In our last post, we talked about how you should take a step back and analyse if the foundational things are ready before thinking of adopting advanced features in your contact centre like AI, advanced analytics etc.
We often see customers coming to us with certain buzzwords in mind, but we recommend they address the low-hanging fruits first. Get ROI from your existing Contact Centre platform (CCaaS) before moving to the next big thing.
Providing a ‘true omnichannel’ experience to customers (not multi-channel, we explained the difference previously), equipping agents with a 360-degree view of customers, using effective self-service options, and dynamic intelligent routing are absolute must-haves if your business wants to provide a personalised customer experience.
So assuming you’ve got the basics covered, how do you scale your contact centre to be ‘The Contact Centre of the Future’?
Daniel McMullen, Technical Consultant and Contact Centre Specialist at CloudClevr explores in this post.
You’ve implemented CCaaS, now what?
Many organisations treat a CCaaS tool as a ‘set-and-forget’ platform. They migrate to a modern system but grossly underutilise its capabilities, missing opportunities to elevate customer and agent experience, gain performance improvements and maximise their technology investment.
So firstly, perform a thorough assessment to identify what your platform is capable of and map out how to leverage its full potential. This is where your technology roadmap – something we touched on last time – becomes crucial.
Some features might offer quick wins, while others could be part of a longer-term strategy. The focus should be to drive continuous optimisation by activating advanced features that support automation, data-driven decisions, and omnichannel customer journeys.
Let’s take a look at some of the features that can really elevate your contact centre experience.
1. AI-powered assistance for a better agent experience
The contact centre of the future isn’t just about improving customer experience – it’s about enhancing agent experience too.
Agent experience is often overlooked, but it shouldn’t be. High agent attrition is one of the key costs in contact centres. Keeping agents happy and fulfilled in their roles is really important and difficult to achieve.
The old ways of working – clicking through multiple windows, siloed systems, and dealing with angry customers all the time don’t exactly inspire job satisfaction.
This is where AI-powered features help by significantly enhancing agent efficiency and job satisfaction. This not only enables faster response times and improved customer experiences but also empowers agents to contribute to more strategic initiatives. With CCaaS solutions and embedded AI capabilities, agents can offload mundane tasks like:
- Searching for customer history
- Searching multiple knowledge sources quickly to come up with relevant answers
- Summarising call notes
- Answering frequently asked questions
- Drafting response emails and more
This lets agents focus on higher-value tasks, such as solving complex problems and building stronger customer relationships. The result? Better productivity, less burnout, and happier customers.
We’ve often seen situations where a customer, after unsuccessfully trying self-service or chat, is transferred or ends up speaking to an agent feeling frustrated.
Rather than agents starting a conversation from scratch and dealing with an irritated customer, integrated CCaaS platforms surface all relevant context and customer information from connected systems to avoid further irritation from repeating information. AI features speed up the interaction and transform the experience for the customer and agent.
The key to delivering a Contact Centre of the Future lies in effectively combining integrations and advanced AI capabilities that assist agents in their roles while preserving the essential value of human engagement.
2. Advanced analytics for data-driven decisions
Quality Monitoring (QM) in the old days was a huge task. It required a team of analysts to manually review calls and score them to provide agent feedback. And even with all that effort, you’d only be scratching the surface – there was no way to efficiently process the hundreds (or even thousands) of calls coming in every day.
Modern CCaaS solutions now include powerful AI-driven analytics that:
- Automatically generate insights from every interaction
- Track agent productivity
- Analyse customer sentiment in real time
- Surface trends and potential issues before they escalate and more.
These tools can even offer linguistic insights, such as identifying speaking patterns, monitoring tone, figuring out how fast an agent speaks and standardising how agents interact with customers. By delivering consistent, high-quality service, you’ll not only boost customer satisfaction but also fine-tune your operations.
With the right analytics, you’re no longer guessing; you’re making informed, data-backed decisions that drive continuous improvement.
3. Streamlining call wrap-up
Equally important is what happens after a call. How long does the agent take to wrap up a call? Ultimately long wrap-up times drive up operational costs. Here’s how automation can help:
- Auto-summarisation: Use AI to generate accurate call summaries and transcripts, reducing the time agents spend on post-call notes.
- CRM updates: Automatically update your CRM and other systems with the latest customer information.
- Follow-up actions: Schedule follow-ups, send confirmations, or trigger workflows automatically.
By minimising wrap-up time, agents can quickly move on to the next customer, reducing wait times and improving service levels.
4. Continuous improvement is the key
Once you’ve implemented these features, it’s crucial to monitor their performance and continuously optimise. The key to a future-ready contact centre is ensuring your CCaaS platform never stagnates.
Staying agile and ahead of industry trends requires ongoing effort. It’s not about adopting every new feature that comes into the market. It’s about staying on top of them so you know which is right to meet your growing business demands and customer needs.
Change is the only constant here and take help wherever needed by working with technology partners who will help you drive operational improvements.
