What to Look for in a Modern Contact Centre Solution

Andrew Leatherland argues that finding the right partner for your contact centre and customer service transformation is critical to its success.

Not all providers can deliver every element of a complete deployment, given the integrated set of capabilities needed that span a wide variety of channels and expertise.

It is hugely beneficial to have a provider with a wealth of experience in the market, global reach, excellent knowledge of specific industries, robust security, and support for every channel you want to offer today and into the future.

8 Modern Contact Centre Must-Haves

1. Support for any channel—now and tomorrow. This should include voice, web, social and mobile, as well as easy integration into the next big interaction technology.

2. Enabling the right conversation with the right person at the right time. Leverage an integrated unified communications and contact centre platform to connect with experts across the organisation, eliminating the silos among departments.

3. Always-on customer engagement. An agile organisation works across multiple locations, and your contact centre must be easy to manage even in times of crisis and must scale to meet demand.

4. Leveraging collaboration and integration with CRM and other back-office systems. Through rich media, video, co-browsing and geolocation you can capture every interaction and activity to ensure customer information is always up to date, as well as improve the customer experience by ensuring your staff have full insight into your customers’ interactions with your company.

5. Self-serve operations. Customer-focused contact centre managers should be able to easily scale their staff and resources as needed to fit demand, allowing agents to work from anywhere at any time while maintaining a consistent level of oversight and training. This frees up the IT team to focus on its own strategic goals.

6. Continuous improvement. Leverage quality management, screen recording, training and real-time data and analytics to enable relevant and timely coaching, ensuring agents are always performing their best.

7. Insights for business decisions. Operational and relationship metrics optimise the customer experience based on real-world data, helping you better manage your business and remove obstacles in the customer journey.

8. Leveraging the power of the cloud. Cloud platforms can offer high availability, geo-redundancy, enterprise features and new functionality as the software is refreshed, without huge upfront investment.

How to Make the Next Step

The notion that companies must create seamless journeys for their customers isn’t new, but turning the vaulted promise into reality is surprisingly difficult.

Despite the hype and demand from customers across all demographics, many companies struggle to successfully enable continuous interactions across a wide variety of channels, including traditional voice and chat as well as more advanced mobile and social applications.

Businesses that want to create an exceptional customer experience must deploy integrated enterprise communications and a contact centre solution that supports all channels of choice, enables business continuity, delivers advanced data analytics, and makes it easy to leverage back-office workers in a thoughtful and disciplined way.

A cloud-based solution can make it cost-effective for companies to meet their customers’ needs, without incurring the time and expense of an on-premise deployment.

Andrew Leatherland

Cloud-based solutions also deliver easy scalability, enable a flexible workforce, and support cultural change throughout the organisation—all of which are required to truly meet the needs of today’s customers.

The goal is to ensure your business is a leader in creating customer journeys that spur loyalty, increase satisfaction and lifetime value scores, plus have a positive, measurable impact on the bottom line.

Author: Robyn Coppell