Call Center Solutions to Improve Your Customer Experience

Omni-Channel – A Unifying Call Center Solution

As technology evolves, many industries find themselves adapting to keep up, and call center software is no exception. Indeed, ‘call center’ is now an outdated term. Today’s organizations use ‘contact centers’.

We’re seeing a shift in the ways people want to talk with businesses, with 88% of millennials saying they would rather text than speak over the phone.

As a result, many contact centers now offer a variety of channels, such as:

• SMS

• Web chat

• Emails

• Phone

• Instagram

• Facebook

• WhatsApp

• And more

By giving your customers the opportunity to speak with you in the way that suits them, you show that their needs and their time are important to you.

Now, while having a variety of contact options can be advantageous, it can also complicate the role of the agent. To avoid this, you must adopt an omni-channel contact center solution.

In short, this would allow you to manage all your various channels from a single interface, making your agents’ lives much simpler. Moreover, this gives your customers the freedom to communicate with you in their preferred manner whilst guaranteeing the same level of care.

Omni-channel is an effective strategy to boost both user and customer satisfaction.

Cloud Based Calling – Efficient Call Center Software

When hearing the words ‘call center’, most people imagine an office with rows of desks adorned by clunky, fossilized phones. But, that’s not the case anymore. One technological innovation changed the contact center forever; the cloud.

Migrating your contact center service to the cloud provides a range of benefits:

• Say goodbye to ‘hard’ phones – With cloud-based calling, there is no need for physical phones on your agents’ desk. Your phone is on your computer and dials wirelessly over the internet. No need for reams of cables, drilled into your walls, or running through your floors.

• Free those hands – Without the need for hard phones, agents can easily switch to hands-free headsets. No longer will they need to hold a heavy device to their ears, simply click on ‘answer’ to ‘pick up’ the phone.

• Informative Displays – A softphone doesn’t need to take up your entire screen. In fact, the best contact center solutions will offer an array of features to utilize that extra space. You can program in data screen pops to remind or inform your agents of key information.  Expand the number of channels a single agent can monitor.

• Experience without limits – cloud based contact center software offers you near limitless scalability, meaning that your contact systems will never be overwhelmed, and can instead scale with your business.

• Work from anywhere – When all that you need is an internet connection, agents can switch to flexible working, decreasing office costs. In fact, many workers nowadays prefer working from home.

The best cloud-based contact center solutions work on a subscription-style payment structure, ensuring that you only ever pay for what you’re actually using. With no physical infrastructure required, there’s no need to pay extortionate installation fees, or to replace existing hardware.

Routing – The Right Path to the Right Person

In life, it’s not the destination that matters, but the journey. This counts for call center software, too. It doesn’t matter how good your staff are, if your customers aren’t able to reach them. That leads to frustrated customers hanging up and leaving your business for good.

Frustrating user journeys can be a leading cause of call abandonment, so what’s the solution?

Finding software that allows you to build easy-to-navigate routing is essential for guiding your customers through your CX estate. Truly effective routing can even resolve issues before a customer reaches an agent, reducing the number of unnecessary queries blocking up queues.

We’ve all waited in a queue for what feels like days, only to be told we’re in the wrong place and need to join a different, even longer queue. Sometimes, the frustration of being redirected and the promise of even more lying in wait is enough for us to forget why we came there in the first place and hang up. If only the signposts had been a little easier to follow, we never would have ended up in the wrong queue.

This is why well-constructed routing is invaluable for guiding callers to the right place, especially in larger organizations with multiple lines of enquiry. 

Automation – The Efficiency Engine

The best contact center solutions are those that can utilize intelligent tools to automate your business. Such tools include:

• Artificial Intelligence – Ease the burden of your agents by allowing intelligent software to share the load.

• Chatbots – Allow a near-unlimited number of customers to talk to a virtual agent, without needing to wait in a queue.

• Natural Language Processing – Utilize new technology that allows machines to interpret speech in real time, opening a whole realm of intelligent automation possibilities.

• Automatic Transcription – Instantly transcribe voice interactions, to check for compliance or summarize with generative AI.

Appropriate call center software will enable you to:

• Reduce agent attrition – By automating tedious, repetitive tasks, you can increase agent satisfaction, discouraging call center turnover. Artificial Intelligence won’t replace ever completely replace humans, but it can make our lives just a little easier.

• Take advantage of wait time – With some intelligent design decisions in your routing, you can let callers provide their details in the queue, before ever reaching an agent. This information can then be entered into your system automatically, reducing handle time for your agents.

• Remove caller confusion – Natural Language Processing (NLP) allows callers to directly say why they are calling. There’s no need for callers to get frustrated by having to sit through a dozen options before finally hearing the one they need. With the right call center software, they can just say what they want, and go straight to where they want.

• Better record keeping – Proper call center solutions can give you the chance to create text versions of your calls. This allows you to quickly and accurately search through thousands of call logs, finding the ones you want, instantly

These are just some the many ways automation is an effective call center solution. Automation is an incredible tool, and its limits are defined only by your creativity in using it.

Reporting – Reflecting and Reacting

A call center can be a busy place. Lots of agents and lots of calls means it’s easy for things to get missed. Sometimes you may feel like you need to hire more, but that’s not the case.

What you need isn’t more eyes. It’s better visibility.

A reporting suite is a key piece of call center software in any business’ repertoire. With the right call center solution you can give your supervisors a full, real-time overview of your call centers’ activities.

Be it adding more human agents to a service, deploying machine agents, or additional self-service options, the best reporting call center software empower supervisors to leap into action to keep queue sizes and wait times down.

Excellent customer experience demands a deeper understanding of your call center’s operations. With the best call center solutions you can generate accurate real-time as well historical reports, allowing you to identify areas of improvement. 

The perfect report produces actionable feedback for your report. That’s why it’s crucial that your reporting call center software has an intuitive, easy to use dashboard as well as a range of templates, to allow you to create the best report for your call center.