Daniel McMullen, Technical Consultant and Contact Centre Specialist at CloudClevr writes.
You’d think by now, most businesses would have made their contact centre a priority, already moving towards Contact Centre as a Service (CCaaS). After all, your customers are your number 1 priority, and how well your contact centre performs, in most cases, directly impacts customer satisfaction. It seems straightforward, right?
But despite knowing its importance, we see many of our small to mid-sized businesses still relying on legacy contact centres running on traditional PBX systems. Sometimes using different systems for handling calls, live chat and emails.
So before jumping into discussions about generative AI, augmented reality, and ‘super agents’, let’s take a step back and ask: What are the foundational things that businesses should focus on before they can even think about such next-gen technology?
If you follow contact centre platforms, you know it’s hard to keep track of the latest updates and features unless you’re a specialist in the field. And most IT managers and decision-makers don’t have the luxury of time to keep up with these rapid changes.
So, how can businesses approach upgrading their contact centres? What are the key things they should focus on?
Let’s break it down.
A CCaaS solution doesn’t mean high costs always
Legacy contact centres often face a range of operational challenges, including high call abandonment rates, extended call handling times, fragmented communication channels, and cumbersome reporting processes. CCaaS solutions, however, offer many advanced capabilities that were once expensive for smaller contact centres, enabling access to tools that enhance customer interactions and operational efficiency.
Yet, with such a vast array of features, organisations face a new challenge: determining which features to prioritise for maximum return on investment. Not every capability will be relevant to your specific needs.
Before jumping into using all its capabilities, develop a roadmap, and prioritise the features that address your most pressing challenges first; those that provide the highest customer impact and largest cost savings and roll out new features gradually over time.
So, what should your focus be? Here are four key areas to get right before making that big leap.
1. Get your omnichannel basics right
Customers today don’t just call their service providers anymore. You and I often go to a website and try to chat live with an agent. Sometimes we email them.
Many companies think by supporting them across different channels, they are offering an omnichannel experience for customers when they’re really just offering “multi-channel” services.
To create a true omnichannel experience, you need to provide an integrated and cohesive journey for customers, no matter which channel they use to contact you. Whether they start on chat and switch to email or pick up the phone, the experience should be unified. They shouldn’t have to repeat their story every time they move between channels.
Get omnichannel right by
- Adopting a CCaaS solution that seamlessly handles all the ‘key’ channels you want in a single platform.
- Ensuring agents have a complete view of customer interactions across channels, reducing call handling time.
- Support agents in adapting to the new blended work environments and making operational changes to manage new workflows efficiently.
And you don’t need to be on every channel. Prioritise the ones that matter to you and the ones your customers are present the most.
2. Give agents a 360-degree view of the customer
If you use a legacy contact centre solution, your agents might be manually searching through multiple systems to gather customer information, leading to longer interaction times. There’s a lack of a complete customer picture during interactions and they spend significant time on repetitive tasks like manual note-taking, finding information and reviewing customer history.
Don’t just implement a CCaaS solution but integrate it with your CRM and other key platforms where customer data is stored. This way, agents have access to the full customer journey and all the relevant information in one place – from past interactions to service requests – allowing them to provide personalised, informed service.
Not just CRM systems, if you use separate tools for internal communications, like Microsoft Teams, make sure they’re integrated into your contact centre solution as well. This allows agents to collaborate with subject matter experts faster when handling complex inquiries.
When a customer calls, agents should know their service history, when was the last request raised, any recurring issues and more. Customers are happy because they don’t have to repeat the information. Agents are productive because they don’t have to switch between different systems. Win-win.
3. Use intelligent automation and self-service options effectively
Many CCaaS solutions come equipped with AI assistants and automation tools, but the first step is to ensure you’ve implemented basic self-service options. Can your customers resolve simple queries without having to call in?
Self-service options like chatbots, knowledge bases, and IVR systems can dramatically reduce call volumes and agent workload. This frees up your agents to focus on more complex, high-value tasks while allowing customers to get quick resolutions to simple questions—without having to wait in a queue.
And, if you have a reasonable call volume, consider switching from traditional static call routing to intelligent routing that assigns calls in real-time based on agent skills and customer data in CRM systems. Good routing matches customer intent to the person who’s best suited to resolve it, giving a personalised interaction, and improving first-call resolution and customer experience.
4. Develop a technology roadmap
Improving your contact centre is an ongoing journey. Once you deploy a new solution, assess how it’s performing by tracking the metrics that matter to you and look for ways to improve its performance. The best way is to develop a technology roadmap that helps you plot where you want your contact centre to be and how to get there.
If you’re unsure when to phase in new features and capabilities, work with a service provider who can best guide you. Customer preferences can evolve quickly and so can market conditions. The key is to never let your contact centre stagnate and keep updating with capabilities that add value and maximise your technology investment. Take advantage of the comprehensive reporting and analytical tools built into your platform to make data-driven decisions for the future of your contact centre.
So there you go. The absolute must-haves if your business wants to improve your customer experience. Now what if you already do all these things and want to leverage the ‘contact centre of the future’? That’s a topic for another day.
