Businesses are undergoing a dramatic rethinking of the role of their contact centres following the outbreak of COVID-19. Once viewed as a cost centre that played a supporting role to the rest of their sales and operations functions, the contact centre has skyrocketed in importance as virtual interactions have replaced the traditional face-to-face engagements of the brick and mortar.
In this new age, companies have come to view their contact centres as an opportunity to gain a competitive advantage with customers. Offering better quality, more efficient service is now seen as a must for satisfying customers for repeat business — replacing the slow, frustrating, and often disappointing service of the past.
This realisation has led organisations to shift their focus and resources into adopting new strategies and technologies to meet the current contact centre challenges, aiming to gain flexibility and a stronger breed of empowered agents.
In looking to gain a better picture of the trends and developments in the contact centre space, UC Today caught up with James Cadman, Luware’s VP, Customer Success, for his insights and predictions from working with a wide range of customers undergoing these shifts during the pandemic.
Breaking Away from the Legacy Contact Centre Environment
James Cadman
Through their contact centre agents, companies now have the opportunity to stand out from the competition by resolving questions with improved accuracy and speed on the first call. Building on the provision of friendly and efficient service, agents are able to engage in up and cross-selling opportunities with customers who trust that they are dealing with a company that they can rely on.
These agents are leaving behind not only their offices but many of the on-prem legacy tools that are impractical for the remote workers to use effectively. What they need are tools that allow them to open up a laptop, plug in their headset, and be able to serve customers uninterrupted from wherever they are.
This has meant adopting new technologies that allow agents to communicate with customers and colleagues, either remotely or from the office in the new hybrid working environment. For more and more companies, this means integrating their contact centre tools with Microsoft Teams, giving them the ability to streamline their customer service operations into the rest of their organisation’s workflow.
Breaking Out of the Silos
Laying the groundwork for easy collaboration is even more important in the remote working environment when in-person interactions with colleagues are harder to come by and achieving first call resolution is a key factor in driving customer satisfaction and retention.
In moving their agents over to teams, Cadman says that companies are unlocking previously untapped resources that make serving customers even more efficient.
“With collaborative solutions, such as Microsoft Teams, the customer service agents are able to really collaborate with any colleague,” he says, explaining that, “Rather than transferring a call to a back-office team member, the agent can simply conference them in. Not only does your customer get their query resolved in a single contact, but the agent has now gained that extra knowledge, and can use it in future.”
In seeking solutions that expand upon their existing Teams platform, many have begun utilising smart workflow management tools that allow them to ensure that calls are routed to agents whose Teams presence status shows that they are available.
By connecting their agents with the rest of the organisation on Microsoft Teams, Cadman explains that businesses are using the UC platform to make it easy to know exactly where to direct the call faster or can even conference the subject matter expert directly into the call without the need to transfer.
Along with these smart workflows, organisations are turning to Teams for its easy management and reliable Microsoft infrastructure.
Self Service Tools Within a Manageable Infrastructure
In the shifting remote environment where calling in IT is not always an option, organisations need their solutions to be easy to run with minimal reliance on their already strained technical support teams.
With its cloud-based infrastructure, Teams reduces the load on IT departments, transferring concerns regarding data centres and application management or user support over to Microsoft, lightening the load for internal IT.
“Self Service is something that we have all spoken and thought about for years as a way to reduce the number of times a customer needs to talk to us, but I see a big need for self-service within the customer service teams to be just as important,” Cadman tells UC Today, adding that:
“Providing teams who are talking to your customers with the tools to be able to respond to changes as they see them is crucial to get the benefit from switching to cloud services. In particular, freeing up the ever-smaller IT department to do more important things”
He points to basic changes to the IVR to alert customers to longer wait times or other notifications need to be easy enough that business departments can handle the job without calling in the cavalry.
Teams also offers integrations that help to analyse and improve workflow. Managers and agents are able to track KPIs with real-time analytics that they can access with dashboards on the cloud for the insights that allow them to respond in the moment if necessary to get operations back on track. Having the ability to monitor calls and review recorded sessions stored on the cloud platform helps managers to enforce the quality standards that they had in place at the office, no matter where they are.
Empowering a New Breed of Agents
“Something that I’ve seen developing over a number of years is the shift from a traditional Contact Centre, to more focused Customer Service teams,” says Cadman, adding that, “This might seem like semantics in what we call it, but it’s more about the volumes, of both calls and people to respond to them.”
He points to the change from the cost-intensive warehouse-style contact centres filled with what he describes as “scores of mostly unskilled first-line agents answer and direct calls, to one where companies are moving to smaller, more highly skilled customer service teams.”
While smaller in number, these higher-skilled teams have more knowledge and resources at their fingertips than before. They also have the benefit of more customers being able to avoid calling in the first place. More information is available online for the public to access, and AI-style bots help to reduce the amount of time that agents spend interacting with a customer.
Making the transition to this new model can be tricky and require a different management style than that of the previous era.
“Today’s Customer Service Agents need to be empowered with their own — and their teams’ — performance. Delivering this can be quite a cultural shift because to be successful requires transparency,” Cadman says, adding that, “The right choice of Customer Service solutions can provide your agents with a real-time picture of the demands on them and their team. In my experience, when you give the ownership to the people on the ground, the quality-of-service increases.”
How Luware can Help Companies to Revolutionise their Customer Service
The benefits of the new model are clear with lower overall costs on HR and higher quality service for customers. The move to remote work brought on by the pandemic has only served to speed up the transition. Those companies that are able to make the necessary changes and adopt the right technologies will be best placed to capitalise on shifts in the market.
With more than 10 years of experience in the contact centre market, Luware has the knowledge and experience to work with companies in making this transition.
“We have worked with hundreds of customers in the last 10 years – so we really know what challenges the customers have and how they can transform their customer service to make it into a profit centre and deliver great customer experiences”
“We are building our solutions on Microsoft Teams and Skype for Business because we strongly believe in having a company-wide solution and establishing customer service as part of the overall customer communication strategy rather than building yet another silo,” says Cadman.
With Teams now the standard for the hybrid (remote and work) environment, allowing organisations to collaborate effectively across their dispersed locations, companies need the right partner to be successful in their cloud-based Unified Communication transition.
Luware’s integrations and services, including routing, call queueing and a full-fledged contact centre solutions provide organisations with the expertise and tools to get there faster.
from UC Today https://ift.tt/2KX9nSA
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