What prevents your contact centre from providing the seamless service that customers expect and deserve? With customers continuing to report frustration because they can't get through, are being passed from pillar to post when they do and even find interactions with agents unsympathetic and ill-informed, it's clear that improvements are required in some quarters. Jeremy Payne, International VP Marketing, Enghouse Interactive discusses the technology that exists to solve these problems, if implemented in the right way.
Failure to deliver scalability and flexibility
All contact centres need to be able to scale and flex to meet the peaks and troughs of demand for their products and services, and to do the same in extreme weather, or at other times of crisis.
Today, with the advent of cloud contact centres, however, the situation has changed significantly. Good cloud solutions deliver a high level of disaster recovery integrally, meaning clients should not require significant additional cover. They also enable agents to connect to the technology platform and necessary applications from anywhere.
Failure to provide a seamless experience
As the first point of interaction with customers and other stakeholders, contact centres need to provide a seamless experience during which queries are dealt with quickly and efficiently.
To address this, organisations need to ensure they have integrated systems in place that allow them to capture the digital DNA of each customer. This includes information about who the customer is; what they have done with the business before; and what they are likely to do in the future.
They also need to build an infrastructure that supports a connected enterprise and enables them to route calls seamlessly from the contact centre to experts in the middle and back offices who may be better qualified to provide suitable answers, technical advice or even final decisions on lending/product availability.
Measuring the Wrong Things
Traditional ways of measuring success in contact centres, using metrics such as average call handling time (AHT) and the number of calls each agent manages to process during the day, are increasingly outdated - but many businesses persist in using them.
It is key that businesses can accurately measure the emotional temperature of every interaction and that agents use emotional intelligence in the way they manage customer engagement. Real-time Speech Analytics (RTSA) has become a key part of the mix for organisations looking to assess how customers, and the agents interacting with them, are feeling.
Contact centres have always evolved and improved in line with the introduction of new technology, which has the power to reshape and improve the service they can offer to customers. The coming of age of cloud-based contact centres, connected enterprises and RTSA will enable the next big step forward by preventing outages and helping to eliminate customers' frustration when dealing with organisations.