team has to contend with and manage.
How to Know Your Contact Center is the Right Fit
A lot of organizations are working with dated systems or are selecting new systems and struggling to implement them effectively. One such company contacted us last October. They had a 20-year-old system they couldn’t get support for and they needed better capabilities. They knew they were faced with another busy season in December and didn’t want to get through the month on pins and needles wondering if everything was going to crash.
Within four weeks, Gregg Communications had their new system working.
We went through our customary lengthy discovery process with them to understand how their unique contact center operates, delivered specific recommendations and conducted a cost-analysis to help identify if cloud-based or onsite-based would be best for them.
Finally, we provided training to their team before and after the new system was implemented, so their December was a very jolly experience, instead of an anxiety-provoking month.
With nearly 30 years of experience as a Managed Contact Center Service Provider, Gregg Communications has the expertise to ensure that no matter what contact center solution you work with, it’s going to work exactly as it should.
Get the most out of our contact center. Contact Gregg Communications for friendly, expert support.